Oh, Bébé

I'm coming pretty late to the party, but that's how I roll these days.  I would like to blame my baby, one of those didn't-sleep-through-the-night-until-one-year-old types, but that would just be showing the flaws in my American-style parenting.  Does that sound defensive?  Sorry.  I just read Pamela Druckerman's Bringing up Bébé, and I am bursting with thoughts.  And yes, defensiveness.  It's hard not to feel a little cornered when someone starts questioning your national parenting habits (even when they are simultaneously questioning their own).  For those of you not in the mom's group orbit, Druckerman wrote a bestselling book based on her years spent parenting small children in Paris, during which she realized that French children sleep, eat, and generally behave better than their American counterparts.

My basic conclusion is that yes, the French parent differently, but that it would be almost impossible for Americans to replicate their philosophy (which the French don't, tellingly, see as a philosophy), because we ourselves were not raised by French parents.*  Every culture raises children to live in their own time and place, and I think if American parenting is a confusing mishmash of tips and tricks, well, maybe it's because America is a confusing mishmash kind of place (people call it a "melting pot" when they want to be more kind).  Just like we don't have any one food tradition (and we then have to read about French diets, or Mediterranean diets, or Okinawa diets, or, mystifyingly to me, caveman diets), we also don't have one parenting tradition.  And part of America, we have to remember, was actually predicated on the very basis of getting away from stuffy European traditions.  We are free!  And we enjoy this freedom right up to the point when we realize that our freedom to eat what we want and parent how we want has somehow ended in obesity and tyrannical children.

Druckerman kind of acknowledges this conundrum.  She herself says that she doesn't want her kids growing up into "sniffy Parisians," even though she wants to imitate many of their parenting techniques.  But it's hard not to wonder whether only sniffy Parisians can really be successful at implementing the parenting practices she outlines so longingly, or, conversely, whether implementing those practices would in fact, inevitably, create little sniffy Parisians.  Control (the French have strict rules about when and where eating, dressing up, and using playground slang are appropriate) and patience (at just a few weeks old, the French teach their babies that they will not respond to their every cry) and prioritizing aesthetics (French women are expected to "bounce back" faster than a Victoria's Secret model with a big show coming up) are all good things, and they are qualities we admire, but I wouldn't say that those are the things that we Americans have been raised to believe are the core values of our country.  And because we weren't raised to believe that, it makes it very hard to convincingly parent a child under those principles.

As a bit of an aside, though hopefully an illustrative one, I've often thought about the difference between the kids I saw in Lesotho and American kids.  One image that is burned in my mind is of the waiting room of the Mokhotlong hospital filled with babies, toddlers, and small children who would wait with their parents for hours (hours!!).  Not a single toy graced what was really just a long hallway with benches (not even those weird wire and wood bead contraptions that I can only surmise must be sold by pharmaceutical salesmen).  Not only that, but the kids didn't even get down and start trying to wrestle with each other, or build forts out of the chairs.  Nothing.  They just sat there.  This was astounding to me even before I had a baby of my own, but now I am truly awed by what this small sight obviously illustrates about cultural differences.  These kids waited because that's what they had always done.  And, here's the key, the adults did it too.  Not once did I see a magazine or any other form of entertainment in the hands of one of the adults.  They had to wait for their medicine or to see the doctor, so that's what they were doing.  Waiting.  And they knew full well going in that it might take an entire day.  Americans just DO NOT GET THIS.  And I am American to my core in this regard.  Anyway, kind of a long-winded attempt at saying, even though we might think we are closer culturally to Parisians than to small-town Basotho, the principle remains.  It would be very hard for me to teach my daughter to wait patiently in line for eight hours, because it would be nearly impossible for me to do so myself without going out of my mind.  And it would be hard for me to tell her she can never snack, because I would hate to live by that rule.

Still, Druckerman does make a convincing case for being a little more structured and confident as a parent.  I wholeheartedly agree that we want to avoid raising little monsters (or les enfants rois, as they are known in France), and there are some suggestions here that even us hopeless Americans might be able to effectively employ.  Some suggestions are so simple as to be almost condescending, until you realize how hard it really can feel to set basic limits.  She relates advice from a French psychologist who says, "when a child has a caprice [whim]--for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy--the mother should remain extremely calm and gently explain that buying the toy isn't in the day's plan.  Then she should try to bypass the caprice by redirecting the child's attention, for example by telling a story about her own life."  Simple, yes?  But how many times have you seen American kids throwing fits in toy stores?

