Category Archives: Nonfiction

I didn’t intend to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book on marriage, Committed, largely because of a couple bad reviews and lack of interest in the topic, but then I saw it was available at my library, and I thought I would give it a try. I’m very glad I did. Having read two of Gilbert’s books now, including Eat, Pray, Love (of course!), I have turned into a Gilbert fan.

I’m aware that there has been some backlash against Gilbert, mostly because of the popularity of EPL, and also, I’m guessing, because she had the extraordinary good luck to be able to nurse a broken heart while spending a year traveling around the world. And at the end, she has the extraordinary good luck to fall in love again. She’s sometimes seen as spoiled and self-indulgent, out having adventures, dashing off books, making tons of money, and basically being a frivolous, privileged person. Although I haven’t seen it yet, I’m afraid that the movie of EPL where Gilbert is played by Julia Roberts doesn’t help matters much.

Well, that’s highly irritating. Gilbert has been doing what writers do: she proposes book ideas, gets advances, does her research, and writes her books. And she’s good at it. Her books are so very readable — engaging, funny, open, smart — that she makes it looks easy, and I know it’s not. Calling her spoiled and indulgent is to forget that there are tons of male travel writers, Bill Bryson types, who do exactly what has done. Except, I suppose, that they don’t write about their broken hearts. Do the people who dislike her writing feel uncomfortable about the personal nature of it? That’s one of its strongest features, I say. One of the things that makes her so appealing is that she seems fearless: it takes enormous bravery to make yourself as vulnerable as she does. Her popularity has a lot to do with her willingness to pour her heart out onto the page, and to do it in a way that’s entertaining, moving, and, sometimes, wise.

I don’t buy the argument that writing a book, or multiple books, about oneself is inherently self-indulgent. What matters is the manner in which you do so. Are you writing about yourself in such a way that others recognize themselves in your story? Are you reaching toward something larger than yourself? Or, are you just a really, really good writer of the sort who can turn any subject into something worth reading? Then by all means, please, write endlessly about yourself. I’d love to read it.

Gilbert’s writing style, in both EPL and Committed, veers occasionally toward chattiness in a way that doesn’t work for me, but to make up for the moments of glibness and the occasional bad jokes, there are tons of passages where she gets the tone just right. She moves easily from personal experience to passages on the history of marriage, from descriptions of travel in Southeast Asia to memories of her mother’s and her grandmother’s marriages. Surely I don’t need to say much about the idea behind Committed, do I? She was basically forced to marry her Brazilian boyfriend Felipe when he is detained at the U.S. border and refused entry and they learn that marriage is the only way they can live together in the U.S. The problem is that they both knew they never wanted to marry again. The book is Gilbert’s attempt to make her peace with the institution before she finds herself a wife once again.

The book isn’t perfect — she comes across as strangely naive about the variety of beliefs about love and marriage and how they often have little to do with each other — but in its best moments, it really is a good read. I’ve come to think that the best essayists and memoir writers are those whose voices are so captivating you don’t want them to stop talking. Gilbert makes a marvelous companion.

First of all, if you are in any way interested in participating in the next Slaves of Golconda group read, make sure to go over to the site and vote on the next book. All are welcome — the more the merrier! You can join the group and post on the website, or just read along and participate in the discussion.

And now, a few words on Janet Malcolm’s book Two Lives, about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. I became a huge Malcolm fan after reading her incredible book The Silent Woman about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I love what she does, which is to mix regular biography with what you might call “behind the scenes” biography: telling the tale of how biographies get written. Books that think critically about biography have become a favorite little subgenre of mine, and I’m not entirely sure why, since I don’t read many biographies of the traditional sort. I think it may be that I like any sort of “behind the scenes” book about how books get written, and I just happened upon a number of experimental biographies, or whatever you want to call them, all at once, and I was hooked.

Two Lives focuses on, among other things, Stein’s and Toklas’s experiences in France in World War II. Both were Jews, so how did they survive living in German-occupied France? And why didn’t they leave when they could? The second question may be unanswerable except for guesses about the nature of Stein’s psyche, but the first question leads Malcolm into some interesting investigative journalism. She looks into their relationship with a man named Bernard Faÿ, who was, paradoxically, both anti-Semitic and completely devoted to Stein and Toklas. In Malcolm’s portrait, Stein comes across as someone who blithely trusts in the goodwill of the universe and the people around her, and generally with good reason, because she’s a person for whom things tend to work out. Well, that’s not actually true: both her parents died when she was young, a huge shock, and Malcolm argues that Stein responded by refusing afterward to acknowledge pain and suffering except in the most oblique of ways. So whatever was actually going on in her mind, and it seems likely the war years in France were very difficult for her, she pretended that all was well.

In addition to the World War II story, Malcolm describes the complicated relationship between the two women who lived together for something like forty years. Their relationship, like their war years in France, is a little mysterious; they were devoted to each other, Alice taking care of Gertrude and Gertrude happily allowing herself to be taken care of, but at the same time there are hints of darkness, of violent anger and fear. Stein was always the popular one, and people mostly put up with Toklas because if you cared about Stein, that’s what you had to do. Regardless of how Toklas felt about this, after Stein’s death, she remained devoted to her, working tirelessly to manage her writings and her reputation. Her relationship with the famous writer didn’t help her in her last years, though; she died penniless.

