Things I’ve been thinking about but can’t seem to write a whole thing on:

• I found what I believe is the first book I ever read to address
  the mutability of time, which is one of my top weaknesses. The book’s out of print, but the magic of the internets
  brought it to me. I read that book in the bathtub until it was
  literally falling apart,
  and when we moved to California I left it behind, which means I hadn’t seen it for nearly thirty years. It was really weirdly great to read it
  again and have whole sentences ring with familiarity in my head. The
  persistence of memory is another weakness of mine. I feel quite
  resonant.
• The kids in Squire’s class have moved on to "faggot" as an
  insult. Is there no creativity in the world of ten years old or what.
  Talking to him about words and then I read this great Steven Pinker
  article, which makes me feel surrounded in a good way by the power of
  words. The concept of being
  able to fairly mock people for what they choose instead of what they can’t help doesn’t seem that
  complex and I don’t understand why it doesn’t get pursued more. I do
  understand that unfairness is part of the fun of bullying, but it seems
  like saying "don’t bully" isn’t terribly effective and maybe more clear
  rules about how to democratically make fun of people might be time
  better spent.
• Squire has fully mastered the dirty look. It is really
  impressive; I finally taught it to him ("finally" meaning I was finally
  patient enough to push through his stubbornness and he was finally
  bored enough to try doing it my way) during a particularly dull train
  ride. Even though it’s my tutelage at work, I shrivel a little when I
  see it. It is extremely awesome. He also has a sympathy face that does
  not fail.
• Presently there will be a rule in the house that people who buy
  food that is not on the grocery list and then do not mention the
  purchase and possible preparation of said food to the primary cook, nor
  (as secondary cook) do they themselves do anything with said food…
  well, not to put too lawyerly a spin on it, but those people are going
  to be force fed moldy mystery vegetable or something. Here’s what we
  currently have rotting in the fridge, none of which is my doing: a pot
  of …looks like it wanted to be chicken soup, a greenish thing that’s
  maybe in the eggplant family, a whiteish thing that looks like alien
  spawn, and corn on the cob, which I do not eat.
• I found a picture of a man about whom I was once quite serious. He’s
  the vice president of his company now. I’m vaguely happy for him. I am
  more happy for myself that I am not with him, despite his meteoric rise
  to moderate heights, because he still looks like he borrowed his dad’s
  jacket and tie to get dressed up, which is a particularly unappealing
  look after 40. I hope he finally got a pet dog and that he either
  learned to kiss or found a girl who didn’t mind having her lips
  bruised; I hope he’s happy.
• Friar and I were talking about condescension, which is not a
  deadly sin but should be. I’ve been told I’m arrogant prickly and some
  other stuff. I don’t know. I don’t work well with others for sure but
  that’s generally why I avoid others. If I’m hanging out with you, it’s
  probably because I like you. I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.
• If you are my friend, I mean good friend, I will probably not
  like the person you date. This is in most cases not because the person
  is actually unlikeable, but because I do not think they are good enough
  for you. Perhaps at some later date we can discuss why it is that most
  of my friends like Friar, and some, including those who have not met
  him, will even go so far as to say I do not appreciate him enough.
  Compare and contrast. For the record he seems to think I appreciate him
  just fine. Of course I haven’t told him about the forcefeeding of the
  alien vegetable.

There’s some bit of nonsense at the end of some of Squire’s latest
audiobooks that just burns me up. It says that it’s important for kids
to be read to… and that in today’s busy world, blahblahblah,
audiobooks are just as good as a parent reading to a child. In today’s
busy world on what planet, I’d like to know. Audiobooks are great –and
I certainly appreciate Jim Dale for his ability to read Harry Potter
and the Gobbledygook over and over again, because once was fine, but
once was enough– but they’re not the same as reading aloud.

Now, I understand that not everyone is the fantastic reader I
am. I am to reading what Jules Winnfield is to a foot massage: I don’t
be ticklin’ or nothing! But I do not read to my son because I love the
sound of my own voice (shut up!). I read to him because:

1. It’s fun to do things together. It’s fun to watch movies
together, learn things together, go on trips together, because we can
talk about it afterwards. How cool was it when Will got his wish of
snow for his birthday? It wasn’t what we expected at all, was it?