What really makes me a little jealous, though, is the sense of confidence that Druckerman's French friends and neighbors seem to have about their parenting.  They advocate following your intuition (as do I), but it is certainly easier to act on your intuition if everyone around you seems to think along roughly the same lines.  I have had many conversations with moms who are tormented because their doctor or mother-in-law or some other person with possible child-rearing authority has told them that they HAVE to do something that feels completely against their instincts.  And often they end up doing it, because being a new mother (or father) is disconcerting and it doesn't matter how good you have been at every other thing in your life, this is something you have to figure out as you go along.  So we want advice, and we want a set of defined answers.  But in America they don't seem to come as easy.  Druckerman tells a great anecdote about how she and her husband were stymied by a question the daycare (crèche) lady asks about their daughter's feeding schedule.  They couldn't answer the question, and she was completely baffled by this ignorance.  How can you not know when your own baby eats?  Druckerman finds an answer to this cultural stand-off when she notices that the American website BabyCenter gives eight different sample schedules for five- to six-month olds, "including one in which the baby eats ten times a day."  A French parenting magazine, in contrast, offers one schedule. Babies eat at eight A.M., twelve P.M, four P.M., and eight P.M.  But then you just end up back at my previous point--she notes that this makes sense because it is the schedule almost all French adults follow as well (minus the snack, of course).  How many Americans do you know who are this scheduled?  Or, much better question, do you know any two American adults who follow the exact same eating schedule?  If not, how do we then implement it with our babies?

Druckerman raises some very interesting questions about American parenting, and I'm sure I will continue to think about them as I muddle my own way through raising a child.  I do want my daughter to learn to wait for gratification, and to respect adults, and to (while we're thinking big) start taking longer naps.  But these are only a few among many positive qualities we want to instill in our children.  It is good to be intentional about fostering whatever qualities you yourself think are essential to leading a good, fulfilling life.  So I'm glad I read this now, because as E enters the toddler years I do think it is important to start really thinking about what "family" values you want to emphasize.  And I think this will also make me pause to evaluate my own habits, because how can you teach qualities that you aren't modeling yourself?

Whether or not you buy the parenting principles (and I'll wager you'll be tempted to, because Druckerman makes French kids sound so....obedient), it's an interesting read for the anthropological perspective.  I would actually love to read a book that just compared cultural parenting styles--kind of like the movie Babies, but with words.  Just putting it out there.



* At the same time, while our current parenting culture might look very different than France's, my husband made the good point that a lot of French parenting practices sound like American parenting from 50 years ago.  I can't imagine my grandmothers or their cohorts climbing around on jungle gyms after their kids, waving baggies of Cheerios and narrating their every move.  

My Two Cents

My sister just sent me Anne-Marie Slaughter's incredibly smart article about "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  Slaughter asks why, despite the message the older generation of feminists strove to impart, does this generation have a much more resigned attitude towards choosing between work and family?  She notes that older women are often offended by the choices their younger counterparts are making to sacrifice high positions or otherwise compromise their careers, but ultimately concludes that what looks like resignation or giving up might actually be a realistic reaction to a society that does not make it possible for women to both have a satisfying, demanding career and be the kind of mother that they want to be. 


 My friends and peers seem to struggle with this reality continuously, but I think the struggle and the willingness to discuss it is hopefully part of the progress towards a new model of working mother (and father, for that matter.  I definitely think that many of the issues Slaughter brings up are just as relevant for men).  I don't know anyone who wants to "just stay at home" (a problematic phrasing, in itself), but all of the mothers, or friends planning to be mothers, that I know have some elaborate plan of how to balance work and family.  Some plan on doing part time, some working from home, some taking a few years off and then resuming when their kids go to school.  Still, I can say firsthand that our culture doesn't make it very easy to reconcile these contortions with a satisfying work and family life.  


One issue Slaughter raises that is often hush-hushed for fear of emphasizing biological realities over women's ambition and potential, is that in attempts to juggle children and work, women are waiting longer to have babies, then often frantically trying to conceive before it's too late.  In addition to causing much angst over conception, Slaughter notes, this puts many women in the position of reaching the height of their careers right as their children enter the teen years--a time when parents often find it just as crucial to be present as they did when their children were infants. Many women I worked with in academia were also facing the challenge of raising young children and dealing with aging parents at the same time: a stressful combination occurring more frequently when women wait to have babies.  


Slaughter's solution (if one can call it that) is an overhaul of how our society thinks about work.  Instead of negatively judging women who ask for more flexibility in order to accommodate and embrace their family lives, this flexibility should become a given.  She quotes Mary Matalin as  saying, “having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”  She observes that men like Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg have made efforts to accommodate work from home, but also wonders "how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs."  She concludes that


The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.


Slaughter takes issue with Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's claims that women need to be more aggressive and ambitious in order to make their way to the top, stressing, "these “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap."  She makes the point that mundane issues require fighting mundane battles--even though it is so much more sexy to make sweeping claims about women's lack of ambition or men's misogyny.  


Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years.


I am currently reading Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent by Meredith Small, an interesting anthropological view of parenting, which makes it evident that we try to parent the kids we think our society needs.  (The documentary Babies made this point very clearly as well--American parents are horrified to see a baby in a field accompanied only by cows, but as that baby needs to grow up to live on the Mongolian steppe with little company, we might soften our judgment of that parenting technique.)  But as society changes, so do parenting and parenting goals.  Perhaps one realization women had following the gains feminists made in past decades was that a society where mothers sacrifice all for their careers doesn't actually lead to a place where any of us would like to live.  How do we create a society that both teaches our children that women are intelligent, strong, and capable of working in any profession at any level, but also that mothering and fathering are enormously worthwhile pursuits?  


I do agree with much of what Slaughter says about the difficulty of balancing work and family, and also about what would need to change in our society in order to make that balancing a realistic achievement.  But one thing I think she misses, from her perspective at the very top of her profession and our society, is that we also need to do a better job of respecting the women who either can't or do not want to go down that path.  She offers solutions for how to reach the peak of your career later in life and devote your life to your career after the kids have left for college, but at some level this still seems to be making a judgment about women who decide to opt out more fully.  We will have made real progress when women can be respected for all of the different choices they make: when we give stay-at-home moms the credit they deserve for all of the incredibly hard work they do, and also give the full-time working mothers the support they need. 

Intuition Parenting

This post on the New York Times Motherlode blog expresses the exact emotion I have experienced reading many books by parenting "experts": anger.  Exasperation, confusion, and resentment pop up from time to time, as well.  Jacob Sager Weinstein, the author of the forthcoming parody How Not to Kill Your Baby (now, that sounds like an appropriately straightforward message!), criticizes the authors of books like What to Expect When You're Expecting and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child for essentially terrifying parents into following their advice.  The funny thing about these "experts" is that they are consistently labeled and acknowledged as such, but what could make an individual an expert in parenting another person's child?  Sometimes this bias is acknowledged, though rarely in admission that the claimed expertise is bogus: Elizabeth Pantley, in her No-Cry Sleep Solution, explains that she came up with her sleep-through-the-night technique based on a few month experience with her own twelve-month old baby, but really glosses over the fact that, though it worked for her and may work for certain other families as well, it is essentially a unique solution to a unique problem.  Tips are great, tips are helpful, especially when coming from other parents you trust, but tips are just tips.  When someone tells you that your baby will have major psychological problems later in life because you aren't following their prescript, well, that's just blackmail.   

The appealing, but devious, premise of these books is to show very confused and insecure new parents the "right" way to raise their child.  As Weinstein notes, and I've recently experienced, as you get a little farther along in the process you gain some perspective and confidence (she really ISN'T going to go to college not knowing how to lift her head above 45 degrees / roll over / sleep longer than 3 hours at a stretch / eat without making horrible grunting noises), but those niggling doubts, the ones that creep in at 3 a.m. when she's up for the fifth time and you are sure that you really are doing something dreadfully, disgustingly wrong, are what the whole parenting-"expert" industry thrives upon. 

Reid and I are not really the types to have a "parenting philosophy," but we decided if we do have one, it is basically one that refutes the idea of having a philosophy at all.  We call it "intuition parenting," which is just an unnecessarily technical way of saying "go with what feels right at the time".  Trying to follow the "experts," against your own personality (taking into consideration strengths, limitations, and varying points at which one begins to need a stiff drink) or the personality of your child (taking into consideration needs, desires, and varying abilities to wail like an ambulance siren), is just silly.  And it makes me mad.

The Egg and I, and I

I just finished reading The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, she of Miss Piggle-Wiggle fame.  (Reid has never heard of Miss Piggle-Wiggle, which makes me deeply sorry for him.)  The book was apparently a massive hit when it was published in the 1940s, proving that our culture's current romanticization of chicken raising and back-to-the-land adventures is actually pretty old news.*  But what is it about the telling of the hardships of farm life that, illogically, makes us long for the bad-old-days of planting and canning and hauling water?  As an long-time devotee of the Little House books, I can't quite explain my predilection, but I can say that this book scratches the vicarious farming itch quite well. 

