"The Best of Me" by David Sedaris

As the title suggests, The Best of Me is a collection of Sedaris' hits, or at least essays he feels best represent him (after all, his most famous, "Santaland Diaries," is not included). That meant that I'd read several of the stories before, though enough distance has passed that they flitted only vaguely on the edge of my memory. Sedaris is NPR-funny--earning a light chuckle rather uproarious laughter--but his best stories touch on our hypocrisy, our tendency to self-aggrandize, our simultaneous rejection of and solace in our upbringing. This collection showcases those themes well, serving as a sort of Sedaris primer.

Though the book is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, it wisely skews towards Sedaris' personal essays. I found the fiction pieces forgettably silly, with cliched jabs at easy targets. The essays, though, focus primarily on his family, particularly his relationships with his parents and his sister Tiffany, who died by suicide. Also there's a lot of essays about air travel.

The worst part of putting all those essays together in a single collection is that much gets repeated. The essays were initially published separately, but put together, we hear about Sedaris and partner Hugh's purchase of a beach home or Sedaris' inability to learn French or Tiffany's death multiple times. The benefit of putting so many similarly-themed essays together is that we do feel a real sense of the Sedaris family and of the contradictions inherent in loving motley people brought together by birth, not choice. 

Sedaris speaks fondly of his father, especially in old age, despite his father's lack of support, particularly when Sedaris was young. It's almost surprising when we head his father cut David out of his will. Sedaris adores his mother, but we later hear of her alcoholism, a problem the family did little to address. He speaks of ups and downs with Tiffany, though at the end we hear the last time he saw her alive was when he had the door shut on her as she approached during one of his readings. Despite the challenges, the dominant theme towards his family is affection and devotion. Given today's emphasis on making your own way, of letting go of family expectations and baggage, it's almost surprising. Of course, Sedaris is not a young man, despite often writing as if he were. Maybe it's age that provides perspective.

There's something warm and comforting about Sedaris' writing: a reminder that you're not that neurotic; condolences that other people think shitty things too; a shared disgust for fellow airplane passengers. In that way, The Best of Me is a cozy read, maybe even ideal for "these uncertain times" (I know, but it's overused because it works... or I'm just lazy.)

"Slaughterhouse-Five," a graphic novel adaptation, by Kurt Vonnegut with Ryan North and Albert Monteys

I taught Slaughterhouse-Five for several years, and it remains a favorite novel. There's the dark humor, Vonnegut's deceptively simple prose style, the uncertain chronology, the war between cynicism and hopefulness. I often quote Vonnegut's admonition, at the end, to appreciate the nice moments (it's a sentiment he repeated in various mediums, though I always think of SH5). I couldn't resist trying the new graphic novel adaptation (it does have a pretty cool cover), even though I've been resistant to the genre as a whole. After all, Vonnegut's book is full of vivid images, from the fantastic Tralfamarodians to Edgar Derby's "climactic" execution for stealing a teapot.

I enjoyed seeing how North and Monteys brought some of the key elements of the novel to life. Shown in adjacent panels, the parallels between Billy's present and his "time traveling" flash backs to the war are made even clearer. Some of the more stunning images--the arrival in beautiful Dresden and its subsequent bombing--are made even more impactful through full-page spreads. Despite those and other arresting images, however, the book very much feels like a lesser adaptation. Something that might be fun as a parallel text in a classroom but which offers little as a standalone. 

Part of that is that a graphic novel must rely heavily on dialogue, which is the least interesting part of Slaghterhouse-Five, whose strength instead is in the deadpan narration. The oft-repeated "so it goes" is present in the adaptation, but it feels more forgotten, rather than the essential refrain it becomes in the novel. North and Monteys also explicitly take on the role of creators, so the first-person Vonnegut-as-narrator who frames the first and last chapters of the novel becomes a third person character too. That diminishes the way the novel challenges understandings of fiction and nonfiction.

The illustrations are fantastic, even if maybe it's better if the Tralfamarodians remain imagined. North and Monteys have worked hard to capture the spirit of the novel, even if it's not fully possible in this form. So I'm glad to have read it, even if it can't live up to the original.

"When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is my second entry in "possible books to teach at school." I was drawn to Kalanithi's book primarily because it's short, nonfiction, and modern. I was also drawn to it because of its clear hook, the undoubtable reason it's become so popular and has over 16,000 Amazon reviews: the author's--a neurosurgeon--tragic death at age 36 of lung cancer.

