books books books

I came in just shy of finishing 100 books in 2018. It wasn't a goal, but I was surprised how much I did read, and some of it took a while, like The Tide, A Perfect Red, and perhaps the longest-running, "great for small increments at bedtime," Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History. So far, nothing compares to Moby-Dick for great literature to put me to sleep. (Robinson Crusoe might, but I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs. Maybe 2019 sees me trying again.)

I started in on audiobooks a bit, for the times when I can't focus my eyes, or I'm doing something else (driving, dog-walking) and need something different than podcasts. The clear winners here were The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft, and various Conan the Barbarian writings by Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft, for all his reputation of writing in the vein of "O, but it is so cosmically horrible I cannot describe it," actually goes ahead and describes it, quite well. The Conan works are also pleasantly surprising, and once you adjust for the era and medium--he was writing in the 30s for pulps like Weird Tales and Oriental Stories, not angling for a Pulitzer--it's easy to see where Howard's avowed feminism shows up. I'm also revisiting Christopher Moore's work as audiobooks, starting with Practical Demonkeeping.

Reading in 2018 was a path for growth, but also an escape from anxiety, and work, and work-provoked anxiety. I've got a lot of stuff to do this year, internally and externally. We'll see what happens.

long-term reading.

I finished Moby-Dick a while back, and I've been a bit at loose ends trying to find something to replace it. I tried Don Quixote, but it turns out Moby-Dick's "stultifying, yet brilliant" character (1851) is quite unusual, and if Cervantes has that quality in Spanish--not likely, in 1605--he definitely loses it in English.

Sorting my e-book collection by word count, I've had Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire teed up for a while: at 1.3 million words, published starting in 1776, it's the biggest book I have, so the obvious candidate. The somewhat awe-inspiring hitch has been that I upload e-books to the Kindle service, so my page location syncs across the 3 devices I read on, but...the Kindle service won't accept anything bigger than 50 megabytes for upload, and the complete Gibbon is 58 megabytes.

I finally realized that:

• My e-book files are all in uncomplicated pure-text formats, so it's not like trying to parse a Microsoft Word document;
• All my books are in Calibre, which is not user-friendly, but does do almost anything you want; and
• I'm a huge nerd and this just isn't a hard problem.

 (Calibre's user-hostility is proverbial. One example is that you can assign a book to a series, like Harry Potter, and you can assign a number within the series, like "1," except that instead of a boring integer like "1," you can use a real number, like "1.4," according to whatever scheme you prefer to use: publishing order, chronological order, both, whatever. Calibre doesn't judge. I myself did designate some book as number 0.6 for some reason, but that's more power than most people want to deal with.)

Naturally, Calibre has a Split plugin, which seamlessly split apart the three volumes into manageable bits. Then comes the weird part.

It's a really good book.

I don't mean that in a "there's footnotes with obsolete vocabulary and if you squint and place it in its proper historical context it's a lot less boring" kind of way. I mean that in a "this prose must have been sent back to 1781 from the future" kind of way. My only comparable experience is with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, and one of the best science fiction books ever written). It's enough to start you thinking that all those people writing centuries of boring prose were actually bad writers, when they were probably like postmodernist scholars, imprisoned in an authorial Purgatory where they only get tenure if they use an incomprehensible writing style.

Seriously, though, Gibbon's writing is so approachable that I think its mystical aura I absorbed as a child came from never having seen it, and from adults overawed by the effort necessary to write what amounts to several PhD dissertations back-to-back, albeit without having to deal with Professor Jerkface on the Dissertation Board who's now rejected the thing, for the fifth time, with the same helpful comment "Too many semicolons; they tell the reader you don't believe in your topic."

Caveats!

1. We know waaaaay more about the ancient world than Gibbon did. Topping the list of academic disciplines that would have knocked his socks off: archeology! Also anthropology, sociology, paleobiology, psychology, and quantum mechanics. Also feminism.
2. I've traipsed through Roman history 3-4 times now: the podcasts The Ancient World and (surprise) The History of Rome, Anthony Everitt's The Rise of Rome, Christopher Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome, and maybe one or two others. I have a decent sense of where Gibbon has probably been superseded.
3. I am the kind of person who would read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to relax before bed.

