NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman

My mother was a genius. And her mom as well. They knew that children function better with consistent sleep. They knew that empty praise makes kids suspicious, while heartfelt, suitably rare praise fills them with pride. They made it clear that telling the truth was always much more important than the original misbehavior. They counseled patience and optimism with misbehaving but clearly bright young children: the kids would, and did, turn out just fine. They understood that self-discipline was a critical skill to impart to all children, misbehaving or otherwise.

So why do we need 300+ pages full of scholarly studies to tell us that?

Invisible by Paul Auster

Invisible is the perfectly constructed, tortuously complicated story of a psychopath and an incestuous brother (two different characters), mixed in with a number of airhead women who tolerate their ways. And it left me completely and absolutely cold. It turns out that I have great difficulty finding anything likable or even interesting in psychopaths or incestuous brothers, and admiring the construction of the novel or its writing just did not do it for me.

You’d be Pretty If by Dara Chadwick

The subtitle of You’d Be So Pretty If is Teaching our daughters to love their bodies — even when we don’t love our own, which should have been a clear warning sign that this book was not for me. Now I have daughters, two of them, but I’m not so sure mothers can, or should, attempt to teach their daughters to love their bodies. What does it mean to love one’s body, anyway? And, without taking away any of the powerful influence we must have on our daughters (hmm…) I can’t quite believe that body love or lack thereof is a mom-induced phenomenon. The author thinks so, and I quote “Our moms teach us what being a woman is all about, including the importance – or unimportance – of our appearance.” Not true for me and my mom,  and as for my daughters, I’m not so sure, having been told firmly by a certain young teenager just last week that her friends were a better source of advice than parents because they had similar experiences to hers. And in the frightening event that daughters do learn about body love exclusively from their moms,  I do wonder what mine are learning from me. Certainly not proper makeup application techniques. What if I scarred them for life?

OK, I did not think this book was worth reading — in case my opinion was unclear.

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Note to self: avoid books that include a reading group guide. Who writes these guides anyway? They are so simplistic and patronizing. The real problem is not the guide, naturally, but the likely pairing of said guide with fairly insipid novels,  The Wednesday Sisters being the second encounter for me in a few days (Bed and Breakfast is in the same category).

This book talks about a friendship between five young mothers and would-be writers that takes place in the late sixties near Stanford University where several of their husbands work. They don’t work, as the phrase go, except for raising their children, and raising them pretty much on their own since the husbands have demanding jobs. There’s plenty of interesting local history that rings true, including the beginning of Intel, the semiconductor company but the rest is tedious. Breast cancer, multiple miscarriages, a messy affair and divorce before divorce became common, all the expected tear jerkers are there, along with tedious friendship secrets and withheld information. If these women are so close to each other why don’t they admit to simple things, such as breast cancer? And the whole book is steeped into a severely heavy-handed treatment of how unliberated these smart, educated women are. It doesn’t ring very true for the period, and it’s so unsubtle!

Homer and Langley by E.L Doctorow

Homer & Langley tells the fictional story of two real brothers who died in a Fifth Avenue mansion filled with treasures and detritus after a lifetime of collecting, much of which spent cut off from the world, having dismissed the staff and rarely venturing out. One brother is blind and the other is nominally the crazy one, the one who accumulates the trash and clearly returned from his European tour of duty during World War I with emotional issues, but they start out with a rather normal lifestyle, even if it involves hosting  paying tea parties in their immense living room before moving a car into it, dismissing all the servants, and nursing a mafia don after a shootout.

The blind brother is an interesting character. While he does not have the paranoiac and compulsive tendencies of his brother he does not exactly go out of his way to get help or to escape, although he can and does get out of the house on his own. Perhaps because the changes are gradual he seems to accept each new delirious restriction as just another opportunity to play the piano a little more. I enjoyed the book very much for his depiction of how crazy can become a way of life.

Thinks by David Lodge

Thinks tells one story from two perspectives, that of a department chairman at the (fictional) university of Gloucester and of a female visiting professor, newly widowed. Their very different reactions to the same events are often amusing and the story that appears to be a simple affair at first turns out to be pleasantly tortuous but still doesn’t amount to much. Add to it a curiously passe description of computer systems (said systems being important to the story because the male protagonist is in charge of the Cognitive Science department where computers are at the center of the work) and a very tedious fixation of the same chairman on his every sex adventure, and there’s not much in the book left to enjoy.

The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew Cherlin

The state of marriage in the US today is interesting: we marry much more than people in other developed countries but we also divorce a lot more. Why? That’s what the author of The Marriage-Go-Round sets out to investigate. Armed with statistics, maps, and historical facts he shows how the cultural messages of “marriage is good for you” and “you must seek fulfillment” conflict, with sad results for married couples and especially the children who must adapt to frequent changes in their parents’ partners. It could be that our propensity for divorce is linked to our footloose attitude in general, since high incidences of divorce, long-distance moves, and even suicides seem to happen in the very same areas. Or is it simple economics, since college-educated couples seem to be much more likely than others to marry later but before having children and to stay married?

The marriage is good for you argument is not new: the citizens of Connecticut went as far as mandating marriage for all adults in 1636! But pushing people to marry doesn’t seem to work very well and our government should probably cease its efforts in that direction.

Books of the Month – October 2009

I found these two books to be close to perfect:

A Gate at the Stairs – a wonderfully well-told, intricate story of a college student with personal, job, and family traumas but grace throughout

Brown Round – the biography of a food critic with weight issues, a great family, and a sweet perspective on life

And two more, in case you have extra reading time (an extra hour this weekend!)

Strength in what remains: a harrowing but inspiring story of a Burundian refugee of genocide. Uneven but inspiring

Admission: a great story of an admission officer in a private college that sadly stoops into the incredible near the end (but I loved the beginning!)

The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

The Lost Art of Gratitude is the last installment in the Isabel Dalhousie series, reviewed here in the past. There’s a significant dearth of any significant mystery in this one, but the usual complement of charming toddler, perfect husband-to-be, and nefarious plotter. I found Isabel to philosophize a tad too systematically so I hope the next installment will combine more mystery and less philosophy.

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham

What came first? Humans or fire? Catching Fire argues that fire was required to cook food so we could absorb enough calories to expand energy on our big brains rather than our guts — and become liberated from the requirements to spend eight hours a day chewing. The author needs to use reasoned arguments because the fossil record simply does nor do a good job at demonstrating when cooking and fire were introduced, and probably never will. He is very convincing, and along the way shows how perhaps it’s soft food that makes us fat rather than the sheer quantity of it, and that the requirement for cooked food may have fostered women’s subservient role in society. Very interesting.