Ballard

J. G. Ballard died last week. I've only read a couple of his books, but I would list him among the contemporary authors I find most interesting. The WWII semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun is an excellent book, probably the one he'll be remembered for, and Cocaine Nights is odd and intriguing, with curious, pathological characters, not least the narrator. Much of his writing dwells on the sociopathology of wealth, a topic that seems apropos; all of his writing I've encountered has been first rate.

If you prefer celluloid, or even if you prefer cellulose, Spielberg's movie adaptation is worth seeing and stars Christian Bale at the peak of his expressive powers.

Ballard will be missed. He was an interesting guy.

Wine update

We've been trying a few more reasonably priced wines, all from TJ's:

The epicuro line of reds is quite good, all $6 a bottle. In increasing order of approval:

• Beneventano Aglianico 2007 (silver label) IGT
  
• Sicilia Nero D'Avola 2007 IGT (blue label) IGT
  
• Salice Salentino (gold label) riserva 2005 DOC
  

We were introduced to the Nero D'avola by our friends John and Kurana, and we are quite grateful. It's replaced Three Knights for us, and just in time, as that wine seems to have disappeared from TJ's shelves.

We made a misstep with Napa River Chaise Selection Syrah Napa County 2008: nothing to write home about there, though I think it edges out Penfolds Koonunga Hills by a nose.

Our best find, though, is one with name that piques my professional interest, Dynamic Sauvignon Blanc, Lake County California 2008.

It's 97% Sauvignon Blanc, 3% Gewürtztraminer, Certified Biodynamic. The extra Gewürtztraminer adds a great twist to what would (in this particular incarnation; other vintner’s may have more skill with what can be a bland grape). The label deserves quotation in full:

Our Vineyards are grown and certified Biodynami cby Demeter which adheres to the DYNAMIC farming methods established in the early 1920s by Rudolf Steiner. The Biodynamic Tower on our property is where, during cycles of the year, homeopathic teas are prepared to enhance and regulate plant growth and soil fertility which brings forward the unique qualities that this wine demonstrates. This is our commitment to you…think DYNAMIC!

They must be transplants from Ithaca. I can't speak to the efficacy of the tea treaments, but it's a good wine. Give it a try -- Think DYNAMIC!

Boston Burgers

We took a break from blogging a couple of weeks ago to host Melanie's German cousins, Ines and Kersten, over the weekend (the one before last) and to empty our pockets for Uncle Sam. The visit from Germany was a lot of fun, though relatively quiet: the girls were in transit from NYC to PEI and used the Beantown stopover to sleep late, read books and watch movies. (Sounds like the perfect weekend to me.) We'll blog about that later; first, a brief update on our gustatory and bibitory adventures.

"Adventure" might be stretching it: our fine dining experiences have been limited to sampling a few burger joints. All are better than any national franchise I've tried, but none really competes with homemade. (We cook burgers often enough at home, and I'd say that homemade is tastier than store bought as a general rule.* Burger restaurants are about convenience, not outstanding food. The ingredients are easy to come by and cooking techniques are masterable in minutes. And now that spring has sprung, or is at least making a noble attempt, I'm looking forward to grilling in the summertime!)

Uburger has two stores near my office and the gym, so it gets points for convenience. The burgers are pretty big and cooked well, the ingredients are pretty fresh, and the fries are pretty good. The standard topping variations are available (mushroom & swiss, BBQ, etc.), and for those who go low-carb, there's the surprisingly decent Uburger salad, which is basically a burger minus the bun on a bed of lettuce. I can report only two serious annoyances with Uburger: lettuce and tomato are not automatically included toppings, and both locations are overrun with high school and college students.

Mr. Bartley's in Harvard Square is good. Like most simple restaurants that manage to persist for decades, its draw seems based on reliability and nostalgia -- a plain, tasty burger and plain, tasty fries served in an atmosphere (so the fantasy goes) unchanged from the golden 60s. The burgers and fries are indeed yummy, as are their accompaniments: the lime rickeys and frappes are delicious. The variety of burger permutations is quite large, as well, totaling over twenty. Indeed, the only deviation from the standard nostalgic playbook is the regular updates of names for the burger varieties: while the Michelle Obama may be the modern counterpart of, say, the Jackie-O burger, I can't imagine what The Facebook was once titled.