See you at the end of Volume 1!

torrents raging down from the mountains

The tally is at 99 books so far, and work is shuttered until the end of the year, so I expect it'll be 101 or so by the end. I've found I've been reading a bit much, and have diverted into watching...not TV, exactly, though I am very slowly working through Luke Cage and The OA, and occasionally Justified. The latter has, for a wonder:

• a 15-year old playing a 15-year old, who...
• is transgendered, and...
• Asian.

American film and TV has been thoroughly appalling here, particularly about the latter two: transgendered roles are routinely given to cisgender actors, Asian characters are turned into white characters played by white actors ("whitewashing"), and, lest any permutations be left out, Asian characters are still nominally Asian characters, but are still played by white actors ("yellowface").

["Teenagers not playing teenagers" doesn't bug me much, since it doesn't erase an already-marginalized group. For an added twist, it also seems to date to early film days, as with 1944's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, starring the then-18 Diana Lynn as the 14ish Emmy Kockenlocker. (You know I do not make these things up.)]

As if to scrub The Vorrh from my imagination, I've been binging through Julie Czerneda's Trade Pact Universe books.

I'm still reading J The Iliad at bedtime. It goes along for a while setting up the story, listing, as J put it, "everyone who ever thought about occasionally thinking about the Trojan War," and rather suddenly Shit Gets Real™:

Now Strife hurled down the leveler Hate amidst both sides,
wading into the onslaught, flooding men with pain.

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder—
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war. 

Antilochus was the first to kill a Trojan captain,
tough on the front lines, Thalysias’ son Echepolus.
Antilochus thrust first, speared the horsehair helmet
right at the ridge, and the bronze spearpoint lodged
in the man’s forehead, smashing through his skull
and the dark came whirling down across his eyes—
he toppled down like a tower in the rough assault.
As he fell the enormous Elephenor grabbed his feet,
Chalcodon’s son, lord of the brave-hearted Abantes,
dragged him out from under the spears, rushing madly
to strip his gear but his rush was short-lived.
Just as he dragged that corpse the brave Agenor
spied his ribs, bared by his shield as he bent low—
Agenor stabbed with a bronze spear and loosed his limbs,
his life spirit left him and over his dead body now
the savage work went on, Achaeans and Trojans
mauling each other there like wolves, leaping,
hurtling into each other, man throttling man.

Soooo...that's horrifying, in a way that is totally appropriate to the poem, and less so for a high-anxiety kid to fall asleep to, even one who laughed at "Whichever contenders trample on this treaty first / spill their brains on the ground as this wine spills...!". Because, you know. Brains.

Anyway, Anna has always done on-the-fly editing when reading out loud, so now I skip over the (occasionally lengthy) verses of people dismembering each other. He does want to know who dies so he doesn't get confused later, though I'm pretty sure almost anyone who dies--Patroclus being the least escapable exception--is then forgotten for the rest of the story.

Iliad's gore obviously fits the setting, but above that, it's not the least bit casual. Homer bends his obsession with detail and mighty command of adjectives to paint a scene of human beings who suffer in ways we can recognize ("flooding men with pain," "Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath, / fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood," and the several lines describing each death), but are simultaneously dehumanized by the battle, at once contributing to and consumed by a bloody, impersonal, greater whole ("as two winter torrents raging," "like wolves, leaping, / hurtling into each other").

That's right, folks: my Computer Science degree came thickly wrapped in a liberal arts education. I'll be here all week.

If you read the above verses and think, "That is fucked up. Why aren't these soldiers traumatized?", then you'll be satisfied to learn that there is a persistent undercurrent of scholarship on just that topic. The marvelously-titled "The Rage of Achilles and PTSD in Antiquity" is a fine entry point.

reading rainbow

I haven't been blogging so much, mostly because when I feel like it, it's already 9:30pm, and then I'm up all the way to 11 writing, and then I don't sleep well. And really, I have enough problems.

I have been reading, which is how it's early November and I've finished 85 books this year. Taking books out of the library and reading them via the Kindle service means that they're accessible and synced on my Kindle, iPhone, and iPad, which means that at any moment, I have, immediately accessible, all the books I'm in the middle of.

Related: now that my books-in-progress count is not limited by paper--storage, cost, portability--I am discovering some limits to how many books I can actually productively be "reading" at one time, in the sense that I can dip into a book and remember what was happening when I last put it down. I think it's somewhere in the 15-24 range. I have about 500 books available in the wings still, so there's plenty to keep me going. (90 or so are books I labeled "work," often lightweight stuff by consultants that I will skim quickly and possibly never finish. Some are labeled "boring," which means I'll either read them before bed to settle my mind down, or I'll just never read them.)

