Aleema Sa Libro

Today’s Post: I have read 100 books.

Fireworks exploded and the people of Prettyview downed endless bottles of cidra (hard cider) as I finished my one hundredth book of Peace Corps service – fittingly, it was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. No, they were not celebrating. In a perversity that belongs in a Dilbert cartoon, my excessive pleasure reading is usually interpreted as “studying.” All the festivities were, of course, a part of arete (the holidays). Yes, Nochebuena and Navidad have arrived with their customary boatload of barbeque, gunfire, and relatives bused in from Ciudad del Este and Buenos Aires to celebrate with the family and ask me how I can bear to forego all the comodidades that they have grown accustomed to since leaving Prettyview.

It is harder for me to maintain my customary cloud of holiday humbug here in Paraguay because arete hardly feels like Christmas and New Year in the northern hemisphere. Really, it feels more like the 4th of July. First of all, the weather is hot and humid: the mid-90s with occasional downpours for weeks. Nobody wants to get anywhere near a fire and the only thing white about Christmas is the sun’s cyclopean eye from about seven in the morning until six or so in the afternoon. And besides, Prettyview is not a terribly observant town and nobody seemed interested in heading out to the nearby municipal seat for services. Customarily, families used to build elaborate pesevres (Nativity Scenes) complete with fruits and vegetables and mbocaya poty (palm flowers) and kids would travel around to pay homage to each one, receiving candy in exchange. But, thanks to global capitalism, that tradition is dying out, to be replaced by Christmas lights, artificial Christmas trees, and images of Papa Noel. Thanks, American economic and cultural hegemony!

The most important holiday traditions pertain to food. Normal Paraguayan party foods make an appearance: Asado (barbeque), Brahma (the national beer), sopa Paraguaya (corn bread trying to go on the Atkins Diet), gaseosa (soft drinks) mixed with boxed wine, and mandioca (could it be any other way?). But the two tastiest arete-specific foods deserve their own explanation. First, comes chipa guazu (the big chipa, which is what I might adopt as my nickname if I don’t eat less chipa my second year in Paraguay). The most diligent of farmers planted avati ky, a moist-kerneled corn, at the tail end of winter. It is just now ready for harvest and everybody wants to buy some in order to grind it up and mix it with pig fat, cheese, eggs, and onions – the principle ingredients in chipa guazu. The whole things is baked in the tatakua (wood oven) and comes out as a wettish bread-cake. Reminiscent of creamed corn, cornbread, grits, hominy, and, weirdly, potato kugel, yet none of these things, chipa guazu is the delight and, due to its health consequence, the bane of Peace Corps volunteers. What is chipa guazu missing? Nothing, except maybe alcohol and sugar. That is why we drink clérico, the second of my favorite Paraguayan holiday foods. Every family makes it differently, but the main ingredients are wine, gaseosa, cidra, and diced fruits (watermelon, melon, grapes, bananas, apples, etc.). If it weren’t so rude to avoid the pig or sheep freshly slaughtered to celebrate ñandejara (literally “our owner,” but can mean either the father or the son – I’m still uncertain about the holy spirit), I would just eat myself into a fat/sugar coma on clérico and chipa guazu alone.

Amid the gorging, Christmas Eve and Day, and later New Year’s and King’s Day (6 January) involve lots of visiting relatives, fireworks, weapons discharges, bathing in lukewarm arroyos and lagunas, and wholesale extortion on the part of Prettyview’s despensa owners. (Ojupima el precio means “The price has just gone up.”) Also Paraguayans celebrate Nochebuena and New Year’s Eve alike, staying up until midnight to welcome in the holiday. Like a good margarita, clérico can be helpful, making the giddy boredom more endurable and the resultant pyrotechnic ejaculations less frightening (Has Paraguay made me less neurotic? In some ways…I now know that the appropriate response to a pig urinating on your foot during lunch is to gently discipline it with said appendage while complimenting the hostess on the newness of her mandioca.)

But with the slow holiday work schedule, I have been having my own fiestas felices, ripping through books faster than a mita’I on asado. My second set of 50 books read in service provided ample delights and frustrations, which I will review now along with a few comments on the “first 100” books (that there may be a second!) read to date.

In an earlier post, I indentified five books (Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, The Cider House Rules, East of Eden, and White Teeth) to which I had awarded a top score of five points in my highly non-parametric and socially constructed Likert system. Perhaps too symmetrically, I add five more books from the second fifty to the list. These are: Collapse by Jared Diamond, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I deeply loved reading each of these books, but feel vaguely embarrassed that, like my previous favorites, each has met with extensive critical and/or commercial success in the broader world.