The restaurant is conveniently located next door to our second or third favorite area bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore (not to be confused with the The Harvard Coop, which is not one of our favorite bookstores, though I do enjoy thumbing through the green and red volumes of their Loeb Classic Library display, not something you can do in your typical corner bookshop.), which has an excellent remainder section, essential for bibliophiles during hard times. If the line's too long at Bartley's -- and it's often stretching out the door towards the corner of the block -- you might as well browse the bookstore as you wait for the rush to pass. Crowd control and order management is highly efficient; the waits for seating and for food are rather short. The only downer is the price: lunch for two can run to $30 or $40, depending on chosen accoutrements.

And then there's Charlie's Kitchen, just around a couple of corners from Mr. Bartley's. Based on one data point, it's not particularly good. The burgers are a step and a half down from Uburger, the fries three. The waitstaff were in desperate need of direction and detox (not to say tattoo removal, but that's a pet peeve of mine), stumbling around addled and aimless, forgetting to actual wait on us. Relatively speaking, lame. And pricey: it cost just as much as Bartley's. Take a pass on this one, unless you're a Harvard faux countercultural pseudohipster (not redundant) with no place else grimy enough to hang out.

* The exception, perhaps. Certainly one of the best things about England.

Persimmons

I don't know that this needs much introduction, but: I run a poem-of-the-day list, which is mostly a chance for me to go through old favorites and share them with (or push them on, depending how you see it) my friends.  I've been doing it for long enough that some poems get a second go-around.  This is one of my very favorites, and worthy of sending out twice.  It's long (by the standards of our current three-second-attention-span world) but clean, and evocative.   

"Persimmons"
by Li-Young Lee 

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose 
 
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. 
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet
all of it, to the heart. 
 
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked, 
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you me.
I part her legs, 
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon. 
 
Other words 
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with. 
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. 
 
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste 
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
 
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing, 
warm as my face. 
 
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper 
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal 
sang. The sun, the sun. 
 
Finally understanding 
he was going blind,
my father would stay up all one night 
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love. 
 
This year, in the muddy lighting 
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost. 
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, 
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle. 
 
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers. 

Under some blankets, I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie 
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth. 

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this? 
 
This is persimmons, Father. 

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times 
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Matisse Mousepad

Before it slips my mind: One of the items I gave Melanie for her birthday was a replacement for the hideous Dell mousepad she'd been using (refuse from work). The old mouse pad didn't just present a repulsive clash of species (we are irrevocably Macophilic), but it uglified Melanie's otherwise lovely workspace, a glass-topped IKEA desk with various colorful amulets and souvenirs aesthetically distributed beneath the pane. This required quick remedy, so I bought her a “custom” mousepad emblazoned with an image from her favorite artist (Matisse -- jot that down for next February). Similar pieces by all your favorite (fine, comic book, poster) artists are available from Art's Not Dead at a reasonable price. It's worth taking a look.

Unique By The Millions

Hello, it's me. I'm a white person. I am pretty predictable. You probably know exactly what I do and don't like.

If not, check out the blog Christian Lander has been writing for a bit more than a year now. "Stuff White People Like" includes, as of this month, the TV show Mad Men. [Funny how I declared my love for MM last week.]

Erik's been fussing about SWPL for a while, but since I often ignore what he fusses about, I just recently discovered Lander's book that lists the 100 top things of what white people like. The discovery happened while I was in the dressing room of Urban Outfitters (think H&M, but more fashionably trashy), waiting for my (younger and female) cousins from Germany. While they were trying on every item in the store (looking terribly cute in those little t-shirts sized XS), I lounged on the leather sofa in the dressing room area. I greatly appreciated that UO put a sofa there; better even was the couch table full of books, ranging from a guide on how to make artisanal cup cakes in the shape of dogs (check it out here) to Lander's compilation.

No matter what page I turned to, I found something that describes my likes: buying organic, living in Seattle, bilingual education for our kids, the name Sebastian, Whole Foods, the New Yorker, NPR, the Ivy League and an arts degree, Obama, the TV series The Wire, cooking gadgets, not having a car (since there's bicycling) or cable TV (since there's Netflix), bicycling & Netflix, art museums, David Sedaris, recycling, architecture, public transportation that's not a bus. Out of the 100 items, I identified with 78 or so.

