Silver Lining?

Jonah Lehrer has an excellent article in today's New York Times Magazine about a new way that a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist, Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson, are thinking about depression, or at least one of its features - rumination. If it such a widespread condition, they ask, then is it possible that it is somehow adaptative? Don't worry, both the article and the scientists are not belittling the pain of being depressed.

Lehrer explores their idea that rumination, which is typical to the grief reaction, is more than simply pessimism, it is also the kind of extended expenditure of mental energy on a problem out of which can be born new understanding. The ruminative feature resembles a part of the cognitive process that often results in successful creations. I would add my thought that, in a situation of pain or loss, the lack of interest in activity, food, or sex, keeps one physically passive at a time when the prediction-making part of us does not have the optimal setting for activities requiring good coordination and fast reaction-time, and we may therefore make bad judgments. So instead our body demands that we sit, collect, and turn things over. This could also be another adaptive feature of the mechanism. Lehrer also gives space in his article to discuss the criticisms many psychiatrists have of this new notion.

I would have appreciated brief inclusion of the current theories of what is happening not just in the psyche, but in the brain, during depression. One theory receiving a lot of attention is that of reduced neurogenesis (less creation of new neurons) in certain parts of the brain. I wonder how this correlates with or contradicts Andrews and Thomsons hypothesis? Their idea began with the prevalence of depression, which Lehrer describes as 7 percent. Is that a world-wide statistic? A Western society statistic? An American statistic?

I have often heard the construct of depression critiqued as an illness of wealthy privileged societies. That made me think two things: a) adaptation occurs by random mutation (although it's the Natural Selection part that people most like to focus on) and, b) the notion of which features are adaptive for humans needn't be monolithic. Humans haven't all evolved to one perfect homogeneous species and stopped. We are evolving many different features. Some of us are hairy, some smooth. We have different pigments shading our skin, which were adaptations to different environments. We have different length femurs, so why not different cognitive styles? Most of us are no longer hunters and gatherers. Perhaps we are becoming aware of a random mutation that gives us a different default setting for our prediction-making organs (our brains) to favor periods of less action, less reproducing, and more rumination. Perhaps in certain contexts in which humans live this will make us more adaptive and therefore it will survive over the long run. Perhaps the features of it that are maladaptive in other contexts will result in it disappearing over millenia. We won't be around to find out. But I am glad for Lehrer's thoughtful look at scientists who are trying to look at a cultural and scientific phenomenon with a longer view. I always admire his writing and, as usual, this piece gives us insight into novel thoughts about topical issues of mind and psyche. It also rekindled in me some thoughts about our society's knee-jerk propensity to always value happiness above grief, anger, passion, or doubt. We have a range of affective states. Perhaps each part of that range has its uses.

Swiss irony and New York satire (Books - The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann & Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem)

I'm currently reading two books critically observant of the times in which they were written, one ironic and one outright satiric. In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium near Davos, Switzerland (interestingly now the home of the World Economic Forum) ostensibly to visit his cousin, there for a TB cure. Castorp is a slave to habit and creature comforts that insulate him with a false sense of the predictability of life and that, in fact, make him critical of anything or anyone who would dare to upset his sense of propriety and that blind him utterly to his own mediocrity:

As is apparent, we are attempted to include anything that can be said in Hans Castorp's favor, and we offer our judgments without exaggeration, intending to make him no better or worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word "mediocre" to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance...

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconscioiusly, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may ever spread to that individual's physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him - even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the questions of why - he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Ouch. Such is the affectionate contempt with which Mann introduces us to his protagonist! One can see him glancing over his pince-nez with arched eyebrow. Much of the first 100 pages of The Magic Mountain is devoted to regaling us, in similarly full-throated detail, to the many residents of the sanitorium. There is a magnitude of detail that reminds me of Dickens treatment of character, although less baldly hilarioius. His tongue is planted more firmly in his cheek. Dickens makes a bold pen and ink sketch but it feels rather as if Mann has gone through his characters' dossiers.

Whereas with Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City full-out, well-crafted hilarity seems to constantly be the whole point. Lethem dishes it out equally for character, situation, or dialogue:

He was, that first time, lapsed into what I would soon learn to call one of his "ellipsistic" moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought nor to begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth's turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dress - trim-tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, moldering tennis shoes - I could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his fifties - still a decade wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a while. He was in his early forties, barely older than me. I'd mistaken him for old because I'd taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooth's whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored th gambit, trained on me.

"You're the actor."

And so Chase Insteadman, retired child actor living on residuals, and our protagonist, meets Perkus Tooth in a vaguely fantasized New York City. I'm about 50 pages into Lethem's new novel, so I've made half the progress I have in the Mann (although percentage-wise I'm much further along), but I have no good feeling as yet what Lethem is up to. The characters are quirky, his social satire is viciously fun:

No male arriving in the Woodrows' circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher's scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her "secular date."

"You mean 'platonic,' I think"

"Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable."

It's hilarious and intelligent writing, but so far seems to just careen from beautifully described joke to beautifully described joke without indicating why I might care. I'm entertained enough, but what's it all about, Alfie? I suppose that with Mann's book I have the advantage of hindsight. World War I has become part of history, as has Mann's book, whereas I must discover Lethem's world as I go. I'm looking forward to catching the thread of this narrative and, given Lethem's other strong writing, I imagine that I will.

The pleasures of insufficiency...

Suggested by Janet: I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”

To what extent does this describe you?

To travel to another place (or time) is certainly one kind of volitional reading experience. When I conducted an informal research project (1, 2) on susceptibility to the reading experience, the sense of being transported away from the place we're in or to another place, was a commonly reported occurrence in the 92 respondents who participated, so one might even say that it is more than merely metaphoric. I do sometimes specifically read to go elsewhere, i.e. to escape, however I can also read to go more deeply towards myself. I would consider that a travel of sorts, but not a move away. I also read volitionally for information, and when I do I feel rather that I am holding my place in the present by seeking a specific piece of information referent to it. I may go briefly to another place, but with one eye fixed firmly on my current location. I'm reading to come back when the information is gained. It's like beginning to go through the wardrobe to Narnia, but constantly looking back and seeing the coats.

