Instead of just reading junk/beach books during the summer (which I certainly also do), I like to tackle some big books, too.  Last summer I read A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, which was the longest book I had ever read at 1474 pages in a small font and narrow margins.  Several kind commentors / bloggers have mentioned Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in the same company as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is currently #1 on Amy’s Top Ten Books of 2005 List.  My bulky copy (1079 pages including end notes) of Infinite Jest with its bright orange binding cover has been waiting patiently on the Read Me shelves here in Alaska for at least a year. I haven’t been able to start Everything is Illuminated for some reason — afraid I’ll be disappointed if it’s not as good as Loud/Close, maybe, or still letting that wonderful book seep into the aquifer of my memory. 

I’ve been reading my Theravada Vipassana Buddhism books, too, which is the type of formal meditation I do, when I do it. Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: the Path of Insight Meditation is a classic, and Dharma Punx and Buddhism without Beliefs are all favorites.  All of the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh do me good, too.  An End to Suffering:  the Buddha in the World keeps sitting at the bottom of my Current Reading pile, but I imagine that I’ll get to it before the Summer is over.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress as I read my way through Infinite Jest.

I buried myself in a thriller series the last couple of days so I could ignore the empty house around me while Brad was off doing his thing in California.  I read the first two John Rain books last summer and bought the third in hardback in Seattle when I was on my last detective/thriller/mystery binge.  The latest John Rain arrived from Amazon a couple of days ago (I’m on a first name basis with Dan, the UPS man), which inspired me to re-read the series.  They’re the best assassin-as-hero books since The Eiger Sanction.  They are set in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Macau, Manila, Bangkok, Phuket, and other fun places in Asia, as well as Brazil and a brief, but memorable, visit to Virginia.  I read the first couple last summer in preparation for a planned birthday trip to Tokyo in September that didn’t come to fruition, and have now read the next two in preparation for a planned trip to Tokyo at the end of this month that’s also not going to come to fruition.  I’m sure I’ll make it to Japan eventually and will look up some of the coffee houses and jazz clubs described so lovingly in these books.

And incredibly sad.  This book actually made me cry, which doesn’t happen very often.  I started it late in the evening and stayed up until I finished it, and then I re-read it again the next day.  It’s beautifully written and funny and the first book I’ve read that includes the aftermath of September 11 in a genuine way.  Foer also interweaves narratives of the bombing of Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden, which I think connects the suffering of 9/11 to the suffering of others and starts the long process of historical context.

From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com)
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer’s bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb’s "charring effect." It’s more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist’s voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters’ constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.

This book definitely goes on Amy’s Top Ten Books of 2005 List, currently at #1.

If A Million Little Pieces (the favorite book of the editors at amazon.com for 2003) made me glad that I’m not an alcoholic or drug addict or criminal or the parent of an alcoholic or drug addict or criminal, My Friend Leonard makes me glad that I feel free to be who I am, and not trapped living my life in a huge lie.  It’s a relief to see that James Frey’s life has come a long way up from the opening pages of A Million Little Pieces.  He’s still struggling in My Friend Leonard.  It opens almost as hard and more sad than Little Pieces and continues in the semi-stream-of-consciousness prose voice that gives his work such rawness and immediacy.  Both of these books are ultimately tales of recovery from loss and the stubbornness of James Frey’s spirit.  Read them when you’re feeling strong —

I love Anne Lamott’s writing.  I first read All New People years ago, and Bird by Bird is one of my favorite books to read about writing instead of doing my own writing.  Plan B continues the themes of Traveling Mercies:  Some Thoughts on Faith, where she describes her reluctant experience of coming to Christianity as being "hunted down by Jesus."  As she says in the acknowledgments page of Plan B:  "I am deeply grateful to David Talbot, editor in chief of Salon.com, who published much of this material in earlier form.  I am just about the only overtly spiritual person he can stand…"  Some of my best friends are spiritual people.  I even invite them over to my house for dinner sometimes, as long as they agree not to talk about spirituality.  And I won’t even start on any of a wide range of possible diatribes about religion and politics and how the last election radicalized me from being self-identified as an agnostic to being an atheist.  One of Anne Lamott’s many gifts as a writer is to bring sadness and humor together in the way that life does, and bring us along with her.  Here is a sample of her work:

I asked a friend of mine who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart to explain the name, because I instinctively know that both Sam [her son] and I have, or are, diamond hearts.  My friend said our hearts are like diamonds because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we not only are portals for this love, but are made of it.  She said we are made of light, our hearts faceted and shining, and I believe this, to a point:  I disagree with her saying we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that merely seem dense and ponderous, yet actually are made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light between them.  It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children.  But I can meet her halfway:  I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs.

I would call my path Diamond Meatball:  people would comfort and uplift one another by saying, "There’s a diamond in there somewhere." 

Still, on better days, I see us as light in containers, like those pierced tin lanterns that always rust, that let the candlelight shine out in beautiful snowflake patterns.  (p. 160)

As a person clearly on the Diamond Meatball path, it’s nice to have a companion like Anne Lamott, and as I finished her book late last night in the after-midnight Alaskan twilight, I didn’t want it to end.

I read two books this weekend/week, both memoirs about adolescence in America.  I couldn’t put down Oh the Glory of it All, which is sad and funny and beautifully written in the cleverly self-conscious and ironic style that I think I first loved in Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis and his first novel, You Shall Know our Velocity.  And it does indeed turn out that Sean Wilsey, the author of Oh the Glory, is an editor at large at McSweeney’s Quarterly, and Dave Eggers wrote a blurb for the back cover.  Small writing world?!?

Oh the Glory is another piece in an unsolvable puzzle about why some kids make it through adolescence and some kids don’t.  Some of the most disheartening parts of the book are about him being shuttled from one boarding school to another until he fortunately gets to one where the people treat him like a person.  It’s nice that Sean Wilsey made it down the long road out of his family and into the comparatively sane world of adulthood and wrote this book.