Despite my best intentions, I did encounter a few disappointments. In my attempts to read books by acclaimed authors whose works I had not read, I sampled Vineland (Thomas Pynchon) and Middlemarch (George Eliot). Both were disappointing. Middlemarch took me two weeks to wade through and left me feeling disdainful of the author and almost every one of her characters. Vineland was technically interesting, but didn’t leave me itching to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow. Tom Robbins disappointed me with Even Cowgirls get the Blues but redeemed himself a bit with Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Lynda Barry’s Cruddy shocked me without engaging me and the derivative page-turners of Philippa Gregory and Terry Brooks left me feeling like I’d eaten too much sugar. The bomb of this batch, A Road More or Less Traveled, is a travelogue of the Appalachian Trail. But I’ll let my reviews do the rest of the complaining.

My statistics continued to show disturbing sexist and Eurocentric trends: male authors outnumbered female authors two to one and only two books were translated into English from other languages. Of those, we can hardly count Thus Spoke Zarathustra as world literature. I did successfully push back my chronological threshold, reading two books (Zarathustra and Middlemarch) written in the nineteenth century. Though only 6% of books in the last fifty were re-read, a full 48% were written by authors whose work I had already read. Still, I made some great acquaintances, including Kobo Abe, Vladimir Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Jonathan Lethem, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, Chuck Palahniuk, and Sherman Alexie.

I continued to enjoy intentional and unintentional threads of continuity among the books I’ve read over the last fifteen months. Leah recommended The Woman in the Dunes after learning that one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, views Kobo Abe as one of his inspirations. I accidentally read Cruddy and The Lovely Bones one-after-the-other, getting my fill of dead adolescent girl narrators. Jackson’s Dilemma, Sons and Lovers, Of Human Bondage, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Middlemarch complemented my earlier glimpses into distinctly English concepts such as disentailments, “trade,” and endless anxiety over proposing to someone who you can’t stand but feel you must marry since 200 a year is not enough to buy your true love sufficient riding outfits. Zadie Smith and P.D. James’s books, on the other hand, provided a more contemporary view of the English. Jared Diamond, Stephen Kellert, and Wendell Barry spoke in dialogue on environmental issues. Nietzsche’s existential advice differed greatly from that of Victor Frankl. Finishing the Lord of the Rings after many false starts during adolescence gave me a sense of accomplishment, although I still can’t stand Tolkien’s poetic interludes. LoTR is also one of four page-turning trilogies I’ve read in Paraguay, along with those by Stieg Larsson, Terry Brooks, and Philip Pullman. Stranger in a Strange Land paralleled my early experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer and “alien.” Like several books of the first fifty I read, My Ántonia, The Lacuna, and House of Sand and Fog also caused me to reflect further on cultural difference.

I’m already well into “the second 100” (number 104 may be read and entered into my spreadsheet by the time you read these words), so without further commentary, I will present my brief comments on books 51 through 100 and again thank all those current and past Paraguayan PC volunteers who have kept our lending library vital.

“The Second Fifty”
Books are listed as “Title (Author) comments”
*Indicates a book I re-read.

