The book post cannot hear the falconer

[roadrunnertwice]

Things I Read During December

Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Bethlehem (12/8)

Something kiplet linked to gave me the Essay Hunger, and I was like, "Hey, didn't I bury a cache of Didion somewhere?"

Here are two things various other people have said about Didion, and which I steal shamelessly whenever I'm telling someone they ought to read her stuff:

• Her essays are perfect, by which I mean not that they're necessarily better than any other arbitrary set of essays, but that they have no lack and no waste, and could not be re-written in a way that would better accomplish their task.
• Her voice is suffused with a quality that is completely unique to her, and which I once heard described as "reptilian calm," and it's simultaneously comforting, upsetting, and compelling.

Here are a few things I have to say about Didion.

• Reading Didion writing about the '60s reminds me a little of reading Sarah Vowell writing about the '90s.
• "Goodbye To All That" felt like it was about my time in MPLS, even though my life there was almost nothing like Didion's in NY. I think it probably feels that way to a lot of readers.
• "On Keeping a Notebook" is as good as everyone says it is, but I almost think I liked the essays in the first section of the book better, because they put that person who described herself in "On Keeping a Notebook" (and the other essays in the Personals section), a person I feel like I have some limited kinship with and understanding of, into a milieu I find completely alien and appalling and frightening, and leave her to fend for herself and scavenge such meaning as she can.

Christopher McDougall - Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (12/28)

Per itastelikelove's instructions, I read only the back half of this book, which is about distance running and is more or less what it says on the tin. Spends some time on the history of distance running, some time on human biology, some time on the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) people (a tribe out in Copper Canyon in the Mexican Sierra Madres, who have a strong tradition—to say the least—of distance running), some time on the state of ultramarathoning (I guess I didn't know that people actually run 100 miles at a stretch, sometimes), and a lot of time on the author and his various compatriots.

It held my interest, but I'm not sure I can recommend it. It has several prominent Modern Popular Nonfiction Disorders in the scientific parts ("if you dislike Gladwell, you'll loathe McDougall!"), and was schlocky and breathless in a way that really turned me off. Yes, it's full of completely lurid characters, and a certain sensationalism is appropriate, but I honestly think McDougall hammed it up much higher than he shoulda. This is of course all relative.

Also, some amount of race fail was committed, the general character of which is summed up by a part near the end where McDougall describes an American guy with a syncretic style of distance running as "the first 21st century Tarahumara." Yeah, he said that a gringo had made himself a better Indian than the Indians they were running against (and never mind that a: the race in question was a pretty straightforward ultramarathon and nothing like the long-haul ball games the Tarahumara are known for, and b: I am pretty sure that there's more to being Tarahumara than just distance-running, just saying). Another highlight: a scene where a bunch of white American folk sit in a circle and give each other "spirit animals." It wasn't nonstop fail, but there was enough of it that I figured my curiosity about the Tarahumara lifestyle and culture (check out the religion section on the Wikipedia page about the tribe—as syncretic mythology goes, that is pretty dope) might be better satisfied via some other source.

Benjamin Parzybok - Couch (12/29)

I highly recommend this book. It's a much more serious story than one'd think its premise could make for, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. (Especially the few quiet parts in Ecuador, and the slow transformation of the characters, and the sheer weight of faith it eventually takes to do something so completely insane without even understanding the stakes.)

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And that's it for Zilch Nine: The Year I Totally Flaked on Goodreads. (I don't think I'm gonna bring that site up to date, but I might declare amnesty and start using it again, because I still like the way it sends me my friends' reviews in email every once in a while.)

That's three years now that I've been doing the book review thing, and it was a little shakier this time than it's been in the past. May as well keep it up for 2010, though. I think I will:

• Step it up a bit on 50books_poc—I've got some Adichie and Murakami on deck, and we'll see what happens after that.
• Attack my to-read shelf in a big way (this is partially opposed to the item above).
• Stop making myself buckle down and finish a piece of fiction before moving on to something else—I'll push through a piece of nonfiction that I'm not necessarily feelin', but my reading time is going to be too scarce this year to spend on un-fun recreation.
• Be more willing to just post a few words about a book, instead of having to make every review a multi-paragraph Thing. This'll hopefully make the monthly posts take a little less of my time; a few of the ones this year turned into epic labors, and they really shouldn't have.
• Try and make more recommendations to people. (Confidential to chronographia: Beagle recommendations duly noted; I've been meaning to read more of his than The Last Unicorn for ages.)