Erik's been teasing me all weekend about how lily-white I am. I'm so white I'm see-through transparent.

Me and my two last names (stuff white people like # 22) are going knitting now. Knitting is not listed. Not yet anyway. Just wait.

:-)

It's been lots of fun browsing your page. You two sound like you're having lots of fun together! I esp. enjoyed checking out your book titles and reading list. But...a question...just WHY isn't Sigrid Lavransdatter on the list, hm??? :-) Just wondering :-)
Thanks for the link,
Sandra

Re: 30-Somethings

Since Melanie posted her list of 32 books, I thought I'd add mine. As she mentioned, I have a predilection for lists--I've compiled many "Top n" lists over the years, and corralled my friends into doing so as well. Book lists, however, are tricky--should the list consist of personal favorites? greats? books you re-read often/ever (depending on your re-reading philosophy)? This list doesn't have a very precise set of parameters--it's just a list of 30 books I enjoyed. Some I love dearly, some were thought-provoking, some have beautiful writing. I did throw a few poets on my list, as a sort of post-script. However, I'm sadly under-read when it comes to essays, nonfiction, and classics, so those are underrepresented on this list.

Like Melanie, once I made the list I thought of things that I should have added. However, in the interest of something resembling brevity, here's the original, unedited list.

From the "books I loved when I was..." category (although I still very much love them):
1. The Lord of the Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -- Robert Heinlein
4. Watership Down -- Richard Adams
5. A Town Like Alice -- Nevil Shute
6. Round the Bend -- Nevil Shute
7. The Stand -- Stephen King
8. The Bachman Books -- Stephen King
9. Enders Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenophobia -- Orson Scott Card
10. Skinny Legs and All -- Tom Robbins
11. The Danger -- Dick Francis
12. The Hobbit -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Books more recently discovered (say, last 10 years) that I LOVE:
1. Plainsong -- Kent Haruf
2. The Power of One -- Bryce Courtenay
3. The Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
4. Hawaii -- James Michener
5. We Need to Talk about Kevin -- Lionel Shriver

Also recent discoveries, just good stuff:
1. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
2. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
3. The Sandman Series (graphic novels) -- Neil Gaiman
4. Gilead -- Marilynne Robinson
5. The Whistling Season -- Ivan Doig
6. The Calligrapher -- Edward Docx
7. The Source -- James Michener
8. The Naked and the Dead -- Norman Mailer

Nonfiction
1. For Common Things -- Jedidiah Purdy
2. The Polysyllabic Spree/Housekeeping vs. the Dirt/Shakespeare Wrote for the Money -- Nick Hornby
3. On Writing-- Stephen King
4. Being America -- Jedidiah Purdy
5. Song Book -- Nick Hornby

Poets
1. Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. Wendy Cope
3. Billy Collins

....other favorite poets include Tony Hoagland, X. J. Kennedy, Li-Young Lee, and Leonard Cohen.

One Mad Man on Revolutionary Road

Because I have a crush on Kate Winslet and watch every movie of hers, I wanted to prepare for Revolutionary Road by reading Richard Yates' 1961 novel of the same title. (Here's the New Yorker's 2008 review of a collected-stories-by-Yates book that includes the novel.)

The novel's so good, I actually haven't seen the movie yet, 'cause I'm afraid it will be disappointing. In fact, the novel's so brilliant, I made Erik read it over Christmas break, forced it on Emma and Norah, and will mention it to anyone who's asking me for a good read.

And why is it such a good read? The prose is beautiful, that's for sure. Yates describes a world of male anxiety that I can only imagine, while at the same time brushing over sexual discrimination that I can imagine all too well, judging by the male behavior Yates portrays. The plot is relatively simple: It's 1955. There's the young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who leave New York City to find a family paradise but instead end up living the suburban nightmare of boredom. Frank is a paper shuffler in the city, where his mistress lives, and April attends to house and children, of whom there are two, in the suburbs. To escape their fate, April plans to move the family to Paris, so that Frank can fulfill his dream of becoming a writer, while April will join the workforce to support them. However, Frank's talk of wanting to write lacks any real ambition, as he now becomes painfully aware, and his wife's determination to work threatens to the core his identity as the breadwinning, successful male. Needless to say, they never make it to Paris.

