The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy With Autism, Naoki Higashida

Emelisa Mudle, Joy to the World

(December 28) Saw this featured on the Jon Stewart show and was interested, particularly because this year I have read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Still Alice.

I was really interested to see whether  this account would jive with Curious Incident, since that author was trying to create the state of mind of an autistic person based on observing them, rather than on knowing how they are from the inside, like Higashida.

And reading this, I kept reminding myself that autistic people are probably all different from one another like non-autistic people are, even though Higashida spoke of "us" and how "we" are as though they are all the same.

So -- autistic people are not flat and affect-free the way Curious Incident author paints them, based on Higashida's narrative... in fact, Higashida makes them seem as if they are the most passionate and emotional people ever... their outbursts are frustration-based, according to him, because they wish to be understood and to do the right thing but can't because of problems with memory and with control over their own motor functions.

This was the most striking thing about the book -- how deeply Higashida felt things and how greatly he worried about hurting other people by actions he couldn't control, while pleading for patience and understanding.

Very sweet book. Higashida really loves nature and this becomes so charming, and he movingly explains why repetition and simple things are so comforting to autistic people. Their humanity is compromised by a faulty OS.

Curious Incident guy would make you think autistic people are not very human at all, and have some private logic for how they behave. But no. According to Higashida, they don't want to do the crazy things they do and they can't rationalize these activities.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

Michal Ivan, Old Man Figure Drawing, 2013

(December 30) Read this because a favourite new blog mentioned it as the blogger's favourite book. When I looked it up, I discovered it was a New York Times bestseller and highly touted elsewhere… so off I went.

I liked it a lot but would not give it more than a 3 out of 5. I liked its style and voice quite often, but there was a lot in it that was just so -- "sigh... everyone’s done this before a million times." And by "this" I mean: captured the charming sarcasm of New Yorkers of the 1930s to '60s (mostly Jewish ones); looked at the lifetime of horror inflicted on Jews by Nazism by way of the small individual life of one or two refugees; written a book about a fictional book that turns out to be the book you are reading (well, this one doesn’t do that exactly, but it’s very close).

It reminded me a lot of The Book Thief, in fact, although the plot is quite different. There is the humorous Jewish sarcasm and a lot about writing and being a writer.

In fact, I'm a little tired of writers writing about writing at this point. Sometimes it feels like the only activity anyone is interested in reading about is the process of creating something to read.

This book, though, is more multi-layered than the usual book about a fictional book, because the fictional book in question is claimed by a number of different authors, and this is, kind of, the tension that has to be resolved.

But there's a trip-up: before we get to sample it, the fictional book is characterized as "amazing" and "life-changing" by some of the characters who have read it, and it is plagiarized by wannabe writers, and it is immediately published by publishers who receive manuscripts of it. Our expectations are high. When we finally do get to sample some of the chapters, we find out it's not that remarkable a book. I mean, I just didn't find it that great -- the excerpts are kind of silly and jejune. I can't imagine a whole book of the kinds of passages offered in the excerpts would be life-changing.

Perhaps more to the point, in terms of my own reaction to the book: I was not interested enough in unravelling all the layers of who was writing what and who was who to go back and figure it out when I got confused. I would just think: "I will go look it up on the net when I’m done," and, now that I am done, I don't think I'll even go and do that.

Yes, lives could potentially cross and criss-cross in extremely complicated ways unknown to the people living them, but in a book I want that all to work out to a conclusion that is insightful, not just "wow, weird coincidence."

Also significant: young people don't have any idea at all of what it feels like to be 60 or 40 or even 20 years older than they are. When you are in your 70s or 80s, you are not acting like a teenager no matter what weird thing life is throwing at you. You can be "immature" in old age, but it's a different version of immature, imo. So Krauss's elderly people are not convincing to me.

I'm dwelling on things I didn't like here, but I didn't hate this book at all. I liked it fine. But I can't understand why it was a bestseller or anyone's favourite.

