BookEnds

I made good on all my promises during a just-finished 11-day break — slept late, went to the gym nine times, started working with a trainer, saw two movies — and read two books.

The first, as I mentioned before I left, was Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow. Connelly, a former crime reporter, is one of my favorite authors: good fast-reads, well-written. He is best known for his Harry Bosch series.

In his latest effort, Connelly leaves Bosch on the sidelines and brings back the characters Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling from one of his best books, The Poet.

While I strongly recommend the book, it will definitely be of particular interest to journalists. McEvoy is a Los Angeles Times reporter, and almost from the first page Connelly skewers the current state of the newspaper industry, and does not stop until the very end.

If you work in a newsroom, you will definitely be rooting Connelly on. If you are in management calling the shots, well let’s just say you may want to leave this book on the shelf.

The July 13 issue of Newsweek has a lot of great suggestions on what to read now. They draw on the gloomy economic mood to point out the books we really should be reading anyway.

I’m not going to repeat the whole list, but I can cull the list and echo some of the suggestions:

1) The number 7 pick is “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. This is another must read in journalism circles, and it’s really worth it.

2) The number 9 pick is “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. It’s one of many recent efforts to use economics to explain why people aren’t always rational, even though rational decision making is the underpinning of modern economic theory.

3) Number 19 is Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” I think this is something most appropriately read as a disaffected adolescent. It also was, I was always told, one of the alleged inspirations for the favorite album of disaffected youth, Radiohead’s OK Computer. I never could see exactly where the influence lay, beyond the generally spacey, sciency feel of both. I think it must be the darkly-ribboned ambivalence toward technology, that our increasing reliance on it is both sometimes bad and inevitable. The story also served as the basis for “Blade Runner.”

4) I have absolutely no desire to read “Bad Mother” by Ayelet Waldman, only the latest in a serious of bad, or at least self-reflective, parent memoirs to come out recently. I’ve never wanted to read the confessional memoir. A few years ago it was drug-users stacking the shelves, now it’s moms and dads. Who’s next?

Incidentally, Waldman is Michael Chabon’s wife (and, in 2005, said she loved her husband more than her kids). So I’m not going to believe the words bad and mother go together in any part of describing her life. The writing couple lives in Berkeley with their four kids. I’m sure it’s all very charming, and there’s nothing truly bad about it.

4) I haven’t yet read the number 29 pick, “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, but it’s about J. Robert Oppenheimer and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006. I only wanted to read it after pieces of the book made it into Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent, Outliers, which I listened to on audiotape. Oppenheimer tried to poison one of his professors at Oxford, apparently. And he got to stay in school.

5) I haven’t read “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe since high school, but last week’s Studio 360 had writers on talking about how Achebe changed world literature. I’ve always hated the term “world literature.” It’s like, “everywhere but here literature,” as if we are the center of the universe.

That’s my list of the list. You should check out the mag, though, if it’s not too late. (Thanks for letting me borrow yours, Elizabeth Kim!) They also have great conversations with several great writers, including my new favorite, Robert Caro.

Tis the season for bookworms, with several book sales coming up in the next couple of months. Many of the books that line my shelves at home come courtesy of the Pequot Library sale in Southport.  I plan to return this year to bolster my stock. But there are others, too. Here are just a few:

The Westport Public Library plans to feature more than 80,000 items for its 16th annual Giant Book Sale, which begins July 18 and ends July 21. The library is located at 20 Jesup Road.

A week later, the Pequot Library’s 49th annual book sale gets under way on July 24, and continues for the next four days with activities, discounts and refreshments. The library is located at 720 Pequot Ave., Southport.

Later in the summer, bibliophiles will be invited to see the offerings of the 49th annual Mark Twain Library book fair, which takes place at the Redding Community Center.

In most cases, admission is free — except perhaps for early buying or other special events that feature rare or vintage books — making it a good stop on a “staycation.” Be prepared to pick up some paperbacks, cookbooks, fiction or nonfiction, whatever strikes your fancy. Selections include DVDs and music, in the form of CDS and those relics from another age, tapes and LPs. One might even find some sheet music and comic books or a print to hang up on the wall.