As for the second part of the question, I would answer yes. To seek the world of a book is to at some level admit the insufficiency of your current place and time, but not necessarily admit its wholesale failure. I read for new experience and new information and insomuch as I do that, I must be considering my current fund of information or my current experience less than perfectly pleasing. I know we supposedly seek pleasure and avoid danger on a very basic level, but I think of complacency as a dirty word. I want new experiences - set in fiction or as memoir, biography or travelogue - I crave to know more about the states and actions of other people, other places, and other times. I want new recipes, new scuttlebutt about Stalin, a new way of thinking about the impact of World War I, new information about how the brain works, new insight into a favorite artist's process (and a picture of their work space) and a new story about some attorney who contracts a disease that forces him to walk endlessly forward. I want the frame they provide to open up the way I experience my own life or to reinvigorate what I think I already know. I want after reading to see greener greens. I want my wine to taste better. I want to enrich the context that is my life, and to the extent that I crave that, I admit its current insufficiency. That's not to say that I'm eternally miserable, only that I know that I don't know everything and that its worth finding out more. And inherent to that ritual of going out from this place to new places via books (and other means like experience of other arts, or actual travel) is the search for new books, their acquisition, and the pleasant anticipation of reading them from this place of comfort. I enjoy that pleasure every day, which is to say that being in this place of insufficiency is not endless pain, even if I live in longing. If I'm honest about it, it will never be sufficient and that insufficiency is, in itself, a kind of pleasure.

Layer upon layer.... (Books - Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, & Film - Tarnation)

Jonathan Caouette's film Tarnation, a recommendation of friend Sheila, is a disturbing and ultimately redemptive blend of autobiography, docu-drama, and performance art. Passionate, personal, and breathlessly edited, the film is a long scream of pain for his mother, who was mistakenly given multiple shock treatments which have left her an unstable mess but who is nonetheless deeply loved by her son. Caouette was raised first in foster care and then by his delusional grandparents. From a very early age, Caouette has documented his life using video. He was also aware that he was gay and taped himself performing monologues as female characters starting around age 11. These disturbingly observant, maturely ironic pieces seem to serve as psychological stand-ins both for Caouette's pain at the abuse he experienced and that of his mother. I watched this artfully edited collage of pain both wanting to hide from the bald confessional nature of it and fascinated by the way Caouette used film and characters that are at once him and his family, but also artistic creations, as a sort of therapeutic diary to grow into the evidently responsible, self-aware, and loving adult he has become.

This was an interesting counterpoint to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, which I read in large part yesterday. Think what you will of the man, but his ideas of the influence of unconscious drives on our behavior, the literary structures he provided to understand the mind (id, ego, superego), and his techniques for unlocking those buried parts of us that are troublingly influential via associative talk and understanding how to read the symbols they use to hide behind have indelibly influenced the way we think and talk about thought, mind, personality, and culture. It was an apt to companion piece to Caouette's film/diary in which the forces of drive in the context of a repressive culture, have their devastating influence on personality, and are ultimately released through multi-layered symbols - the actually personalities of Jonathan and his mother on the deepest level, the level of the characters he played in his life to survive them, and the most visible layer of the work of art he fashioned to depict them.

The third work I experienced this weekend (although I barely had 20 minutes to touch it) was Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Nearly a contemporary of Freud, Mann's work famously evokes the political and cultural forces impinging on the European continent through the characters inhabiting a sanitorium high on a Swiss Alp. All three of these pieces struck me for their use of symbol - letting one thing stand for another, a feature not only of art and psychology but of spoken language, which represents concepts symbolically and written language represents the sounds of spoken language symbolically. These are all fashioned the sum of electrical bursts and the forces that inhibit them in our brain - acts that are decidedly not symbolic but literal and whose computational sum result in our cognitive and motor activities, the states from which they emerge, and whose experience we describe as behaviors and the forces that motivate them.

The inexorable drive forward or just a way out of the rat-race? (Books - The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris)

I am not one of the bookish set that raved on about Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, but that may only be because I have not yet read it. If his new The Unnamed is any indication, I should go out and get a copy immediately. Mark Sarvas's gush sealed the deal on my picking up The Unnamed, a novel about a high-powered New York attorney who contracts an illness which compels him to walk without stopping until he drops in his tracks from exhaustion. Or is it an illness? Perhaps is his psyche calling out for a break from the rat-race. And no, the treadmill doesn't work. He has to cover ground.

'...a dazzling book about a marriage and a family...' the jacket waxes on. Dazzling maybe, but no, it's not. As I read it, this book is about an individual and nature. His nature. This is King Lear, and Ferris writes some chapters that are a worthy analogue to Lear's howl on the moors. Tim's drive forward is bigger than marriage, it's bigger than career, it's more essential than family. He walks right out of a multi-million dollar case he is in charge of for his law firm, he sacrifices body parts to frost bite. I'm reading Freud's seminal work on understanding the mind through dreams for a class right now. Our favorite Viennese Victorian doctor envisions the events of dreams as encoded messages about those deepest wishes and fears we cannot give voice to. The mind symbolizes them (says Freud) so that in their disguise they get past the censor (our conscious mind) and find a partial expression that can then be interpreted. That is what Ferris has created in The Unnamed, a Freudian symbol for the inexorable drive forward. Sometimes that drive is the life force itself. Sometimes it can take on a more destructive character but can be sublimated, kept within the lines culture approves of, as career ambition. But then there are those other times that it takes on a more elemental cast. Witness, for example, Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. What possessed him, we ask? Well, something bigger than the either his marriage or the presidency - institutions that we imagine should be strong enough to keep our natures in line.