As a 20-year-old Seattleite, MacDonald falls in love with an older, gainfully employed man, who, soon after their wedding, tells her of his dream to run a chicken ranch.  Trained by her mother to support a husband's whims, MacDonald shoulders the plow, more literally than she had hoped to do, and throws herself into the relentless work of a ranch in the remote mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

The book could probably described as a comic farce: city girl bumbling along in the wilderness, surrounded by eccentric, larger-than-life characters (so THIS is where Ma and Pa Kettle come from--I'd heard the reference, but never knew who they actually were).  But, at the same time, it is a meditation on loneliness and alienation, which simmer right below the comic surface:

Being lonely all of the time, I used to harbor the idea, as who has not, that I was one of the few very fortunate people who was absolutely self-sufficient and that if I could just find myself a little haunt far from the clawing hands of civilization with its telephones, electric appliances, artificial amusements and people--people more than anything--I would be contented for the rest of my life.  Well, someone called my bluff and I found that after nine months spent mostly in the stimulating company of the mountains, trees, the rain, Stove, and the chickens, I would have swooned with anticipation of a visit from a Mongolian idiot.  And if the clawing hands of civilization could only have run a few telephone and light wires in there they could have had my self-sufficient right arm to chop up for the insulators.

About nine months after she arrives on the farm, she finds herself with a baby as well as a barn full of chickens to look after, and it's hard not to conclude that "women's work" is often a good deal more strenuous, or at least more isolating, than "men's work."   I've been drawing inspiration from MacDonald these days, as I adjust to baby-minding and home-making as a full-time enterprise. When laundry starts to seem overwhelmingly onerous, I can at least feel grateful that I don't have to haul the water and stoke the fire in order to wash Eleanor's endless stream of dirty clothes.  At the same time, and this is maybe where the longing for our mythical agrarian past comes in, the sense of purpose and necessity that accompanies the farm chores could actually be comforting.  It's not that laundry is so bad, but it's the doubt about whether you should be doing something more worthwhile, or that justifies your student loans, that can really throw you into crisis. 

The other dark, but not-quite-spoken, undercurrent in the book is the conflict in Betty and Bob's marriage.  She doesn't mention it, but when I looked up some biographical details about her, I wasn't surprised to find out that she left the ranch and her husband soon after the events chronicled in the book.  Her references to him are generally amusing, but also frequently indignant about his lack of attention and ignorance of her needs. 

Perhaps I've painted an unfairly grim picture of the book.  It's fun, it really is.  And if I had to choose a guide to the wilderness, I'd go with Betty MacDonald over Ma Ingalls any day. 



*I'm sure you could do a fascinating analysis of this drive and how it relates to our current political and socioeconomic reality, but for now I'll be content with making some sweeping, completely anecdotal, claims.

Settling In

Wrapping up my first week home with the baby, I'm feeling completely sure about my decision to leave my job, but full of many swirling emotions.  Maybe that's a defining point of motherhood?  The highs!  the lows!  The doldrums!  It seems a rare day when you don't experience a mix of all three.  The highlight of my week?  Probably the twenty minutes I spent lying on the floor, laughing at the fan.  It's a strange, new world, but I think I like it. 

The Nap-Time Hustle

Something I did not fully appreciate for my first 28 years on earth was the luxury of free time.  Time that was truly free, whole days stretching out, malleable and unformed.  I could decide what I wanted to do with a day, and then, barring laziness or catastrophe, do it.  With a baby, time is a completely different beast.  Babies are demanding of time, but not of action.  In fact, babies seem to resent any action that does not directly relate to them.  (Perhaps we all do?  We just learn to live with it at some point?).  So, in a day full of baby minding, the nap is a very precious thing.  

I was thinking about this the other morning, when I was experiencing a violent cake-baking urge (it happens, from time to time).  E was due for a nap, and the moment she went down I RAN to the kitchen to begin mixing things up.  I had mulled over which recipe I would choose all morning, as I changed diapers and sang Baby Beluga for the seven-millionth time.  So I measured and stirred and poured with an urgency all out of proportion with the actual gravity of the task.  I stuck the batter in the oven, sat down, had a sip of coffee, and then heard E wake up. 


So that was one nap.  But I'm curious about how other people approach these glorious little windows of free time.  My mother-in-law (who raised 5 children) told me, a few weeks after E's birth, that she always tried to do all of her housework while the kids were awake, so that when they went down for naps she could take a few moments for herself, to read or drink a cup of tea.  I thought that was an excellent attitude, and promptly stopped doing any dishes during naps.  But then what?  Do you put your feet up and read People magazine?  Try to dash off twenty e-mails?  Do yoga?  Take your own nap? 

While it can all seem a bit hectic and stressful, I think the positive light to shine on this is an increased intentionality with time.  If you only have an hour to yourself, how do you really want to spend it?  What are your priorities?  While I was pregnant with E I felt like I was really ready to have a baby because I felt so sick of only having myself to think about.  Sure, the unfettered days were nice, and I now long for a day in which I could both run and go to the grocery store, but the new preciousness of time, the rush of the efficiently used hour, the huge smile greeting me when E does wake up...a worthy exchange. 