Although Yates makes Frank the victim of the suburban prison and of middle-class conventions, it is April who suffers, doing so quietly, in contrast to the vocal egomaniac Frank. Yates doesn't tell her side of the story, but he provides enough room for us to imagine it.

With the same attentive care to padded foam-rubber bras as Yates, AMC's series Mad Men tells the story of both the competitive men in the 1960s advertising world of Madison Avenue and the housewives who care for their domestic (and suburban) happiness. In addition, it looks at the Mad Men's secretaries who, in search of a successful husband and with the dream of trading the city for a colonial-style 3BR house in the suburbs as soon as they have found him, vie for the attention of their bosses, who readily abuse that affection for their own sexual gratification. Like Frank, many of the Mad Men have enormous egos (that poorly cover their anxieties), especially regarding their literary aspirations, and gamble with their wives' well-being to fulfill their ambitions. Apart from the story line that focuses on advertising genius and ladies' man Don Draper and the women in his life (the wife, the mistress, and a business client), the images themselves are captivating: the colors, the fashion, the interior design... The show is true eye candy. (Although bad for your health: with all the smoking going on in the show, it hurts my lungs just watching.)

We haven't made it past two discs of Mad Men, but if the show is as good all the way through the current season, it may become a favorite.

And now I will rent Revolutionary Road, the movie, and hope it's as visually appealing as Mad Men and somewhat faithful to Yates' novel.

Empty Bottles

Melanie and I are without a doubt oenophiles: One of the major categories of our wedding registry was wine glasses. When we cook together, we often drink a glass or two, and occasionally end up splitting a bottle. One of the best classes I took as a grad student was the Cornell hotel school's Introduction to Wines, which imparted enough knowledge to me that I can identify what wines I like and why, and I can avoid being ripped off. It's not quite enough knowledge for me to un-self-consciously fake wine snobbery, but it brings me close enough to aspire.

Ithaca had two very good wine shops we favored: Northside Wines, which has the largest selection (nothing compared to the wine megastores you can find in much larger cities, but for a city of 30,000, the selection is very good) and Red Feet, a boutique wine store within walking distance of our apartments where we could always pickup a tasty wine for not much money -- or absinthe for our Europrententious boozer friends. We miss those stores, along with Just a Taste, the tapas and wine bar where Melanie and I went after our first movie date.

In Boston we've bought wine from three places: Walsh Wine and Spirits, the libation store just down the street (and the closest store that regularly carries Leffe); Best Cellars, a trendy looking shop at Coolidge Corner; and Trader Joe’s, also at Coolidge Corner. (Massachusetts law allows a grocery chain to sell liquor at only two locations per city; given the size of the 18-30 demographic near the intersection of Harvard Ave and Beacon Street, locating the alcohol there was a wise decision by corporate HQ.)

Walsh is perfectly good in a pinch, but its selection and prices reflect the fact that most of its customers are 20-somethings picking up a bottle on the way to a “dinner party” in some cramped, rotting studio apartment, where sliced cherry tomatoes and water cracker canape hors d'oeuvre will introduce a hearty meal of fine spaghetti and slightly burned garlic bread, followed by store bought, half-frozen cheesecake, and, if things go well, a hazy, cannabis-scented melange of pseudointellectual blather and kiss-and-tell gossip that may just devolve (hope springs eternal) into random debauchery. Such patrons, whatever their night-out pretenses to discriminating taste, are hardly ones to dicker over a ten percent markup above the going rate.

Best Cellars seems to be a bit of a joke. It has a very bright, hip, trendy interior design, with wines assorted according to taste categories rather than region; the appellations appear to have taken from the short-shorted derrieres of the passing college girls (fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, sweet, big — perhaps an intentional subliminal suggestion). This arrangement demands no knowledge on the buyer's part, which is matched by a symmetrical ignorance on the part of the seller. I suppose this arrangement prevents shoppers from being embarrassed by condescending clerks, always a hazard in a real wine store, and it abets the owners in selling wine not worth drinking at prices not worth paying. The store has regular wine tastings, which are often as not more about providing the wine clerk lotharios with opportunities to chat up roving cliques of overpainted, overperfumed and underdressed young women to find out where the party is, as it is about selling wine to paying customers. Generally speaking, everything featured at the tasting is pretty bad, though we did buy one bottle (after about three trips and twenty samples) of Finger Lakes riesling, not because it was so good, but out of pity and nostalgia.