I finished Moby-Dick! It wasn't a bucket list item or anything, but when I was in Chile and we read whatever books were available, I read a few things I would not have otherwise: Reading Lolita In Tehran, Siddartha, The Alchemist, The Shack, and East of Eden. All good in their way, and all with serious flaws, except for East of Eden, which felt like the kind of pure clear jewel of a book that an author should win the Nobel Prize for.

I'm not sure how to hedge about Moby-Dick. It's not...interesting, exactly. It's very good, in its way, but the reader must let go the idea that a "novel" is a "story" where things "happen." Having done that, you can then roll with the endless digressions, which start right at the beginning and continue through to the last chapter, which is the only one that has a white whale actually on-screen. The narrator doesn't board a ship until 25% of the way through, and this is not a short book. Character-free discourses on whale behavior, anatomy, and flensing occupy, conservatively, a full third of the book. You get the idea. It's fine bedtime reading.

Somehow J started reading the The Iliad, and since I've never read it and needed a new bedtime classic, I've added it to the rotation. I had been thinking Don Quixote, I got bogged down picking a translation. Meanwhile, The Iliad isn't long, and the opening sets its hook in you:

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, 
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, 
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, 
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, 
feasts for the dogs and birds, 
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. 
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, 
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Right? I assume the Greek is better, but read that out loud and hear how Robert Fagles makes this a story you'd hear over the fire, back when humans had to be afraid of the dark. (Back when Europe had lions!)

I'm curious now why I read The Odyssey in high school instead, while my older brother read The Iliad; maybe I'll read The Odyssey later. (He did take some kind of Classics class, since I also remember his copy of Virgil's Aeneid kicking around; maybe he took Latin also? It wasn't something we discussed as a family.)

I chewed through 5 sci-fi novels by Peter Watts. First the two Firefall books (Blindsight, Echopraxia), then the Rifters trilogy (Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth). His writing is kind of cold and bleak, so it's just as well I need to move on to something else.

on reading.

I gave up on a book recently: Apostle: Travel Among the Tombs of the Twelve, by Tom Bissell. The idea has promise, since a journey like that will take you all around the Mediterranean all the way to Rome, and conceivably in the other direction to India (where went my own patron saint, Thomas the Doubter). The author is an ex-Catholic, and his interest in the Apostles' tombs specifically is a little hazy, nor does he go into the fact that any tomb of impoverished sectarian outcasts from 2,000 years ago is probably as historical as King Arthur's.

The real flaw is that the book is dead. The writing is flat, grim; the writer seems to experience only despair and ennui, dragging himself along as though it were a self-inflicted punishment. Maybe he should have saved the money and taken a cruise ship to Bermuda, I don't know. You could scarcely ask for a more vivid and influential part of history to be traveling in, and there's no reason to do it with so little joy, let alone to inflict your joylessness on the world, with a book.

Life is short and I have lots of more enjoyable things to read. Plus Moby-Dick, which I will continue to recommend as the most high-quality soporific literature you can find. I remain ignorant of why anyone would heartily declare it the Great American Novel, but I do hear Shakespeare in the characters' mutterings. (The characterization per se has some issues: damned if I can remember anything to distinguish Starbuck and Stubb, from one page to the next.) Again, if you let go of any belief that a novel has a "plot" where "things happen or change," then the long, long, long, long sections describing whale anatomy, whale behavior, whale hunting, and whale butchery appear as educational signals to the reader that there's no story worth remembering here, so you don't have to worry about it.

shape categorization is hard.

The whole house has been reading the Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik, and they're quite consistently delightful: the world is one where the Napoleonic Wars are underway, but everyone has air forces made of dragons. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the size of the big dragons, though, which are sort of...mansion-sized.

I've been working with Leela on her ridiculous Cujo Mode she gets when she's on leash now. I'm glad we got a couple months' grace, and now the technique is to train her so the command Watch turns her attention to me--reinforced with chicken hot dog, which is a serious escalation in treat awesomeness--then when she alerts and starts heading toward Cujo Mode, I interrupt her as early as possible with Watch and hot dog slices, and eventually she makes the connections, and when she starts to alert, she looks at me instead. This has started happening, which makes walks less stressful.

