queenlyzard

*** 1195) "When You Are Engulfed In Flames" by David Sedaris

One of his better collections, in my opinion; surprisingly, it didn't contain a single story that grossed me out-- except maybe the one about keeping pet spiders, but still. Witty and fun, and I only wanted to smack him a few times.


*** 1196) "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

A book club book (shows you how far behind I am on my journaling-- I think I've listed three club books lately, and we only meet once a month!) This is a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir about a woman who loses her husband and has her daughter fall into a coma in the same year. It is a terribly honest and moving story of grief, love, and surviving heartbreak. Poignant.

"These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible." 75 This quote in particular struck me when I looked at the author's photo on the back cover-- she had that exact look in her eyes, so full of grief it was as though you could see straight into her.

"...many people I knew, whether in New York or California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own managerial skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice... Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them." 98 Oh, I know how that feels!

"...I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death./ And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame." 206

"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place./ I look for resolution and find none." 225

{1170-73}

I've been so busy reading every spare moment I never have time to write reviews anymore!

Oh hey, I think I'll start a new rating system too, since I'm getting more readers: books will be given 0-4 stars (*), instead of the previous 0-2.


Have some nonfiction.


*** 1170) "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

A wonderful (small) book in which Kincaid muses about her home island of Antigua, in her vivid, acerbic, insightful way. Funny and sad and wistful and angry all at once.


**** 1171) "A Primate's Memoir" by Robert Sapolsky

July's book club book. With Jewish humor and unflagging optimism, Sapolsky tells tales of his years in Africa studying baboons. Part science journal and larger part memoir/travelogue, this book is a joy to read despite the many frightful facts and events it covers. Through his stories, Sapolsky reminds us subtly that we, like his baboons, are strange primates whose behavior is often hard to comprehend.


*** 1172) "Alex and Me" by Irene Pepperberg

A sweet memoir about the bird who changed the world-- or at least made people think twice about the term "birdbrain." Alex was an African Grey parrot and Irene was his trainer and advocate. The book doesn't focus so much on their work as on the deep personal relationship the two formed over the years.

A caveat: I passed the book along to my roommate, who is a professional scientist, and she pretty much hated it. So-- not to be read from a scientifically critical standpoint (I don't think Pepperberg talked enough about her studies to judge them, but apparently a lot of her personal decisions-- turning down a teaching post and then complaining that she didn't have the funding to do her research, for examples-- are major faux-pas in the world of professional science. My roommate branded her a "kook"-- but I still have to recommend the book, if only as an animal lover's personal odyssey).


** 1173) "My Lobotomy" by Howard Dully

The story of Dully, a man who, at age 12, was given an "ice-pick lobotomy" at the request of a stepmother who found his behavior unmanageable. It is unclear from Dully's description of himself as a child whether he may have had ADHD or something similar-- honestly, he struck me as a normal, if somewhat rambunctious and mischievous, boy.

What is so strange to me is how little the lobotomy seems to have changed Dully, at least according to his own descriptions. He seems to have given up on himself as hopeless at that point and went through many years of delinquency, alcohol dependence, and assorted self-destructive behaviors-- but no more so than anyone who grew up in a broken and distant family. I think, oddly enough, that the psychological effect of what was done to him may have been worse than the physical effect on his brain-- although his life-long history of poor choices and impulsive behavior is certainly consistent with frontal lobe damage.

This is an interesting memoir, strange and disturbing at times, and often disturbing in its tone of normalcy and banality. Perhaps some of the flatness of the descriptions is, in fact, due to the lobotomy... and perhaps not. It's hard to tell. As someone with an interest in brain science, I found this very frustrating to read because it is truly a memoir, not a case study, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

After long years of researching his own history, and some heavy soul-searching, Dully at last is content in his life, and has realized that, in some ways, he is both better and worse off than others-- as are we all.

"That's true for everybody, I guess. We are all the victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and I'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.' " Amen!