So much of who he was was involuntary...The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.

Every drive forward, we would like to think, can be answered by turning around. Except at those times when it can't. This beautiful, sad, strong novel is about those times.

Does reading Magic Mountain count?

You may have noticed–the Winter Olympics are going on. Is that affecting your reading time? Have you read any Olympics-themed books? What do you think about the Olympics in general? Here’s your chance to discuss!

That's an easy one. No, it's not affecting my reading time in the least. No, I have not read any Olympics-themed books although I have begun re-reading Magic Mountain which is set on an Alp and for which, if I finish, I should probably get a medal. And, I don't actually think much about the Olympics, unless I'm made to, like right now. I don't have a television (although I do have a monitor on which I watch DVDs). If I'm going to do anything even vaguely related to sports or fitness, I'm going to do it, not watch it. I like to hike and to ice skate, but then I want to do it, not watch someone else do it. I know the athletes have trained for years and have developed grace or strength I could never imagine having in my wildest dreams, but they have plenty of other admirers and I don't really care for competition. I don't even like it in the arts. That is a cultural pastime I do participate in, but I don't watch the Oscars or the Tonys either. I don't get enough exercise as it is. I barely get to see my friends. I almost never go to the theatre any more, and although some people think I read a lot, it's not enough for me, so the last thing I'm going to do is crowd my life with corporate-sales-driven sports programming on television. Sorry. There are too many better things to do.

Read along...

My friend and fellow blogger at Criticlasm is making his way through War and Peace. If ever you were tempted and felt like you had a better chance of finishing it if you had company - now is your chance to join A Year of War and Peace. And more power to you. I feel I have greater odds finishing a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and sometimes even that seems a stretch

Novelties VI

Eating: I was introduced to these chickpea flour pancakes from Andalusia by Mark Bittman, who calls himself the Minimalist Chef. Yum.


Drinking: Hannes Schuster 2007 St. Laurent is a light-bodied, bright red, with sweet/tart cherries but also an earthy funkiness. Complex, delish, and not for the Merlot drinking crowd.






Watching: We've been getting into the BBC television versions of Ruth Rendell's books. They call them mysteries, but they're not classic who-dunnits. Some of them are more like Patricia Highsmith stories. And they frequently have good actors in them like Colin Firth and Phoebe Nicholls.


Listening: To the late, great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson



Surfing: Super Dilettante, Absorbed in Words, Ivan Terestchenko, Science-Based Medicine, Words to Eat By


Learning: These last few weeks I have been interested by my class readings and lectures on different theories of what defines a 'self,' by thinkers such as William James, Roy Baumeister, Erving Goffman, Hazel Markus, and Dan McAdams.

So, what's new with you?

The 20th century as patient (Books - The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas)

I read D. M. Thomas's 1981 novel, The White Hotel, in connection with a class I'm taking on psychoanalytic theory - how it was born out of the science and the symbols of its time and place, how its practice impacted individual lives and culture, and how psychotherapeutic processes evolved from it. The novel is a remarkably potent record of the life of one woman, a Ukrainian opera singer, living in Vienna in the early part of the 20th century. To say she is one woman is misleading, she is a many-layered affair and that is one of the book's points. One of Freud's chief metaphors for his psychoanalytic process was archeology, and that is an apt and visible metaphor played out in this novel as it is the unearthing of the meanings of not only one individual's life, but the lives of the denizens of the 20th century. It also evoked for me Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and his discovery as the end of his life as he faces the Button Maker (the play is a must read) that a person's identity is like an onion. As you peel away the layers, you keep finding more.

One could say that the book's different sections introduce us to our protagonist as biographical fact, as dream, as a third person's imagining of her, as a result of natural forces (the drive for pleasure, or toward death), or her self as the product of world events, or fate if you prefer. Or one might say that the book's structure, which includes her life as a fever-dream of a poem, her journal, a case study of her psychoanalytic sessions with Sigmund Freud (this chapter is in a tour-de-force act of ventriloquism. Thomas as Freud is superb), a more conventional third-person narrative of the facts of her life without psyeudonym, and the aftermath of these creative acts - each of which were 'her' - as they unfolded into what became her life. Id. Ego. Super-ego. One can look back and create sense through narrative, Thomas seems to say, but no analysis has all the answers. The only final version of a life, is discovered after it was lived. Analysis is not about truth per se, it's about interpretation so that one can live with the events that came before. However, it does not determine what will happen in the future. The forces that impinge on a single life are more than personal or even interpersonal. We are also made by our culture, and by history. In the final chapter we see how the pieces that make up I/Anna/Elisabeth live in the punishing facts of Stalin's selling out the Jews of Russia to Hitler and his SS and, at once, how the symbols that have been born again and again through the different narrative interpretations that are all aspects of the same woman are finally given their ultimate truth. The facts are searingly cruel but one's experience of life is itself a creative act, and one can see how our protagonist finds coherence and solace through what she has created and Thomas (the ultimate creator in this case, no matter how temporarily real she becomes) makes a wounded patient of each inhabitant of the 20th century and attempts to help us find beauty (for there isn't much sense) there as well.

When I finished Thomas's novel at 1 am, there was no way I could go to sleep, so, at the recommendation of Mark Sarvas, I started The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris's new novel. I barely began it before the effects of the White Hotel began to wear off enough for me to go to sleep, but The Unnamed already has me in an iron grip. I expect that you should hear more soon.

Peddling our vice to minors...

Suggested by Barbara H: How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader? In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.”

