Teaser Tuesdays: The Victorians by A.N. Wilson

I'm joining in the bookish meme hosted by MizB of the Should Be Reading blog and posting what I'm reading today. My wordpress skills are not up to the formatting of MizB or Julia, so forgive me. But my reading at the moment, continuing my recent return to giant nonfiction tomes, is The Victorians by A.N. Wilson. It's one of those grabbag compendium popular histories -- I'm only 88 pages in but it seems to jump around a lot. I suspect I'll learn quite a bit by the time I finish though I'm dubious about how much I'll retain. I've read the first two volumes of James/Jan Morris' Victorian trilogy -- Heaven's Command and Pax Britannica -- and the only thing I remember is that the Brits got slaughtered in Afghanistan trying to get through the Khyber Pass.

Anyway here's the random excerpt:

" The Queen had been in effect an only child -- though she had a half-sister she was brought up as a solitary, uncertain of her mother's love and yet monarch of all she surveyed. ... Neither from parent nor from first-born son could the consolations of affection be found, nor the even more deeply consoling qualities of dependability, obedience, affection for her whims."

Dave Eggers and the power of positive thinking; Or, I'm a believer

At the Miami Book Fair over the weekend, I saw Dave Eggers talk. I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t read any of his books – though I did read (and love) the original New Yorker piece that became his first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And I’ve been a big fan of his publishing enterprises – I was a charter subscriber to The Believer and I like McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, especially the awesome lists. So I figured it would be interesting to hear him talk.

And it was – he was very engaging in describing the 826 Writing and Tutoring Centers, which offer writing help to schoolkids in several cities around the country (with a retail storefront offering, depending on the location, pirate supplies, superhero crimefighting tools, time travel supplies, etc.). He read some funny letters from the upcoming I Live Real Close To Where You Used to Live, kids' letters to Michelle Obama and a sequel of sorts to the entertaining Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country, kids’ letters to President Obama. I really liked hearing him talk about Zeitoun, his most recent book that describes the experiences of a Syrian immigrant (and successful businessman, and husband and father) in New Orleans after Katrina, where he canoed around the city helping stranded people and dogs – until he was picked up by federal authorities who decided he was a terrorist.

The amazing thing, though, about Eggers – besides his seemingly infinite energy and capacity to juggle a multitude of disparate projects – is his positive attitude. I don’t mean he’s positive in a stupid, Pollyanna-ish way, of the variety promoted by self-help books like The Secret and ridiculed by detractors like Barbara Ehrenreich in “Brightsided.” Eggers deals with some tough issues – the early deaths of his parents, or the plight of a young man from the Sudan, or Zeitoun. To name a couple. But he manages to do it without anger or bitterness, and to be positive without being pious. This is a remarkable skill and I sure wish we had more of it around. Snark is fun – I adore The Daily Show and all. But relentless negativity is a drag, especially of the Eeyore variety – the "woe is me, everything was so much better in the old days, texting/digital publishing/television/the internet are leading to the end of civilization" variety. I get it, change is unsettling and there’s some stuff about the old days you miss. Me, too. But when people are wallowing in nostalgia or bitching about change, I always cringe – because the old days were not always great, at least not for a lot of people, and I think a lot of the new stuff is pretty great, whether it’s being able to communicate and share information of all sorts on Facebook or the ability to read and publish blogs from all kinds of people all over the place or to hear directly from Margaret Atwood or Neil Gaiman or Nancy Pearl on Twitter. On the whole, I like the world we’re entering – and even if I didn’t, I would be free to opt out and stick with paper (after all, there is still plenty of it still around and even plenty still being produced). What you get by being bitter and angry all the time is … being bitter and angry all the time. Eggers has obviously figured out that’s pointless -- or at least not very rewarding. I, for one, appreciate that – so much that, at the Book Fair, I resubscribed to The Believer.

We become the Bone Island Bike Blog

There's been a lot of talk about bikes around Key West recently. Much of this talk was from a local weekly newspaper, which has railed for months against the dangers posed by "scofflaw bicyclists." The police department, obligingly, launched a special enforcement effort aimed at bikes to curb wrong-way riding, running red lights, etc. As someone who both rides and drives, I'm all for the enforcement. However. I was very concerned about the city taking sides in the bike versus car battles that take place on the streets every day. Then the sexton got into the act, locking the Frances Street gate to the City Cemetery. I don't ride through the cemetery much -- I live on a street that is midway along the cemetery, so riding through shoots me a couple blocks out of my way. But I felt strongly enough about the hasty and unilateral decision to go down and speak at a City Commission meeting (where a vote to re-open the gate failed, 5-2). So my latest Letter From Key West, for WLRN's Under the Sun program, is about that. (The photo, by the way, is of my grandfather Douglas Grafflin -- he's the one on the right, acting goofy -- and his older brother, Don. Since I posted this photo on Facebook last night, I have learned a bunch of interesting family facts: Uncle Don left college to join a barnstorming flying circus as a mechanic. And three out of my four great-grandfathers belonged to cycling clubs, which must have been in the late 19th or very early 20th centuries).