Trader Joe's is our regular wine store. The selection is decent, ranging from Three Buck Chuck to medium range Burgundys, and spans most of the world. Nearly everything is less than $20 a bottle, mostly under $15. Drinkability generally starts at around $7, unless there's a special; stay away from the few offerings (often Spanish or Portuguese vinhos verdes hot off the wine press) under $5. We've never found any exceptional wines at Trader Joe's, just pleasant, affordable wines for the dinner table. That's just right for a grocery store.

We are hardly oenomaniacs: our apartment's basement is filled with moldy cobwebs, rusting bicycles and uninsulated wiring, rather than row upon row of fine Bordeaux or Barolo under close light and temperature control (in our next abode, to be sure), but we do have a makeshift wine cabinet -- a wooden IKEA kitchen shelf modified to hold two wine racks. Seemingly permanently affixed there is my prized bottle of Chateau Guiraud, a Sauternes given to me by Melanie for my birthday a few hours before I asked her to marry me. (That's a story for another time.) Keeping it company is a bottle of Glenfiddich given to me by my Uncle Frank some years ago. I'm not much of a whiskey drinker, but now that I have a stepfather-in-law and a cousin who fancy themselves whiskey connoisseurs, I suppose I will learn.

We bought a wine tasting journal at the Ithaca Farmers Market last summer, and I started keeping notes on what we bought, but since the turn of the year I've fallen behind recording our impressions. I kept the bottles, reasoning that I'd fill in the journal as I found time. Three months of bottles makes quite a pile, and this weekend the empty bottle pile will succumb to the imperatives of housecleaning. Here's what we're tossing:

• From Jerrel's stash: Jerrel brings excellent French wine whenever we host a get together, even a Superbowl Party. It's wonderful, though occasionally he casts his pearls before swine. Both terrific:
  
  • Louis Latour Macon-Lugny Les Geneievres 2007
    
  • Joseph Faiveley Bourgogne Pinot Noir 2005
    
  
  
• From Canada, a somewhat disappointing novelty Riesling picked up for about $15 Canadian in duty free (there were appealing ice wines available, but they were all about $100):
  
  • Thirty Bench “Limited Yield” Riesling 2004 (Niagara Peninsula)
    
  
  
• Gold Medal Wine Club wines (a gift from Eric and Stephanie, my cousins in White Plains/NYC), both highly recommended and expensive:
  
  • Ballentine Vineyards Old Vines Chenin Blanc, 2007 (Napa Valley)
    
  • Niner Estates Sauvignon Blanc, 2006
    
  
  
• From Walsh, both perfectly fine, but a bit unremarkable and slightly overpriced at $12 and $14, respectively:
  
  • Veramonte Reserva Chardonnay 2007 (Casablanca Valley, Chile)
    
  • MadFish Sauvignon Blanc 2005 (Western Australia)
    
  
  
• From Trader Joe's, first a good picnic wine ($7, but we're not quite ready for picnics), and second our current favorite dinner wine, which we've bought several times and is priced nicely ($6, staff favorite). The merlot is light-to-medium-bodied, relatively smooth and a bit spicy, tasting of black fruit and maybe a bit of tobacco and cloves:
  
  • Ken Forrester Stellenbosch Petit Chenin Blanc 2008 (South Africa)
    
  • Three Knights Merlot 2006 (Russian River Valley) (no link I can find, just at TJ's)
    
  
  

Now, off to the recycling bin!

Do You Still Believe in Paris?

If you don't know it already: I love Paris. On the wall next to my desk is a message board that has a plastic shopping bag taped to it because the bag says "Paris" and shows the Eiffel tower (nevermind that the bag also says "Las Vegas" and is a souvenir from the Las Vegas hotel Paris); Paris paraphernalia is cluttered everywhere in our house and includes several miniature Eiffel tower sculptures, an Eiffel tower earring display, and, my most prized possession, a salt and pepper shaker in the form of--you guessed it--the Eiffel tower. I have notecards and notebooks and stationary and fridge magnets and gift wrapping paper and pretty cardboard boxes decorated with Paris images; a large street map of Paris is waiting to be mounted to the wall. I know where to draw the line, though, and did not purchase the Paris pillows offered in Las Vegas (although I wish I had gotten the Paris apron).

