Oh, Fierce and Nerdy!  How I’ve missed you.  Thanks for letting me visit you again — this missive comes to you from the west coast now, where I am fiercely anticipating the start of a new job in Los Angeles.  As a reader I tend not to delay my gratification (actually, that’s pretty much a good description for my life) but I do tend to have a list in my head that I refer to when the latest book is finished.  Welcome to my list! FIERCELY ANTICIPATING I have begun to wish very much that there were a literary Pandora, where you could enter the novel you just loved and come up with a series of suggestions.  Did you love Howards End?  Then may I suggest Brideshead Revisited for its similar themes of inter-generational family conflict.  Amazon will do this for you, but it won’t explain why you like the books you do – or why you don’t like the other books on the same themes.  The suggestions often devolve into listings of authors writing at the same period.  Like Margaret Atwood?  Why don’t you read some Kazuo Ishiguro or Ian McEwan?  (This is a terrible example – I think if you like Atwood you’d love either of these authors.  Maybe Amazon really has solved all my problems.) Periodically I review the lists of books that I’ve loved to find qualities in common: intellectual families, overlapping storylines, bildungsromans, magical realism, settings in London, thwarted and inconclusive romances, a certain preoccupation with death.  They’re the kinds of themes and features I would include in my own imaginary novel – the one that I write in my head when I’m feeling particularly angst-y. Some examples?  A.S. Byatt’s Virgin in the Garden quartet, which follows red-headed Frederica...

The animals are discomfortingly close at the Washington zoo.  The cheetah, with a running start, seemed like it could easily clear that mere wall of holly surrounding its realm.  The sign which warns not to touch the prairie dogs due to their propensity to bite appeared, well, much more necessary than in other zoos I’ve visited. Despite the recent warmth, by afternoon there was a distinct chill, giving the zoo an air reminiscent of Cold Comfort Farm, the charming novel by Stella Gibbons, had it also been overrun by several busloads of parents and toddlers in Maclaren strollers.  “The farm lay in the shadow of a cold, windswept hill … surrounded on all sides by rough stone buildings, where the animals were kept – cowsheds for the thin, bony cows, stables for the horses ….”  February, the time when Flora Poste arrives at the farm, is rather bleak, but as her uncle Amos knows, “soon all the animals and plants would be renewing life.” Let me explain: Flora, our heroine, needs to find housing.  When her distant parents passed away “Flora was discovered to possess every skill except that of earning enough to live on.”  Like any sensible girl, she turns to relatives.  Despite the charming offer of a bedroom borrowed from a mother’s cousin and shared with a parrot, Flora chooses the Starkadders.  “Child, child,” writes Aunt Judith, “We are not like other people, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm, and we will do our best to welcome Robert Poste’s child.” Arriving at the farm, Flora discovers that, while stocked with the anticipated “highly sexed young men” named Reuben, Seth and Adam, Cold Comfort Farm is additionally full of opportunities for Flora to organize.  Flora can put Reuben,...

I’m planning a dinner party, so of course I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway.  There has never been a better dinner party book, not in the history of literature.  It so perfectly captures that dreamy sense of excitement the afternoon before a party as you shop for ingredients and choose your dress.  There is so much space in your head when you plan a party to think of other evenings, other friends, other fun. I often think of Clarissa Dalloway, into whose head we dove so completely during my college course on the Modern British Novel.  That was a wonderful class, a caricature of itself like something out of a film.  The scene: young literature students sitting in a circle in a drafty room on the top floor of a Gothic stone hall staring out leaded windows into the green quad.  It rained every lecture.  Our professor taught us that World War I and the fall of the British Empire brought about a new kind of literature, one that tried to make sense of a world smashed into pieces.  We read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Howards End. We read The Secret Agent in that class, and every time I opened the cover I heard the Johnny Rivers song. I’ve always loved this era between the wars – the clothes, the poetry, and the novels – because so many times I’ve felt like my life was disintegrating around me.  Despite my best efforts, l still read sometimes to dress in the roles of characters rather than analyze them.  Feeling other people’s sadness in the place of your own can be so cathartic.  Who hasn’t felt, like Rezia Smith, that agonizing feeling “I am alone; I am alone!” confronted with a lover...

Wondering how long it will take me to stop writing 2010 and then having to delete and correct with 2011. So far I’ve made this mistake four weeks and counting. Sad. How are you all doing with this? Other than that, let’s get into my notes re this week at Fierce and Nerdy. 1. Missy’s meditation on the fact that her partner, Raoul only uses cash made me realize that I couldn’t remember the last time I used physical cash other than coins to pay a meter. I hate dealing with it now. I judge (and don’t return to) retailers and restaurants that don’t accept credit cards. Same goes for the coffee shop that charges a $10 minimum to use one. I’ve seriously considered changing doctors, because she’s in one of those cash-only parking structures, and I’m tired of asking my husband for a five every time Betty or I have an appointment (but I won’t because she’s awesome and has a knack for spot-on referrals). I’m just wondering when we’re going to get technology that allows us to transfer money to our friends in an easier manner. For example, a fellow author invited me out to a movie on Wednesday, and got a bucket of popcorn to share and a soda for me. I hadn’t thought to get cash before leaving the house, so I couldn’t pay for my half of the popcorn or the drink. Surely they should come up with an app for that. [Dork Lifestyle: Raoul is so retro] 2. Hey Amy! I’m listening to ONE DAY by David Nicholl’s in the car right now, and you are correct. It rather eerily nails twenties angst and stupidity — so much so, that as a person who both wrote plays and...