The Meaning of Sunglasses; and a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable, Hadley Freeman

Alexsandro Palombo, Marge Simpson Loves Coco Chanel, 2012

 (November 5)  Simon Doonan says, “I shrieked my way through this book” and, while I didn’t shriek my way through this book or shriek at all, girl is a clever writer.

Sample:

Prada styles itself as the label that's okay for intellectual feminists to like. You have to wonder how precarious a woman's self-image must be to be damaged by showing an interest in fashion, and it is on this kind of knife-edge, poised between careful cerebralism and mocking artificiality, that Prada balances.

Prada's reputation as the acceptably intellectual label stems primarily from the designer Miuccia Prada. Rare is the profile of Mrs. Prada, as she is known, despite Prada actually being her maiden name, that does not make reference to her university degree and youthful dalliance with communism, as if they were proof of her unique cerebralism. As for the former, this carries the not inaccurate suggestion that everyone else in fashion is an uneducated cave dweller who thinks Chekhov is a pattern. In regard to the latter, some might question whether a move from communism to fashion design is more suggestive of fluid personal values rather than a show of deep intellect, but that belief seems to belong to the minority, judging from the tones of awe in which this biographical tidbit is constantly repeated. 

And she says many profound things about fashion and feminism… and did well at being both British and American.

Snark level? Very high.

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year, Kjerstin Gruys

Art Babbitt, Queen Grimhilde, 1937

(September 12) I read this because I saw Gruys interviewed on The Colberrrr Reporrr, and it sounded like a cool concept.

Strangely, however, I found it a dull read and struggled to finish. This in itself was interesting, because I could tell that if I had read the equivalent text as blog posts over the course of a year, I would have probably enjoyed it… in the way one enjoys blogs, I guess… as a little lighter weight than books.

And so I have concluded that what is entertaining detail in a 700-word blog post twice a week is tedious detail in a book. Often while reading Mirror I wondered about the detailed scene-settings offered when some of the principals discussed a vague aspect of the “project.” I kept hoping these details would eventually prove to be important to Gruys's experience of a mirrorless year, but they never were.

There was one kind of nice moment when Gruys has a dramatic epiphany about her mother-in-law, and that was well served by the reams of banal details about the MIL that had come before, but there’s no real sort of book going on here. There is no organization, no foreshadowing, no thesis presented, no shape at all. It is like a blog, but without the “benefits” of a blog, which include the live relationship between the author and readers, and the slow, authentic timing.

And, then, more seriously, I don’t think Gruys went very deeply into her topic. She was quite vague about her reasons for wanting to go mirrorless… she just talked about “living for her values” and such platitudes. She didn’t offer a detailed analysis of her mirror use prior to starting. Did she think she used mirrors a normal amount or too much? What would those amounts be? She seemed to think that everybody would get how weird it would be to avoid looking in mirrors for a year, like we’re all the same in our devotion to mirrors. What exactly is wrong with looking in mirrors?

I wanted the set-up: I wanted to know how Gruys used mirrors. Did she look at herself every 10 minutes to check something or did she spend hours on end practicing speaking and facial expressions to use in public or did she just stand around adoring herself? We don’t know.

Affects the whole story.

 Even more disturbing: once the project starts (and even well before the start) the word “makeup” comes up every other sentence. It’s not clear why that is her biggest concern… I mean, she says vaguely that she’s “vain,” but there are so many things to be vain about concerning one’s appearance, and she doesn’t worry about 98 per cent of those at all. I would be all worried about getting earrings on... and about whether I would be allowed to use a mirror to look for an eyelash or a piece of grit stuck in my eye or to examine the areas between teeth… and I think I’d be more worried about my hair not looking like a rat’s nest than makeup… or about my beard and mustache… yet none of these issues ever came up. It was makeup, makeup, makeup… planning a way to wear makeup without a mirror, going into a big theory and testing method to prepare for applying makeup without a mirror, on and on… was she covering up some real problems or was she afraid to look blah and tired the way everyone who stops wearing makeup looks? We don’t know.

And this is her doctoral dissertation topic!

