Freakonomics

Freakonomics it is.

I started it the same day I finished Northanger Abbey.  My first impression was that the authors seemed rather chuffed with themselves.  In hindsight, I suppose that was warranted, but it isn't very appealing (and a few chapters in, that impression lingers).  I do think it's an interesting book, although I suspect that it would have elicited a few more moments of shock and awe if I had read it when it first came out; at this point, most of the big revelations have become, if not common knowledge, at least more common than they were 7 years ago.

A couple of other observations:

1. The editing isn't stellar.  It's not terrible, but I'm noticing and remembering a few mistakes along the way.
2. There are end notes.  Personally, I prefer footnotes.  I like to have supplementary information or citation information right there, because if it's at the end, I either don't know that I should be looking for it, or I'm constantly flipping the pages back and forth, which makes me kind of nuts.  Again, this is a personal preference, but it's really bugging me.
3. I'm not a huge fan of the way the book is structured.  Specifically, there are some revelations in the introduction or early chapters (the things that come to mind are the correlation between plummeting crime rates and Roe v. Wade and the way that real estate agents sell other people's homes vs. how they sell their own) that they then try to use as cliff-hangers or big revelations later on...it just doesn't work.  At the end of the chapter about crack dealers (probably the most interesting chapter thus far), they talk about how even though a lot of analysts thought violent crime would continue to rise at a furious rate, all of a sudden it dropped off.  They treat it like a cliff-hanger, but if you, like me, tend to read books from beginning to end, you already know why.  They talked about it in the introduction!  

Anyway, I feel like I'm being really negative about this book.  I don't mean to be.  But the most lasting impressions I'm getting from this book are those listed above.

Admittedly, I just finished the chapter about crack dealers and I walked over to the computer and immediately began writing this - there's a good chance my frustration will fade quickly.  But that was always the point of this blog - when you're reading, there are things you are excited about or frustrated with or just generally overbrimming with opinions on, and you want to share those thoughts right in the moment, right when you're thinking them, because if you don't (if you're me, at least), you lose them.  And in a perfect world, you want to share them with someone else who just finished that part in the book too (or, in lieu of a perfect world, I guess you share them with your blog and hope that someone else will stumble upon that particular thought when they particularly need it).

And with no fanfare, I arrive at the end

I went to all the trouble of explaining why I was having so much trouble getting through Northanger Abbey, just yesterday, and then I went and finished it today!

So what can I say about it?  First, I was way off about the General.  The thing is, he was so solicitous, and Eleanor was talking about a mother being such a dear friend...I just completely misread everything.  And what the General turned out to actually be like!  Well!

It isn't my favorite Austen (it's cliche, but I just love Pride and Prejudice - none of her other books come close in my estimation), but it isn't my least favorite either (that dubious honor going to Mansfield Park or Emma, I can't say which for certain).  Catherine Morland is frustratingly naive but still quite endearing.  And the younger Tilneys are lovely.  Austen paints these characters with a rather broad brush - Isabella is a contriving coquette, her brother a boorish buffoon, and Mrs. Allen is pure comic relief (and she really is funny - I laughed out loud when she kept repeating that she really had no use for General Tilney).  But I guess this makes sense in the context of Austen taking about heroines and what should befall them.

What book should be next?  I nicked Freakonomics the last time I visited my parents, and I am in a pattern of switching back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, so perhaps that's the way I'll go.  Stay tuned.

An Interlude

I'm still reading Northanger Abbey and Anne of Green Gables.  The breakneck pace which took me through The Colossus of Maroussi earlier in the month (not to mention A.S. Byatt's Possession and William J. Broad's The Science of Yoga) has slowed a little, a result of nicer weather (which leads to longer bike rides), the 2012 European Championships (during which I dare not read, for fear of missing something like Zlatan Ibrahimovic's goal against France), homework (which I've been putting off, but can't any longer), and the whole reading on the iPad thing - I feel like I shouldn't privilege Anne over Catherine because I prefer paper, and so I wind up just not reading sometimes.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying Northanger, though I'm a bit concerned about the interest General Tilney has taken in Catherine.  It's kind of creepy (utterly unlike Colonel Brandon and Marianne, maybe because Brandon was a bachelor, where Gen. Tilney has children older than Catherine - don't tell me, but I hope all this worry comes to nothing).

But mostly, I just wanted to share this tidbit from Anne:

"It's such a responsibility having a minister's family to tea.  I never went through such an experience before.  It's a sight to behold.  We're going to have jellied chicken and cold tongue.  We're to have two kinds of jelly, red and yellow, and whipped cream and lemon pie, and cherry pie, and three kinds of cookies, and fruitcake, and Marilla's famous yellow plum preserves that she keeps especially for ministers, and pound cake and layer cake, and biscuits as aforesaid; and new bread and old both..."

For tea!

A second book...

