Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That’s Right for Your Body, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London

(May 15) Fun. I have gotten on a kick of watching What Not to Wear on Friday nights while wrestling the dog, and have slowly learned there’s a science to choosing clothes. Dress Your Best is mostly images with magazine-style cutlines and bullet points, not a book, really, but it gave me an awareness of the visual aesthetic of clothing that reminded me of learning the compositional aesthetic of The Oath of the Horatii in art history (only quicker).

Now, would Stacy and Clinton say that Madame X is dressed appropriately? Oh, I think so.

-- John Singer Sargent, Madame X

The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

(May 7, 2006) Good read. I really liked it. I haven’t read a lot of time-travel novels (just the Diana Gabaldon books), but I feel like I know the genre from movies (Groundhog Day, Time Bandits, Austin Powers, Back to the Future, Lola Rennt, Peggy Sue Got Married, Somewhere in Time, Terminator, Prisoner of Azkaban) and TV (Quantum Leap, Mr. Peabody, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits), and I think that this was a very innovative approach to time-travelling. I like how she schemed it all out, so that for a while Henry knows more than Clare, then Clare knows more than Henry, and at almost every encounter one of them is surprised and one of them knows what’s going on. Despite this constant dislocation, both always know some of the “back story” and can guide the other through. The characters are very likable, and they do the harmless things you’d do if you had this kind of relationship with time -- they get a lottery win, they play the stock market, they get prepared for September 11th. It’s clever and imaginative. It gets a bit gruesome at the end, but Niffenegger must have felt that she couldn’t wind up the whole thing too happily.

-- Caravaggio, Narcissus

When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Gabor Maté

(May 1) Bittersweet: “sweet” because it confirms my own amateur observations; “bitter” because I feel like a ticking time bomb now, lol (the word I really need instead of “bittersweet” is “vindicating-scary”). Maté is completely convincing with his thesis that autoimmune diseases are caused by inappropriate responses to stress (repression, resentment, overcompensation, etc.). I am so convinced and have internalized the theory so thoroughly that my own reaction to a news story I heard the other day surprised me. The story reported how raloxifene is showing better results than tamoxifen in treating breast cancer, and my reflex reaction was, “Why are researchers wasting our time with these finger-in-the-dike drugs?” It was, to me, so clearly a big waste of time and money to do this kind of research -- yet I realize this is an impious reaction to “good news.” But I also know that the relationship between emotions and cancer will never galvanize people, neither researchers nor victims -- it’s too “unscientific,” no matter how many studies prove it.

-- Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

(May 30) Hmm. I got this out of the library because I liked Gilead so much and because several reviews of Gilead harked back reverently to the predecessor, Housekeeping, as an amazing book. My expectations were very high, and they were not met at all, at all, at all. This is one of those books in which semi-insane people float around lyrically, occasionally noticing details of their environments. Because what they do is so aimless, it’s hard to bond with such characters. I don’t find myself looking forward to “what will happen next” -- it could be anything (shrug) . The word “cold” must appear on every page.

-- John Everett Millais, Ophelia

"Brokeback Mountain," Annie Proulx

Disquieting. I haven’t seen the movie, but I kept running into reviews that called the original short story “haunting,” the “most powerful love story I’ve ever read,” “a tale of star-crossed lovers,” etc. I found the story brutal -- there’s violence, suffered by the characters themselves and featured in their stories about other people, the characters are in extreme denial and don’t have much to live for, and the narrator’s attitude toward them is sort of cold and clinical. I can’t believe the movie treats them this way -- Jack and Ennis couldn’t have remained the blank slates they are in the short story for the whole two hours of a movie; nobody would stay till the end. And even though there is star-crossedness, there’s no catharsis, no real tragedy, because there’s no effort on anybody’s part to challenge his dismal existence, and no awareness that it even is dismal. I don’t know why Jack and Ennis fall so profoundly in love; one minute they aren’t in love, the next minute they are. All I know is that these are very sad lives, and that it was not a good thing to be gay in Wyoming in the ’60s through ’80s.

-- Daniel Brown, See You Tonight for Supper

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, John Fox, Jr.