Curiosity

I remember one of my sister's friends describing some tenet of Buddhist philosophy that required  you to meet each apparent setback or bump in the road of life (even Lesotho-sized potholes) with a disciplined sense of curiosity.  When facing potential catastrophe, you were to sit back and muse, "I am so curious about how this will all turn out."  I have no idea if this is a legitimate element of Buddhism or not, but the idea has returned to me many times through the years as an ideal reaction to stressful changes.  Either that or massive numbers of chocolate chip cookies washed down with red wine, the whole concoction shaken up on the dance floor of Boatclub.  But alas, Boatclub is no longer with us and E's presence makes gallons of red wine a less viable option.

So yes, when I realized last week that it was either quit my job entirely or come back full time (an option neither desirable nor even advisable, given my paltry salary and the cost of childcare in DC), I took a deep breath and tried to be very CURIOUS about how this next stage in our life will unfold.  And lo, I am feeling very Zen about the whole thing.  The very next day, R was offered not one, but two, part-time positions--an immense relief.  And I feel enormous joy at the prospect of the days ahead with E.  There are little frissons of anxiety, too--what will we DO all day, will we never see R again, what about health insurance??--but what more can you do but go with what feels right and have some small confidence that it will turn out in the end?

Meanwhile, E is more delightful every day (though not, come to think of it, every night).  She goes through phases of determinedly practicing her rolling, then gives up the enterprise when she realizes that all it does is get her someplace she doesn't want to be.  She loves oatmeal, squash, and apples; adores bananas; and detests avocados and green beans.  She wriggles in excitement every time we open the dryer (why??).  She is, in my completely and utterly biased opinion, the cutest baby that ever rolled the earth.

She Doesn't Do It

Well, for the past 6 months (!) I've been consumed by a real-live illiterate peanut, so thinking that this blog might be expanded to include her in its nascent considerations.  Pre-baby, I was all about reading; post-baby, I am all about reading about babies. 

My sister-in-law recently loaned me a copy of I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson, a "chick-lit" book about Kate Reddy, a London-based hedge fund manager and mother of two.  The book was predictably (based on the hot pink cover) page-turnery, but it also still has me thinking, several weeks later.  This raises some questions about the fairness of the chick-lit designation, but we'll let that issue be hashed out elsewhere, for now.  Anyhow, Kate spins (and appears to have been spinning for some time) very close to out of control, trying to manage both what she perceives as fundamental motherly responsibilities and her demanding, testosterone-heavy, stimulating job. The titular question, asked many times throughout the book by various acquaintances and family members of Kate, is finally answered in the book's final chapter: How does she do it?  She doesn't.  She opts out.  She quits her job, sells her house, moves to the country. 

What does this mean?  What does it mean that even narratively, in a friendly fictional place, we can't figure out how to reconcile these things?  Granted, Kate's situation is extreme.  My current 30-hours per week job can't really compare with the demands of a hedge fund.  I work with other women, many who have children.  I work at a university, which would seem to be the height of flexibility and family-friendliness.  If I had read this book before I had Eleanor, I think I would have dismissed many of Kate's concerns as monsters of her own making--she chose that super-stressful career path, and I didn't, so why would I experience similar conflicts?  But STILL, the work place is much less friendly than I had naively assumed it would be.  The thing is, no one else wants to pick up your slack, whether you work in a coffee shop, law firm, or hedge fund.  And there is suddenly a much-heightened awareness of your availability--sure, everyone takes off for an occasional doctor's appointment or has a sick day, but when you are a new mother all of the sudden these things start to seem a bit symbolic.  Like, oh, so this is how things are going to be now.  The slippery-slope phenomenon.  The fact that you have likely just come off of a several month maternity leave serves to make you appear even more unreliable. 

So what is the answer?  How do we do it?  The fact is, most women with new babies don't want to work as much as they did pre-baby.  Time is precious, development is fast, and life has a whole new element of chaos that is grossly magnified when trying to coordinate job responsibilities with mothering responsibilities.  And let me go back a sentence: the not wanting to work as many hours in your former position has absolutely nothing, lest you labor under a very rosy picture of motherhood, to do with the amount of work you suddenly find yourself doing everyday.  (More on this in another post).  But yes, in my anecdotal experience of my neighborhood mom's group, nearly every woman changed her expectations and plans about how much she wanted to work outside of the home once the baby arrived.  This, of course, is not always possible, either from the perspective of the family or the employer.  But why does it come as such a surprise?  Especially to the mothers themselves?  Is the problem that we don't quite understand what motherhood entails, us highly-educated women who perhaps haven't touched a baby since our middle school babysitting days?  Or that the system hasn't really changed much to accommodate women in the workplace?  It's a beaten horse, but since I am just newly experiencing it, it boggles my mind that women worked so hard to get equal rights, and the result is a system that allows us to do exactly what men do, as long as we also do what women do and don't ask for exceptions to be made. 