Maybe they're not telling themselves anything, maybe they really don't like to read. There are many different kinds of brains. Reading may be associated with great pleasures for some of us - maybe because we were really good at it, maybe because it helped us to escape doing other things, maybe because it allowed us to be alone - it gave us pleasure, but not everyone is like us. As the book Proust and the Squid discusses, our brains did not evolve with reading "in mind." Collecting information while solitary from a bunch of arbitrary symbols that have nothing to do with the sounds they represent, then linking them into groups which have little to do with the concepts they represent, and then tying that to information others tell us we are meant to have or stranger still to imaginary people and places that come alive in our heads might be completely nonsensical to some people. It comes very naturally to us bookey types, but for others it is unnatural or even difficult. Perhaps they are more skilled with gathering information from what they hear. Maybe they are better at processing non-verbal information that represents concepts through two and three dimensional constructions. Not every one of those people has a learning disorder, although if that difference is very extreme then that could be the case, but there is a natural range of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and reading may not be your childrens' strength.

Forty years ago we had many fewer choices for either amusement or for information. There weren't 200 television channels and there was no internet. If you needed information for school or for your own interest, you went to an encyclopedia, The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, or to the card catalogue. You will notice, you even had to read to know what to read! Now we have so many choices and there is so much information. Reading may seem to a child to be completely overwhelming or completely unnecessary. Turn off your television, and limit their TV and hours on the computer.

So how to get a kid to read - I wish I knew since I love it too. With a younger one - read to them, read around them. With any age, notice what their interests are and give them books about that. Notice your child - do they like solitary activities or those in groups? They may not like to read because they have to do it alone. Perhaps there are some organized peer activities that involve books, the characters from books, or writing. Do they like pictures? Although some think it sacrilege, many kids begin to love reading through comic books. Are they impatient? Can they not sit still? Maybe they can act out the story of a book either as they read it or after they have read it. Any time they do talk about a story, television program, or film - do they go for plot, language, character, or design? See what it is they connect to. If they like pirates, get them a pirate book. Notice their style - do they want to do what you or their father does or would they sooner be caught dead? A child can define themselves by doing things and liking things that are different from their parents. That may be a way to identify with a peer group.

Ask yourself - do they really not read at all or do they not read what you want them to read or not feel the same way about it that you do? Do they read sports in the newspaper? Do they read information on the internet? How much reading are they doing in school? We cannot control what is fun for other people and there are plenty of people whose brains don't work like ours and whose taste are not like ours. My style would not be to assign a book and have a child write a book report. I used to have to practice penmanship during the summers. I hated it, it did not make my writing any better, in fact it made me hate writing more. My handwriting is still terrible and I survive. If you give an assignment, I would make it indirect, short, and interesting to them. Perhaps a conversation at the dinner table about an article in the day's paper or about a single paragraph in a book about something that would interest them, or someone they know. Tell them an hour before dinner, 'there's a little piece in the paper today I want to ask you about. Take a look at it before dinner.' And if you ask them a question, make sure you listen to their answer. Don't say anything about reading. Don't ask them if they liked reading it. Focus on the content and on them. If they ask you a question about something they want to know, pull down a book and show them the information on the page. If they don't read it, read it to them.

Lastly, it is important in today's world that people be capable of gathering information by reading, comprehending it, and using it to reason and problem solve, so if you have a real concern that your child has a hard time doing anything of these things - get them evaluated by a neuropsychologist. For the teenager, if they are adequate but you are concerned at their attaining enough competence in one of the above areas so that they will will have access to a certain level of education, explain that to them and get them involved in some specific activity for a limited amount of time each week, perhaps with a tutor, the way you would give someone a vitamin to supplement a poor diet or an exercise to strengthen a weak limb. But if they can read at an adequate level, have many things they enjoy and excel at, and simply don't relate to it the way you and I do, that just may be a difference that, in the long run, you have to accept. Although, over time, people have been known to change.

Bits and pieces composing the whole (Books - The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble)

I have at last finished Margaret Drabble's memoir cum cultural history of puzzles - The Pattern in the Carpet. I say 'at last,' not because I am revising my earlier warm feelings for the book, I'm not. But it drums up a more leisurely rhythm than the resumption of clases affords me. Between the book ends of Drabble's memories of her Auntie Phyl, begun reluctantly after her earlier fictional attempt at writing about her mother, and reflections on her own aging, are multiple desultory narratives of puzzles, games, and mosaics - their history, their use, anecdotes, and literary mentions of them. I particularly enjoyed this, about homophones and her love of Jules Verne via Gregory Benford's anecdote:

Verne even influenced those who didn't quite know how he was. Isaac Asimov once told me that when he was still a young science fiction fan he found himself listening to a lecture about a great foreign writer, a master of fantastic literature. But Asimov couldn't recognise the name. Giving the French pronunciation, the lecturer said 'Surely you must know Zuell Pfern,' and described From the Earth to the Moon. Asimov replied in his Brooklyn accent, 'Oh, you mean Jewels Voine!'

Or some delightful ephemera on Convergence, an important work by the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack, which achieved far more reknown as a jigsaw puzzle than as a painting. Or this quote from Virginia Woolf's Diary, September 1924 which reflects:

...on the heterogeneity of daily life and its mixed tapestry composed of postmen, invitations to Knole, and lectures on the League of Nations... 'All this confirms me in thinking that we're splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.'

As much a comment on the important change Woolf's point-of-view wrought upon the fictional form as it is a fitting comment reflecting on Drabble's use of the jigsaw or mosaic as metaphors for the putting together of a picture of life. I don't think it would be cute to call them bits and pieces - this is rather the point of the book. I probably could have done with a few fewer anecdotes in the final reckoning, but none of the information Drabble delighted in researching and presenting was a chore to read, I felt that had I returned to the theme of Auntie Phyl, Drabble's own reflections on aging, memory, writing sooner, the work as a whole might have possessed more integrity. How much and which of these pieces should make up the whole we apprehend, is indeed the meditation of this book. The writer's assembly of pieces makes a willful creation - a story, a novel - just as actual factual circumstances give shape to a person's life, although the narrative can be written and re-written and those facts interpreted by recalling them idly or actively, consciously or unconsciously. Whether this whole is a work of fiction or a life, its summing up will be a collection of pieces whose assembly finally gives us satisfaction or not. While I didn't love every piece, The Pattern in the Carpet did produce a very satisfying whole.

