Currently Reading Nonfiction

I spent March and some of April reading mostly romance novels. Those lurid adventures will be detailed in the next entry. For now, I am going to discuss what I'm reading currently, only partly because it will make me sound far more educated and discerning.

I'm halfway through Malcolm X by Manning Marable. Since I consider Autobiography of Malcolm X to be one of my two favorite nonfiction books, I was really excited when this came out. So far I am really enjoying it. The hype surrounding it suggested it was some big 'tell-all', find out 'who the real Malcolm X was' sort of thing, and that it would greatly contradict Autobiography. So far, I'd have to say no dice. Okay, so Autobiography left some things out, glossed over some other things, etc. A little bias is inevitable in an autobiography, particularly one written during the last year of your life and then finished by your cowriter after your assassination. I still think (again, so far) that the Malcolms presented in both books are recognizably the same man: compelling, intelligent, intriguing, frustrating, admirable.

Second: Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. It's taking me a long time to get through this because of how fucking depressing it is.

Third and fourth: I just finished Three Cups of Deceit and Under the Banner of Heaven, both by Jon Krakauer. I did not realize they were by the same author until I was done with Three Cups and almost done with Banner. Shows how observant I am, eh? Both were excellent and I enjoyed both more than I did Into the Wild, his arguably most famous book.

Three Cups of Deceit is about Greg Mortensen, an author and the founder/CEO of a charity that builds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Deceit documents how the foundation myth of the charity (per Mortensen's book Three Cups of Tea) is precisely that, a myth, and how the charity is not run properly financially, and how the good that it does is greatly exaggerated/lied about. Deceit ends up being part detective story, as Krakauer investigates and documents the claims made against Mortensen, and part lament that 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak'. Mortensen's ideals are good but his execution is flawed because humans are flawed—he is flawed.

I highly recommend buying Three Cups of Deceit. It's a fast read, only $2.99 from the Kindle store, and 100% of the author's proceeds goes to 'Stop Girl Trafficking'.

Under the Banner of Heaven is about fundamentalist Mormonism, and it is absolutely fascinating. The book spends about half the time talking about fundamentalist Mormonism today and about half talking about the history of Joseph Smith and the rest. For me the history part semi-overlapped with Lies My Teacher Told Me. I remember studying Mormons and their history in school, but the really interesting parts were left out. For example, high school history books don't mention the Mountain Meadows massacre, nor the crazy extent of discrimination Mormons faced in the early years back east. Also, did you know that the way modern Mormon fundamentalists are able to have such ridiculously large families is through welfare? The husband marries the first wife, and then the subsequent wives generally all collect welfare for their multitudes of children since technically they are single mothers. One family collected something like $1.5 million in welfare and benefits in 10 years. Absolutely crazy.

I'm also reading Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) and Eating Animals and Smells Like Dead Elephants but I will leave those for another day. After the romance post!

Recently Finished

Handling the Undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist - 4/5

This novel is by the same author as Let the Right One In, which was made into pretty much the best movie of 2008. I enjoyed reading both these novels, but I found Handling the Undead much creepier.

The premise is that something very bizarre causes a segment of dead people (basically those who have been dead two months or less) to come back to life. But though they are 'reliving', their bodies are still mostly dead: they have the wounds and diseases they died with, their skin is dried out (in some cases) or destroyed and bloated. And they act very strangely. Are these reliving good? evil? neutral? Are they still the people they used to be? What should be done with them? Where do they belong? Everyone seems to arrive at different answers.

The characters are multidimensional and well-drawn, and I read this book almost straight through, even though I don't find zombies interesting generally.

The Postman - David Brin - 3.5/5

I have a love/hate relationship with sci-fi. It can be so satisfying, and it can be so frustrating. My main issue with it is that as a genre it is so male. Sci-fi seems to be men's counterpoint to women's romance novels, and both genres suffer from their one-sidedness.

I thought The Postman was pretty typical in that way. It is an interesting take on a post-apocalyptic landscape, but the main character is male, it has a very masculine sort of vibe, and most of the peripheral characters, with two notable exceptions, are men. The first notable exception is a woman who is the de facto ruler of a small settlement, and the other is the main love interest, a sort of technosavvy Amazon. Unfortunately, what eventually becomes of her rather annoyed me. I am still torn as to whether it was believable or not, but either way I didn't like it.