We have a grand sense of "fairness" in the world--what deaths are tragedies, and what deaths are acceptable to our understanding of the modern universe. Kalanithi's death challenges that sense of fairness. He's young, for one, and he dies just months after the birth of his first child, but even more importantly, he's incredibly successful in one of the most challenging fields most of us can imagine. In a country that prizes professional success and academic recognition, Kalanithi reached the absolute top, only to be toppled by a unconquerable disease. Plenty of that irony also carries the book. Kalanithi is a doctor, yet his medical training offers no respite from his cancer; he has access to the best doctors and treatments available, yet we're reminded that modern medicine can't save all.

I say all this preamble to note that much of what sustains When Breath Becomes Air is its premise. It makes it hard, then, to separate out the compelling premise from Kalanithi's writing. Is the writing good? Is the book good? Or does the story simply pull too many strings of human belief to look away?

I don't know. I found myself pulled in by Kalanithi, but was I pulled in by his prose or his credentials? Surely a Stanford neurosurgeon is to be listened to, regardless of what he says! Plus he faced death in a way most of us (I'm the age he was when he died, I note with a shudder) would find unimaginable. I think, though, I ultimately would have preferred a more honest book. Kalanithi spends the book primarily exploring his life's work, his search for philosophical meaning in the scientific practice of medicine. He speaks in grand (and, perhaps, vague) pronouncements and metaphors about the ephemeral nature of life itself; of our search for purpose. But he doesn't really talk about ambition. About the single-minded pursuit of a demanding profession that nearly broke up his marriage (it's saved by his cancer diagnosis). I don't mean to belittle Kalanithi's philosophical meditations or his desire to help others, but you don't become a neurosurgeon because of philosophy or out of altruism. The cost is simply too high. Becoming a neurosurgeon is a result of ambition, a drive for success and recognition at the highest possible levels. 

I don't fault this pursuit--it's one imminently respected by Americans--but it's not a pursuit without cost emotionally and socially. It's an individualistic pursuit, one that precludes a priority on family, for example. I don't mean that as a criticism. Platitudes about "family is the most important" aren't useful. But I would have appreciated more awareness of the fact that, to succeed as Kalanithi does, the self--via the actualization of his work as a surgeon--comes first. When faced with his cancer diagnosis, Kalanithi chooses to keep working, despite his limited time left. Again, I don't fault that choice. Given his life's work, it's the most obvious and natural choice to make. But it does make his romantic statements at the end about the joy his young daughter brings him ring hollow. He acknowledges this joy is "a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied" (199), but we never see that criticism of medicine earlier in the novel. That pursuing professional (or academic or athletic) success means pursuing an unachievable joy.

Nevertheless, while I might have wanted more brutal honesty about his profession, there's plenty of compelling material, both about the work of top doctors and surgeons and about the limitations of modern medicine. 

I wrote the above after finishing Kalanithi's portion of the book, assuming the epilogue by his wife wouldn't substantively impact the memoir. Surprisingly, Lucy's epilogue is essential to the book as a whole and actually changes my opinion somewhat. Lucy's description of their final months is heartbreaking and intimate in a way Paul's writing is not. It was in her section that I found myself quietly crying, even though I was reading in the middle of class with a bunch of teenage boys in the room. While Paul focuses on philosophical questions of the body and mind, she focuses on the love of family--something Paul practically ignores (he acknowledges his family's support but offers few details, spending far more time on his relationship with his oncologist; Lucy's pregnancy--undertaken only because of Paul's short time left--is mentioned in passing). She notes, too, the limitations of Paul's story: "Paul's voice in When Breath Becomes Air is strong and distinctive, but also somewhat solitary. Parallel to this story are the love and warmth and spaciousness and radical permission that surrounded him.... He wrote with a clear voice, the voice of someone with limited time, a ceaseless survivor, though there were other selves as well" (220).

After reading the epilogue, I can see more value in When Breath Becomes Air, and see it more of a story of the many-faceted life one lives, even near death. I'm still not sure if this is the book I'm looking for to use in the classroom, as my students might find the more philosophical portions dry, but it would be an interesting shift from the material we more commonly teach.

"Irresistible" by Adam Alter

I chose Irresistible in pursuit of a new book to read with my AP English Language class. Our current full-length texts are fiction, even though it's a nonfiction course, and I've wanted to shake up the curriculum for awhile. I thought a contemporary book about the danger of technology might be appealing, but I'm disappointed to say the book was largely a miss, mostly because it had so little to say about technology.