My educated guess as to how many books related to Paris I own is fifty. My collection includes an old Baedeker Paris guide (unfortunately not the 1903 edition), some magnificent photo books from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that I picked up at several Ithaca Friends of the Library book sales, and an assortment of Paris histories, architectural guides, and, to my embarrassment, tons of bad Paris fiction written by American writers who probably all own Paris aprons, pillows, and salt and pepper shakers. (For a fantastic collection of written testimonies by Americans who lived in Paris, check out Adam Gopnik's Americans in Paris.)

It's not that I have any good reason to be completely enamored with Paris other than that I image it to be a magic place that turns anyone who is fortunate enough to actually live there into some mysterious being more fabulous than the rest of us. I have visited Paris six times; twice I rented an artist's studio apartment just across from the Centre Pompidou, and it was in this Parisian apartment, filled with large canvasses, an antique-looking printing press, and thousands of books that crammed even the bathroom, that I read Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon.

I love Gopnik's book; it's my favorite on the topic of Paris (read an excerpt here). When I previously wrote that the essay genre deserves it own "top 30" list, I was thinking of Gopnik (and Anne Fadiman, but that is a separate blog entry), who is, by training, an art historian and has been a prized contributor to The New Yorker since 1986. He started out as an art critic, but his essays really cover any imaginable topic. From 1995 to 2000 Gopnik lived in Paris and wrote about the expat life of his family for TNY; a collection of those essays appeared as Paris to the Moon. This book is as much a declaration of love for Paris and French life as it is for fatherhood and family life: Gopnik's first child, Luke, was born in Paris, and what Gopnik says about parenting is beautiful and very moving. At the end of the book I was as much in love with the Gopnik family as with Paris. (Fortunately, Gopnik wrote a sequel: Through the Children's Gate is a collection of essays he wrote once his family-- including now baby-girl Olivia--returned from Paris and settled in New York City.) (Also not a bad city to live in, if you ask me.)

This has led me to become a literary stalker of Gopnik. I faithfully read his TNY essays, the most memorable of which is his eulogy to and personal memory of the legendary art historian and MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe, who died of cancer in May 2003. "Last of the Metrozoids" tells of Gopnik's extraordinary friendship with Varnedoe, who, while preparing the Mellon lecture series for the National Gallery of Art in D.C. that spring, also took up the coaching of a team of eight-year-old football players--Luke among them!--in Central Park. (Here's Gopnik's Charlie Rose interview about Varnedoe, if you can't access the essay, a copy of which I'd be happy to send you.)

Last night, Gopnik was at our favorite independent bookseller, the Brookline Booksmith, as part of a book tour promoting his latest book Angels and Ages. A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (excerpt here). Equipped with my collection of Gopnik books and a camera, I was at the store an hour early, just to make sure to get those perfect seats in the second row (close enough but not right in the author's face). Gopnik is, unsuprisingly, a great speaker; he's very eloquent in a quiet, beautiful way. During Q&A a woman actually compared his to the voice of an angel. The same woman had asked a very good question: why Gopnik, who had written so many essays on art, now turned his back to art. He replied, to my utter shock, that he no longer "believed" in art. (Not believe in art???) Fortunately he further explained that he referred to much of contemporary art: once he began to be concerned with the wonders of fatherhood, tried to figure out French customs, and discovered his love of cooking, he no longer understood the craze over installation or video art; Bruce Naumann's clown metaphor simply didn't hold up anymore. Matisse, however, was a different story. That's art to believe in.

What a relief! I can accept that. Baby/Paris/cooking for video art: that's a fair trade. What about today, now that he lives in NYC and has two children: did Gopnik still believe in Paris, I wondered? So I raised my hand, ready to ask the most pressing question of the evening:

"Mister Gopnik, do you still believe in Paris?"*

Thank God, he does.

I can still believe in Gopnik.

______________________
*If this question wasn't already a bit silly, I definitely made a fool of myself when I told Gopnik, as he was signing my book, "I really love your Paris book." All evening I had prepared for an intelligent conversation with Gopnik about the art of essay writing, ready to give examples from the history of the essay. But instead I said: "I really love your Paris book." Ugh.