Still, thought-provoking and a valid view of what happens after everything crumbles.

Wild Child - Mary Jo Putney - 3/5

Mary Jo Putney's novels are always better than your average romance. For one, she tends to write strong female characters who are at least as likely to do the rescuing as be rescued (usually there's a little of both going on). For two, the conflict between her love interests is pretty much never the fault of the lovers themselves, which is refreshing. Most conflicted romance—in any genre or medium—stems from the stupidity of one or both of the lovers, and this at times makes it hard for me to care even if I otherwise enjoy the book/characters (hello, Scarlett O'Hara).

Wild Child is not my favorite of her books, but it was still enjoyable. The ending seemed a little bit rushed, but that could be because I was reading it at one a.m. as fast as I could so I could finish it and go to sleep.

The American Claimant - Mark Twain - 4.5/5

I read this some time ago but figured it was time for a revisit. Oh, Mulberry Sellers. Oh, Gwendolyn.

It's about a quintessential American dreamer, always quick with a get-rich idea and his ability to gullibify anyone, most especially himself. And it's hilarious. Mark Twain skewers the British peerage and multiple American pretensions at one go.

I was reading this on the subway when I got to the part about Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass, and I was laughing so hard I was getting multiple weird looks and knowing smiles, but I could not stop reading.

history of my evolution as a reader

I'm a book whore. I read good shit, bad shit, and everything-in-between shit. I can love the really literary stuff, and I can love a super schlocky romance novel (and analyze it from a feminist perspective, too). There's a special place in my heart for fantasy novels, and for dystopian stories like 1984, Brave New World, The Wanting Seed, and The Hunger Games.

Most of my life I've gone through relatively defined phases, but now I'm at the point where I'm reading Richard Dawkins, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Arthur C. Clarke, Mary Jo Putney, Mark Twain, Anthony Burgess, Carl Jung, Caroline B. Cooney, Anne McCaffrey, Matt Taibbi, and Barbara Kingsolver all at once. And technically Cormac McCarthy too, although Blood Meridian is on pause at the moment.

Anyway, here is, as promised in the title, a History of My Evolution As a Reader.

kindergarten: I wasn't allowed chapter books from the library, so I don't have too many specific reading memories. I do remember when, reading Cat in the Hat with my aunt, I got the concept of what the black marks on the page meant, and how to interpret them. Surely I did not learn to read all in a flash, but that is how I remember it.

1st grade: In first grade, when we got our reading books, I always read all the stories the first day and then suffered through the repetition of the remaining weeks as the rest of the class caught up. This was the year I read The Boxcar Children books: all six million of them. Around the end of the year I read the Little House series, which I recall taking me a long time to finish.

2st grade: This year was defined by about 100 orange-covered, watered-down-for-kids, "everyone is a saint", 39% fictional biographies that our library had on famous Americans (Merriweather Lewis, Betsy Ross, Harriet Tubman, etc). I also remember my teacher reading us Matilda, and a couple really terrible Bobbsey Twins books.

I read a lot of mythology—mostly Greek. I didn't have any books about them (too pagan), but my family had a set of 1950s encyclopedias. I loved reading random articles, and the mythology ones were my favorites. I would find Aphrodite, and then use the SEE ALSO: HEPHAESTUS, PARIS, EROS, ZEUS. I'd grab the H, P, E, and Z books, and flip to all those articles, and then to their SEE ALSOs as well, until I was surrounded by a sea of encyclopedias opened up to mythology articles, waiting patiently for me to get to each one in turn.

3rd grade: I read almost every Nancy Drew book the library had. They were formulaic and I knew it even then, but I did enjoy them. I think this was the year I read the Chronicles of Narnia too, or it may have been fourth grade. My parents were big on history, so I had a ton of books about the Holocaust and World War II, and a biography of Amelia Earhart that I read multiple times.

4th grade: I read the Babysitters' Club and Hardy Boys series. I had kind of a crush on Joe Hardy, and was jealous of Iola. This crush solidified when I started reading the Hardy Boys Casefiles (which had murders and other exciting things that the classic series didn't have). Iola got blown up by terrorists (or did she) and Joe went romantically crazy. It was very tragic.