Malcolm also discusses Stein’s writing and the scholars who have made her their lives’ work. She tells the story of Leon Katz, an extraordinary lucky scholar who found notebooks Stein had kept while writing one of her most important works, The Making of Americans. Katz was able to interview Toklas about these notebooks and apparently discovered a bunch of juicy information. This interview took place in the 1950s, and Katz promised to publish his findings. Unfortunately, the Stein world is still waiting for him to do this. For some reason, he has not been able to bring himself to get the work out, much to the frustration of Stein scholars everywhere.

One of the most interesting sections of the book, to me, is reading Malcolm’s description of her feelings about Stein’s writing. That writing is, famously, impenetrable, at least to many readers. The Making of Americans, is widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece, but it’s a masterpiece hardly anybody has read. It’s long, has no real plot, is full of repetition, and has passages like this:

They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it.

Her method is to fixate on an idea and to work at it relentlessly, going over it again and again, repeating herself over and over, until she feels she has had enough, and then going on to the next thing. Occasionally, Malcolm writes, it veers into intelligibility and something closer to a traditional novel, but it never stays there long.

Speaking for myself, I haven’t quite decided if The Making of Americans falls in the category of Finnegans Wake, a book I feel I never need to read in my life, or in the category of Ulysses, a challenging book but one that’s worth tackling. I don’t know. The Stein scholars Malcolm talks with apparently love Stein’s most difficult, experimental writing, although Malcolm finds this a little hard to imagine, as do I.

At any rate, Malcolm’s book is an excellent introduction to the world of Stein and Toklas. It’s a relatively short book, but full of fascinating information on their lives and on Stein’s writing and the people who study it.

Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir A Widow’s Story is a harrowing, powerful read. I had trouble putting it down, even though it was thoroughly wrenching. I started reading it on my iPhone (my copy courtesy of the publisher) and only after I’d been reading awhile did I figure out that it’s over 400 pages long; it turned out to be a very quick 400 pages, but still, I wondered how she would keep it up for that long. How could she write with such detail, such honesty, such emotion, how could she keep up that level of intensity and make the book readable at that length?

The book tells the story of the death of Oates’s husband, Raymond Smith, in February, 2008. It was a fairly quick final illness and death; he was fine one day, and the next in the hospital suffering from pneumonia. He died a few days later from an infection. Oates tells the story of the days in the hospital and then the days, weeks, and months afterward as she tries to survive and make sense of what happened. She is thoroughly distraught, full of anger and guilt, and she collects sleeping pills in case she decides to commit suicide. The thought of suicide is a comfort, an escape available if she needs it. She has friends who take care of her and help her through all the tasks a widow faces (the funeral, the will, etc.), but she feels only a shell of the person she once was. Her world is an entirely new, unrecognizable, horrible place.

She writes about all this in great detail, describing her thoughts and emotions each step of the way. It should get dull, but it doesn’t: there’s something riveting about her voice that kept me almost spellbound. There is a lot of repetition, which also should get dull, but doesn’t; she faces the same problems again and again — not wanting to be out with people but when she’s home alone not wanting to be there either, getting angry when people say insensitive things, feeling guilty for surviving her husband, thinking about and counting her sleeping pills — and each time it’s a fresh emotional hit, and I felt like I was right there with her.

The writing is awkward, full of dashes, fragments, parenthetical phrases, and various kinds of stuttering and repetition, but the awkwardness works because it captures the emotional intensity of the experience:

Those days! — nights! — a Mobius strip continuously winding, unwinding.

This nightmare week of my life — and yet— during this week Ray is still alive.

She also frequently switches into a detached, third person point of view, printed in italics, to talk about “the widow”:

Something of the derangement of Widowhood is beginning here. For in dreams our future selves are being prepared. In denial that her husband is seriously ill the Widow-to-Be will not, when she returns home that evening, research E. coli on the Internet. Not for nearly eighteenth months after her husband’s death will she look up this common bacterial strain to discover the blunt statement she’d instinctively feared at the time and could not have risked discovering: pneumonia due to Escherichia coli has a reported mortality rate of up to 70 percent.

She also explains things that don’t really need to be explained, for example, describing Catholic theology and giving us a history of lobotomies, things that relate to the story she is telling, but don’t need to be dwelt on in the way she does. It feels, though, as if Oates no longer understands the world around her and needs to explain it to herself. She needs to tell herself the story of her life and her husband’s life and all the details that went into them, and she needs to recount to herself what she, “the widow,” is experiencing, in order to try to grasp it.

She touches only lightly on the question of why she is writing the memoir and doesn’t discuss at all what the experience of writing it is like. In fact, she mentions grief memoirs others have written and wonders why they wrote them, without taking up the question for herself, or at least not until near the book’s end, when she very briefly says:

Though I am writing this memoir to see what can be made of the phenomenon of “grief” in the most exactly minute of ways, I am no longer convinced that there is any inherent value in grief; or, if there is, if wisdom springs from the experience of terrible loss, it’s a wisdom one might do without.