Reading for warmth...

The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

I'm in the northern hemisphere but we don't have much snow, at least not yet. A day like that can be lovely. Snow makes the world so quiet and clean, and that is unusual for New York City. The image conjured up by your question is an appealing one. Generally, I would think of enveloping fiction. A story whose world wraps the reader like a blanket and does so with quality, I want eiderdown not polyester fill. Something like this. The romantic image, however, will be different from the reality should we get belted by the storm this weekend. I am more likely to be reading Diagnosing Learning Disorders, I of the Vortex, Rhythms of the Brain, and many articles by and about Freud. That, and I'll take a walk in the snow!

Remembering J. D., his lousy childhood, and all that crap...

Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenter & Seymour and Franny & Zooey are some of my favorite writing ever (J.D. Salinger, those italics were for you). By now, most inveterate readers have heard that J. D. Salinger died last week at the age of 91. Besides a pitch-perfect rendering of dialogue as we speak rather than as writers approximate it, he wrote into existence the Glasses - a family so vivid that I am sure that I knew them. I can't say I will miss reading his new works because he hadn't published one in 50 years. He was a man who loved to write but he found publishing and the attention it brought him a tremendous invasion of his privacy. Ironically, his death might finally bring us news of the Glass family or even work of a new and unimagined sort and I must say that my aching to get my hands on anything else J. D. Salinger wrote makes me feel a little guilty. Here is the New York Times's obituary as well as a rememberance of him by his neighbors in the town of Cornish, N.H.

Neurons and pastimes (Books - Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki, The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble, Gratitude by Joseph Kertes)

Classes have started up again and with them lots of assigned reading. In addition I have been reading three books simultaneously and had three false starts, so I haven't managed to complete anything new this week. On the false start front, I gave up on The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik after a brief try. It's claims were too absurdly broad for it to be a serious work about science, even if it is written for a popular audience. General readers deserve well supported and well reasoned arguments too. It might have gotten better if I had waited it out, but I didn't have the patience. I also thought I might re-read Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a book I really love, but found that I was not in the mood for it. Lastly, I got a copy of Margaret Drabble's novel The Realms of Gold from the library, but someone had highlighted words they did not understand. Write in your own book, ok. Some can't stand that practice but I consider it a form of dialogue. But writing in a library book is defacing public property. It really angered me and I couldn't enjoy the book as a physical object, and as that is part of the pleasure of the reading experience for me I will have to get another copy. That leaves my ornery self with what I did manage to read this week:

I continue to wend my way through Gyorgy Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain. It is a carefully reasoned, highly technical thesis about the role of oscillations in the workings of the brain. He has been building his case via an examination of the different tools neuroscience has of observing the brain, what they measure, and, as a result, what kinds of rhythms we will see. Then he gives an overview of the types of oscillations seen in nature; the ways we might characterize the rhythmic behavior of individual neurons as well as large groups of them; and his observation that the brain is in a state in which it generates lots of independent rhythms from internal sources. The relationships among these rhythms appears chaotic but can be described mathematically and furthermore, they exist in a mathematical relationship seen throughout nature. This might be thought of as semi-organized chaos. These states alternate with more organized rhythms which, when there is enough energy built up or when there is input from outside, coordinate the activity of the groups into regular patterns for brief periods of time. The brain, it seems, teeters on the edge of this organization, but lives just outside it, disposing it toward being able to carry out coordinated actions when required, but not live in a state of constant activity. This is important as the variety of patterns of coordinated activity are the alphabet of the brain's language. Neurons communicate in bursts of these. Just as the computer has a binary language (represented of 1s and 0s what we'll call for simplicity's sake "on" and "off" states) and the human mouth has periods of sending air through the vocal cords while making various shapes with our mouths alternated with periods of silences, the brain's language must be capable of making on-off contrasts in order to communicate. Anyhoo, I find stuff like this fascinating, but a book like Buzsaki's isn't merely conceptual, it asks the reader to be well acquainted with neuronal physiology and the measures of neuroscience to reap the rewards of his carefully structured case. Even with a few years of neuroscience under my belt, I have to read it slowly, so it will be a while before I finish it, but I am finding it worth the work.

I am alternating the worthwhile exercise of Buzsaki with a less aerobic, indeed completely contemplative, read - Margaret Drabble's The Pattern in the Carpet. As I said about this book when I first started it a few months back, this is a thinly veiled memoir (Drabble protests that she doesn't care for writing that is directly revelatory of self or family members) of her beloved Auntie Phyl, her own life-long relationship with writing and with depression, and the solace she finds in doing jigsaw puzzles, combined with a history of puzzles, board games, and other pastimes.

The human capacity for fear of boredom must have an evolutionary significance. Animals in nature do not seem to get bored, even when (like gorged lions) they have plenty of time for boredom. Domestic animals have caught the habit from us, and caged animals clearly and visibly suffer from it. So do horses in small wet fields. It has been experimentally demonstrated that laboratory rats, given stimulating activities such as a treadmill, retain their joie de vivre much longer than those deprived of these entertainments, and also retain a capacity for neurogenesis. Jigsaws and treadmills renew the brain cells. Activity is good for you, lethargy is bad for you. So the human intolerance of very long periods of lethargy is in itself an evolutionary stimulus towards invention, creativity, discovery. Playing games to pass the time is connected with intellectual development, just as funerary rites are connected with an apprehension of mortality.

