Statute of Frogs

A little late to the party, perhaps, but following in the footsteps of divine angst and Yayarolly (and apparently pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere), I’m picking up on the “most unread at LibraryThing meme.” The list below is the books most often tagged “unread” at LibraryThing.¹ Like all such lists, it points out my embarrassing lack of attention to the classics in my reading. I actually do reasonably well on the recent ones. In any case, ones I’ve read on my own are bold, ones I read for school are underlined. Others have italicized ones they started by never finished. I didn’t have any in that category. Perhaps I’ll turn my attention to picking some of these off over the summer.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury
Memoirs of a Geisha
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver’s Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela’s Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince
Watership Down
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

1. I believe they’re ordered by proportion of listed copies tagged “unread.” [↩]

This is depressing. According to a new survey, one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year and the average American read only four books. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. When I was a software consultant, most of my colleagues weren’t readers. But nearly all of them read at least occasionally.

One of the ways in which my new career is a better fit is that I’m more likely to be surrounded by people who read. But I find it hard to imagine how people who don’t read spend their time. And I shouldn’t be too dismissive. Maybe those people who don’t read books read several newspapers every day or something. But I’m dubious.

UPDATE: A less depressing (and pleasingly snarky) view of the survey is here.

I was very excited when I heard that Saira Rao was publishing a novel based on her clerkship experience. Not only did this promise to be a dishy novel about clerking (a subject near and dear to my heart), but it takes place in my courthouse, so I was sure to recognize familiar people and surroundings. The results, however, were most disappointing.

Though I question her judgment (it’s hard to believe that any law firm would even think of hiring her at this point and I’m shocked by the number of firms that are hosting readings), I have no ethical or philosophical problem with Rao’s decision to write a tell-all novel about her clerkship experience. (Scott Burris does, however, make a good point about how difficult it is for Judge Sloviter, for whom Rao clerked, to avoid being tarred by her broad brush.) But if I’m going to devote my time to a book, it should (at a minimum) either make me think or entertain me. Chambermaid does neither.

First, Rao’s narrator and heroine (cleverly named Sheila Raj to avoid any possibility that she might be understood as having anything in common with the author) is an unlikeable companion in every way. (I will make no attempts to compete with James Grimmelmann’s characterization of her as a “raving narcissist,” which is particularly apt. He also supports this contention with some representative samples of her unpleasantness, which serve to give you a feel for the experience.) Before the end of the first chapter, I was already tired of spending time in her company. To make matters worse, because we see everything through her eyes (and she doesn’t like any of it), it is difficult to develop any empathy with anyone in the book (except maybe the poor saps who have to endure Sheila’s company).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Chambermaid’s characters bear no resemblance to real people. They don’t remind you of people you know (thank God), they don’t respond believably to their surroundings, and they don’t grow or change in a realistic way. Because this is a first-person narrative, we’re hamstrung by Sheila’s inability to understand those around her. She doesn’t pick up on any of the nuances that would make them seem like real people, so she’s unable to share them with us.

Finally, the book is full of moments that just make you wrinkle your forehead and wonder how this can have been written by someone who’s been through this process. We’re expect to believe, for example, that Sheila has graduated law school and been hired as a federal clerk without ever having come across the term en banc. And that she only realizes on her first day that she needs a good suit. (What, I wondered as I read this, did she wear to her interview? Or, for that matter, her first day of work?) Individually these moments aren’t such a big deal, and they exist to serve the plot, but they start to wear on a reader, particularly given that only lawyers (and, in particular, clerks) are likely to be interested in this book at all. The most egregious is that Sheila seems to work on only a single case for her entire clerkship. Although we are treated to vague references to how much work there is, we never actually see her do anything except work on the death penalty case that forms the centerpiece of the plot.

All of this might be forgiveable (or might well go unnoticed) if the book were funny. But it’s not. I didn’t laugh. (I might have smiled once.) It was occasionally gross, and frequently over-the-top, but never actually funny. And so, in the end, it served no purpose at all. Oh well…at least it was a quick read. If you’re going to waste my time, at least do it quickly.