I'm not here to announce the completion of Northanger Abbey, but, as you may have guessed, the commencement of a second book.  I'm not abandoning Catherine Morland, by any means.  As a matter of fact, I like her quite a lot (certainly more than Fanny Price, who infuriated me to no end).  And I'm always pleasantly surprised by Austen's wry tone and acerbic wit.  But as I mentioned previously, Northanger Abbey is on the iPad.  While I'm adjusting to using the iPad as a reader (though I remain staunchly in the actual book camp), there are some times when it simply will not do - to wit, in the bathtub (where I dearly love to ensconce myself with a good book) or in the pack on the back of my bike (because I firmly believe that a book is a necessary accompaniment to any occasion, including a bike ride).  A borrowed iPad especially has no place near water or bumping along a bike trail.  Thus...

Not my copy.  But a very close
approximation of the shape mine
is in.

Anne of Green Gables.  The literary equivalent (for me, at least) of a warm bath, comfort food, or a broken-in pair of jeans (or all of the above).  I read this the other day -- Fire Up Your Tivos, Nerds: Anne of Green Gables is Returning to TV -- and this nagging urge to revisit the books for the umpteenth time has been dogging me ever since (as has a desire to revisit the Megan Follows movies, which I'm proud to own).  Thus, confronted with a lazy, rainy day and the desire to take a nice, long bath, I fished out my well-worn (well-loved) copy of Anne of Green Gables and happily returned to Avonlea.

I doubt there is much I can say about Anne that hasn't already been said.  (Of course, the same could be said for most books, yet here we are.)  Since I've only just begun, let me try to explain why I'm always sucked back in so quickly, why I'm always certain that rereading these books was a good decision.  First, there are the characters.  Perhaps it's a bad idea for what is ostensibly a children's book to start by focusing on three characters, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert and Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who are in their 60s.  But the quick sketches that are given of them in the opening chapter are so deft that they come immediately to life (it doesn't hurt, of course, to have Colleen Dewhurst, Richard Farnsworth, and Patricia Hamilton in mind while you read, either).

For instance, this:
"She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humor."

Also, I can't help being delighted by a world in which you know expected company is nothing special because "the dishes were every-day dishes and there was only crab apple preserves and one kind of cake."  Only one kind of cake - heaven forbid!

Also, though I would probably find a particularly precocious and talkative eleven-year old exhausting in person, I think Anne is just delightful and I love her world-view.

"Isn't it splendid there are so many things to like in this world?"

Indeed.  And this series, my dear, is one of those things in this world that I like immensely.

Where to now?

In my rush to post something (anything) before hitting the hay last night, I completely forgot to say where I was going next in my reading.

(Pause for dramatic effect)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen!

Why?  Two major reasons.  First, and less embarrassing, I have a loaner iPad for the summer and I could download Northanger Abbey for free and I feel like I should be using the iPad as much as possible.  (My initial impressions, four chapters in, are that I'd much prefer to be reading this in real book form.)  The second, arguably more embarrassing reason requires a new paragraph.

I've read 5 of Austen's other novels: Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park.  I have also read Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (probably after reading Sense and Sensibility, before Persuasion and Mansfield Park).  In TJABC, they read the aforementioned five, plus Northanger Abbey and sometime in my reading of TJABC, I got it into my head that I should read all six of the Austen books that they did.  So I've been working on them, and this is my last one.  Much as I hate to admit it, I kind of enjoyed TJABC.  I also (this is probably worse) have seen the movie, more than once.  It's one of those movies that goes really well with a lazy Sunday morning.  It's also got a pretty stellar cast (though I'll never be able to see Maggie Grace as anyone but Shannon from Lost).  So...a mazy run to get to Northanger Abbey, and kudos to you if you can follow my twisted logic, but that's where I'm headed next (actually, that's where I currently am - as I mentioned, I'm four chapters in thus far).

Starting all over again...

Up front, this is for a class.  That said, I keep trying to maintain a blog but haven't had much luck with that since college.  Here we go again.

That little bit of business out of the way, it hit me this evening as I came to the magnificent end of Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, that reading was indeed a lonely business.  Books like this beg to be discussed, to be gushed over...and in the moment, not at a book club a week down the road or in a class, but immediately after you read the final account of Katsimbalis crowing into the Athenian darkness and being answered by invisible roosters (incredible!).

Anyway, lacking that simpatico individual who is not only reading the books I am reading, but reading them at the same pace, I turn to this blog.  I'll attempt to say intelligent things about the books I'm reading when I can, but more than that I will just try to say something about them.  During the school year, I'll probably focus on young adult novels because I work in a junior high library and I always feel like a fraud recommending books I don't really know anything about (also, YA books are pretty amazing).  This summer, I'll be sticking to the grown-up books, probably going back and forth between fiction and non-fiction.

To get off to a rather pathetic start, let me just sing the vague but full-throated praises of The Colossus of Maroussi.  It was recommended to me by one of the professors I toured Greece and Crete with, a fellow philhellene, and it pulled me back there forcefully.  Of course, Miller visited about 65 years before I did, but there is something eternal about the way he captures those places (he would say, and I'd probably agree, that it is the places themselves that are eternal).  If you've had the good fortune to spend some time wandering the streets of Athens or exploring the ruins of Knossos, you should read this book.  If you haven't, you should still read it.  He captures the joy of finding kindred spirits in foreign places, of finding yourself surprised by your travels, and maybe most significantly, of hearing a well-told story.