While not exactly a hard scientific look at her claim, Drabble's exploration of the value of pastimes in light of her own malaise is a sort of behavior-level literary analogue of Buzsaki's discussion of alternating rhythms among neurons. Just as bursts of oscillations are the result of an accumulation of energy while in a disorganized state, so too is creative human activity born of the quiet that surrounds it. (I love relating ideas across the books I am reading). At any rate, Drabble offers us a quietly enjoyable collection of bits and bobs: mentions of the jigsaw puzzle in literature from Wordsworth to Austen, where she likes to get pizza near the British Museum, the London taxi driver who broadened her thinking about jigsaws, and details of her writing process (something I particularly enjoy) and why a writer like Drabble would be drawn to a pastime such as puzzles.

One of the reasons why the jigsaw appeals to me... is that it is pre-made, its limits finite, its frame fixed. No ordinary degree of manual clumsiness (and mine is advanced, and inevitably advancing) can yet prevent me from finishing a jigsaw. It can't be done badly. Slowly, but not badly. All one needs is patience. (The French used to call puzzles les jeux de patience, and the Germans called them Geduldspielen. Now they both call them puzzles.) In this aspect, the jigsaw in the very opposite of the novel. The novel is formless and frameless. It has no blueprint, no pattern, no edges. At the end of a day's work on a novel, you may feel that you have achieved something worse than a lack of progress. You may have ruined what went before. You may have sunk into banality or incoherence. You may have betrayed or maligned others. You may have to scrap not only the day's work, but the work of hte preceding week, month, year, lifetime. You may have lost ground, and for ever. You may have lost your nerve, and indicted all that you have achieved. Writing fiction is frightening. Some novelists find the safety of a reliable formula, but I never did, nor did I really wish to.

But she did find puzzles, and so the connection that brings us this original memoir cum history. The experience of reading The Pattern in the Carpet evokes that quiet, rainy afternoon with time spread out before you feeling. None of the information contained in it is, shall we say, necessary to me. I am not writing a paper on Margaret Drabble, nor am I fiendishly interested in puzzles. Drabble's integration of her topics is not even particularly graceful, but journeying with her as she places side by side these two stories and methodically searches for her way to make of their intersection satisfying literature, is proving a quietly enjoyable pastime of its own.

I cannot manage a week's reading without fiction, so finally the novel in the group - Joseph Kertes's Gratitude. This is an epic novel set during the Nazi occupation of Budapest that came out last year. I am drawn to the subject matter as well as the setting. The book jacket is studded with glib hyperbole by best-selling fiction writers. I have barely started the book and already its set-up is cliched and made for the movies. I am hoping as I get into it, that either the story or the writing (dare I hope for both) will grab me by the neck and that something original to this author will emerge to make me read on. Now it's off to some school reading about the relational-self and diagnosing learning disorders.

From a boy to a man - a creation story (Books - In the Beginning by Chiam Potok)

Singing the praises of Chaim Potok the other day in Booking Through Thursday sent me straight to the shelves for a re-read. Having re-read My Name is Asher Lev, The Chosen, and The Promise several times, this time I chose In the Beginning. As its name suggests, this is a creation story. The creation of the man, David Lurie, from the boy with the combined influences of his physical and mental qualities, his family, his schooling, his friends, his Judaism, and the events taking place during his formative years both locally in his neighborhood in the Bronx, New York and in the world at-large, which include everything from the Russian Revolution and pogroms against the Jews in Poland, to the stock market crash and World War II.

I spent my early life growing a little and being ill a lot. I thought and dreamed a great deal. I lay in my bed and watched and listened. I turned my long lonely days and nights into nets with which I caught the whispers and sighs and glances and the often barely discernible gestures that are the real message carriers in our noisy world. But it was years before I could shape what I saw and heard into a pattern that made some sense of the lives of my aunt and uncle and cousing, the alternately withdrawn and volatile natures of my parents, and the mysterious comings and goings of the now ubiquitous, now vanishing Mr. Shmuel Bader.

David is a prodigy with an abnormally observant mind, a photographic memory, and is reading three languages before his tenth birthday. Destined to become a great rabbi or teacher, his schools promote him ahead, which still does not prevent him from boredom in class and simultaneously does little to make up for his immature social awareness. David has the propensity for a certain kind of dreaminess that is unusually developed because he spends so much time sick in bed. He takes the pictures and ideas that revolve through his daily life both real and imagined and turns them over and over, making images of them in his mind's eye so that he might "enter" into them, as he explains. He tries to make sense of the crazy world he lives in through empathy. This is a world in which his relatives are senselessly murdered simply for being Jewish and even at the level of his neighborhood, he often faces the anti-Semitism of some of his non-Jewish peers. So this method of understanding is a painful one for his sensitive and idiosyncratic sensibility. Potok is particularly good at creating the feeling of being inside the point-of-view of this unique child's mind. And this point of view is particularly useful for probing the challenge of living with any sense of purposefullness or more traditional religious faith in a world of senseless and repeated cruelties.

David is named for his mother, Ruth's, first love, who had, it seems, a similar brilliance as well as a similar frailty. He was the brains and his brother Max the organizing force in a resistance movement among Galician Jews. When David (the elder) is murdered by the Cossacks, Ruth marries Max and they emigrate to America, where Max uses his strength to save hundreds of lives and becomes a hero to his community. Living up to the ghost of his unseen uncle is a tremendous burden to David, but one of the chief lessons of this book is the value of challenging beginnings.

The chief idea of this deep and powerful novel is exemplified through the two brothers - David and Max - as the fictional realizations of two ways of apprehending the world's challenges - action and thought. These natures are experienced by our protagonist through his childhood as irreconcilable qualities. What makes this more than simply another long tale of a childhood hardship is the richness of detail Chaim Potok gives these two men. He doesn't create simple caricatures that summarize their qualities to make for expedient symbolism. Rather, he struggles through the novel's pages as David struggles through his childhood, to understand the complexities of these men. This is an analogue for the exhaustive study of the torah and its many interpretations that David and his peers go through in their Yeshiva education. This study is the center-piece of an active, practicing Jewish life. Judaism is not a tradition of accepting the most obvious explanation of anything, least of all its primary texts and Potok's fiction is no less probing of human beings and their qualities.