That’s all we get about her purpose and motivations. I generally like to have more self-consciousness from memoir writers, more discussion of the purpose and meaning of the writing (although I may be in the minority on this — most memoir writers that I know of don’t do it), but in this case, the reticence works. Throughout the whole book Oates seems to be a mystery to herself; she no longer recognizes herself in her new role as widow, so how can she analyze her motivations? The most she can do is describe what is happening, moment by moment.

I happened upon David Ulin’s book The Lost Art of Reading in the library last week and checked it out on a whim. It turns out that Stefanie has been reading the book as well, and she decided she liked the book very much. I have to admit that I began the book feeling very resistant to it and prepared to dislike it intensely. I also have to admit that as I sat down to read it, I was prepared to enjoy not liking it. I don’t like books that make sweeping generalizations about the way things are now, and that lament a lost glorious past and tell us our world is steadily getting worse. And surely a book with the title The Lost Art of Reading would do those things?

It did those things in places, but it turns out the book is much better than I thought. It steadily won me over, and by the end, I decided that I like Ulin’s way of thinking about things very much. He does worry about where our culture is headed, and he laments how much harder it is for him personally and for the culture at large to focus on reading in a deep, thoughtful way. We are too easily distracted by our laptops and our gadgets, too easily sidetracked by blogs and twitter, to be willing to sit down with a book for a lengthy stretch of time and to lose ourselves in it. He thinks there is something valuable about deep reading and how it encourages us to think carefully, to get to know ourselves better, to develop empathy for others, to bring us back to a sense of time and our place in it.

But at the same time, Ulin is not anti-technology. This gets at how the book won me over, because his argument is more complex than a simple dismissal of the internet. He sees the value in being able to look things up on Google; he has a Blackberry and loves it. He discusses Jennifer Egan’s new book A Visit From the Goon Squad (which I’m in the middle of right now and am enjoying it very much) and the cool things she does with multimedia in the book and on her website. He’s fascinated by the Facebook page for The Great Gatsby. He sees that technology can add to our experience of literature rather than merely spiriting us away from it. He wants to preserve the experience of reading but at the same time is willing to acknowledge that our ways of reading can change, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I also liked how he hinted at a spiritual element to reading, something I’ve been thinking about lately. He says that reading can be like meditation, a way to practice focus and calm and to get out of our own minds for a while:

What does it mean, this notion of slow reading? Most fundamentally, it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of the need to savor — this instant, this scene, this line.

I’ve often felt that if I don’t get the chance to read, at least a little bit, every day or almost every day, that I start to lose a sense of myself. I feel scattered. Taking the time to read helps me pull myself back together again, somehow. It’s partly the simple act of sitting quietly that does it, but also the discipline of following someone else’s thought, focusing on someone else’s experiences or arguments. I’m not sure what kind of person I would be without reading, so in spite of all my doubts, it was a pleasure to read Ulin contemplate what reading has done for him.

I just began reading the letters of Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, in a collection called I Too am Here. I don’t think I’ve ever read a volume of someone’s letters before, which seems strange to me (and makes me think I’m forgetting something??). But if this book stays as good as it has begun, I may begin to read collections of letters regularly. Recently I’ve been preparing for a letter-reading binge by buying collections here and there, including ones by John Keats, Charles Lamb, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Jane Austen. Since I love epistolary novels so much, perhaps reading letters by real people is a logical next step?

I’ve read only maybe 20 pages of the Jane Carlyle book, but right off the bat she charmed me with this passage, written to a friend:

Do read this book [Rousseau’s Julie, or the new Heloise] — You will find it tedious in many of its details, and in some of its scenes culpably indelicate; but for splendour of eloquence, refinement of sensibility, and ardour of passion it has no match in the French language. Fear not that by reading Heloise you will be ruined — or undone — or whatever adjective best suits that fallen state into which women and angels will stumble at a time — I promise you that you will rise from Heloise with a deeper impression of whatever is most beautiful and most exalted in virtue than is left upon your mind by ‘Blairs sermons’ ‘Paley’s Theology’ or the voluminous ‘Jeremy Taylor’ himself — I never felt my mind more prepared to brave temptation of every sort than when I closed the second volume of this strange book — I believe if the Devil himself had waited upon me in the shape of Lord Byron I would have desired Betty to show him out …

It makes me wonder how much time she spent thinking about the devil waiting upon her in the shape of Lord Byron …. The rest of the letters so far are addressed to Thomas Carlyle in the years before their engagement and marriage. The two of them write about their literary ambitions, their reading, and their feelings for each other. Unfortunately for Thomas, so far Jane has insisted that she can only love him as a friend. Her reading of Rousseau’s novel has made her impatient with common, everyday lovers, and even Carlyle with all his genius and potential can’t live up to her ideal.

I know from reading the introduction that theirs will be a difficult though loving marriage, but it’s fun for right now to read Jane’s feelings about their relationship as it is still fresh and new.