Ah well.  If you have any solutions, let me know.  I'll close with a gratuitous baby picture, just so it's not all doom and gloom here. 

All is well. 

Reading in Rondavels

I have a whole list of books that I want to discuss, but I thought it would be fun (and satisfyingly dilatory) to look back at the books I read while in Lesotho.  Sure, as a kid I had endless summers to read, checking out 10 books at a time from the library and discovering everything from Charlotte Brontë to Mary Higgins Clark, but what glory to have a year of unimpeded, unregulated reading time as as adult!  The only limit was the lack of access to bookstores, but the happy side-effect of that was picking up some books from the pile contributed by former volunteers and visitors that I probably would not have read otherwise.

So, here it is, my list from the year of magical reading:

September

True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl
The Little Book, James Selden
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

October

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
(Two books?  What happened in October?  I blame Ellen and Will's arrival and Charles Dickens's verbosity.)

November

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Sea, John Banville

December

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

January

People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Twilight, Stephanie Myers (one guilty 18 hour flight from D.C. to Jo'burg)
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon

February

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Unless, Carol Shields
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Moo, Jane Smiley
White Noise, DeLillo
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

March

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

April

The Ambassadors, Henry James
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Net of Jewels, Ellen Gilchrist
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

May

The White Lioness, Henning Mankel
The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camillieri
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenberger
Emma, Jane Austen
Written Lives, Javier Marías

June

A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos

And....then apparently I stopped keeping track.  So close to the end!  54 books, not counting whatever it was I read in June, July, and August.

Utterly subjective ratings:
Highly recommended (even if you're living somewhere a bit more hectic than a rondavel on the edge of Mokhotlong)
Fun (if you have close to unlimited reading time)
Skip it (would kind of resent having to read this again)
I suppose all of the others would fall somewhere in between.

Cutting for Stone: Brief Review

The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals.  Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training.  The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.

Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked.  The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother.  Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia.  And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little.  While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age,  Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child.  Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates.  Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations.  Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.

We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings.  Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable. 

Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period.  His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn.  The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book.  Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.

These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book.  More reviews to come soon!

God on the Rocks: Review

Hmmm...so writing reviews of books that you didn't really enjoy reading turns out to be not as much fun.  Actually, it's overstating things to say that I didn't enjoy God on the Rocks at all.  It's just that I've enjoyed Jane Gardam's other books so much that this one felt like a let-down.  In the interest of making prejudices clear, I really have something against books about children.  I mean, I like children.  I'm sure they would have interesting things to say, if they ever wrote novels themselves.  But I kind of hate reading adults' interpretations of a child's world.  In most bildungsroman, I really only like it once the narrator has reached, say, fifteen.

While nearly all child narrators are somehow precocious (otherwise they wouldn't know all of the big words that their adult puppetmasters force upon their lips), they do provide a tempting canvas on which to paint a distorted picture of the adult world.  Children are credited with understanding the world in a unique and prescient way; because they don't always understand what is going on around them, they can give us fresh interpretations.  But again, I usually come back to the cynical position that we are not actually seeing things through the child's lens of confusion and wonder, but rather from the artificial construct of that lens by the author.  I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother other people.  Maybe I need to get over it.

Anyway, rant against pseudo-childlike insight aside, I just didn't think that this was Gardam's best work.  Margaret Marsh, the young girl protagonist, reminded me a little bit of surly Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, but without the eventual sunny breakthrough.  Her mother has just had a baby, and Margaret is disgusted both by the infant and her mother's obvious infatuation with him.  Because of the baby, though, Mrs. Marsh decides that Margaret deserves a special treat each week, as a solace for the reduction in motherly attention.  The treat takes the form of trips to the seaside with the Marsh's servant-girl, Lydia.  While the Marshes are strict and upright Christians, particularly fanatical Mr. Marsh, Lydia plays up her sensuality with tight satin dresses and speaks coarse Cockney English.  Margaret begins a period of growth and change on these day-trips, first in the exposure to some kind of sexual relationship between Lydia and a gardener on an old estate, and then through her experience at the estate itself.  Unsupervised while Lydia conducts her love affair, Margaret wanders onto the private property and its strange denizens.  At this point in the story, perspectives begin to open up and we learn that the estate begins to Rosalie Frayling, now a mummified old woman, who has opened up the house and grounds to mental patients.  Unbeknownst to either Margaret or Rosalie, Mrs. Marsh was once engaged to be married to Rosalie's son, but the affair was quashed by Rosalie's outrage at the idea of her son abasing himself to marry the daughter of the postman.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh decides to reconnect with this son, who has moved back into the village.  How these pieces all come together in a fairly natural way demonstrates Gardam's sure hand with plot.