Charming, involving, but peculiar. I was a bit surprised by what this turned out to be. When it was mentioned in Gilead, it sounded like it might be about two men, one older, vying for the love of a young woman. That premise would have had some bearing on the love relationship and the conflict in Gilead if it were entirely the case. But, really, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a twist on the Pygmalion story, with the Eliza Doolittle character symbolizing Kentucky’s pre-industrial wilderness paradise. The age difference between the principal characters is completely different from that in Gilead: it’s slightly disturbing that Jack Hale falls in love with June at her young age. On the other hand, it strikes me as something you’d get away with in 1908, as well as with the usual anachronisms, such as the old-fashioned terms and turns of phrase and the unenlightened attitudes about class and race.

It’s quirky because it’s from 1908, but the author’s also quirky. The pacing is very uneven -- you can tell that Fox wove a fictional narrative around scenes he actually witnessed among mountain people -- he dwells on some moments with a vividness that is out of all proportion to their importance in the story while paying bare lip-service to moments that should be dramatic in the alleged story. He also has an odd way with a phrase every once in a while: he’ll write a sentence backward: “The longest of her life was that day to June,” or he’ll open a chapter in a funny, detached way: “Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter, things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways -- not,” or he’ll describe something bizarrely: “The Hoosier was delirious over his troubles and straightway closed his plant.” He shifts point of view frequently and without warning.

Still, I liked it a lot; I even ordered a fairy stone from www.highhopes.com.

-- J.C. Leyendecker, The Watchers of the Plains

Live the Life You Love: in Ten Easy Step-By-Step Lessons, Barbara Sher

A very encouraging book. This was a re-read for me. I read it a few years ago but never practiced any of the principles; I got it out of the library again because I recalled some good advice about setting priorities and de-cluttering that I would probably benefit from if I followed it. However, it’s just too file-card-heavy a system, and I will never keep it up. Nonetheless, it is fun to read -- Sher has a bracing, encouraging attitude that everyone is capable of great things, and she has a charming, chatty style that goes down easy. It is the perfect voice/style for this kind of thing.

-- A Mon Seul Désir, early 15th-century French master

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley

Very interesting. It addresses some of the gaps I felt in university English classes: I imagined that in university we would examine what it was that made poetry and prose great, powerful, whatever, and how the artist achieved the effects he did (it was always “he” then). Of course, we never did look at those things; courses were usually historical surveys and we were supposed to analyze technique fairly dispassionately. So Smiley has opinions on what I think are some really interesting aspects of how novels are written and how they achieve their effects -- such as the relative entertainment value of the first-person narrator vs. the omniscient narrator, etc.

It was a bit of a shock after 10 chapters on the features of 100 well-known novels to turn to two chapters on how to write a novel. I was not expecting the DIY aspect.

I had never heard of Jane Smiley before hearing of this book, but don’t want to read any of her novels now -- perhaps because they’re thoroughly autopsied here. She did make me want to read Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

-- M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

This is a lovely, winsome, “restorative” kind of book. It was wonderful to share consciousness with the narrator of this book, who is such a gentle, well-intentioned individual that your heart wells up with pride that the human race could produce such a worthy specimen. Experiencing this book is like being given a warm coat when you’re freezing, or a soft bed when you’re exhausted, etc. -- it’s nourishing or strengthening somehow. The creation of this character is amazing -- it never for a minute feels untrue, and yet a paragon such as this could never exist. It’s several days since I finished Gilead, and I am only now struck by how artificially structured the story is (to create the contrasts of good and evil that the author is obviously interested in). It felt real and true throughout, and compelling. I want to read Housekeeping now, and also The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

-- N.C. Wyeth, Portrait of Lincoln

The Sparrow: A Novel, Mary Doria Russell

Good read. I started reading this simultaneously with Gilead, and this won out. The premise is interesting, the storytelling is vivid and the characters are so likable. In fact, I don’t know why I kept reading, since you learn early on that only one of the group of eight survives. I guess that’s a sign of how likable the characters are -- I couldn’t let them go even though I could see I was going to lose them one by one to gruesome deaths. I enjoyed this book, but I’ve had my fill of torture and gruesome death for a while. I will not be reading the sequel to this.

-- Ferdinand Hodler, Night

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Bruce H. Lipton

The author loves histology and is probably a good teacher, and probably has made a breakthrough in the understanding of cell biology... but the editing and copy-editing of this book leave a lot to be desired.

-- Paul Plante, Northern Cardinal