Jenny Diski is one of my favorite nonfiction writers (I’m scared to read her fiction in case I hate it), and as far as nonfiction goes, I like pretty much whatever she writes. That includes this essay in The London Review of Books, a review of Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project. Those of you who have read Diski will not be surprised to find that she did not like The Happiness Project, is suspicious of the whole notion of happiness, and prefers not to use the word, as well as the words “love” and “feeling.” They are all just too vague.

Here’s a taste of her style (lengthy, but every bit of the paragraph is worth it):

Back to the Twelve Personal Commandments. The first, it has to be said, is difficult: ‘Be Gretchen’. I can see the sense in that as things stand, but being Gretchen is beyond me. Apparently, it isn’t even easy for Gretchen, since she has to remind herself to be her. Still being Gretchen is the first step on the road to happiness. OK, she means: ‘Be yourself’. But like many purveyors of such advice, she gives no guidelines, and I could more easily be Gretchen than fathom how to ‘Be Jenny’. If I thought I knew that, I probably wouldn’t have the doubt-space in my head to enable me to consider myself unhappy in the first place. Some of her commandments are more clear-cut than others, but that’s true too of the more modest ten that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. ‘Be polite and fair,’ like ‘Do not commit murder,’ may not be easy but you can see how it might save you trouble in the long run. Walk into a shop and call the proprietor a capitalist, thieving cunt, and you are likely to leave less happy than when you went in, though I can imagine circumstances in which another kind of contentment might override the social benefits of hypocrisy and self-control. There are contradictions, too: isn’t ‘Identify the problem’ cancelled out by ‘No calculation’? And ‘Act the way I want to feel’ doesn’t chime well with ‘Do what ought to be done.’ But what of the gnomic ‘Spend out’? Gretchen helps us with this and explains: ‘by spending out, I mean to stop hoarding, to trust in abundance. I find myself saving things, even when it makes no sense. Right now I’m forcing myself to spend out by wearing my new underwear.’ This does at least makes sense of the ‘Be Gretchen’ commandment, because surely anyone who wasn’t Gretchen who heard themselves say that or read it back after they’d written it would immediately head to the nearest tall building and throw themselves off.

The entire essay is a treat. And I think this even though I read books about happiness and like them. The Lovingkindness book I’m reading now is subtitled The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, and I praised the book Positivity earlier this year, which makes a point of not being about happiness, exactly, since happiness is a much narrower term than positivity, but can still be said to be about happiness anyway, in a loose sense of the word.

I don’t think I’m being entirely contradictory here. I agree with a lot of what Diski says. Unhappiness is a part of life, and there isn’t much to be done about it — it’s just the way things are. There isn’t much to be done about it, but there is something. I have found books about happiness, or positivity or lovingkindness or whatever, to offer realistic ways of responding to unhappiness. The ones I’ve read don’t argue you can get rid of unhappiness entirely, but that there are things you can do to really experience the happiness that does come to you and to encourage it to happen more. They also show how to experience and then move on from the sad moments in life — not to reject them and not to wallow in them, but to respect them and then to recover.

It seems to me that people who complain about self-help books and books about happiness tend to conflate them all into one category of badness, when the truth is there are good examples and bad examples, just as there are of any genre. I’d probably hate The Happiness Project too, but I don’t want to dismiss books that might offer genuine wisdom.

In a lot of ways I like the idea of reading biographies more than I like the actual reading of them; it sounds so nice to learn more about authors, find out what their life was like, learn a little bit about their time and place, but the reality is that biographies are often too long, they can get dull, and I forget much of what I read. Sadly, I’m not good with fact-filled nonfiction and prefer the kind that is narrative- or idea-driven.

But in spite of the above, I still do read biographies now and then, and I do get something from them, especially when they are written by someone great, which is the case with Richard Holmes and his biography of Coleridge. I read the first volume last summer (apparently, I don’t like super-long biographies, unless they are written by Richard Holmes), and just finished the second volume a week or so ago (a good 500+ pages long).

The books are enthralling. It’s partly that Coleridge is a great subject, but more that Holmes does such a good job with the story. He somehow manages to make Coleridge’s story suspenseful. Of course the final ending is never in doubt, but in the meantime, I didn’t want to put the book down because I had to know whether Coleridge was finally going to make good on his creative and intellectual promise, whether he would kick his terrible opium habit, whether his latest publication would sell, whether he would find another friend to care for him when the last one abandoned him. There are tons of facts in the books, but they are all part of the narrative, and Holmes never loses sight of it.

He also writes a lot about Coleridge’s writings and his philosophy, so there’s a strong focus on criticism as well as the life. Coleridge was not only a poet, but a journalist, a playwright, and a philosopher, so there is a lot of intellectual material to make sense of. Coleridge’s thinking was often abstract and metaphysical (so much so that people began to mock him for it), and Holmes does a good job explaining the ideas and also situating Coleridge in his historical context. It’s great fun to read about Coleridge’s relationships with other writers and philosophers, William and Dorothy Wordsworth most obviously, but also Lamb, Hazlitt (who loved Coleridge and then viciously attacked him), Southey, Keats, Shelley, and lots and lots of others. Coleridge was an extremely gregarious person, which makes him a great subject for a biography — there are just so many good stories to tell.

