My perusal of E.M. Forster’s classic novel began with such good intentions. With wholesome, faintly academic fervor, I embraced the prospect of reading the imperishable “A Room With a View” after several months of contemporary fiction. I love modern novelists, but I was ready to return, for a moment, to 1908, the year the novel was published. And, this was a book, I’d been told by many, that everyone must read, one of those timeless, inimitable pieces of literature that should not only be read thoroughly but absorbed with reverence for its merit and splendor. Settling on my couch, flanked by a cat and a cup of tea, I opened the book, fully prepared for merit and splendor.
Like Forster’s young heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, my initial reaction to the opening pages was pragmatic and studious. I strolled through the paragraphs much like Lucy strolled through the glorious churches of Florence, painstakingly searching for the praised frescoes of Giotto with the aid of Baedeker, her indispensable guidebook. I ventured into Forster’s prose with the air of a somewhat nervous tourist, armed for sightseeing. Ooh, look at his wonderful diction, succinct and yet so evocative! And how artlessly he deploys his humor! Ah, such skill and mastery. I chuckled with appreciative laughter over sentences like this one, describing the fussy British chaperone:
Miss Bartlett was already seated on a tightly stuffed armchair, which had the colour and contours of a tomato. She was talking to Mr. Beebe, and as she spoke, her long, narrow head drove backwards and forwards, slowly, regularly, as though she were demolishing some invisible obstacle.
Oh, Mr. Forster. With deft strokes, he paints a sharp and accurate portrait of the British upper classes abroad — eager for a Fashionably Exotic Adventure, but priggish and suspicious of foreigners, unwilling to completely leave their comfortable Britannia behind.
I was in Barnes & Noble the other day with a $50 gift card burning a hole in my pocket. Predictably, I headed straight for the food section (I’m in a fiction rut right now) and immediately noticed some of the prominently displayed works of food porn, notably “A Day at El Bulli,” and Thomas Keller’s “Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide.”
The former is a 600-page tome containing literally thousands of full-color photographs representing a 24-hour period at the Michelin three-star restaurant in Spain. Widely considered one of the best restaurants in the world, you can see why as you page through this book.
The famed French Laundry, Per Se, etc., offers a “do not attempt this at home” look at Keller culinary genius. Amazon writes:
The book makes no bones about being addressed to professionals. Typical recipes, like Marinated Toy Box Tomatoes with Compressed Cucumber-Red Onion Relish, Toasted Brioche, and Diane St. Claire Butter, involve multiple preparations and dernier cri ingredients, and thus resist home duplication. There’s also the matter of the pricey equipment required–chamber vacuum packers and temperature-maintaining immersion circulators–not to mention the precautions required to ensure that foods, usually cooked at low temps, are safe to eat.
Whatever the case may be, this book is beautiful and inspiring.
Continuing on with the Spanish theme is Jose Andres new book, “Made in Spain,” playing off of his PBS show of the same name. I’ve had the opportunity to visit one of his restaurants in Washington D.C. and have always enjoyed is wild-eyed enthusiasm for all things delicious.
IT SHOULD BE NOTED: Some of my perennial favorites, Calvin Trillin and Jefferey Steingarten are buried on the lower shelves, below all the celebrity chef cookbooks but are well worth checking out.
WHAT I BOUGHT:The Silver Spoon, an encyclopedia of Italian cooking.
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!
I listened to The Leonard Lopate Show in my car on the way to grab lunch when I heard him mention that his guest was Jason Kersten, the author of “The Art of Making Money.” At first I was confused. That was the title of a really fantastic Rolling Stone article in 2005 about an expert counterfeiter from the south side of Chicago named Art Williams. I figured the show must be a rerun, until I heard a few seconds later that “The Art of Making Money” is now a book. I couldn’t be more excited. Williams is a fascinating guy, and this is a deeply interesting topic. It’s going on my to-read list, and I’m going to recommend it go on yours as well.
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.”
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?
For November, I'll be reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year. We'll update our book club selection for December and January shortly.
Marilyn Ramos is a partner at the Stamford litigation law firm of Silver Golub & Teitell. She is a member of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association and the Connecticut Bar Association. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Fairfield County Bar Association and the Fairfield County Bar Foundation. She received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1989 and is a member of the Connecticut and New York bars. Prior to her career in law, she was a teacher with the Greenwich Public Schools and worked for the Stamford Human Rights Commission. Her views expressed on this blog are completely her own and do not represent those of Silver Golub & Teitell.
Roy J. Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. He grew up in Stamford and his father was a firefighter on the West Side. He received his bachelor's degree from Southern Connecticut State University and went on to receive a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami. He has traveled around the world, visiting 35 countries, but said, "I can’t credit on the road with getting me on the road."