Random peeves:

• Gruys seems to think that wanting to do girly things is the same as wanting to look in a mirror.
• Feminism is linked to using mirrors for vague reasons. 
• p. 16 -- a long passage about how she piled some new books she bought. Why so much detail about this? It's too much even for a blog post. 
• The "tradition" of “taking a good long look at yourself in a mirror on your wedding day” is a "tradition" I’d never heard of until this book. 
• p. 147: “How annoyingly self-involved I’d been” BEEN?? As I say -- there's no moment of truth, so it's hard to know what change she sees. 
• The fact that Gruys did this just before getting married seems to up the ante: so the stakes were maybe how lovely her wedding pictures would look? They turned out lovely -- but could they have been better?? I think only someone of her demographic -- age group, income level, fashion experience -- and a fellow Bridezilla -- would get the drama of this. 
•  I didn’t get the mascara epiphany on p. 152. 
•  She seemed to see herself in mirrors every other day despite this conscious undertaking. 
•  She didn’t seem to love her body in the end, which she often mentioned as a personal failing related to mirror-gazing. 

Colbert Report, I can’t trust your book recs.

Still Alice, Lisa Genova

Candice Bohannon Reyes, Dementia, 2009 (?)

(August 15)  Quite liked it. Read it because, when I mentioned to Andrea that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time made me wonder if I had Asperger's Syndrome, it reminded her of Still Alice, which made her think she might have Alzheimer Disease. Like Curious Incident, this is written from the point of view of the person with the condition... which is such an interesting challenge in both books: since neither author actually has the condition they present from the protagonist's point of view they can't claim complete authenticity, but they know enough about the condition to try for near-authenticity (Haddon had worked with people with autism and Genova is a doctor who has treated people with Alzheimer).

Basically, it's interesting to see what narrative techniques get used to convey disassociation, obsession, superstitiousness, etc. (Curious), or memory lapses, cognitive confusion, disintegration, etc. (Alice).

And I really enjoyed what Lisa Genova tries here. It's a clinical case (but totally fictionalized) so there is no big dramatic arc -- Alice just finds out she's got early-onset Alzheimer's and tries to cope with it as it progresses. And yet the story is as compelling as any proper “heroic” drama. You want to know what happens next as this disease develops. The tension mounts: at only halfway through the novel, it seems Alice has already lost so much... how much worse would it get? you wonder. And Alice early on tries to provide herself with an escape hatch, something I think I would try to do myself; it was gripping to watch that play out.

So Genova successfully persuaded me that the early stages of dementia would be as she presents them.

And, yes, it did make me feel I might have early symptoms of Alzheimer's in real life. Did Andrea and I get this impression because we all do have some symptoms of dementia by a certain age, or because Genova wants us to see how easy it is to deny the symptoms?

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg

J. Howard Miller, We Can Do It!, 1942

(August 13) I didn't have any expectations about this at all… why did I read it? I have in my notes “because short and trendy.” It is well known and I kept seeing it recommended, but I don't remember whose recommendation tipped the scale… maybe Michele Landsberg's?

And then it was much more interesting than I thought it would be! I had this bias against people with MBAs: I have found them usually to be formulaic, best-practices-oriented, and phobic about originality or quirkiness, and since Sheryl Sandberg had worked for Facebook and Google, I assumed Lean In would be a business mogul's how-I-got-here story, offering a few tips and tricks to her fellow women, along formulaic lines.

But it was not that. Sandberg has taken a long, hard look at what holds women back from both the outside and the inside, and she offers solutions that are not easy-breezy and have to be grudgingly accepted. No "tips" or "tricks."

Sad but true: people, both men and women, don’t like to see women succeed in business. They criticize women for failings they would never even notice in a man. There is so much wanting to pull women down. So Sandberg says women must be nice, must jump through hoops successful men don't have to, must accommodate that negative attitude, until we get enough women in place that they don't have to do those things anymore. It's maddening, but she's right. The point is to get more women into positions of power.

Every fibre of my feminist being resents that women have to do anything different from men to get … anything! And it is so sad to accept that many people blame the victim.

But Sandberg is right.