Gardam is also a beautiful writer, and she does justice to the setting as well as the complex emotional lives of her characters.  In the end though, I wasn't fully moved by the characters.  Blame my irrational hatred of child protagonists, if you want.  But I'd pick up Old Filth or Man in the Wooden Hat first.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Review

This is one of the must-reads that I came across in my days of post-college malaise, when I figured that the only thing that could give my life meaning would be to continue my Great Books education and read every obscure classic that I could get my hands on. Luckily I decided to continue my education more officially soon thereafter and thus was spared too many more angsty moments, but I'm pleased that one result of those wrought days spent reading book reviews and then browsing used books stores is that I heard about The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The book is translated from the Italian and was published posthumously in 1958. It tells the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina at the time of the Risorgimento, or Italian unification. Lampedusa was himself a titled aristocrat, and resigned wistfulness seems to be a predominant theme of the book.

I was watching the PBS miniseries Downton Abbey right at the time when I picked up The Leopard. Both the show and the novel depict societies on the brink of major, perhaps inevitable, upheaval: England just prior to World War I, and Italy in the 1860s. While Downton Abbey gives a fascinating picture of life both above and below stairs and the anxieties and hopes faced by all parties, The Leopard primarily explores the complex emotions of those at the top.

Don Fabrizio, though, seems more accepting of the change he sees coming with the landing of Garibaldi. This acceptance (which is arguably more like resignation), seems to come from a conversation he has with his nephew, Tancredi. Tancredi is both a force of change and also a sign of the limits of transformation. Though an aristocrat, has chosen to join Garibaldi's forces. His decision initially shocks and upsets the Prince, but Tancredi responds, "They will foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

This very pragmatic approach to revolution ferments in the Prince's mind, and he begins to dwell on the certain sameness that underlies all human interaction and politics. Later, at his estate in Donnafugata, he thinks, in depression:

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always,' of course, a century, two centuries...and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

What seems unique is his willingness to admit that the way of the Leopard and the Lion is no more right or justified than the way of the hyena and jackal, and he undermines his very assertion that things will be "worse" by assuring us in the next line that every last being will go on thinking that their way is the best.

I have had a long standing argument with my husband and father-in-law about whether the state of man and the world is constantly improving or simply cycling through highs and lows. I tend to believe the latter, which might be part of why this book appealed to me. The thing is, someone's high is usually someone else's low (from the personal to the global scale). Don Fabrizio is prescient because he realizes that his loss of power is simply someone else's gain. Of course happiness is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but many of the things that people think accompany or support happiness sometimes are--power, money, prestige, resources, etc.

I'm probably making this book sound a little more grim than it actually is. But though this story isn't about the promise of change, it's also not about it's devastation--it's more the often humerous exploration of the realities of transition, often so very mundane. The author, himself the last Prince of Lampedusa, must have understood this particularly well.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: Review

I admit that I picked this book up because it was sitting on the "Free Book" table outside of my office and was persuaded to read it because it was a Booker finalist in 2009 (and thus a candidate for Complete Booker inclusion!). It is another of the seemingly endless stream of books written about World War II and its lead-up and aftermath. Admittedly, this is a time period with amazing narrative potential; nearly every major country in the world has its own story to tell.

This particular book centers around the story of a Czech couple who begin their life together in the late 1920s. I am personally fascinated with this period and the literature produced both within and about it--there is a certain pleasurable omniscient doom that comes with reading about that period before the Second World War went and made a mockery of the First World War's claims to be "Great." Liesel and Viktor Landauer are confident in their future and the improvements that are sure to come, and they make this hope manifest in the designing and building of their dream home. They hire a visionary architect, von Abt, to design a space free of all ornamentation, a house that will liberate them from all of the hindrances of the past. In an early conversation, Viktor and von Abt discuss the value of modern over neo-Gothic architecture. Von Abt says the true ideal is the Japanese house of paper, which does not injure its inhabitants if it happens to fall down. But here is the novel's central problem: how do you move from houses of stone to houses of paper, from the old to the new, without people getting crushed in the process?

Viktor and Liesel see their home as its own revolution. They "watched their future world growing around them and they thought that it was a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for living." But quickly the reader understands that the glass walls of the house give only a false sense of transparency.

They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city, but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all of ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sigh of the tempest that is coming.