The book is subtitled "the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked," which gives the impression that it's about technology (of course) and about the big businesses (presumably via behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) that manipulate natural human behavior in pursuit of profit.

Unfortunately, the book has almost nothing to say about the tech giants' predatory behavior, and relatively little to say even about technology. The book is, instead, about the psychology of behavioral addiction. And while technology-assisted addictions fall under this label, technology-related examples make up less than half of the examples Alter uses. The first third of the book is spent justifying in what ways behavioral addiction is deserving of the "addiction" label, which previously had been reserved primarily for substance abuse (alcoholism, drug addiction). This distinction is important to psychologists who must diagnose mental illnesses, but it's an unnecessary justification for most people who, I'd argue, are fairly willing to accept that behaviors can be addictive.

The second part of the book explores some elements that can make behaviors addictive: goal setting, inconsistent feedback, cliffhangers, for example. Some of that can be interesting, but in using such a huge variety of examples, Alter's point seems to be that some evolutionary advantages in the past make humans susceptible to a variety of addictive behavior today. That's fine, but it's not a particularly compelling observation about technology in the 21st century.

The ending of the book attempts to offer some solutions, but bizarrely offers a number of tech solutions to addictions that seem like they would simply substitute one tech addiction for another tech reliance, rather than get at the root of the issue. The chapter on gamification is especially problematic. At the end of the chapter, Alter does briefly acknowledge the deep criticism of gamification (it suggests things must be extrinsically made "fun" to be worthwhile, rather than focusing on self-motivation or intrinsic rewards), but then rather than dive into when gamification is or isn't appropriate, he offers a wishy-washy "it's good and bad!" to conclude. 

Even worse, his solutions overall focus on the individual user rather than on the creators of addictive tech. There's a few suggestions aimed at companies (say, turning off email between certain evening hours), but ultimately Alter argues the individual needs to steel against addiction--through awareness or maybe more technology. But if, as Alter argues, many of these behaviors are instinctual, inventing more apps and programs to treat behavioral addictions isn't really the solution. It's removing the addictions in the first place. Alter notes this, but he doesn't take it a step further by speaking to the companies themselves. A teenager today honestly can't remove himself from the world of social media and still exist as a social creature. A damning critique of social media companies' exploitation of young people would have been more interesting and useful. 

That's not to say there weren't some interesting tidbits. Though I was aware of the effectiveness of intermittent rewards, I hadn't thought of that in the context of social media--how the uncertainty over the "reward" of each post (how many "likes" will I get? how many comments?) propels users to post more. I also thought the chapter about the dangers of goal setting (the inevitable disappointment once a goal is reached; the lack of contentment) was useful in a society that prizes ambition. 

As a last point, though the book was only published in 2017, it already feels somewhat dated. There's an outsized focus on World of Warcraft, a game which I imagine is still popular, though I've never met anyone who plays. Newer apps like TikTok are completely absent. Online shopping also seems important, though it's only addressed briefly.

Ultimately, it's a disappointing book that doesn't deliver on the blurb. An excerpt here or there could be interesting, especially for someone unfamiliar with the basic human psychology behind high tech use, but otherwise it's a skip.

2020: Year in Review

Everyone, including me, has agreed that 2020 has been the worst, but shockingly, it's been fantastic for my reading--and even more fantastic for writing about my reading. This year I wrote 22 (!) reviews, the most since 2014, before I had children. I also read 30 books, equaling my 2014 total (and in 2014 I spent a whole summer hugely pregnant, sitting around the house, doing nothing!). I had attributed my continued reading to my book club, but with that on pause since March, I realized I'll read plenty on my own, and maybe even more without the pressure of a deadline.

Partly I read because I didn't want to think about this year. Reading was an escape and a distraction. I wrote because I felt stupid and ineffective sitting at home. Writing was a way to prove to myself that I'm still capable, still have intelligence to offer, even if it's rarely called on these days. 

Even so, writing the reviews was a struggle at first. I had fallen out of the habit of composing reviews in my head, something I used to do as a way to occupy idle time. When I do sit down to write, my brain resists the necessary effort to make my swirling ideas into coherent thought. I feel myself getting lazy--putting down ideas but not taking the time to form them into a cohesive whole. 

But I decided permitting some of the laziness was a necessary compromise in order to write. If I demanded A+ work every time, I'd stop doing it altogether. So I wrote 22 reviews. Some I'm happy with, some I'm not. Some expressed my thoughts about a book well, and others are just glimpses of still-inarticulate thoughts. That's okay, which is probably the biggest lesson of 2020. 