So this is a practical approach to feminism from a practical MBA / manager type of person. Her theory on pregnancy / maternity leave: “don’t withdraw: work like a dog” was different and interesting, and no doubt absolutely correct.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

Victor Borisov-Musatov, Boy With a Dog, 1895

(June 14) I was surprised to find this so compelling: because it’s a novelty narrator, you feel like the focus might be on the verisimilitude and not on the bare plot... but I found I wanted to know what was going to happen to Christopher and was sorry to see the book end. This is part of the surprise -- that Christopher is so endearing -- given that he’s autistic spectrum condition and is without affect. At least one reviewer on Amazon said it was hard to like Christopher because he was so lacking in empathy for his fellow human beings... but I found him likable -- he is so scrupulously honest, consistent and curious... and you certainly can’t hold the lack of empathy against him.

 Whether this is really how autistic people think, it’s a compelling story.

 Another Amazon review said: “Although Christopher cannot grasp subtlety and nuances, the reader can, and that's where the true force of this exceptional novel lies.”

I noticed that, too -- being made to see how important it is to be able to interpret behaviour. There are these compliments to the reader.

But I wonder if I’m partially autistic, because I thought Christopher’s reactions to certain situations -- particularly to the “incident of the dog” -- are better, more admirable, than the behaviours of the so-called “normal” people.

 I wonder too about the consistency of the portrayal or whether autistic people themselves think they are something they are not. Christopher says he believes only in what is real, but he also has dreams and imagination -- about space if nothing else, but about his A levels and so on.

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green

Crystal Cook, Whispers and Trust, 2012

(June 8) Funny and sad at the same time, but in such an interesting and unusual way. “Funny and sad” is not a new combination and you are warned that this book is “that” well before you read it... but it is truly done in a lovely way in this book.

It was hard to find an image for it... I liked this first off, because of simply the broken girl, but the further you go the more you realize the broken boy is important, too, as well as the broken love. But it’s not at all sentimental... which rules out something like this or this,which are otherwise obvious (because of the evanescence... and the separation... and the way they suggest the eerie light of radiation! lol).

I settled on the image above because it suggests a couple of true things about the book -- the boy and girl are very much in love, and they also have to comfort each other quite a bit. These two aspects are well captured above. But it doesn’t capture the humour, which is also a huge part of the book. Alas, there is no artwork that would capture that.

They are such likable people and they are in such a sad situation.

Noted while reading: John Green must have felt weird when Newtown and the Boston marathon happened. O_O

Many resonances for me: “we all have the same culture, man!” Prufrock, Magritte, Gatsby, "The Red Wheelbarrow," Nothing Gold Can Stay... it is odd that this generation (16-year-olds in 2012) has the very same cultural touchstones as my generation. Like, no.

But who doesn’t love to see all their own touchstones anyway!

Also, BiPAPs! (and other nasal gear!)

Very enjoyable -- but, again, it’s weird to be saying something so sad is enjoyable.

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

John R. Chapin, In the Trenches at Cold Harbor, 1890

(October 2) I found this a very powerful book -- very hard to read, actually -- I had to steel myself to it every time I read it, as much as I loved it, and I spoke to more than one person who found it too hard to finish. Pat said it was “too violent” which is true, but it’s not always man vs. man violence -- in fact, it’s much more just the regular violence of nature and what it’s like to live in the mountains in the 1860s in the middle of a war. Frazier is a graphic, vivid describer and can be heartless with the details. He plays hard ball. It makes the stakes high. I especially had to steel myself to read the ending, for you had no idea whether he would spare Inman and Ada.

It’s kind of picaresque, but there is this overarching form of Inman returning to Ada, a quest whose significance increases and becomes ever more gripping even though the two are apart for so long. It’s a clever device. The more time we spend with Ada and Inman, the more we get of their memories, which at the beginning don’t hint at the depth of the relationship. It’s definitely Odysseus returning to Penelope and his kingdom, but here the relationship is so much more the driving passion.

The vivid details of mid-19th-century life in the southern U.S. are amazing, totally engrossing. I feel like Frazier got the habits of speech right, too. There are oddnesses of expression and vocabulary that you see in letters and newspapers of the time.