I also really liked Claudia and MaryAnne in the Babysitter's Club, and Stacey and Kristy annoyed me.

5th grade: There weren't any quintessential series that I remember. I think I just kept reading Babysitters' Club as well as anything else that caught my eye. I know that by this time I'd read most of Madeline l'Engle's books, and loved them. A T.A. read us The Hobbit, which I thought was great, so I started reading Fellowship of the Ring. Even though I thought parts of it were beautiful, I also thought large parts of it were dull and I couldn't get through it that first time. I'm not sure exactly when I discovered Gordan Korman, but he was a great favorite through all these years as well.

6th grade: This was the first year we were allowed to check out books from the "grown-up" section of the library. I almost immediately started reading the romance novels—the really bad, tearing-her-bodice-off kind, along with some less terrible stuff like Nora Roberts's River's End. About two months into it, the librarian told me those books were too old for me and would no longer let me check them out. My mom also caught me with a Johanna Lindsey novel and kind of freaked. So my literary sex education was put on pause.

I started reading John Grisham instead, and random fantasy novels. I remember feeling the verdict in A Time to Kill as if someone had punched me in the stomach, I was so invested in the story. I think I cried from sheer emotion.

I read Needful Things by Stephen King, which intrigued and repulsed me, and every book by Mary Higgins Clark (until I figured out that the main character's love interest is always the killer, and her secondary love interest is the good guy, who she ends up with). I read a lot of Agatha Christie. I read Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine three or four times, and every Tamora Pierce book I could get my hands on.

I also bought The Trojan War by Bernard Evslin at a garage sale, and to this day I think it should be required reading for every person in the world.

7th grade: I kept reading fantasy, including the first Harry Potter book, which I thought was great. I remember that I thought J. K. Rowling was a man (how sexist of me), something I thought for at least a year or two.

I discovered Song in the Silence by Elizabeth Kerner, which is still my favorite fantasy novel, and I loved the first two Acorna books by Anne McCaffery and Margaret Ball, as well as Exiles: Ruins of Ambrai by Melanie Rawn and Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. I read A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin and disliked it, but I finished it despite its length, from the principle of things. (To this day I can only remember one or two books I have deliberately never finished.) I read a lot of George Orwell, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare; tried to read Pride & Prejudice but never finished it; read Jane Eyre and adored it; and read a lot of random mystery/thrillers, with some romance sneaked in too. I believe I finally finished all the LOTR books, and I found them more interesting than I had at first.

8th grade: I'm almost positive this was the year I read Kurt Cobain's Journals. I hid the book under all the textbooks I was carrying around because I didn't want people thinking I was weirder than they already thought me or starting an intervention (my school was very conservative). I read Stephen King, John J. Nance, and Arthur C. Clarke's Ghost From the Grand Banks. I checked out the Quran from the library, which REALLY freaked out my mother. I was still reading some romance: Mary Jo Putney's One Perfect Rose was one of my favorites, along with The Actress and the Marquis by Cindy Holbrook, which made me laugh till I cried. Around this time my cousin Myndi, who was a great reading influence, gave me Perks of Being a Wallflower and told me to read Slaughterhouse Five, which I did.

9th grade-10th grade: I read basically the rest of Shakespeare. I memorized Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar, and I recited it until my best friend wanted to hit me in the face. I started reading more nonfiction. I tried reading James Joyce but stopped. I read The Great Gatsby, which didn't make much of an impression. I finally finished Pride & Prejudice, slowly realizing how much I loved it. I also reread LOTR a few times since the films were coming out about then, and I started reading Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis. And at some point I discovered Lee Child, who quickly became my favorite thriller/mystery writer. I read The Double Helix by James D. Watson, and some books about Rosalind Franklin.

11th grade-12th grade: The saga of these two years will be expounded further in another post, but suffice to say I read a lot of European classics. I read Ulysses, which I really hated until about the last three pages. I read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, Robinson Crusoe, everything by Oscar Wilde......

At some point I read most of Neil Gaiman's work, a lot of Vonnegut, and the rest of the Sword of Truth series, along with anything else that happened to come my way.

Most importantly, I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx, both of which made lasting impressions on me, as did Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Such were the dark and terrible origins that led to my downfall as a whore/victim of books.