Coleridge had such great promise as a writer that reading the second half of the biography was sometimes hard because his opium addiction and other aspects of his personality kept him from living up to his potential. It’s a story of Coleridge again and again abandoning this scheme and that plan because he had another bad spell with his health. As flawed as the man was (the story of how he treated his wife and family is a little hard to take sometimes, although complicated), I couldn’t help but fall under his spell. It was a book that was hard to put down and sad to finish.

I hated the Romantics in college, but grad school changed my mind completely, and now I’m eager to read more. Fortunately, Holmes has another super-long biography of Percy Shelley, and I have books about Dorothy Wordsworth and Keats on my shelves, not to mention some primary texts by those writers as well. And now I really want a copy of Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics: The Tangled Lived of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation. I don’t think I’ve ever read this kind of group biography before, but I have at least one other on my shelves (Partisans), and I’m curious how I will like them.

I’m not sure at all what I would think of David Shields’s book Reality Hunger, were I to read it. I’m sort of tempted, and sort of feel as though I’ve heard enough about it already. The fact that it’s subtitled “A Manifesto” is a strike against it, as the thought of reading a manifesto makes me yawn. I had only the vaguest idea what the book was about until I read this article by James Wood in The New Yorker, an article that is ostensibly a review of the latest Change-Rae Lee novel, but is really more of a meditation on the novel itself. Wood introduces Shield’s book as an argument “against the traditional novelistic machinery” and includes this quotation from the book:

I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage works are nearly always “about what they’re about”—which may sound a tad tautological—but when I read a book that I really love, I’m excited because I can feel the writer’s excitement that in every paragraph he’s manifestly exploring his subject.

I feel two ways about this passage. In some ways I agree, because many of the books I love the most are ones that don’t have traditional plots or traditional novelistic devices. These books I love are forms of thinking and consciousness and deal with ideas directly. I’m also someone who can’t remember charaters’ names or plot details. On the other hand, I love stories too and am far from ready to dismiss “traditional” novels. In fact, writing a manifesto dismissing “traditional” novels strikes me as a highly silly and annoying thing to do. Expressing one’s personal preference strongly is fine, but I have a feeling Shields is doing more than that.

Ultimately Wood’s discussion of the book is mixed; he calls it “imprecise and overwrought” but also finds Shields’s skepticism towards traditional narrative useful. (Amusingly, in this interview, Shields says that he hopes Wood will review his book “because he’ll hate it. And it’ll be hilarious.” He got his wish, and I wonder if the review is as hilarious as he expected. It seems that Wood might have pleasantly surprised him.)

So, who knows if I’ll read the book or not. As I read the Wood piece I thought the one really excellent reason for reading it would be to see what books Shields praises, since it sounds like we share similar tastes in some areas at least. And then I came across this list of 26 “shifting nonfictions” Shields recommends. And oh, did this list make me happy. It’s exactly what I wanted. By “shifting nonfictions” Shields means books that explore “our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.” The only thing that would have made the list better would be if he had dropped the nonfiction label entirely and made a list of books, fiction or non, that are explicitly idea-driven and have things to say about truth and reality.

But as it is, it’s a really awesome list, and I know that because it has a handful of some of my favorite books ever, enough to prove that we have similar tastes, and then it has some books I’ve been meaning to read forever, which confirms my desire to read them, and then it has some books I’ve never heard of. Perfect! The ones that are among my favorite books ever are Nicholson Baker’s “U&I,” Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage,” Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” and David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.” I also loved an essay by Joe Wenderoth I read recently, and his book Letters to Wendy’s is on the list. Other books I’ve been meaning to read forever include Blaise Pascal’s Pensees and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants is there as well, and although I’m not a huge Sebald fan, I do admire him. And I’m intrigued by a bunch of other names included there. So much to explore!

It is interesting to describe Barbara Fredrickson’s book Positivity to friends to see what they say and to read the comments on my post about the book — interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. One is that I used to be the sort of person who would make fun of the sort of person I am now — one who is vaguely spiritual, a westerner interested in eastern religions, one who reads self-help books and throws around terms like “positivity” without sarcasm. So when people express the same doubts about the concept of positivity that I once would have expressed myself, I remember that version of my self (which was around up until quite recently and still sort of exists) and have to laugh. I have my doubts about the whole thing too. And I agree with those who say that the positive psychology movement has its dangerous side and can be misused or warped into something that’s about repressing negativity in a harmful way.

And yet it doesn’t have to turn dangerous or be harmful, and I think Fredrickson does a good job of staying balanced; she argues that negative feelings are useful and important, and we should pay attention to what they mean. But people also tend to focus on the negative to such an extent that we block out the positive, and she urges people both to dwell on the positive more and to learn to distinguish between negativity that’s useful — the sort that tells us to get out of a bad relationship, for example — and the negativity that isn’t — the sort that keeps me up at night replaying a conversation that made me angry over and over again in my head.