And, in some cases, it is a chance for a little summer cleaning. Often, the libraries and groups holding these events will accept donations, which means the books you loaded up into the paper bags last year can be shared with fellow bibliophiles. Share those tales!

Liz, I completely agree. I’m not a big consumer of sports or sports writing but it does seem that we let our cultural id loose on the field. Or on the ice. I remember as a kid watching ice skating during the ’92, and ’94 winter Olympics, and I’m pretty sure I remember Surya Bonaly, the only black skater I remember ever seeing, being one of the best skaters on the ice. She had the best jumps, although she fell more than Nancy Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul.

She was criticized as not being the best “technical” skater, but that just speaks to the weird subjectivity that judging ice skating entails. She often went for some spectacular, rule-bending flip, and would be penalized for it. Worse, though, when the announces talked about Bonaly, she was “athletic,” and a rule breaker. When they spoke about Kerrigan and Baiul, it was all about their grace and their art. It certainly seemed to borrow heavily from racial and gender stereotypes, the petite blond and the elegant brunette against the more muscular Bonaly.

Of course, class issues rose to the forefront when Kerrigan got her knee busted by Tonya Harding’s ex-husband and bodyguard.* No matter how bad the attack was, I was always shocked at how ready everyone was to dismiss the former champion Harding as trashy. Harding also was from a broken home, and claimed her mother was abusive. And it didn’t help that Kerrigan was from a Boston suburb, and has the toothy smile and pretty looks everyone likes to call “All-American.”

Click to read Roberts on Tonya Harding

So Monica, it seems like we lost Dave, not that I blame him for being ready to move on. Yet as the one who suggested we read this book, I feel it’s my duty to resurrect the conversation somehow. So instead of skewering Roberts some more, I thought I’d turn to this idea of A-Rod as a kind of cultural anti-hero. To me, it’s the most interesting way to read him and how sports reflect our cultural values. Note the way Roberts compares A-Rod and his Yankee teammate Derek Jeter:

Jeter had been raised in a disciplined home with a father who was a drug and alcohol counselor and where structure was a virtue. He had grown up seeing his parents in the stands for his games. At 28, Alex was already playing for his third team (and had gone through two ugly baseball “divorces” to get there); the Yankees were the only team, Jeter, 29, had ever known.

In other words, A-Rod = broken family = maladjusted. Jeter, meanwhile, thrives emotionally and professionally as the product of a happy family. It’s a painstakingly retro formula, but one that many people, not just Roberts, and not just sports writers, have applied to A-Rod. Despite his all-star performance and lucrative contracts, he has become a symbol of failure: he is a selfish player; he is a cheater, both in the professional sense with his use of steroids, and, personally, with rumors of his relationship with Madonna splashed across the cover of tabloids; and as Joe Torre and Roberts both tell us, he is a loner in the clubhouse, insecure and jealous. Sports has always revolved around characters that appeal to basic values of decency and heroism. Their backstories are an inherent part of the drama that makes the games so riveting. But as I’ve grown up, the way athletes are made to conform to one stereotype or the other has made me uneasy. Oftentimes, the depictions elide issues of race and class. For instance, I find it troubling that inner-city kids are often faulted for being savvy about the one thing that they can’t afford not to be savvy about—the worth of their bodies in a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to profit off them.

Fans and baseball observers, I think, have been overeager to typecast A-Rod. But maybe, as with fairy tales, we need our villains as much as heroes. Would Jeter be everything he is without A-Rod?

Hi guys….Yes I did get a note from Monica freeing me from A-Rod. I’m happy to say the book has been passed on to a Yankees fan recovering from knee surgery. Not sure I did him a favor.

On a much happier note, I started Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow. One of my favorite authors, a former journalist and in the first 60 pages there is some heavy editorializing on the current state of the newspaper business. You go Michael!