The beauty of In the Beginning is the way Potok combines the twin strengths of David's "fathers" into thought-as-action through the character of the younger David. It is this marriage of approaches that is David's coming-of-age and makes clear the usefulness of his iconoclastic mind. And it is the hardness of his beginnings that gives him the strength to endure life as a ground-breaking scholar - a tradition anathema to his community's way of life. Potok's writing is simple and evocative, the world he creates believable and enveloping, and the ideas he brings to life intelligent and complex, confirming my memory of this book as a moving and deep reading experience.

Novelties V (Including Carl Sagan's explanation of the 4th dimension and my favorite culinary tv)

Eating: Lately, I've been enjoying the simple pleasure of fresh raw honey on toast. Mine is from the Champlain Valley Apiaries. The folk wisdom is that local honey has benefits for those with allergies as one is eating small amounts of digested pollen from whatever grows nearest you.


Drinking: Umathum Zweigelt, 2007 - a dry, medium-bodied red wine from Austria with the taste of purple fruits, herbs, and stones.


Watching: I've been enjoying my favorite cooking show from the BBC on You Tube. Ready, Steady, Cook! Really the full-length segments one can stream on You Tube (but cannot be embedded here) are much more enjoyable to watch than those that can be found divided into parts.




Listening: The trio from Act III of Der Rosenkavalier (this audio from the recent Met broadcast):


Surfing: BLOG, A Home for Paper Trimmings, Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper, My Porch


Learning: I learned from the wonderful Carl Sagan not how to imagine the fourth dimension per se, but how at least to think about it:



hat tip: BLOG

So, what's new with you?

Publishing with a heart... (Books - The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire)

Gregory Maguire's latest, The Next Queen of Heaven, is an ultra-lite bit of amusement that, if I were to unfairly armchair-psychoanalyze the author, attempts to make some rapprochement perhaps between his Catholic half and his gay half? In any event, it offers some very funny moments wrapped inside a predictable bit of fluff with a terrific bunch of nuns, a singing trio of gay men, and a woman who appears to undergo a conversion after being knocked on the head by a statuette. Aside from the laughs, the reason I really stuck with it is that it is the fruits of a philanthropic publishing venture by the Concord Free Press. They offer their books for free as incentive for you to donate to a charity of your choice. Once you have read the book you then pass it on to someone else. Either Lambda Legal or GLSEN will be the lucky recipient of a donation from me and I have a so-called recovering-Catholic friend who Im sure will get an enormous kick out of the book.

Underappreciated author pep rally...

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

I had to think about this one, because although for a while people had not heard of Australian novelist Tim Winton, I think that Breath changed that. Richard Powers seems to be on the map too since The Echo Maker and Deirdre Madden with Molly Fox's Birthday (but if you say 'who?' to any of these names, then that's my answer to you - go out and read them .) Iris Murdoch also achieved popular fame, unfortunately more for a movie about her Alzheimer's disease in which she was played by Judy Dench than for her books (so read her too!). I almost answered Nicholas Mosley, but the last sentence of your question changed that. Mosley's work is dense as well as stylistically challenging. His masterpiece - Hopeful Monsters - is a wide ranging novels of ideas spanning history and biology across the 20th century (as well as being a love story). If you can get through this brilliant book then read it. But I cannot say, as the last sentence of your question stipulates, that I don't understand why he's not famous. His work is very demanding. So if I am to include that last sentence, then I would answer with Chiam Potok and Herman Hesse, who have both had their moments of fame, but they have passed. Potok wrote all his beautiful works about Orthodox as well as secular Jews living in a little corner of Brooklyn, N. Y. I think his stories are all set between the 1940s and the 1970s, but the human content of his stories could not be more universal or his writing more accessible. His books include The Chosen, The Promise and my favorite, My Name is Asher Lev. A beautiful author whose works deserve to be widely read. I'll also campaign for Herman Hesse, the German author from the first half of the 20th century who wrote Siddhartha and Steppenwolf which may currently doom him as an author of classics. Funny enough, in the 1960s, he was embraced as a writer who connected with the Eastern mysticism popular at the time and who was willing to be a critic of the institutions of his day. Really, he is a wide ranging author of immense passion and humanity. Beneath the Wheel is a wonderful example of his early work. I am also a fan of Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game. And just for good measure - I will also put in a plug for reading the wonderful novelist and diarist May Sarton and one of my current but underappreciated favorites - Sarah Salway. You must read her Tell Me Everything.

Writer as magician (Books - The Magicians by Lev Grossman)

Lev Grossman's The Magicians might be called the anti-Harry Potter. It is at once a fantasy novel and criticism of the fantasy novel, an entertainment and a tragedy. In reading it, one is diverted but it is not escapist. Its writer might be thought the love-child of J. K. Rowlings and Herman Hesse. This is the first book in a long while I was compelled to read late into the night until I had finished it.

The protagonist, Quentin, is highly intelligent, nearing high school graduation, the third wheel to a relationship between his best friend and the girl he is crazy about (actually Quentin feels third wheel to just about everything). He is discovered by a school for young people with aptitude for magic. He passes the test and is subsumed into a world that is all about learning to use that power. The school is in upstate New York and is cleverly masked from the ordinary world. Spells are woven so that Quentin's clueless parents believe their son is away at a prestigious college. Yes, this is a magic school just like Hogwarts, it is called Brakebills, and even a game played with a small ball and magic spells called welters. And yes, it's hero comes of age through hardship, traffic with evil, and disappointment in love. But The Magicians has more subtlety, more intelligence, and way more grit than Rowlings's made-for-the-movies fairy tale. Grossman's narrative voice is more disgruntled and more wry - you could say Salingeresque - and is more frank about its violence, its drugs, and its sex - this is a story about contemporary teenagers after all.