51. The Hobbit* (J.R.R. Tolkien) I appreciated Tolkien’s prose more than I did when I was in middle school. Specifically, he goes for maximum detail when it counts while eliding the insignificant.
52. Apocalypse’s Children (Terry Brooks) I read this gripping post-apocalyptic fantasy novel in one day! The writing is so-so, but the characters come alive. Much of the action is set in Seattle and it was fun to recognize parts of Downtown in the setting. Suspiciously reminiscent of some elements of Garth Nix’s Schade’s Children.
53. Collapse* (Jared Diamond) One of my all-time favorite books, I first read it in January 2006. Peace Corps service in an agricultural society definitely enhanced my second reading. I still love the book, but why does Diamond refer to plantation forestry as “agroforestry”?
54. A Road More or Less Traveled (Stephen Otis and Colin Roberts) Two Tennessean high school teachers hike the entire Appalachian Trail. I enjoyed learning more about the AT, but found the writing style in want of editing and the authors’ cultural naïveté offensive.
55. Primary Colors (Anonymous) Titillating and presumably informative about real-world politics. Libby Holden’s character is as much fun to read as Kathy Bates’s performance of her is to watch.
56. Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence) As promised in the scholarly introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers was both less torrid and better-written. The vivid psychological narrative left me feeling that Lawrence’s autobiographical protagonist was pathologically narcissistic.
57. The Toughest Indian in the World (Sherman Alexie) A beautiful collection of short stories dealing with, among other things, identity, grief, and the nature of love. I couldn’t put it down.
58. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) Nietzsche’s answer to the Bible. Though Zarathustra’s weaknesses include repetitiveness and lack of clarity, the novel-treatise makes up for them through its wealth of shocking aphorisms and iconoclastic philosophy. I felt that books 1 and 4 were more engaging than books 2 and 3.
59. Diary (Chuck Palahniuk) A disturbing page-turner that, while musing on the nature of family and personal choice, also contains instructive tidbits on anatomy, handwriting, art history, etc.
60. Station Island (Seamus Heaney) The second book in a collection of Heaney’s poetry I found. I especially enjoyed, in addition to the eponymous poem, “Making Strange,” “The Birthplace,” and “Changes.”
61. The Boleyn Inheritance (Philippa Gregory) Another page-turning Tudor novel! This sequel to The Other Boleyn Girl (which described the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn) engagingly chronicles the fates of the latter three of Henry VIII’s wives.
62. House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III) Though the characters were engaging, I found this novel too unpleasantly suspenseful to enjoy fully. I was constantly on edge.
63. In the Name of Salomé (Julia Alvarez) Not as well-written or compelling as In the Time of the Butterflies, this fictionalized account of a historical Dominican poet was disappointing.
64. Cruddy (Lynda Barry) This novel was more shocking than skillfully written. For me, its biggest failure is characters who are so incredibly damaged and/or deranged as to become unbelievable.
65. Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) This novel managed to be both beautiful and suspenseful at the same time. Dealing with what could become clichés, Sebold draws original meaning out of the plot and characters.
66. No Logo (Naomi Klein) Klein addresses the rise of the brand, addressing its implications for political activism, labor rights, environmental impacts, psychology, art, education, and global economics. Like The Shock Doctrine, it is comprehensive and instructive, occasionally bordering on tedious.
67. The Book of Ruth (Jane Hamilton) This understated family drama explores the effects of suffering on the human psyche and their passage from generation to generation.
68. Choke (Chuck Palahniuk) A super-disturbing page-turner about abusive parents, addiction, and how to be a good person. Again, I serendipitously paired books; the narrator had a lot in common with the narrator of The Book of Ruth.
69. Jackson’s Dilemma (Iris Murdoch) A muted and enjoyable human drama about contemporary British socialites sorting out their romantic lives. Interesting to me in that the characters seemed lifted out of a D.H. Lawrence novel (shall we dine at the city or the country house?) but were living in the late twentieth century.
70. Watership Down (Richard Adams) An uplifting, Narnia-esque story about personified rabbits that, weirdly enough, effectively deals with the themes of freedom and bondage, courage, and dignity.
71. 1st to Die (James Patterson) A page-turner crime novel with chapters that average two pages in length. Like reading “Law and Order.” Not great, but fun to read and aware of its own limits.
72. The Elves of Cintra (Terry Brooks) The second book in the “Genesis of Shannara” series. More mediocre but gripping fantasy writing. It feels like Terry Brooks wrote a 1200 page monster and arbitrarily split it up into three books.
73. The Gypsy Morph (Terry Brooks) The third book in the “Genesis of Shannara” series. I wanted to finish the trilogy, but felt that the dénouement was ultimately unsatisfying.
74. Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) A shockingly beautiful novel set in a barricaded mansion following a botched political kidnapping. Patchett portrays the characters in with sympathetic, nuanced humanity and charts the new territories of love, art, and language they explore.
75. The Fellowship of the Ring* (J.R.R. Tolkien) Entertaining, but I still can’t bear the poetry and songs.
76. The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien) After a few false starts, I finally finished the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Ents and Sam’s imitations of Smeagol were especially gratifying.
77. The Haw Lantern (Seamus Heaney) The third book in a collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and my favorite so far. The celebrated long poem “Clearances,” written in memory of the author’s mother, was especially moving, as was the shorter eulogy “Two Quick Notes.” Most of my other favorite poems belonged to a conceptually interesting and well-written group of allegorical poems, in which an imagined location stands in for a non-spatial idea, such as conscience, faith, or the idea of allusion itself! Many were engagingly written as dispatches or reports. Favorites from this batch of poems included: “From the Frontier of Writing,” “Parable Island,” “From the Republic of Conscience,” “Stone Verdicts,” “From the Land of the Unspoken,” “The Wishing Tree,” and “The Mud Vision.”
78. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins) I like Robbins’s ideas and themes, but find his writing to be sloppy and uneven. I understand that there is a relationship between his embrace of the messy joys and freedoms of life and his novels’ structures, but that only excuses so much.
79. The Unsettling of America (Wendell Berry) Berry’s collection of essays on industrial agriculture and its relationships with culture, spirituality, psychology, etc. poise an ideal of low-technology, conscientious, limited-government communitarianism against the dominant discourse of quick fixes, ever-greater productivity, and massive business or government solutions to environmental problems. I am in great sympathy with his ideas, but am also forced to report that his writing is often redundant, overly general, and pedantic, and takes the form of “preaching to the choir” or a scolding depending on whether or not you agree with him.
80. The Favoured Child (Philippa Gregory) I did not find this historical tale (set in an eighteenth century manor) to be as strong as Gregory’s Tudor novels. A page-turner, but lacking in substance.
81. My Ántonia (Willa Cather) A concise and beautiful portrait of first-generation European pioneer families of the Midwest. It was a relief to read this well-structured, elegant novel.
82. The Girl with the Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier) An elegant story with many delights, including excellent verbal depictions of normally visual processes, such as creating and viewing paintings.
83. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) Ignatius J. Reilly is inimitable as a protagonist. His arcane political beliefs and bizarre personality enable Toole to portray New Orleans and Reilly’s family and associates in a lucid, satirical light.
84. The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien) I felt that this final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was as good as or better than The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien’s placement of the dramatic climax in the middle of the book was refreshing to me.
85. Perfection (Julie Metz) A gossipy page-turner about the author’s pathologically narcissistic husband’s death and the aftermath. This memoir was fun to read, if not terribly challenging.
86. Middlemarch (George Eliot) I did not enjoy reading Eliot’s account of the romantic and economic tribulations of the middle- and upper-class residents of a rural English town; the novel’s one-dimensional characters struggled with problems no longer relevant to contemporary readers.
87. The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver) Unable to see how Kingsolver could top her previous works, I was hesitant to start The Lacuna. But she manages, again, to produce an intricately structured novel of appealing, passionate characters tackling themes of political and historical importance. What amazes me is that she can still do so without seeming overly preachy or maudlin. Addressing leftist political theory, homosexuality, and Frida Kahlo through a postmodern, epistolary format in a blend of English and Spanish, The Lacuna was basically the kind of book that Kingsolver would have written if, as I have often dreamed, she had offered to write me a customized novel.
88. Vineland (Thomas Pynchon) I was impressed with Pynchon’s rendering of a narrative voice that seemed to be speaking directly out of the culture of northern California, former hippies-turned-government informants/societal dropouts/ninjas in the Reagan years. However, his unsympathetic characters, stream of consciousness structure, and cynical perspective did not appeal to me. Vineland reminded me of depressing Tom Robbins without many chapter breaks.
89. Iberia (James A. Michener) Michener drew on several decades of travel in Spain to compile this non-fiction account describing its major regions and customs. The profusion of edifying histories and anecdotes ultimately make the book worth reading, although, as was the case with the Covenant, its sprawling self-indulgence sometimes makes for boredom. Michener’s social and political commentary has also aged poorly over forty years. The photos and routine cameos of famous people Michener met are bonuses.
90. Gun, with Occasional Music (Jonathan Lethem) Skillfully blending science fiction, noir detective drama, and post-apocalyptic forecasting, Lethem enticed me to keep reading. I couldn’t say if this was because I wanted most to solve the mystery, explore his bizarre posited future, or discover the truth behind strange creations such as “babyheads,” “make,” and “the Office.”
91. Of Human Bondage (Somerset Maugham) Compelling bildungsroman about a young British man. I found the protagonist imperfect but honest, and thus sympathetic.
92. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (ed., Alice Sebold) I found these stories more accessible than some of those in The New American Book of Short Stories.
93. The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe) An elegant, psychological novel. His style, in turn, reminded me of Kafka and Saramago. Published in the 1960s, The Woman feels like it could have been written fifty years before or after it actually was.
94. Devices and Desires (P.D. James) An engaging but unremarkable murder mystery set in the English countryside against the backdrop of a contentious nuclear power plant.
95. Tooth and Claw (T.C. Boyle) This collection of short stories is loosely structured around themes of humanity’s descent from animals, survival of the fittest, and humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Many of the protagonists are down on their luck.
96. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (Tom Robbins) My favorite Robbins book of the three I’ve read. To me, the narrator spoke with a more authentic voice than most of his protagonists.
97. Seeing Things (Seamus Heaney) Fourth and final book in a collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. I especially enjoyed “Field of Vision,” “Glanmore Revisited,” “The Rescue,” and poems viii, xii, xviii, xxi, xxv, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxviii, and xxxix of “Squarings.”
98. A Postmodern Reader (eds., Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon) A dense, scholarly collection of essays on postmodernism, and especially its relationship with modernism and its manifestations in academia and politics. Readers already familiar with postmodern theory could skip the first two sections and move ahead to the more interesting essays in the latter two.
99. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) A thrilling psychological portrait of an unrepentant lover of “nymphets” which both attempts to expiate its speaker while also telling a story of desire and loss.
100. Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein) This science fiction classic posits the appearance of a Martian on Earth. Beneath the trappings, it’s really a story about social psychology, mind, spirituality, and love. I found the first two-thirds to be better written than the last third.