Elizabeth, it looks like Dave has left us. He is on vacation this week, but didn’t leave before asking me if I expected him to read and blog about A-Rod while he was gone. I told him I did not. I don’t want to read this on vacation either.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten through about half the book, to chapter 8, “The Trophy Date.” A-Rod has been traded to the Yankees after his unprecedented $252 million/10 year deal with the Texas Rangers.

Leaving aside for a moment the shadily sourced accusations of cheating as a Rangers shortstop and Jose Canseco’s conjectures (even though A-Rod’s already admitted to using steroids now, and we don’t need Canseco telling us something he doesn’t know) I have a big question for you: why is the subtitle “The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez?” So far there’s only one life.  That life has just changed over time. Maybe he’s a conflicted person, but he doesn’t seem to have multiple personalities. And I only have about 100 pages left, so I think, at most, Roberts has room to make the case for dual personalities. And even duality would be tough in 100 pages.

There were also a few spots where I felt as though I was stepping out of time and space to read Roberts actually criticizing her own book. She brings up Stuart Smalley, the Al Franken “Saturday Night Live,” I had compared her vision of A-Rod to in a previous post. She says the following at the beginning of chapter 5, “The Perfectionist:”

Alex Rodriguez was suffering from a writer’s block of sorts in forming his own baseball identity, wanting badly for his career to be a living folktale but comparatively frozen on how to start the narrative.

Oh no, Selena. Did you mean to put that in, or was that a note to someone about you writing this book?

Click to continue reading

ABOVE: Ernest Murrell, right, of the Stamford CC, and Rahul Francois, of St. John’s CC during a friendly last year.

6/27/2009

STAMFORD – Sitting at a picnic table in Lione Park, brown bagging a tall-boy as the cricketers in their starched whites ran about the pitch, I couldn’t help but think of Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland.”

The 2008 novel is ostensibly a post-9/11 story of New York, of its citizens grappling with life in the months after the devastating terrorist attacks, but it is so much more than that. The elegant prose is so precise and crafted it is an absolute pleasure to read – a quality all too often forgotten in modern fiction.

Hans van den Broek, the novel’s narrator, is a Dutch financial analyst living in New York with his wife and young son when the attacks of 9/11 force them to move from Lower Manhattan to a residential hotel in Midtown. Unable to cope with this new life, his family returns to Europe without him and the despondent van den Broek seeks friendship and the consolation of familiarity on the cricket pitch.

It is here, on the cricket grounds of the outer boroughs, that he falls in with men from the West Indies and the Asian Subcontinent, revealing a world within New York unseen from his life on Wall Street. With men more familiar with bookmaking than the oil futures market, who suit up in brilliant white and take the field each week for the love of a game that took hold on every island, every colony, every outpost once touched by the British Empire.

Likewise, in Stamford, members of the local cricket clubs gather on the West Side for matches, putting aside national rivalries to play overs on the new synthetic-turf field. Most of the players here hail from Jamaica, Barbados and other island nations, but India, Pakistan and occasionally England, Ireland and Australia are represented. Their national origins are evidenced by the colors on the caps many of the men wear, not officially part of the uniform, yet proudly displayed. In Lione park these men keep alive traditions first formalized in the 18th century.

The world of cricket in “Netherland” is rendered in vivid detail; the slow, humid Sundays of midsummer provide a rich backdrop for the dueling plot lines which explore not only the implosion of van der Broek’s personal life but also the Gatsby-esque tale that unfolds when he befriends a Trinidadian con-man with ambitions to build a world-class cricket stadium on an abandoned airfield in Brooklyn.

Comparisons to the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic – a paragon of American fiction – are not to be taken lightly, but O’Neill’s book stands up to this praise in many ways. O’Neill, Irish by birth, ultimately comes closer to the “Great American Novel,” than most American writers could ever hope.

–CP

NOTE: “Netherland” recently won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction after being a finalist in the National Book Awards and is now out in paperback.