But I also wanted to write about another book I read, this time for work (for discussion amongst faculty), Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. This is not a book I liked a whole lot, although it did overlap a little with Positivity. The argument in Pink’s book is that because of three factors — abundance, Asia, and automation (I find the repeated “a” words obnoxious) — the types of skills that are in demand and will get us jobs in the future are changing. What matters now is right-brain thinking, a kind of creative, artistic, empathetic, and emotional approach, rather than the old left-brain thinking, which is about calculations and logic. Basically, computers and cheap labor from overseas will be able to perform the kind of rote, mechanical mental work that many people in America are doing now (computer-programming, accounting). Instead, skills such as creating new designs or empathizing with people’s problems or being able to create compelling narratives will be in demand. Pink lists six aspects of right-brain thinking that he describes in separate chapters, which include resources for developing that skill: design, story, symphony (making connections, synthesizing ideas), empathy, play, and meaning.

Now Pink’s argument may be entirely true, I don’t know. I can’t really critique the rightness or wrongness of it. But the book seems to be meant to inspire people to develop a facility with “right-brain” thinking, and rather than being inspirational, it’s frightening. It’s like an order to start being creative — now! — or lose your job and become irrelevant. It’s really hard to work on developing a new mindset, especially one that’s about openness and play, when feeling under threat.

Some of the attributes Pink talks about came up in the Positivity book; Fredrickson argues that cultivating positivity can increase our creativity and emotional responsiveness, and that it can be a part of our quest for meaning. I really like the idea that fostering positive emotions can make a person more open to new ideas, more willing to try new things, and more able to see creative possibilities. These are things Pink values as well. But his argument is “change or else,” whereas Fredrickson’s is “give it a try and see what happens.” That’s a much better starting place, don’t you think?

I’ve read a couple books in the last few months that are basically self-help books, each with their own very different audience and with very different tones. One I read for myself, and one I read for work. You can probably guess which one I liked best.

The first is Barbara Fredrickson’s book Positivity, which I decided to pick up after a friend sent me a copy of an interview she’d done for Sun magazine. The interview had so many interesting bits of information of the sort I found myself immediately wanting to share with others, so I thought taking a look at the book would be worthwhile, and it was. Fredrickson is a psychology researcher and professor, and the book is part of the positive psychology movement of recent decades.

The term “positivity” is a better one than happiness, since it contains within it a whole list of positive emotions, including joy, love, curiosity, contentment, gratitude, amusement, hope, inspiration, wonder, and pride. Fredrickson has done lots of studies on the effects of these positive emotions on people, and what makes this book so interesting to me is that the science behind it seems sound (or at least she does a good job presenting it convincingly in the book). The basic argument is that if we think of the number of our positive and negative emotional experiences as a ratio, if we are able to get that ratio up to 3-to-1, meaning we have three positive emotional experiences for every negative one, then that’s a tipping point that can fundamentally change our experience of life. Once we reach that point, we become more open to life, more curious, more imaginative, and more resilient.

By nature I’m uncomfortable with this kind of schematic argument — it seems too simple — but I don’t have any reason to mistrust the research that’s behind it, and there’s much in the book that does ring true to me. Fredrickson describes what life is like for people with low positivity ratios, which includes most of us, and that picture sounded familiar — one of just getting by, of the kind of low-level dissatisfaction many people feel. The key to thriving, she argues, is to make a conscious effort to create positive emotions and to fully experience the ones we already have. A major part of the book is devoted to describing ways of doing this, and her recommendations (which she backs up with descriptions of studies she has done) often fit with things I’ve learned from yoga classes and books about spirituality. Her recommendations include things like making a conscious effort to savor the positive things that happen to us, to practice insight meditation or lovingkindness meditation in order to open the mind and heart, to find distractions that will get us out of negative ways of thinking, and lots of others.

The book is typical of its sort by being way too repetitive and not terribly well-written, but still, I’m glad I read it. The book is part of a series of books I’ve read recently that are loosely about spirituality, psychology, and self-help (including Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart and Judith Lasater’s Living Your Yoga). What’s been interesting to me about reading these books is the cumulative effect of reading them one after another, which has felt almost as important as what the books themselves say. They aren’t all saying the same things, of course, but there are connections among all of them and some of their arguments overlap. I’ve read them slowly, too, which means that I spent weeks or months looking into them now and then and contemplating their ideas. So I feel like I’m slowly absorbing some of the ideas and am able to make them a part of my life. It’s a process that I’ve enjoyed and benefited from.

The other book, the business/self-help book I read recently for work? I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

I expressed some mixed feelings about Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates in my post from earlier this week, and I thought I’d expand on those a bit. For the most part, I enjoyed reading the book. It’s under 300 pages and is a quick read, so it’s a good way to learn or review a little history, especially if longer, more serious history books aren’t your thing (which they aren’t for me).

Vowell tells the story of the pilgrims who sailed to America in 1630 and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She analyzes what motivated them to leave England, and then describes the problems that faced them once they arrived — the challenge of settling themselves in to a strange and difficult landscape, the internal conflicts and disagreements that inevitably came up, and the wars with Indians that eventually arose. The most interesting parts were her descriptions of the Puritan’s religious beliefs and the legacy they left to America. She argues repeatedly that although we think of ourselves as cultural descendants of the Puritans, our relationship to their legacy is enormously complicated. The evangelicals of today who might seem like the Puritans’ most obvious descendants differ from them in crucial ways. John Winthrop’s famous use of the phrase “city on a hill” to describe the new colony appears again and again in the book, most effectively when Vowell launches a scathing critique of Ronald Reagan’s many uses of it for purposes that would have been quite a surprise to Winthrop.