Completely unrelated addendum: This is a much-deserved Google bombing link to the name Judith Griggs. You don't have to follow it or do anything -- as I understand it, the existence of the link is what matters -- but if you're curious about why I should do such a thing, there's more info here.

Catching up

You know what's really cool about finding a series you like after it's started? You can gobble the books up ... none of this waiting around for a year or two for the author to produce the next installment (maybe that's why people like James Patterson and Stuart Woods so much -- you only have to wait around for a month or two!). But I digress. This week, I unfortunately caught up to C.J. Sansom with the fourth installment of his Matthew Shardlake series, Revelation. Fortunately I don't have to wait that long -- the fifth title, Heartstone, is due out this fall. This situation is especially frustrating because this series just keeps getting better, in my estimation. Maybe I'm just getting fonder of the characters or more familiar with the milieu but Sansom is doing a great job keeping up the intrigue and filling in the setting of London late in the reign of Henry VIII. This time, Shardlake is called in to help investigate a serial killer (a couple centuries before that term existed) -- mostly the debate between the characters is whether the killer is mad or possessed by the devil. Either way it's a scary chase involving Shardlake's friends, household and of course himself. I'm going to give this one -- the only in the series you can get from the Monroe County Library collection (we have it in print and audio) -- an A, or 4 stars out of 5. But I recommend starting from the beginning of the series, with Dissolution, the first in the series -- you can buy the earlier titles or do like I did, and order them from interlibrary loan.

A couple other quick links while I have your attention. Keys residents should check out our newly redesigned library website -- and a darn sight prettier it is, too! It also includes some book recommendations from staff throughout the Keys -- you look under "books and more" and then "staff favorites." Also I've done some revising to the links on this site -- new additions include Citizen Reader, a kickass book blog from a librarian who appears to read even more than I do and Flashlightworthy Books, a cool site of book lists. I find this especially handy for book recommendations in genres about which I know next to nothing, such as slipstream and steampunk.

Happy reading!

More than 140 characters on recent reading

First of all, I did finish Elif Batuman's The Possessed and I intend to review it for Solares Hill so no review type copy here except to say that I liked it very very much and give it an A. Or four out of five stars if that's the system I wind up going to, which I might. Maybe even four and a half. After finishing that I started on Neil Gaiman's American Gods ... and started following the One Book One Twitter experiment on Twitter. I'm not going to go into the reasons I resisted then finally caved to Twitter -- David Carr does that far better than I in this piece from the New York Times. I don't think it will supersede Facebook in my online life -- most of my friends and family are on Facebook; I hardly know anyone who Twitters. I signed up for a bunch of book-related feeds and will use it for local stuff. (Hey Key West Citizen -- it's great you guys have a Twitter feed and all, but I think the point of Twitter is that you post to it occasionally -- as of this writing the most recent post is 11 days old -- that's not very, um, newsy.) I am starting to get the protocols, with feeds and hashmarks etc. though I still feel like a blundering ignoramus in danger of making an online fool of myself. But I can see its appeal and think it might even be a good exercise for someone like me, who has a tendency to think I must be up on all things all the time. That's impossible on Twitter and good thing, too -- so you just check in, see what others are saying and maybe follow a couple interesting links.

As far as a reading/literary experience goes ... well, it's not a coherent conversation of any kind, that's for sure. More like dropping into a big cocktail party where you don't know anyone but everyone's pretty friendly, and eavesdropping and engaging in a couple quick exchanges. Is that edifying? I'm not sure. It's kind of fun. I can't say I've gotten any big insights into the book from any of the posts that I've read. But I'm grateful to the people who made this happen because 1) they finally got me to read American Gods and 2) now I finally have a rudimentary understanding of Twitter.

I can see that for others, including Neil Gaiman, Twitter is an important part of their lives. I don't know that it will ever become an important part of mine. And I really would like to resist Yet Another Online Timewaster. But it's been an interesting introduction.

The bird pictured here, in case anyone was wondering and didn't already know, is a Northern Mockingbird, Florida's state bird and the primary twitterer of local environs. Recently, many people I know have been complaining about this bird twittering outside their windows early in the morning. Personally I don't mind that but don't like it when they divebomb you because they think you're too close to their nests.