3. "Snark," by David Denby (2009)

All throughout this slim volume, I found myself nodding at one of David Denby's points or shaking my head at the next debasing example of snark he had retrieved. It'd be easy to draw a thought-bubble above Denby's author photo and write, "Get off my lawn!" but the fact is that he's right. Snark is a dead-end, and it's about time someone diagnosed it. Whether Denby succeeds is another matter.

My own rudimentary definition of snark has always been that it's insult simply for the sake of insulting, without some aspiration for social change (satire) or to expose hypocrisy (irony), and that there's never a standard to which its practitioners hold themselves to. It's easy to make fun of everything, but without some idea of what you actually do like, those insults just become hollow and exhausting, and, most of all, every bit as predictable as the people snarkers rail against. If you like something, that means you stand to be judged by X amount of other people, and the snark generation is paranoid of being judged.

Denby, to some extent, covers all of those points, and yet I'm totally underwhelmed by his book as a whole. He does a nice job giving us a primer of snark's history, and he competently identifies snark as a growing problem. But we all know this. Who's going to disagree that what Denby defines as snark has become the prevailing tone of our generation? It's everywhere. Seinfeld, (whose motto, recall, was "No hugging, no learning"), feels almost quaint these days. But snark relies on words, and words are just the expression of deeper feelings and motivations. As such, this book feels like half an argument, with the psychic and more lasting implications of snarky behavior left for another author.

2. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," by Muriel Spark (1961)

When I told people this week I was reading Muriel Spark's famous story, most of them replied that they remembered the movie, notably Maggie Smith's iconic, Oscar-winning performance. It's not hard to see a younger, more conniving Professor McGonagall in this role, that of a spinster-ish teacher of a cult of six girls, trying to mold them into her image until one of them betrays her.

I had a hard time getting into this book. The prose is drier-than-dry and (deliberately) repetitive, and, let's be honest: in the nearly 50 years since this book's publication, how many off-the-wall teachers with unorthodox methods have we been exposed to? Then I read this paragraph:

It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls' education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie's special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. "It is for the sake of you girls -- my influence, now, in the years of my prime." This was the beginning of the Brodie set. (p.39)

I think up to this point I was happy to play along with the idea that Miss Brodie was just a loopy, self-absorbed, and altogether lonely woman -- but ultimately harmless. But with that excerpt, the novel takes a much darker turn: what she really wants is a cult of sycophants, little versions of herself. And to what end? This is a woman who possesses only a facile understanding of fascism -- she sees the low unemployment and clean streets of Mussolini's Italy but pays no mind to the tyranny behind them -- and likely enjoys that same feeling of power with her girls. What is fueling her Messianic complex?

What's interesting about the novel is that even though she's unquestionably the focal character, Jean Brodie remains an enigma. We know her only through her actions and her memorable turns of phrase ("For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like" being my favorite). The novel truly belongs to her cadre of girls, and in the second half, almost exclusively to the girl who betrays her.

All of which is to say is that the story is nothing if not an unsettling mystery. Don't be surprised if you read it, begin something else, but still find your thoughts creeping back. It's a grower.

In Which I Lay Out the Game Plan

There's every possibility I'll come to regret writing this, but I hope that by doing so, I'll commit myself more than if it's just a notion in my head. In setting out a reading goal for 2010, I knew there were a couple bullet points I definitely wanted to reach: that I would begin reading more books by women* and I'd try more authors I've never read before rather than just the old standbys. And read more than the 50 books I read last year.

But how many more? I thought 75 was a good number, but I already did that in 2007. Why not raise the stakes? So in a possible kamikaze move, I have decided to read 100 books, and use this blog to document my efforts. Why? Who the hell knows. But it'll be fun.**

100 books: that's an average of 8 1/3 books a month, or just less than a book every four days. I read steadily, but not so steadily where I can polish off one literary heavyweight after the other every 3-4 days.*** Besides, I have to account for longer books and occasional funks where I can't get into anything. So I kind of have to cheat a little -- well, not cheat so much as recognize my own limitations and adjust accordingly -- and acknowledge that the only way to reach 100 is by reading a steady diet of YA books and airport fiction. I'm not as well versed in good YA fiction as I am in adult fiction, so any recommendations are welcome.****

Let's start the insanity.