Was surprised by some of the Penthouse scenes at the end. LOL

Had a great writing style in general… very rich. Anything Inman thinks or says is interesting (“a sermon of Monroe’s, dense to the point of clotting”) and on and on.

The love story -- so moving -- so excruciating -- like a Jane Austen parlour.

Gripping, bracing, all those words that convey high-tension wire binding you thrillingly to a dangerous ride.

A passage I found very profound: “And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.”

The most treacherous, perfidious, soul-wrenching sentence I have ever read in a book: “Even after all this time and three children together, Ada still found them clasping each other at the oddest moments.” It was the first sentence of the epilogue, titled “October of 1874.”

Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland Rampant, 1984

(June 1) Was previously interested in Diana Vreeland, but was astonished by the level of interesting she actually was. I loved Vogue in the '70s when it was high-art wacky, and never realized this was just specifically because of Diana Vreeland. It was her crazy, and her crazy only.

This was a good biography, because the biographer is a responsible scholar who is also aware of what is interesting to read, and she can furthermore write beautifully.

Despite this goodness, you feel like you have gotten only the slightest taste of Diana, because you just want to hear a steady stream of her riffing off of things she liked, not just tidbits of it in between biographical facts.

Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

Edward Gorey, from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963

(July 19) An unofficial motto can be found on p. 145: “life was grim.”

For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was like -- yecchh -- this is just one long gross-out -- but I did want to read to the end to see how Flynn wrapped it up. Dark Places definitely has that grabs-your-interest thing going, like her others -- it just seems even more obsessed with the disgusting, sordid, gross details of daily life than the other two, and they were pretty bad. It’s almost like Flynn is an adolescent boy. She overdoes the ew factor.

In terms of “world-making,” though Flynn acknowledges advice from agricultural experts in the Acknowledgements, it’s clear she doesn’t know how a farm is run, and this bugged me.

And, she equates poverty with smelly laundry and unwashed clothes in general -- such items get described in full at every opportunity. It’s like people with income problems wouldn’t be so pathetic if they just washed their clothes a little more. ::eye roll::

These things give the book an amateurish feel, which only makes sense since it was a first novel.

A lot of the Amazon reviewers who awarded Dark Places only one star say the same as I do -- “loved Gone Girl, read this because of that, but this is so depressing and revolting I almost didn’t finish it.”

So, at the three-quarter mark, I was thinking I’d be giving this book less than 3 stars -- even though I was kind of hooked on the story. At that point I thought I would pretty much be constantly on the verge of vomiting through the last 70 or 80 pages just to reach the denouement.

BUT THEN

At roughly the three-quarters mark, the plot got so unbelievably interesting. I mean, my curiosity was already piqued or I would have stopped reading, but -- pow. All of a sudden a lot of unexpected resolutions to the main mystery start to make some weird kind of sense. And there is a scene with the narrator and a niece that is a horror-movie classic and yet is done with words on the page.... pretty amazing.

This made the whole book suddenly seem way more clever and well-crafted. Maybe a reader gets played by the book like this, with the icky but neutral story line going on for so long. Lulled by the ick.

So. 3 stars. Or even 3.5.

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

Alphonse Mucha, Medea, 1898

(January 1) Got this (Flynn's first novel) because I liked Gone Girl so much. This was a little harder to love.

It seems to me from both books that Flynn's not sure if she wants to be a horror writer or a mystery writer -- there's a lot of random monstrousness from the get-go, with hints that the randomness is maybe not so.

Even though gross, this book's first part is engrossing... heh heh heh... but, halfway or two-thirds through, the pacing suddenly changes and the whole thing ends very abruptly. To me, it felt like the classic author-just-wanting-to-get-this-done rush (there’s a little of this in Gone Girl, too, actually: there's initial enthusiasm for the great idea, but the momentum dies away).

I was also lukewarm on the Southern Gothic elements. Macabre Southernness is so popular: why?

Third strike for me: Sharp Objects tries to be triple-x-rated sexy, which is weird when mixed in with the grotesque elements of the story.

And yet: overall not so terrible that I didn't want to finish it!