I’ve been eager to read this ever since I heard Linda Greenhouse speak earlier this year. I wasn’t disappointed. This book succeeds because of the combination of Greenhouse’s unparalleled ability to write about the complex issues before the court in a way that’s easy to understand and the amazing resource that Justice Harry Blackmun left to the Library of Congress when he died.

Blackmun seems to have kept every piece of paper that ever passed through his office. The collection includes everything from drafts of opinions (both Blackmun’s and those circulated by the other justices) to the notes that the justices pass back and forth across the bench during oral arguments. Greenhouse uses them to create a fascinating portrait both of the Court and of Justice Blackmun himself. And she does it, as she generally does in the New York Times, without getting in the way of the story.

This book gives at least as much insight into the workings of the Court as Edward Lazarus’ Closed Chambers without the sense of airing dirty laundry that I got from that book.  Certainly there’s dirty laundry here, but there’s nothing sensational about the way Greenhouse portrays it and, unlike Lazarus, she doesn’t seem to be seeking out the dark side of the Court’s operation.

The book has enough detail so that, as someone with legal training, I don’t feel like the story’s been dumbed down, but it’s not so full of legal minutiae as to make it only interesting to lawyers.  In short, Greenhouse displays the same skill at being clear without being simplistic that has made her such an excellent Supreme Court correspondant for so many years.

More catching up, since I finished this a couple weeks ago, but here it is. My father sent this book as a birthday gift. I was very excited to read it because, although I haven’t seen the movie yet, I saw the previews and the movie looked like lots of fun. I was disappointed in the book, though. Although reading about the parrots was sometimes entertaining, Bittner’s style kept getting in my way.

For example, the book opens with 30 or 40 pages describing how Bittner comes to be living on Telegraph Hill. It is, in theory, an interesting story (and it is, I believe the subject of his next book), but it’s not why I’m reading. I want parrots. Also, he has a tendency to anthropomorphize the parrots more than I’m comfortable with. I’m sure he knows them really well, but he attributes to them relatively complex emotions and/or understanding that I found somewhat implausible. Perhaps it’s the nascent lawyer in me, but if he’s going to describe a parrot’s thought process in the face of its own imminent death, I want some evidence.
Though I almost always prefer books, I suspect that this subject matter works better as a movie. The best thing about the preview was, of course, watching the parrots. I find their movements fascinating and loved the shots of them all gathering around Bittner on the balcony. There’s a fair amount of description of the parrots’ behavior in the book, but the prose simply isn’t vibrant enough (I’m not sure anyone’s would be) to really help me see it. So I kept finding myself wishing for a picture. I’m still looking forward to the movie, but the book was disappointing.

Just finished “The Well of Lost Plots,” the third of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. I really love these books. They’re full of the sort of geeky, literary humor that makes me laugh out loud and feel smug at the same time. Well of Lost Plots is no exception: it’s got an anger management counselling session with the characters of Wuthering Heights, several outbreaks of the mispeling vyrus, and the villain from The Squire of High Potternews (say it out loud a few times…if that doesn’t work, think Pythagoras).

This book deals with Thursday Next’s apprenticeship with Jurisfiction, the police force of the book world. They’re responsible for investigating all sorts of literary crime: characters who are trying to change their stories, infestations of grammasites, the plot device black market, and the theft of all the punctuation from the last chapter of Ulysses. Miss Havisham and the Cheshire Cat are back along with several new characters, both from real books and from made up ones. Fforde’s conception of the Book World, which sometimes seemed a bit vague in the first two books, is now fully formed and wonderfully inventive. Unfortunately, this book isn’t as tightly plotted as the previous ones, so it sometimes seems like there’s not much holding all the puns and literary references together. It gets going at the end, but I wanted a bit more of a story to keep it all moving. Still, none of that is going to keep me from going out and getting the next one, Something Rotten.