Books read in 2020:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Jan)
2. Lanny by Max Porter (Jan)
3. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Feb)
4. Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott (Mar)
5. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Apr)
6. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (Apr)
7. Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams (May)
8. Normal People by Sally Rooney (Jun)
9. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (Jun)
10. Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (Jun)
11. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson (Jun)
12. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (Jun)
13. The City We Became by NK Jemisin (Jul)
14. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Jul)
15. Wordslut by Amanda Montell (Aug)
16. A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Aug)
17. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Aug) 
18. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Sept, a reread)
19. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Sept)
20. Pew by Catherine Lacey (Oct)
21. There There by Tommy Orange (Oct)
22. Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (Oct)
23. The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine (Nov)
24. The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (Nov)
25. Survival Math by Mitchell S Jackson (Nov)
26. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Nov)
27. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (Dec)
28. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (Dec)
29. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell (Dec)
30. Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (Dec)

Twenty-one of the books were written by women, a huge shift from when I started blogging and oddly favored men. In addition, about a third of the books were written by people of color. Almost a third were non-fiction, also a big change from a decade ago. Most of the books were published in the last three years, with only four written before 2010.

There were some fantastic books this year. I'm still proud of myself for finishing Ducks, Newburyport. It's an English lit fanatic's dream, and I'm still thinking about it. Little Women was an absolute delight (as is the Gerwig movie adaptation). Perhaps Normal People wouldn't have resonated as much if I hadn't watched it alongside the Hulu miniseries, but it nonetheless has stuck with me. Though there were some I didn't love, there weren't any real stinkers.

So as I close out 2020, I'll just reiterate that this year was the worst, except for the books. 

"Homesick for Another World" by Ottessa Moshfegh

After teasing for weeks, I've finished Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection! The collection that I reacted to so strongly, I had to put it down twice in favor of the sparseness of Carver and the poetry of Greenwell. I've learned a few things. I don't like reading the same author back-to-back (just as I don't like binge-watching TV shows). For me, the magic of artistry falters when examined in repetition; the artist's skill becomes a trick exposed. I also don't like reading short story collections back-to-back. Stories demand savoring, yet a collection demands to be read as a whole. I find it hard to balance the needs of the individual story with the theme of the whole in a single collection, let alone three.  

But none of that ultimately says anything about Homesick. In most fiction, the characters’ emotions are relatable, even if their actions are not. I alluded to this as much in Greenwell's Cleanness. Though the protagonist and I have little in common, his feelings were something with which I could empathize. Moshfegh’s characters, on the other hand, exist very much on the periphery of human experience—little about them is relatable or understandable. They're scarcely believable as human beings half the time.

I tell my English classes that they can’t argue a character is “crazy” because it stops the conversation. “Crazy” (in literature, anyway) means meaningless, arbitrary. I don’t think Moshfegh crafts stories that are either, so what, then, to make of her undeniably “crazy,” delusional, and (as I put in my Greenwell review), psychotic characters? Characters who have no lucid grasp on reality or other people?

Beyond existing on the periphery, her characters are similar in many other ways. Moshfegh’s protagonists are united by a common revulsion for fat people, by disgust at the classless-ness of the poor. Yet they have a fascination with the human body at a base and visceral level. They’re the kind of people who casually use the word “retarded” or refer to gay people as “homosexuals.” They’re also arrogant and proud; their fringe existence confirms (for them and only them) their specialness.

The same type of protagonists occupy the two Moshfegh novels I’ve read—My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands—but isolated from other “crazies,” their protagonists’ actions can feel like a reflection of a crazed society. Placed together in a short story collection, however, the protagonists appear separate from society. Their psychosis seems to be about them, not a broader whole.

 So while I didn't see any larger meaning or message to the stories, there does exist within them a weird energy, a sense of life in their absurd characters. There's "The Surrogate," about a woman hired to play the attractive face of a business. It seems like a story that should take a dark turn, but it doesn't really. In "Dancing in the Moonlight," a man who spends all his money on luxury clothes but is essentially homeless decides he's in love with a woman who remodels furniture. He goes on a tragically comic adventure to convince her he has an ottoman that needs reupholstering. "The Beach Boy" maybe works best as a whole. In it, a middle-aged couple returns from a trip to Mexico; the wife's unexpected death leads the husband to reconsider everything about his marriage (in absurd fashion, of course). They're all unsettling and fantastical.