2. It’s good to see how he thinks. I think it’s important for me as a
parent to observe how information gets processed, and to guide the
processing when it’s tangled, and sit back and relish it when it is as
clear as only a child’s processing can be. I get more out of a book
when I read it to him because I see it in his eyes and mine at the same
time.

3. It is good for me as a reader to read aloud. Words sound different,
and sentences sing or they don’t, and it’s different than reading in my
head. I would have missed some of the magic of "The Subtle Knife" if
I’d read it to myself, and I’m glad I’ve had someone to read to.

4. If he has questions while I’m reading to him, he can ask. This might
not be As True for girls as for boys, but it’s been my observation that
it’s easier to talk about something if you stumble over it together.
It’s true for vocabulary definitely, and also for storytelling.

5.
It is fun to experience things that are generally solitary together. So
much of what we experience is solitary, even if we’re all in it
together– reading together is like watching a television show where
both people are watching the same show at the same moment, and both
people can hit the pause button whenever they want to be witty or
insightful or confused. I like the remote control in the middle of the
couch, and I like reading as a companionable activity.

Please understand: I like audiobooks. Kids have the ability to listen to the same thing over and over again (CrazyFrog, I hate you so much) and it’s been great for Squire to have that available to him, because I wouldn’t do it. I understand that in "today’s busy world" we sometimes can’t take time
for everything that we feel we ought to do for our kids. I really do
get that and I also understand that I am privileged to have the time to
read to my kid. But I think that if you don’t, you’re hurting… not so
much the kid, because whatevs, kids are tough. But you’re hurting
yourself. And I’m angry that these audiobooks, in the interest of marketing
audiobooks, imply that they’re more able to do your job than you are.
Delegate the housekeeping, delegate the lice removal. But really, why
delegate the fun stuff? And reading is fun.

I finished "The Golden Compass" over the weekend. I had started reading it to Squire Tuck and then apparently wasn’t reading it fast enough, because he started reading it alone. Since I hadn’t already read it, I hopped to so we could talk about it.

I liked it a lot. It takes a certain amount of thinking for granted, which I particularly like in a children/YA book. It was well-written, and there was a decent flow to the plot. I liked that the end of a chapter was really the end of a chapter, and not always a cliffhanger. I liked how things progressed in a way that was exciting and possible to follow.

I also thought Pullman did a good job of telling you things about characters in a way that revealed his thoughts about them. For example, there’s a part when he says that Lyra has no imagination. This is hard to fathom because she’s a great on-the-spot liar, which to me requires an active imagination, but Pullman explains that in fact she is a good liar because she believes what she says… in a way, he presents something and explains it away at the same time. I wasn’t sure I agreed with him but it’s clear he thought about what he wrote.

He has a way of describing people through their behavior that I thought was really powerful. Mrs. Coulter only has a few complete scenes in the book, and each scene revealed more about her than a page of adjectives. I wish that he had spent less time using the adjectives later, because it felt a little screenplay to me, a little "stay with my visuals!" but he did so well describing action to reveal character that if he wants to be sure you see HIS character, that’s fair.

On the downside: He doesn’t always describe how people interact and how they got to feel the way they do about each other very well. Some relationships are clear in a sentence or two ("Ma Costa had clouted Lyra dizzy on two occasions but fed her hot gingerbread on three") but many of them fell short, for me. Lyra explains that she loves Iorek because he was kicked out of a country for murder, as was her father, except that no loving relationship ever seems clear between her and her father. Her quick affection for Iorek seems reasonably placed but the reasons given don’t line up. I had problems with her relationship with Lord Asriel, too, who spends quite a few pages threatening to kill her in the beginning, but is described later as always treating her as "an adult engaging a child in a pretty trick." Wha–? Her parents’ relationship was particularly difficult for me to understand: so passionate and so dead at the same time. Maybe I’ve never had relationships like these, so it doesn’t make sense to me, but I think the problem is that Pullman doesn’t really know how to describe these relationships himself. A relationship that should be key, Lyra’s parents are fierce and infinitely sad and passionate and dizzy and they don’t make sense, and it hurts the book that they don’t.