He would have thought he'd gone all the way to Seventh Avenue by now. He shoved his way even deeper in, brushing up against who knew what toxic flora. A case of poison fucking ivy, that's all he needed now. It was odd to see that here and there among the dead plants a few vital green stalks still poked up, drawing sustenance from who knew where. He caught a whiff of something sweet in the air.

He stopped. All of a sudden it was quiet. No car horns, no stereos, no sirens. His phone had stopped ringing. It was bitter cold, and his fingers were numb. Turn back or go on? He squeezed farther in through a hedge, closing his eyes and squinching up his face against the scratchy twigs. He stumbled over something, an old stone. He suddenly felt nauseous. He was sweating.

When he opened his eyes again he was standing on the edge of a huge wide, perfectly level green lawn surrounded by trees. The smell of ripe grass was overpowering. There was hot sun on his face.

The sun was at the wrong angle. And where the hell were the clouds? The sky was blinding blue. His inner ear spun sickeningly He held his breath for a few seconds, then expelled freezing winter air from his lungs and breathed in warm summer air in its place. It was thick with floating pollen. He sneezed.

Grossman is great on creating atmosphere, momentum and point-of-view with his narrative - not just in weaving story. So all the necessary elements are in place - who, where, and what. Now what is he up to?

This is a book about the interplay of three things - power, love, and fantasy. It tells a story about a magical world, but at the same time it openly mocks escapist fantasy. Sometimes Grossman zings a few cute barbs at Harry Potter, but that's just a way of acknowledging that the similarities are intentional but they are not all. Quentin and all his circle at the magic college read in their youth a series of fantasy books that Grossman obviously means us to associate with C. S. Lewis's Narnia series. Quentin, in particular, with his desire to escape the real world as he cannot discover his place in it, was an expert in this fictional one. Re-reading these stories and escaping into them long after most of his acquaintances were tentatively experimenting with sex and drugs. If the magical world is the foil to the real and non-fantastical world of most grown-up people in Grossman's novel, the world of Fillory and Further (Grossman's Narnia) is the counter-foil to the real-magical world Grossman creates and his reader comes to believe in. These layers of fantasy are important because Grossman wants us to accept the magical school and powers as a reality that exists alongside our own.

"Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic," Fogg said expansively. "It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect, don't you think? If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart - reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

"Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

"But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.

The layers of fantasy are also important because literature itself bridges this separation of word and thing, making worlds where none existed before. It is not surprising that children, adolescents especially, figure so frequently in fantasy literature - they still move between the worlds of word and thing with less to-do. However, their power to link word and world is tied up in the maelstrom of their very strong feelings - their love, loneliness, and pain. It is only supposedly mastering oneself as an adult that one can harness the powers called magic in these stories.

Grossman mercifully does not play simple-mindedly with the notions of good and evil in this story. His fanstasy within a fantasy creates an Escherian narrative - a hand writing a story of a hand writing a story.... - the creatures who do good are not all good, nor are those who wreak havoc all bad. Grossman's critic's eye (he is the book critic of Time magazine) never leaves him in this novel. He comments on books like the Harry Potter and Narnia series because he is writing a fantasy that will not let us escape. One will hopefully love in this life, this book says, but then one will not escape from the pain of loss. And while it may be attractive when one hurts to simply envision oneself as a character in the narrative of an all-powerful author, characters are themselves authors of multiple narratives, each with their own characters. We are not merely victims we also all have power over others and as adults we must be mindful of whether we use that power for good or evil.

Grossman has a fantastic imagination. One of my favorite scenes in this novel was a segment during their magical education when Quentin and his friends were turned into swans to migrate to special training site. The visceral reality of this segment was powerfully enveloping and marvelously fun. The writer I associate Grossman mot with is Herman Hesse. A romantic sensibility fueled with a critical point-of view about the culture he lives in and expressed in a narrative that is entertaining, intelligent and inevitable. Occasionally he can not resist gilding the lily, with one too many a curly-cue in a sentence or the use of a word that stops this reader to make him say - what a smart guy this Lev Grossman is. With five pages left to this fantastic book at one am., did I really need to stop to look up the word aeruginous? But this is one of a few rare glitches that occasionally reminded me that Grossman is a human writer, not a real magician. Fantastic stuff. It's nice to write a rave so early in the year!

Charleston, Charleston...

Suggested by Prairie Progressive: Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?

Am I a flapper, you ask? Sure. I'll read a hard cover's book jacket or a paperback's rear cover (or the quotes and blurb on the book's on-line page) as one criteria if I'm considering whether to buy it in the store or borrow it from the library. If it is giving away too much of the plot I will skim over it lightly, just looking to see if my appetite is whetted by theme, setting, a description of the writing, or anything else. If it is peppered with obviously over-the-top hyperbole I will usually put it down. I'll also read reviews and blog posts and I love it when bookstores have employees who read and who post their own recommendations. I will also dip into the book for a page or two - usually the opening and one other page - and see if the quality and tone of the writing are what I'm in the mood for. Books are very much a thing of the moment for me. I have to be taken by the right book at the right phase of the moon, or something. Some days I want Buddenbrooks and some days I want Harry Potter and I'm not beneath flapping to figure out if a volume has my name on it. I will break into a Charleston if I have to. I also have such a, er, generous TBR pile, that I will often read the book jacket a second time, along with several pages, when I am deciding what to read next. Then when I settle down to read a book, I will read everything. The the title page, the copyright page, the dedication, the acknowledgments, and will often skim the book jacket again, just to increase the anticipation as I begin!