What I’ve Been Reading

Books in brief.

1. Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O’Neill. A post 9/11 novel about all sorts of things, using cricket as central metaphor. A very competently written book (highly praised by the critics) with many interesting musings on life. I was engaged through to the end. My three favorite paragraphs below.

One night I went out with Appleby to a bar on the Lower East Side, anxious to talk about Rivera’s fate and scheme in his favor. Appleby, however, had arranged to meet up with friends. He passed the evening telling them jokes I couldn’t quite hear or get, and from time to time they stepped out onto the sidewalk to smoke cigarettes and make calls to carousers elsewhere in the city, returning with reports of parties in Williamsburg and SoHo and, as the night whirled away, leaving me on the rim of things. I drank up and left them to it.

No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity’s enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle’s supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.

There came a moment, not long after the Danielle episode and in the first stimuli of spring, when I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we’d examine each other’s unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith.

2. Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception by Claudia Hammond. A fine, if not especially revelatory, examination of how we perceive the nature of time. A great topic but doesn’t quite support a whole book. Some good nuggets, though.

Even memories of unique, personally momentous events can fade. Most of what we do is forgotten. When we talk about the study of memory, really it should be the study of forgetting. Every day we experience hundreds of moments that we simply forget

Once again William James summed it up for us, ‘In general time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.’

The days are full of new experiences and while their parents rush them to school they want to take every opportunity to explore the world. They will stop and stare at workers digging up the road; they will pause to pat a dog; they will notice anything that’s different; they will try new things. Why walk along the pavement when you can hopscotch along avoiding the cracks in the paving stones or pick your way up and down the crenellations on a wall? This means that overall, despite a few slow hours where they’re forced to do something boring, on the whole days for children, just like ours on holiday, are all-absorbing, and packed with new memories which, looking back retrospectively, makes the months and years seem to stretch out.

If you feel you are someone who takes on too much (and this might not apply to you – I’m not saying everybody should turn down every request), then before you commit to an event later in the year, imagine it is happening next week. If it seems out of the question that you could fit it in, then ask yourself what steps you would need to take to be free to do it in six months’ time, remembering once again that you are unlikely to have more free time. By imagining it is next week you are more likely to consider the practical feasibility of the whole event,

Research has found that anticipation is associated with stronger emotions than remembering the past, so if we want to improve our well-being maybe we should pay less attention to the pleasures of nostalgia and more to anticipating positive events in the future.

‘Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.’ Tennessee Williams

3. The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Couldn’t make it far in this one. I enjoy random Alan Watts quotes but apparently couldn’t get into him in full length. My favorite paragraph of the little that I read:

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for pleasure is offset by the “ability” to dread pain and to fear the unknown.

4. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales. The premise of this book is captivating: when confronted with a life threatening situation, 90% of people freeze up and make horrible decisions (leading to death), 10% stay calm and survive. What do the 10% do exactly, and can we learn to do the same if we one day find ourselves in peril? Gonzales doesn’t deliver on the potential of this question, and it may not be his fault. What the 10% do is hard to concretely figure out (beyond obvious lessons like “Be decisive”), let alone really learn for yourself. The storytelling here is pretty good (and frequently tragic in nature). I read about half of the book before deciding to move on. Recommended for outdoorsmen or folks who find themselves braving the great outdoors regularly; for the lay reader it’s probably not worth it.

5. Empire Falls by Richard Russo. A modern classic. It’s a novel, though written 15 years ago, that resonates strongly in 2014 — it reveals how a small manufacturing town in America fares in an economy that no longer supports small manufacturing towns. Amidst a backdrop of economic malaise and a flight of the town’s best talent, Russo creates rich characters and a compelling social dynamic between them.

Max unzipped there and reflected that a good, long, soul-cleansing pee was something many men his age were incapable of. Once they turned seventy, they became leaky faucets with slow, incessant drips.

In the deepest sense, he hadn’t loved her. Not the way he’d intended to. Not as he’d sworn he would before God and family and friends, and this simple truth embarrassed him too deeply to allow for anything like analysis. No, he hadn’t loved her, and he didn’t know why. He also didn’t know what to call whatever it was that would’ve prevented him from telling her, even if he had known. If you didn’t call it love, what did you call the kind of affection that makes you want to protect someone from hurt? What was the name of the feeling that threatened to swamp him now, that made him want to take her in his arms and tell her that everything would be all right. If not love, then what?

but you were clever enough to avoid what you feared most, which was a poor crippled young woman, who was suicidally in love with you and whose pitiful devotion would’ve made your life one long, hellish exercise in moral virtue.”

My God, he couldn’t help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles’s heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

There’d still be a good television and one shitty one. The only difference was that what people had thought of as the good big one now would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last.

6. China Airborne by James Fallows. A brisk, fun report on the state of aviation in China, and what it says about China more generally. For airplane junkies only.

7. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. Some interesting nuggets here about how artists organize their day–when they wake up, how they work, when they take breaks, etc. It doesn’t take long before you re-learn that everyone is different. No, you don’t have to be a morning person to be an artist (thank God!). I didn’t feel like I needed to finish it. I liked this nugget:

“He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas. And that’s the way I work. And it’s marvelous, just wonderful, the relationship between working and copying.”