Book Review

Oh, David Sedaris. When a copy of Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls arrived on my doorstep, I actually squealed because getting one his essay collections always delights me. Admittedly, I was pretty disappointed with his last collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, because it felt familiar and formulaic. I remember feeling like the book was a little over-the-top, like Sedaris was pushing too hard to make his stories funny.

I was so happy to discover that Sedaris decided to use a little more restraint in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls. The essays are extremely funny, but in a way that feels more realistic. They’re more subdued, but in a way that makes them feel richer and more reflective. They’re still full of Sedaris’ skewed and strange way of seeing the world, but it doesn’t feel quite so absurd this time around. The collection is delightful.

It probably was a little weird that read Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, right after finishing Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, since they’re both pretty dark books and what I wanted most after The Round House was a palate cleanser.But in some respects, Sharp Objects fits that bill since it’s an addictive, fast-paced story, but it’s equally as dark and even more twisted. I any case, I enjoyed the heck out of both these books!

Since 2004, the year I moved out of my parents house and into the dorms at my university, I’ve moved 11 different times. And every single one of those times, my mom, my dad, my brother and my sister and my friends have been there to help me. But that’s a luxury (or perhaps tradition) that people who move far away from their social networks often don’t have. Instead, a huge industry of professionals has developed specifically to fill a gap created by diffused communities.

While The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild never specifically mentions movers (I think they’re too functional for her purposes), it was the best example I could think of from my own life that sort of illustrates the conundrum of this book: what happens when we allow market-driven services into our personal lives?

When I read the premise of The New Republic — a wannabe journalist heads to a backwater town to cover a fledgling terrorist movement — I was intrigued by a lot of things. I’ve enjoyed Lionel Shriver’s writing in the past (particularly The Post-Birthday World), and I love stories about foreign journalists (like Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists). This book seemed like it might meld some of those things.

Often, serendipity plays a role in putting the perfect book in my hands at just the right time. That is the experience I had last week, when I happened to be finishing Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu on the same day the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on two cases related to same-sex marriage. In the book, Chu, a journalist who grew up in California and now lives in New York, sets out on a year-long pilgrimage to ask tough why so many people who read the same scriptures and follow the same God can end up at radically different conclusions on issues of faith, the church and homosexuality.

As I said in one of my earlier posts, the first, I believe, one of the reasons we picked Possession for this project is that it is a book both Lu and I (and it appears many others) have tried to read but abandoned after a few chapters. In fact, when I picked up my book to start this time around I still had the bookmark in it from where I abandoned it around page 50 sometime last year.

Possession isn’t an easy book to get into right away. Our opening narrator, a milquetoast scholar named Roland Mitchell, is hard to care about. And the Victorian poet he studies, Randolph Henry Ash, initially appears equally difficult to care about (especially if you are a reader like me that doesn’t especially love Victorian poetry) despite Roland’s discovery of the drafts of some letters to a mysterious woman — soon revealed as fellow Victorian poet Christabel Lamott — in one of Randolph’s books.

At the end of World War II, more than 75,000 people lived and worked in the makeshift town built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The bus system to take the thousands of workers from the hastily-built barracks, trailers, and homes was one of the 10 largest in the United States. There were 163 miles of wooden sidewalks, 300 miles of roads, and 17 cafeterias. The compound consumed more electricity than New York City, but didn’t show up on a single map.

No one outside Oak Ridge knew what was going on at the facility. And for the most part, no one inside knew either. But they weren’t supposed to know, and weren’t supposed to think or talk about their work at the end of the day. As a sign outside the facility gently reminded them: “What you see here. What you do here. What you hear here. When you leave here. Let it stay here.”

I have to admit, I haven’t been entirely surprised by some of plot twists. Without being too spoilery, I think I’ve been reading under the assumption that Randolph and Christabel did have a relationship and that the relationship was much more involved that even Roland and Maud suspected. So when certain revelations came about in Sabine’s diary, I wasn’t shocked.

At the end of World War II, the newly-created United Nations was on the hunt for a headquarters. Well, sort of. The leaders of the United Nations were trying to figure out how to make their organization work. A headquarters was low on their priority list. But enthusiastic government officials, business leaders and citizens from cities around the United States recognized that, eventually, the United Nations would need a to find a headquarters.

In Capital of the World, history professor Charlene Mires tells a story of how differing visions for the Capital of the World threatened to undermine the goals of the United Nations before they even had a building and the diplomats who worked to hold the organization together.