Ultimately I don't know what it all means, or whether it means anything. I wouldn't universally recommend Moshfegh--she's something to be taken in small doses--but there's undeniable skill in her craftsmanship of crazy. 

"Cleanness" by Garth Greenwell

It's rather odd that I've felt the need to begin both this and my last review (of Raymond Carter's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) by referencing Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick from Another World. Partially it's because all three books are essentially short story collections (though Cleanness has a single narrator), which inevitably invites comparisons. Partially it's because twice I picked up Moshfegh only to set it aside for another.

Even more so than Carver's collection, Cleanness exists opposite Homesick for Another World, which could probably be subtitled "Dirtiness." There's plenty about Moshfegh that enthralls, but coming off her novel Death in Her Hands, I couldn't handle even more nearly-psychotic narrators, nor her minute and all-consuming focus on the disgusting nature of human bodies and habits. Though Greenwell's novel also focuses intensely on the human body and the inner self, its focus, tone, and style have almost nothing in common with Moshfegh's cynicism.

Greenwell's narrator, a gay American professor living and teaching in Bulgaria, goes through a range of emotions, including depression, but unlike Moshfegh's protagonists, he never feels psychotic--even his tendency toward self-harm is understandable, natural. And though Cleanness contains the most explicit descriptions of sex I have ever read, Greenwell writes in such a way that the acts don't inspire disgust or titillation, nor laughter or grimace; instead, they read as pure expressions of need or love or feeling. So maybe ultimately it's love that's absent from Moshfegh's work and which sets her and Greenwell most apart.

While Moshfegh's characters are usually alone, Greenwell focuses on love--and its mate, pain--through the relationships of human bodies. The explicitness of the sex in Cleanness was what most stood out in the New York Times review that led me to pick up the book, and undoubtedly it's something that could turn off readers (especially the second chapter about a BDSM encounter gone wrong). I thought of a teachers' Facebook group of which I'm a part; in a recent post, a member asked about the acceptability of a teenager using casual profanity in an essay. I was shocked by how many teachers were horrified--it was a sign of lack of intelligence, they bizarrely argued; they would never read anything with profanity. I think English readers as a whole (or maybe just Americans?) have a similar attitude toward sex, particularly in the written word. Sex can exist "off-screen," but any detailed description is pornographic, a sign of smuttiness and poor writing (unclear which is worse). 

Greenwell seeks to challenge that assumption, writing about sex in exquisite detail and beautiful prose. For Greenwell's narrator (and Greenwell himself), sex is an essential part of one's true self--to remove sex or to deny sex's role in life is to deny one's humanity (a metaphor that is especially apt for the queer community. Though the protagonist is an openly gay man, he lives in Bulgaria, a country with rampant homophobia that demands his relationships be kept somewhat hidden). In the novel, sex is a vehicle to explore love, hope, heartbreak, and shame in ways that we hide in our day-to-day interactions.

But to focus only on the sex is to do a disservice to the rest of the book, much of which goes beyond sex. The first chapter, where a student comes out discreetly to the professor and the professor finds himself unable to offer the comfort or solace the student seeks, is incredibly heartbreaking, as is "Decent People," about pro-democracy protests in Bulgaria that attack simultaneous LGBTQ-rights protests. The largest section of the book, about the narrator's relationship with R., a Portuguese man, is one of the most moving depictions of love and heartbreak I've read. 

In trying to determine what it is about Greenwell that's so moving, eventually I realized it's the prose itself. It's not a surprise that Greenwell started out as a poet--there's a rhythm through his sentences that carries the emotional content. In an interview in The Paris Review, Greenwell describes his syntactical style: "The kind of sentence I'm drawn to, which constantly falls back on itself in correction or hesitation or defeat but is also drawn forward by the demands of rhythm and cadence, feels mimetic of desire to me, even of sex" (yeah, okay, there's a lot of sex; in the same interview, he says "the great human virtue is promiscuity"). I do think that Greenwell's recursive style is part of his appeal, so at odds with the assertive, "masculine" style of an author like Carver or Cormac McCarthy. Maybe I felt reassured that the prose itself assumed a lack of knowing rather than bold pronouncements; that the prose invited one to be washed over by emotions. 

Maybe I also felt reassured by the fact that, despites its sadness, Cleanness seems hopeful about love. Moshfegh's characters are hopeless and alone, but Greenwell suggests meaningful connection is possible, even if fleeting.