This counterfeit safety is revealed first in Viktor and Liesel's relationship and then slowly through their entire world. Viktor is Jewish and Liesel Christian, and though Viktor begins to understand their vulnerability as the Nazis cut a wider and wider swath, Liesel maintains her belief in invisible lines. "The story is there, not here" she says, "It is over the border in another country, another world, another universe." Of course, those borders reveal themselves to be as fragile as glass.

Mawer's book convincingly explores these large ideas, though at times his personification of the Glass Room begins to grate. Ultimately, it is the inhumanity of the house that seems significant. Viktor believes that the value of the house lies in the fact that "there are no disturbing curves to upset the rectilinear austerity of the space. There is nothing convolute, involute, awkward, or complex." In other words, there is no life. The house is just an object, a modern statement that becomes a relic by the book's close. The people, the living, continue to struggle on.


*If anyone is interested in seeing the real "Landauer House", actually the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, click here.

Complete Booker Introduction

Cross-post from The Complete Booker blog:

I'm new to this world of book blogs, so I thought that the organizing principle of a reading challenge would be helpful! By very unofficial accounting, I think I've enjoyed Booker winners and nominees more than those of other prizes, so I thought this would be a great place to start. I have an MA in English Literature and am currently working in academic administration, so I miss the formal contact with reading and writing. Yes, I'm the kind of person who thrills to the sight of a good syllabus.

Booker winner/nominees that I've read:
The Sea, the Sea by Irish Murdoch (1978 winner)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981 winner)
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984 winner)
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie*
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989 winner)
Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford*
Possession by A.S. Byatt* (1990 winner)
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997 winner)
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998 winner)
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999 winner)
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002 winner)
Unless by Carol Shields
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters*
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004 winner)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell*
The Master by Colm Toibin
The Sea by John Banville (2005 winner)
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes*
The Accidental by Ali Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai* (2006 winner)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007 winner)
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel* (2009 winner)

*favorite

On my list of Booker winners/nominees to read this year:
1. God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (1978 shortlist)- I just love everything she writes. The Man in the Wooden Hat was one of the best books I read last year.
2. Oscar and Lucinda (1988 winner) or Parrot and Olivier in America (2010 shortlist) by Peter Carey--I've never read any Carey and it seems about time I should start. Any recommendations?
3. Amongst Women by John Gahern (1990 shortlist)-I read a glowing review of this somewhere this year, after which I put in a bit of (failed) effort tracking it down at the library. This year I will prevail!
4. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974 winner)--Another author I've always meant to read, especially after living in South Africa (well, Lesotho) for a year.
5. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (2010 shortlist)--This is another Lesotho-influenced selection, as the protagonist travels through Lesotho in one of the stories. Most people can't pronounce the country's name, much less write about it, so I'm very interested to see what Galgut has to say about this desolate and remote little enclave.
6. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (2009 shortlist)--To be honest, this is a pick because I found it in the "free book" pile that sits outside of our department office. It does look good, though.
7. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009 shortlist)--I've really enjoyed the Sarah Waters books I've read, so I might overcome my aversion to anything that tends to make me frightened to be in my apartment alone at night.

2011

Oh, the predictability of beginning the new year with resolutions and good intentions. But here I am, starting a blog and hoping that there is some magic dividing line between one year and the next! The goal here is to be a little more thoughtful and intentional about my reading and to force myself to write something--anything! After the flurry of graduate school and teaching, I am finding that I actually--dare I say it?--miss the idea of required reading. Reading "for fun" is wonderful and liberating, but I want to push myself a bit. So, in the spirit of resolution, I decided to sign up for some reading challenges (idea courtesy of Laura Miller at Salon). I'll be trying to post reviews of these books here as I read them.

Shakespeare Reading Challenge: How have I not read King Lear? I'm hoping that promising to read four Shakespeare plays this year will help me atone for the fact that this "Master" of English has a pretty threadbare knowledge of Shakespeare. Plus, one of the four can be substituted for a performance--perhaps R will again have one too many and order season tickets to the Shakespeare Theater?

The Complete Booker Challenge: Reading at least six Booker Prize winners or nominees. I have really enjoyed the Booker winners I've read in the past--Wolf Hall, The Inheritance of Loss, The Line of Beauty--and I'm interested in reading some of the short-list candidates as well.

Foodie's Reading Challenge: The perfect way to combine reading and cooking! I'm going to go with the "Gourmet" level of 10-12 books here, as cookbooks count and I have an unhealthy obsession growing on my shelves...

Chunkster Reading Challenge: An old wish-list for Santa requests "Lots of Fat Books". I think I was about 8, but some tastes never change. I'm going to try for six books over 450 pages long.

To 2011!