*By which I mean authors like Marilynne Robinson or Jhumpa Lahiri rather than Sophie Kinsella. Nothing against Sophie Kinsella.
**Or some facsimile thereof.
*** Which kind of goes against the spirit of good reading, anyway. Unless you read nothing but junk (and why would you want to do that?), how would you find the time to actually think about what you read? Letting a good story roll around your head for a while feels like an essential component of the reading experience, yet it's what mercenary reading (like the woman who reads a book a day) can't allow.
****Harry Potter is still another couple years away. Twilight is another lifetime away. Find me something else.

"Looking for Calvin and Hobbes," by Nevin Martell (2009)

(This is a review I posted on my Goodreads account last year; I dutifully re-post it here.)

As someone who considers Calvin and Hobbes to be one of his very favorite things, I breezed through this biography with expectations that in retrospect I know had no business being so lofty. Anyone familiar with C&H knows that Bill Watterson has chosen not to be a public figure and has not bastardized his creation with countless knockoffs; it's part of the mystique of the strip which consequently has a purity that I assume is why so many people continue to revere it. So the idea that we needed...more As someone who considers Calvin and Hobbes to be one of his very favorite things, I breezed through this biography with expectations that in retrospect I know had no business being so lofty. Anyone familiar with C&H knows that Bill Watterson has chosen not to be a public figure and has not bastardized his creation with countless knockoffs; it's part of the mystique of the strip which consequently has a purity that I assume is why so many people continue to revere it. So the idea that we needed a biography of its creator was a noble but inherently flawed endeavor.

The main problem with this book is its subject. How do you write a biography of someone who won't talk to you and has not provided a copious public record for you to wade through? Obviously, you then have to go to people who know Watterson, but even that proves frustrating here, since most of the interviewees either remark on how little they actually know Watterson or offer boilerplate "Watterson is a genius" praise. And no matter how well-intentioned it is, interviewing Watterson's mother unsettled me a bit.

As it is, Martell relies on what interviews Watterson has given to a handful of newspapers and the commentary he's offered in his books. But anyone who's reading this book is likely a C&H fan who owns the books and has seen these opinions already. Including them here doesn't illuminate Watterson as a subject; it just makes Martell a dutiful transcriber. There's also the writing style, which struck me as too conversational to really take seriously.

Ultimately, this book is a big-hearted but doomed hagiography of one of the most cherished artistic achievements of my generation. I applaud Martell for his efforts and I have no doubt his heart is in the right place, but I'm not sure I know anything about Watterson that I didn't know before.

1. "Paper Towns," by John Green (2008)

I grant you that this book is essentially a rewrite of Green's first novel, "Looking for Alaska," which won a bunch of awards and turned Green into a YA sensation. Judging from the synopsis of his second novel, "An Abundance of Katherines," it seems that "Paper Towns" is yet another variation on the themes there as well.

I grant you that this story comes perilously close to succumbing to the "Juno" syndrome, where all the teens are too witty by half and seem to possess uncanny amounts of wisdom, which they dispense in well-timed morsels.

I grant you that the target of the protagonist's quixotic journey is a cipher, a girl given far too much credit when what she really is is just immature.

I grant you that the main character unspools a faux-poetic monologue near the end that is both overlong and borderline ludicrous.

I grant all those things and yet I still enjoyed the hell out of this book. Maybe I'm just feeling charitable with the New Year, but I turned my grizzly critic's switch off about halfway through and just went along for the ride. Green absolutely needs to begin branching out in future novels, but for now, he's written at least two really good ones.