I've been observing her responses to cats more carefully. She's essentially non-reactive to cats that are seated or lying down: sometimes curious, sometimes not, but low-energy regardless. We know that she's compelled to go grab hold of anything with a tail (I folded up a cardboard rat once to experiment with this). I finally noticed that she only gets amped up and tries to chase after a cat that is standing or walking. And she met a live pet rat once and found it pretty confusing. So the question is:

Does my dog's bred-for-work little brain think that cats up on all four feet are just really big rodents?

an enabling technology.

My new-found ability to accumulate–"hoard" wouldn't be too far wrong–library e-books, in a private collection free of return dates, has fed my lifelong habit of reading a dozen books at once. I've only met a handful of other people who do this, and I appreciate why it's not common. For those of us who do it, it is our mood and setting that dictate what books we want to dip into, and in what order. There are occasional books (and series!) that I will chew through without a break, but those are less common.

To look at the books I've finished so far this year (ending with The Fast and the Furriest), it's mostly fiction, because non-fiction just takes longer. (And some of them, like Unnatural Selection, are not exactly sparkling.)

These lists don't count various books I've given up on because they sucked.

Books For Falling Asleep

• Dog Sense
• Cat Sense - John Bradshaw
• Anti-Intellectualism In American Life - Richard Hofstadter
• Quiet - Susan Cain
• Moby Dick: or, the White Whale - Herman Melville
• Cubed - Nikil Saval
• NeutroTribes - Steve Silberman
• The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard
• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language - David W. Anthony
• A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

Fiction

• The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
• The Neutronium Alchemist
• The Confederation Handbook - Peter F. Hamilton

Books Not For Falling Asleep

• Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men - Lundy Bancroft
• Self-Compassion - Kristin Neff
• Children of the Self-Absorbed - Nina W. Brown
• The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron
• 10 Minute Obedience - Amy Dahl
• The Gifts of Imperfection - Brené Brown
• Drive - Daniel H. Pink
• Peopleware - Tom DeMarco

20 books! All of which I carry around in my phone everywhere I go. And this isn't the full full list. I don't really miss the physical paper. Is that a good thing? My best guess is that it's good because I'm reading more.

pulp classics

I finished a couple more classic books.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars. One source for the recent movie John Carter. It's a really good book. There are elements of the colonialist white-hero thing (torn to shreds in lovely short essays here and here), but while Carter does come in and save Martian society #1--a more advanced society than Earth)--he does it by helping them make peace with Martian society #2, and the allied natives win their war against Martian society #3. Deliciously absent is the arrogance of the white hero not only marrying the native princess, but defending the nature-loving natives from the other white men.

H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines. Apparently the first of the Lost World literary genre, it's a rollicking adventure read, but HOLY CRAP, so racist. It's set in South Africa, future home of apartheid, in the 1870s or so, and...yeah.

"I do perceive that now as ever thy words are wise and full of reason, Macumazahn [Allan Quatermain, the narrator]; that which flies in the air loves not to run along the ground; the white man loves not to live on the level of the black or to house among his kraals [villages]."

I just finished re-reading Huckleberry Finn, finally, but Twain is clearly anti-racist. Haggard...not so much.

technology and misanthropy

I've been subscribed to a Quotation of the Day list for about 8 years; it's been run by some random guy in Canada for at least 20. Today at work I was reminded of this, from January 17, 2011:

"I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next."

- Nicholson Baker, from his novel The Anthologist.

oof so busy

No house yet. The sellers accepted the offer on June 6, but as you'd expect, we're still waiting on their bank (it's a short sale). Still looking around at other places, but there isn't anything, really: lenders are only dribbling out the foreclosures and short sales, to keep prices from cratering, and combined with the local tech boom, prices are only inching down.

I'm flying to Western New York State this weekend for my grandmother's memorial service. It will be nice to see everyone and be supportive however I can. I expect miserable weather, although on the bright side there seems to be some hope of thunderstorms.

I studied a little bit for the GRE! Have I taken practice tests yet? Nope! Do I need to? Yes! When will I do that? Dunno!

Work is going smoothly. It's pretty slow in the office. Also pretty warm. The Ops office completely lacked ventilation until last night: one of our guys sent email (possibly profanity-laden) to a few people explaining that he wasn't coming into the office until they fixed the AC like they've been promising to since before I started there. They installed a couple vents in our office, but it was a little hard to tell how well it worked because one of the AC units for the entire building broke, so it was generally a bit warm. Our floor-standing AC unit seemed to keep us in better shape than the rest of the office, though.