Vowell makes all of this interesting (although it’s interesting material to begin with, I think) by her sense of humor and her method of moving back and forth in time, making connections between what happened then and has happened since. She has a sarcastic, smart-ass tone that provides some laughs (I don’t have the book anymore, so I can’t give examples. unfortunately) and also keeps the narrative light and fast-moving. At times it’s a little glib for my taste, but the truth is, I don’t know of many history books written in such an amusing manner, so overall, I appreciated it. She also frequently jumps forward in time, sometimes to tell a lengthy story, such as her discussion of Ronald Reagan or her story of visiting Plymouth Plantation with some family members. She also uses contemporary references to help explain her points, such as her description of how American history gets portrayed on The Brady Bunch. It gets silly sometimes, but it’s also fun, and illuminating.

You can tell from my descriptions that I’m not a huge fan of Vowell’s sense of humor. My other complaint is that I would have liked a better sense of the book’s structure. There are no chapters, which means it’s hard to get a sense of the overall structure of the book — what its historical starting and ending points are and how the narrative elements are organized.

However, if you want a quick review of early American history, this is a great place to go, or if you want to know more about the Puritans and their legacy (again, without reading something longer and weightier), this book will suit you.

I read The Sixties by Jenny Diski not so much because I’m interested in the sixties, as because I’m interested in Jenny Diski. I mean, I find the sixties an intriguing time period, but not any more so than, say, the 1930s or the 1790s or the 1660s, other decades when lots of interesting things happened. It’s just that Diski has such a wonderful voice in her nonfiction that I’m ready to read anything she writes. What about you — are there people whose writing you will read no matter what the subject?

The Sixties is short — about 140 pages — and part of Picador’s “Big Ideas, Small Books” series. What makes this book so good, and what makes all of Diski’s nonfiction good (I haven’t tried her fiction yet), is the way she combines ideas and analysis with personal narrative. The Sixties is about the decade as a whole, but it’s also about Diski’s experience of the time, and she has an interesting story to tell. She was very much of the decade, living in London and participating in the drug use, casual sex, and political protests of the time, and she tells her story with appealing openness and honesty. Although she remained skeptical about some of the more extreme political ideas circulating around her, she believed, as so many did, that after their generation, the world would never be the same again.

Diski spends a lot of time evaluating what the sixties did and didn’t accomplish, and although she is aware of how much the world has changed since that time and of how much her generation contributed to the change, she also argues that there is an awful lot that is still the same. Our basic political structures have not changed, our economic system has not changed, nor has our individualism and acquisitiveness. Yes, we are less racist and sexist, at least as far as our laws go, but she wonders just how much attitudes have really shifted. The biggest gains, she speculates, may be changes in attitudes toward homosexuality; this is an area, she believes, of which the sixties generation can be proud.

She also compares how the British and Americans experienced the decade differently (the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement made the decade a much more serious, high-stakes time in America), and considers the extent to which the sixties generation led directly into conservative Reagan/Thatcher era. Here she is quite harsh with her generation for failing to recognize the difference between liberty and libertarianism; there were theorists and politicians saying things about individualism that sounded good at the time but that were actually the opposite of everything the radical sixties generation held dear. It’s one thing to seek personal liberation and freedom to live as one likes, and another thing to want to destroy community and society so that the individual can reign supreme. In the sixties, though, people didn’t always take the time to think about where their ideas might lead or who might warp them for ends they never envisioned.

Diski manages to say an awful lot in 140 pages; the first chapter covers the early to mid sixties when changes were just barely beginning to appear, and then she devotes a chapter each to drugs, sex, politics, education, and psychiatry. Each chapter creates a vivid picture of what the times were like and what Diski herself experienced, and each chapter makes an argument about the legacy of the times, whether positive or negative, lasting or not. And once again I’m reminded of why I admire Diski so much.

Maureen Corrigan’s book Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading isn’t the best reading memoir I’ve ever read (I’m not sure what is, now that I think about it; if this turns out to be my favorite one, there’s a little room for improvement), but it has interesting and entertaining parts. It also makes me think that reading memoirs are fun to the extent that the reader shares a taste in books with the writer, at least to some degree. The parts I liked best are the parts about books I’m familiar with; the sections I rushed through are those where I had no connection to the books under discussion at all.

The premise of the book is that reading has made Corrigan’s life what it is, an interesting and appealing idea that Corrigan returns to again and again. Books kept her company as a child, they took her out of her Irish Catholic neighborhood and landed her in Philadelphia to study literature as a grad student, they led her out of the scholarly world into the world of book reviewing, and they shaped her experience of adopting her daughter. She now teaches and reviews books for NPR’s show “Fresh Air.” I’ve listened to a number of her radio reviews, so it was interesting to learn a little more about the person behind the voice.