The Facebook Version of the BBC Great Book List

Thanks to Erik's response to my last post I realize that the BBC's top 100 list that I linked (and which comes directly from the BBC website) isn't identical with the BBC's top 100 list that is making its round on Facebook (and on which I based my post). Therefore, I'm pasting the BBC-slash-Facebook list below.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
6 The Bible - God -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte-
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare –
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy-
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein-
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne –
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens-
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno - Dante-
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo –

30-Somethings

Nay, this doesn't refer to age. It refers to list items.

I have a new friend (a mathematician, incidentally, in spite of all efforts to cozy up with Harvard humanities people whose paths I cross every day in the library; instead I meet people through Erik, which means they're math people or, if they are not, married to math people or, in the case of said friend, both). My new friend likes lists. Norah's her name, and she reads a lot. This became obvious after the latest Facebook Conspiracy Against Writing My Dissertation: I was forwarded the BBC's list of the top 100 books of all times*, with instructions to mark all those books I read and then pass this altered list to all my Facebook friends. Being an obedient Facebooker, I checked off those Dickens, Shakespeares, and Austens I read as an undergrad, shook my head in disbelief over books that clearly ought not be counted literature, wondered why there was no single German author on the list (after all, ten Nobel prizes for literature went to German-speaking authors**, and that's just the 20th century!), then counted my 46 check marks, and sent the list to everyone I know (this entire process eating up loads of quality library time: which is why Facebook is evil. evil. evil.).

Norah responded with 42 check marks and the brilliant idea that, since the BBC list wasn't really reflecting our tastes, we should come up with our own reading list. She'd been asking me for book recommendations long before the Facebook thing, and now we agreed to each come up with a list of 30 books that, either because they are great or just different and interesting, we'd recommend to our friends. Since I made my list of 32 books, I keep remembering books that should have made the cut. Hence I'm declaring the list a work in progress. Here's the original list, mixing "classics" with entertaining books with cheesy stuff I read as a teenager:

Classics
1. Sebald: Austerlitz
2. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
3. Mann, Thomas: Dr. Faustus
4. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
5. Flaubert: Madame Bovary
6. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
7. Sebald: The Emigrants
8. William, John: Stoner
9. Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road
10. Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
11. Nabokov: Pnim
12. Chekhov: (short stories)

More recent/entertaining/popular (not necessarily in order of preference)***
13. Chatwin, Bruce: The Songlines
14. Swift, Graham: Waterland
15. Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
16. Kaminer, Wladimir: Russian Disco
17. Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
18. Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose
19. Calvino, Italo: Invisible Cities
20. Miller, Sue: A Good Mother
21. Munro, Alice: (short stories)
22. Winterson, Jeannette: Written on the Body
23. Roy, Arundhati: The God of Small Things
24. Hermann, Judith: Nothing but Ghosts
25. Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections
26. Styron: Sophie's Choice (I suppose this actually counts as a classic. But I have issues with it, so Styron won't make my classics list.)
27. Schätzing, Frank: The Swarm
28. Shalev, Zeruya: Love Life
29. Wolf, Christa: Divided Heaven

Teenage favorites
30. Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Arc de Triomphe (yes, that's actually three books)
31. Hesse, Hermann: Narzissus and Goldmund (my very favorite book when I was 16; it's quite, well, cheesy)
32. Süskind, Patrick: The Perfume

Now, the list ignores poetry, essays, non-fiction, science fiction, mystery novels and a whole bunch of other genres. I don't care much for SF, and mysteries are a guilty pleasure I indulge in when sick (and therefore not capable of reading anything more serious****). I don't know enough poetry to include poets on the list. Non-fiction and essays deserve lists of their own (a future project). What about plays?

For now, however, this is the list. I'll keep fiddling with it. Cheers to good reads!


*I stand corrected. While the instructions that came with the Facebook gig gave the impression these are the 100 best books ever, the BBC website clearly states that these are the "nation's best-loved novel[s]," not more or less than that.
**Is it really ten? Two different websites say two different things. In any event, four Nobel prizes were given to Germans within ten years, and if this strikes you as fishy, here you can read why you might be right.
***This isn't saying that classics aren't popular or recent or entertaining. My distinctions are pretty random and probably reflect how I'd answer my dissertation advisor if she asked me for my favorite books: I'd name the first group. (Thinking of it, though, I'd tell her of several books in the second group as well.)
**** There's plenty of serious crime fiction, some of it quite philosophical (think Jan Costin Wagner) and literary. I'm actually quite fond of the genre, but need to dismiss it for professional reasons. :)