For reference, the guy who complained has a weather station on his desk, and it was 86F in the office, with no air movement, when I gave up and went home yesterday.

My toes seem to be doing well. Anna had the bright idea that my awesome kick scooter might have been the problem, and sadly I think she was right. But, I can run again. Or I would be able to, if I weren't drastically out of shape and my limbs didn't feel like lead. I'm working on it.

Perhaps in lieu of studying for the GRE, I've been reading a lot. I finished Dracula! It's really, really good. I'm not entirely clear on how deep it is in the "literary" sense, as opposed to just being exquisitely constructed storytelling. I'm going to read some background essays for help: there are various claims of themes involving Irish-ness (did you know Bram Stoker was Irish? I didn't, until a few weeks ago) or the power/danger of female sexuality, or whatever. Philistine that I am, I failed to notice any themes that persisted through the book, despite my years of education. But I often think any fiction more complicated than Steinbeck is wasted on me.

(Speaking of nice things being waste on me, I tasted a $300 bottle of red wine last week. It had the exact same metallic-dirt taste as reasonably-priced red wine, except this was worse because it was a Bordeaux, so it was kind of watery as well. Yum!)

I highly recommend Dracula, because it's probably not quite what you expect. Set aside your previous vampire-fiction experiences: I got to the end and thought "Wow, that would make a horrible movie." Plus it's just fun to read.

Sunday felt like my first Father's Day. J spent the day with his dad, but Anna took me out to dinner.

Anna refers to me as a "bonus parent," and J and I are growing closer with time spent together. So I get to do things like tell him how to dump the nasty cough medicine on the back of his tongue so he tastes it less, and he occasionally steals my shoes like he steals Anna's. We have the occasional history lesson: for example, if you're building a Lego base on the moon a thousand years ago, there were no horses because they were brought later by the Spanish.

This is nuts. When did I ever find time to watch TV?

Douglas Adams, prophet.

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.



(Original meme link.)

media consumption

I don't read as much here, because I don't have my home library's delicious selection of books that really grab me. Instead there's a WorldTeach collection in Santiago, the expected set of loaners that volunteers pass around, and anything I feel like picking up off the street (which is rare, because the small selection is always very expensive). I've been plowing through Lost, which is occasionally interesting if I hold it lightly.

I have read a few books, though: Reading Lolita In Tehran, Siddhartha, and The Alchemist. I'm also about 1/3 of the way through Steinbeck's East of Eden, which is one of many books I feel I should have read, except I don't usually read fiction. I read some science fiction and fantasy, of course, good nerd that I am, but not usually Literature, as such. I don't usually find it engaging, and moreover I'm always aware that there's a craft and a structure to it that I just don't appreciate. I'm not very good at teasing out symbolism and allegory and parallelism and whatever else a novelist can put into a novel, and even worse, it doesn't move me emotionally. I learned to do literary analysis for school, but only for school, and it's always an intellectual exercise: I don't feel like understanding a novel's structure or symbols ever changed my direction or helped me see the world differently (except to understand that novels have structure and symbols and these affect other people). I just like a good story.

East of Eden fits the bill, and in addition to the masterful writing I'm too much of a philistine to fully appreciate, it's wonderful, perceptive prose, and eminently quotable. This, for example, is true:

It became more apparent than ever why old Sanchez had built his house in the little draw, for the wind and the dust did not penetrate, and teh spring, while it diminished, still gushed a head of cold clear water. But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the earth is sick in the rainless months.

I still feel that way sometimes. I come from a green land of year-round moisture, and I hate California weather.

still working on this one

I am reading Isabel Allende's memoir, My Invented Country. I could probably run through it in a day, but I'm reading it slowly, the way I used to save my Halloween and Easter candy for months, and for the same reasons of perceived scarcity and hoarding. It is highly quotable.

"We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency. In Santiago the temperatures are worse than in Madrid; in summer we die of the heat and in winter of the cold, but no one has air conditioning or decent heating, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the climate isn't as good as they say it is." [p 48]

She has many choice words about Chilean gender roles. I'm enjoying her point of view, not only for the excellent prose, but as I try to understand what's behind some of my experience here.

"Some frivolous thinkers believe that Chile is a matriarchy, perhaps deceived by the strong personality of its women, who seem to carry the lead in society. They are free and well organized, they keep their maiden names when they marry, they compete head to head in the workforce and not only manage their families but very frequently support them. They are more interesting than most men, but that does not affect the reality: they live in an unyielding patriarchy....Chile is a macho country: there is so much testosterone floating in the air that it's a wonder the women don't grow beards.