The book is divided into four chapters interspersed with short, unlabeled meditations on books. The chapters take up such subjects as “women’s extreme adventure stories,” detective fiction, portrayals of single women, and pre-Vatican II Catholic martyr stories. The women’s extreme adventure idea is that there is a whole tradition of stories about women who spend their lives waiting — for men, for relief, for salvation, for recognition, for children — and struggling at home with, perhaps, abusive men or babies or loneliness. Instead of getting to go out and have adventures at sea or in the workplace, they spend their time enduring at home. Books by novelists such as the Brontës and Barbara Pym argue implicitly that the lives of women who wait deserve recognition as adventurous and valiant.

The chapter on crime fiction argues for the literary merit of the genre and claims that it is for the most part the only novel form that portrays work directly. Other novels take up work as a theme or describe work in brief sections, but crime novels dig deep into the working lives of detectives, showing in detail what it is they do on the job. She argues that part of the appeal of detectives is that their work is so satisfying — it allows them to use both their bodies and their brains, and it gives them an unusual degree of freedom and independence. Corrigan complains about those who dismiss crime fiction as mere “genre fiction” and believes that crime novels are capable of incisive social analysis.

I found these arguments interesting, and they were among the highlights of the book. The chapter on Catholic martyr tales was the book’s weak point, however. It seemed like too specialized a subject to appeal to most readers. The subject comes out of Corrigan’s Catholic education, a part of which was reading uplifting books about virtuous Catholics whose lives were full of sacrifice and self-abnegation. The self-abnegation, however, sits rather uneasily with the books they wrote and published detailing their heroics. The cultural argument Corrigan makes here is interesting, but the books she discusses are obscure and not ones I (and I’d guess most readers) would want to pursue.

That last chapter aside, however, I enjoyed the way Corrigan combines discussions of books with stories from her life; she brings the two together in a way that feels natural and seamless. I would have liked the book more if my reading taste overlapped with hers to a greater extent, but still, there is much that’s worth while here. And, as I said in an earlier post, the title is perfect for sending a message, if “leave me alone, I’m reading” is the message you want to send.

It’s impossible to read Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father without thinking about the fact of his presidency the entire way through. Everything takes on a different meaning knowing that that one big event is on the way, eventually. The uncertainties about his future he describes we now know are unwarranted — everything is going to work out. But other kinds of uncertainties — about his identity, about what it means to be biracial, about how to address racial conflict in America, about how to respond to white and black people both — these uncertainties take on a new meaning, since the person who felt so much doubt and experienced so much conflict is now president and in a position where he can’t speak about his feelings with the same honesty. I kept thinking as I read the book that I would really like to know what he is thinking and experiencing right now, but that’s one thing I can’t know. There is a degree of self-awareness and honesty in the book that no American president could get away with expressing while in office.

I came to like the personality that comes through in this book, and that has made me think about what kind of personality one needs to be president — because I tend to like self-aware, thoughtful people and it seems to me that having that kind of personality would make holding such an important political office a nightmare. When I think about some of the absurd, utterly irrational things people are saying about Obama (those in the “birther” movement, for example), I wonder how hard it would be to keep one’s cool, and when I think about the constant criticism and commentary and second-guessing he receives, I wonder how someone as prone to self-doubt as Obama seems to be can handle it all. I want someone whose mindset and thought processes I understand and relate to in the White House, and yet I wonder how such a person can survive.

I recognize that the book’s persona is a creation and is not Obama himself and also that he has changed since the 1995 publication date, but the book really does give the impression that there is an open, genuine person writing it, a person who has struggled and is now trying to write about those struggles honestly. Obama’s focus is his racial heritage and the problems he faced coming to terms with what it means to have a white mother and grandparents from Iowa and a black father from Kenya, and to have grown up in Hawaii where racial tensions existed, although on a fairly low level, and then to have spent time in California and New York before settling down in Chicago, where racial tensions are much more pervasive and his job is to try to do something about it.

The book is framed as a quest — Obama’s quest to find himself, ultimately, which means an attempt to come to terms with an absent father and to find a place or a way of being or a state of mind he can call home. Dreams from My Father has three sections, the first one describing his childhood up through his college years, the second part describing his years in Chicago as a community organizer, and the third part telling about his trip to Kenya to meet his father’s family. In each of these sections, he is searching for clues as to who he is and how he should behave. He tells of his introduction to racism, his uneasy response to the other black students around him, his rebellion and anger that stem from his self-doubts, and his search for an identity that will help him cope with so much uncertainty. When he gets to Chicago, he tells of the poverty and hopelessness he sees around him and of his struggles to figure out the best way to make some kind of lasting change — a monumental task. And when he gets to Kenya, he tells about his initial relief at being in a place where blackness is the norm and his disappointment that Kenya doesn’t have any simple answers to offer. He does find a resolution of sorts, but it’s a partial and complicated one.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I want Obama to succeed as president to such an extent that I don’t like following and often don’t follow the news because I don’t want to hear about the possibility of failure. I’d prefer to be able to look back at this time with enough perspective to know how things will turn out rather than having to live through it. But since I can’t do that, I’ll just take comfort in the fact that we have a president who is smart and thoughtful and who writes well. Dreams from My Father is a well-crafted, engaging, engrossing, thought-provoking read.