Book #38: Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly

I have been reading several baby/pregnancy books lately, but I didn't really feel like it was necessary to include What to Expect While You're Expecting or The Essential Guide to Breastfeeding in this list of books I've read. Somehow, I don't really think they count. But this book definitely counts--it's not just a list of steps on how to avoid the first-trimester nausea, but it's advice and thoughts and reflections on motherhood from the author to a younger friend throughout her friend's pregnancy. My friend Angela kindly sent me this book through the mail to California and I just got the chance to read it yesterday, and loved it.

Beth Ann Fennelly is a poet and a poetry teacher living in Mississippi, and she really is an incredible writer. She uses amazing metaphors and words sprinkled throughout the book--it just makes me happy to read really beautiful writing every once in a while. It reminded me of the reading I went to with all the MFA students at NCSU at the end of the school year: they were all so talented and so thoughtful with the individual words they used and the rhythms of the sentences they wrote out--you could really tell that everything in their poems or stories were the results of a conscious decision and not just a random choice or laziness. I'd like to be a writer like that someday, but it obviously takes a lot more work than I put into writing right now. I guess a blog is a great place to practice, so I might as well work on that right here!

Besides the writing, though, I really liked getting the perspective and the advice that Fennelly was offering to her friend. It seemed more real than what you get out of other pregnancy books, even though it was just based on her personal perspective and experience more than what doctors think. And I think that's what makes it so valuable. I want to to get more personal advice like this, from people I actually know and who care for me, like friends and family. I'd rather get advice and well-wishes and good thoughts and vibes than presents, actually. We can buy any of the baby clothes and pacifiers we need; we can't buy the experience that everyone else has that we will desperately need.

Book #37: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Ann Patchett is a beautiful writer. I don't know what exactly caught me about this book, but I really became so engrossed in it, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day. I started this book yesterday and couldn't put it down (except when we were leaving for the evening) and finished it this morning.

The storyline is basically that there's a group of rich and famous people gathered together in someone's house for a party in some South American country, and then the party is interrupted and taken over by terrorists. They take everyone hostage so that they can make demands of the government, but don't kill anyone. Then a standoff begins between the terrorists and the government that lasts for four and a half months--the hostages and the terrorists living side-by-side, as guards and prisoners, but slowly getting to know each other and finding common ground. One of the hostages is an amazing, world-class opera singer, and her music and the beauty of the music is a huge theme throughout the book--it brings these two totally separate groups together on numerous occasions. I loved Patchett's descriptions of the music and everyone's reactions to it--everyone, all the uneducated teenage terrorists and the wealthy corporate giants, are affected by it and feel the music so strongly. Patchett does a good job of making you feel attached to and familiar with a huge number of different characters--you hear their perspectives and their backgrounds, and even if it's only a paragraph or two, you end up getting to know many more people than you might in another story.

Not to give a big spoiler, but Patchett pretty much does it herself: I thought it was interesting how Patchett pretty much gives away the whole storyline in the first few pages. After describing how the terrorists came in to the party, she says something like, "All the guests at the party were sure they were about to be shot and killed, when in reality it was the terrorists who would be killed in the end." Why did she give that away? Because that part of the story doesn't come until the last three pages, after you're attached to many of the terrorists who are really just young kids and human beings and can't believe the cruelty of the people killing them. I'm not sure if she was just testing to see if you're paying attention, or maybe she thinks you won't believe it as the story progresses and everyone gets so close.

Book #36: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

I picked this book up from the bookshelf in the apartment we're renting for the summer. The guy who lives here has a surprisingly large collection of books, which made me happy when we moved in. (Actually, a lot of them are movie scripts, which helped us to conclude that he's probably an aspiring screenwriter--fitting for someone living in LA.) I saw this one and vaguely remembered hearing about it, and then saw the "Pulitzer Prize-winner!" on the front cover and decided to take the time to read it. And it DID take a lot of time--that's why it's been so long in between posting. It's not a quick read by any means, but it really was fascinating.

Diamond's overall thesis is that the way that our world is set up now--with European and Asian societies dominant over African, Polynesian, and other native American societies--is due to environmental considerations that affected how those countries developed. He's basically trying to write the anti-racist explanation for why white people are in charge, and arguing against all those people who say it's because Aboriginal Australians are just lesser forms of human beings.

For example, we can look at the conquest of the Americas by the Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Diamond claims that there are a number of historical developments that supported Europe in being the overwhelming society instead of the overwhelmed. For example, Europe had much earlier domestication of plants with many more domesticable species, which in turn allows for larger populations and more complex societies. They also had thirteen of the fourteen major species of large domesticable animals on the Eurasian continent, which enabled them to develop better farming techniques and therefore better technology--and also to develop stronger immunity to the germs and epidemic diseases that wiped out most of the native Americans. Eurasia is also a mostly east-west continent, which made for easier transport and dispersion of food and trade between groups. So Eurasia developed more quickly in those elements, developing more complex societies with technology and literacy. And the Americas are exactly the opposite. So it's no wonder that they were DESTROYED when the Europeans came in (scientists estimate that there were MILLIONS of native Americans in the Americas before the Europeans came over, and over 95% of them were killed by the epidemic diseases brought with the Europeans. CRAZY.) There's way more I could include here, but that's a small summary of the whole book.

Diamond writes in a VERY scientific way, very methodically--he always sets up lists that he goes through in full throughout each chapter, which really appealed to me as an obsessive list-user. It did get a little repetitive by the end, but I don't think that was his fault, because he had to keep referring back to all the proofs and explanations he offered earlier in the book as he went through the case studies he gives at the end. All in all, it was a really interesting book that I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in world history.

Book #35: Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

This is officially the third time I've read this book--but I just keep loving it. Tommy and I started listening to it in the car on our drive across the country, and only just finished it as we drove to and from Fresno to visit his grandma this weekend. I don't know how we left a month in the middle of our reading, except that we'd already listened to it before and knew how it was ending--it's very intense and really gets your excitement. I've only read one other Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan book (the South American drugs one) but every time I read one, I want to read more. They're so easy to get sucked in by and to get really invested in. Even though they're reasonably long, they're quick reads and have a lot of interesting insights about the CIA and government operations (even though it's fiction of course). It's generally not quite so fight-y/gory as the Bourne books either.

One thing I kept laughing about is how Clancy gives some of the WORST metaphors to describe things. He always says stuff like "His face was that of a man who had escaped a load of fear and shame," or something like that. HOW does that help me visualize what that man's face looked like? What the heck does that face even LOOK like? That's the worst description ever--it's just stating exactly what just happened and not bothering to be creative about it. He had a pretty good one later in the book though--something like, "He smiled like a lion surveying a pack of crippled antelope." Now THAT'S an image I can be interested in. Good work there, Clancy--keep up the attempts at being more creative.