"Chilean women are abettors of machismo: they bring up their daughters to serve and their sons to be served. While on the one hand they fight for their rights and work tirelessly, on the other, they wait on their husband and male children, assisted by their daughters, who from an early age are well instructed regarding their obligations. Modern girls are rebelling, of course, but the minute they fall in love they repeat the learned pattern, confusing love with service. It makes me sad to see splendid girls waiting on their boyfriends as if they were invalids. They not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat. It makes me unhappy because I was the same way." [pp 51-53]

Today, for example, I triggered a new height in Oscar's resistance to my eating lunch anywhere but the school.

"I'm done early, I'm going to go home and cook something for lunch."

"Just eat here!"

"I don't really want to wait, and I like cooking."

"Lunch is probably ready now. Hang on, I'll call them."

[he calls the kitchen, asks if lunch is ready, tells them I'm coming early]

"There, just go on down."

"No, I'll go cook something. I like cooking, and I haven't cooked in a long time."

"But there's no one at the house!"

"Yeah, I know. I'll make myself some food."

Eventually his three (female) minions chimed in with the suggestion that I didn't like what they were serving for lunch--it's true, the fish over rice is not my favorite--and Oscar did his "Bah, okay, okay, bye" thing and waved me off.

(I bought spinach and made scrambled eggs and it was awesome.)

Now, Oscar is reasonably progressive, as far as I can tell, and he's the best cook in the house and does almost of the cooking. However, there are definite gender roles in the house, which he vigorously participates in and enforces, and he is extremely emphatic about making sure Steve and I are taken care of. Today, though, makes me think that he's trying to make sure we're taken care of like Chilean men. It would explain the resistance and bemusement at the various independent things we do for ourselves.

reading

There's a certain amount of unusable downtime here--waiting around or unscheduled time, when I can't go travel to Patagonia or anything--especially right now when I'm not actually teaching (and coaching the English debate team, which will be special--more on that later). I like reading books in English at home, so I do here, too, maybe more so because it's a break from everything else.

I just finished Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, which I borrowed from the WorldTeach library in Santiago. It's...kind of vague. Mushy. Maybe this is what memoirs are supposed to be like, describing a fog in front of a painting, and describing little bits of the painting as the fog clears away, in an excruciatingly slow process roughly akin to watching paint dry. The writing lacks force, impulse, energy. It doesn't have any bite. Maybe that's how she felt, living under the Islamic Republic, but living under psychotic religious totalitarianism seems like it could easily stimulate more vivid prose. I like my books a bit al dente.

It's a fine read if you're in a South American country where books are incredibly expensive, and you want stuff to read in English.

I also just finished Santiago's Children, by Steve Reifenberg, about his two years working at a Santiago orphanage in the early 80s. It's not impeccably written, but it paints a good picture of Chile under the dictatorship, and he also ended up having a hand in most Chilean development projects in the past couple decades, including WorldTeach and English Opens Doors. Just a couple months ago he moved out of his office next to the WorldTeach Chile office, in Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies ("Doctor Class" for short).

This one I actually recommend, especially if, like me before I got here, you know nothing about Chile. Things have modernized quite a bit from the book (and he talks about that in the epilogue), but the culture and cuisine are identifiably the same: bread, avocado, tomato, tea.

Next up, also from the WorldTeach library, is Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote. It's 940 pages long, and I've never read it, so hopefully it will take me a little while.

While I'm at it, can anyone recommend a good translation of Dante's Divine Comedy?

someone else's culture consumption

The checkout machines at the library give you a receipt when you're done, listing everything you checked out. It's a pretty useless and wasteful thing, and as far as I know we all throw the receipts out immediately. Today someone left theirs, and it was really interesting.

• Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went by John Kenneth Galbraith
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
• Essays In Persuasion by John Maynard Keynes

This isn't light reading for anyone, even a dedicated economics nerd. Keynes and Galbraith are two of the towering figures of 20th-century economics. The General Theory is one of the landmarks of economics for all time: when you make a list, you start with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, then a few centuries later comes General Theory.

• Gandhi
• Milk

Excellent movies, but pretty intense.

• Always
• Serenity
• She's Having A Baby

I guess at the end of the day, we all have to relax.