Extreme Measures

This book is about Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.  He invented eugenics and statistics, amongst other things.  Martin Brookes wrote the book and it is well worth reading if only to see how much more dishonest we are now.  Galton was a racist and his idea of making the human race better- preventing criminals and idiots, amongst others from reproduciting- was horrifying.  H.G. Wells thought that criminals were some of the smartest people he knew.  He thought they were smarter than some judges.  Therefore, he disagreed with Galton.  Who knows who would make a good parent?  Galton didn't and he never became one himself.  Doesn't what you give your child after he is born mean as much as the genes you have given him?  Galton didn't think so.  It's one hundred and fifty years since Galton came up with eugenics.  As Brookes notes, a lot of people followed him, including thirty states in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s.  He was a proto-Nazi.  But I've been reading letters to the editor from people with Down syndrome children who say they get asked all the time why they didn't get the amneo that would tell them whether their child was going to have birth defects.  They say this with the child standing right there!  How much have we really changed?

Dick lit versus chick lit

Chick lit is a way to dismiss women readers, of course.  Dick lit is a way to laugh at men, who follow their penises everywhere, even into their intellectual endevours.  And what poor endevours those are, filled with laughable plot lines where the most-unlikely things happen with young women to the delight of the male readership.  Fantasy, said Freud, is a major part of every normal person's life.  Therefore, it's not surprising that literature should allow us to live in these places.  I've read one book that I would consider dick lit and that is a book by Ross MacDonald.  It was fantastic, but far too uninteresting.  I want my authors to get me closer to glory, which is all they wanted too.  If I can share in that glory, the fiction has succeeded.  I have delved more deeply into the human soul.  It's great books that put me in touch with the eternal.  I loved Ross MacDonald's book.  But I have to spend my time reading great literature.  I realize how pompous I sound; what I'm trying to sound is sincere.  I am happy about Prose's list because it doesn't just have the Russians, Irish, Canadians and Americans.  It has new writers too.

The end of reading

The New York Times says that people read these days to be social and to fit in with others who are reading the same books.  It also says that we are losing our ability to think deeply.  That we spend far too much time being interrupted by one kind of technology or another.  Either it is true that reading is an individual activity whose enthusiasm cannot be easily transferred to another or it is a communal activity that moves us more towards the hive mentality that one writer warned against of the Internet.  Does anyone have the patience to sit through an entire book?  A book takes hours!  We have only seconds!  Add to this the fact that, according to the same NYT article, people have no thirst for fictional constructions.  We want reality as much as possible.  Perhaps we are losing our imaginations.  When that happens- watch out!  Fascism will not be far off.

Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon"

Prose is right to say that you can learn to write by reading outside of your genre.  But it would seem more strange if someone was interested in writing non-fiction and therefore refused to read novels.  Or would it?  I've heard people- a person that Margaret Laurence might call a pioneer- say that they don't read novels because they're untrue and therefore distracting from the world as it is.  Of course, a novel is a lie that tells the truth.  West's writing is lively and it's no wonder that this book got on to the list.  I approached the book with reluctance, but was won over by the dedication which said: "to my friends in Yugoslavia who are now all dead or enslaved."  I like politics too and that doesn't hurt if you're going to read such a tome.  What are you reading?

Patricia Highsmith's bleak vision

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is devastating.  I'm encouraged by these stories because they're blunt.  Without getting too exaggerated about it, my writing is like them and a lot of people have said great things about her book: that it's existential and that it's not about crime where people get killed, but about being caught outside in your underwear.  Her imagination is boundless.  It makes me uncomfortable to read stories that I would dismiss as written by a curmudgeon in print.  I'm better than I think.  What are you reading?

Oh! The Noise!

It's hard to read a book like L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between."  There's far too much noise in my life.  Too much distraction from the quiet space within that all of us need in order to read such a devastating book.  Besides the fact that I'm on the subway.  And the damn station announcements, largely unnecessary, every two minutes.  The book is a coming-of-age story, as Kathleen Kirk says on her wonderful blog, Wait!  I have a blog?  It is a great book and I know why Francine Prose put it on her list of books.  It is another room that art has.  But it is not television.  There is nothing in it demanding to be paid attention too unless you can be very quiet inside.  I doubt I can be that quiet.  I'm off to read Patricia Highsmith's Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes now.  Prose mentions in passing that she spent a summer reading all of Highsmith's books, but she didn't put her on the list that she created.  I think Prose would admit that Highsmith too occupies one of the rooms of art.  What are you reading?

Sunday's the best day to read

A colleague said once that she couldn't read on a bus that was only going to be traveling for twenty minutes; she needed more time.  Our weekends are now as busy as our weekdays, but, if you get up early enough, you can have time for reading.  I am reading Turgenev's "First Love" before I sleep and it is luminous.  Unlike Alcott, it is filled with light.  I guess that's the thing about Prose's list: it includes all of life, children's books too.  Which I usually like.  Prose wrote a book for children that I like, for example.  What are you reading?