And… the alethiometer seemed a little too handy. It was not as handy as "because Dumbledore thinks so" (glargh!) but it really did seem almost too much. As if the book got written and then there were holes in the plot that had to be mended, and boom! they were. This is a minor complaint, though. It’s just — he did so well at describing other otherworldly things to a degree that made them seem really possible that I’m sorry he didn’t spend more time making the alethiometer seem as real, at least not to me. I finished and wanted to think for days about what form my daemon would take, but I never once considered what I would ask the alethiometer, if I could. Do you see what I mean?

Anyway. Good book, glad I read it, want to read the rest. Next up will be some non-fiction, I think. By the way, when people tell you Nora Ephron’s latest book ("I Feel Bad About My Neck") is "funny" what they mean is that they have never read a decent blog post, because there are at least 20 writers out there who make my ribs hurt, but Nora Ephron never even made me smile.

I’m still reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I was going to finish it before I went to Greece but then I took on this textbook editing project (editing by hand! Totally quaint! Fortunately I remember most of the proofreader’s marks so it’s okay… but it does interfere with my pleasure reading).

Anyway. I thought I didn’t like Marquez because I really didn’t much like 100 Years of Solitude; I’ve never really been able to get behind magic realism. I love long meandering stories, I like a touch of the absurd, I like the idea that reality is in fact pretty flexible, but magic realism is the potato salad of literature: I love all the ingredients, I hate the result. Other than a weak spot for Tom Robbins, which he’s doing his level best to eliminate, I really have never gotten the point of magic realism.

So I never bothered to read any more of Marquez’s work, because, you know, why. You don’t keep picking up Raymond Chandler if you don’t like hardboiled detective stories. But then here I am with  …Cholera and I’m reading it and I’m enjoying it and yet there is something in it that nags at me and I tried to explain this over beer last night and I thought I’d try again over coffee.

I really don’t do well with adjectives deployed to describe characters. I need to be given actions and allowed to locate my own adjectives. And I’ve noticed this with Kundera, too, and it’s why I have trouble with him, and why I have trouble with Klima, and why so many books that are otherwise delightful to me wind up flung across the room as if they were Hemingway clones (really, really hate Hemingway clones. Not a big fan of Hemingway either, but glah, the clones). I do not want to hear "she was a fierce woman" or "he was a man of firm principles" — I want to know how she’s fierce, what principles are firm. I think that this is why, ultimately, I find Kundera’s characters (and am now finding the ones in Cholera) to be so unbelievable: because it seems these adjectives mean something different to me than they do to the authors, and so then the actions that are shown make no sense. I have noticed this problem with my friends, too, that the ones who tell me stories of "he did this and this" are the ones I can listen to for hours, but the ones who tell me "he is cruel" are the phone calls I have trouble returning.

I also have, and I realize this is a personal thing, trouble liking characters who leave their children. I will never, ever like Anna Karenina, although I’ve given it almost as many attempts as I have Lolita (another book I can never like, I finally realized after several miserable rides through Nabokov’s hideous sea. I concede that the man can write words, sentences, paragraphs, but I can’t stay in a boat with someone who hates his main character) and my conclusion is the same: I don’t like Anna and I can’t like that book. And I can’t like Fermina now and I don’t know if that’s going to ruin the book for me, but between the adjectives, which are on a steady rise here at page 270, and the fact that things appear to be boarding a hot air balloon of unreality without showing any signs of actually cutting the ropes and soaring away… well, I don’t know. You don’t get a lot of first sentences better than "The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love," and it’s not as if I’m not going to finish or that I’m going to hurl the book from me or anything but I’m a little frustrated.

And I wanted to talk about something other than my shameful craving for Ronald McDonald and the Deathly Hallows.