I should have known when my aunt recommended it; she always appreciates books as literature rather than some sort of a terrible looking glass and can tolerate much more emotional turmoil in her reading than I can manage.  I should have known better than to read it on a work night, I thought, when I paused for a moment so that I could sob out loud.  But there I was, two in the morning, openly weeping over One Day, by David Nicholls. The book describes a series of days in the lives of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, both graduates of Edinburgh University.  The date is St. Swithin’s Day, proverbially used to predict the weather for forty days.  In the novel, each day forms a chain through the lives of our two protagonists.   We meet Emma as a slightly ridiculous, puffy political activist and Dexter as a vain, shallow peacock, and their first encounter (unsuccessfully in bed, after too much wine) makes you wonder exactly why either of them would ever bother to think about the other again. But I’ve known several Dexters in my time, so I wasn’t surprised to find Emma writing long, long funny letters to Dexter as he travelled about abroad the next year.  “China has turned out to be too alien and ideological for Dexter’s taste, and he had instead embarked on a leisurely year-long tour of what the guide books called ‘Party Towns.’”  While Dexter travels, Emma remains at home and slightly bored.  “So they were pen pals now, Emma composing…two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper.”  She sends him thick bricks of English literature to broaden his mind.  Dexter returns to her postcards reading “‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS.’” Don’t do it, Emma, I thought. ...

Despite my general dislike of new year’s resolutions – winters are hard enough without February being riddled with disappointment and moralistic shame along with seasonal affective disorder – I have made one every year since I graduated from college.  It is: finish the Guardian’s 100 Best Books and the BBC’s Big Read booklist.  There’s another list floating around Facebook as well. This seems like a no-brainer.  I love lists; I read a lot, obviously.  My tolerance for boredom is bigger than the average bear’s – see: my doctoral dissertation.  Why is it that I just can’t cross off the final ten-or-so classics that would free me from my yearly guilt?  It comes down to three problems: War and Peace, Ulysses and On the Road.  These three books, and yes, I’ve tried to read all of them, create a sensation not just of boredom, but rather the feeling of time slowing to a standstill.  At least Joyce is doing it on purpose – what’s Kerouac’s excuse?  Knowing that that these three books must be read to complete the lists sucks away all the sense of accomplishment finishing another one from the list might give me.  Struggling through Infinite Jest only to have to battle another behemoth of western literature seems too grim to imagine. So, as ever, I turn to murder mysteries.  This week’s – Jar City, by Arnaldur Indridason – is set in Reykjavik, where Detective Erlendur, divorced, worried about his daughter’s addiction, must explain a note left on the brutalized body of a 70-year-old man.  “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?” the detective asks, “Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.” The connected unexplained death of a little girl brings Erlendur to the Jar...

This Sunday I couldn’t stop reading The Hunger Games trilogy.  Gudrun made it sound so good last week that the books rocketed right up to the top of my Kindle wish list.  I started the first novel meaning to compare dystopian futurescapes with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but to be honest, I can’t.  Suzanne Collins’s devastating rebellion is addictive in a way that Ishiguro’s gorgeous slow reveal can’t be, even if both books analyze the dehumanization wrought through authoritarian government from the focal point of a love triangle. Gudrun already discussed the trilogy, so I’ll keep my synopsis short.  Katniss Everdeen competes as a tribute in the Hunger Games, a brutal televised battle to the death played out by kidnapped children and used by her government to keep the poverty-stricken outer districts from rebelling.  “There are no rules in the arena,” Katniss notes, “but cannibalism doesn’t play well with the Capitol audience, so they tried to head it off.” Accompanying Katniss to the Capitol is her fellow tribute, Peeta, a baker’s son who saved her once from starvation.  Katniss leaves behind her a budding romance with the hunter Gale, but when the politics surrounding the Games requires her to feign a romance with Peeta, she is surprised to find her emotions torn.  “Gale and I were thrown together by mutual need to survive,” she explains.  “Peeta and I know the other’s survival means our own death.  How do you sidestep that?” This becomes the motivating question behind the first book: when your survival is threatened, is it possible to love?  The very emotion can become a chink in your armor.  As the trilogy continues, Katniss discovers that love can be illusory, disappointing, used as a weapon against her.  What is most amazing...

In economics, we believe that consumers are rational agents who consume subject to the constraints they are given.  People would buy and buy and buy – buy until the store shelves were empty – if they didn’t have the nagging knowledge of their bank accounts dwindling with every purchase. Preferences differ between agents; someone buys those Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light ™ monstrosities, even if nobody you or I know would admit to it.  But universally the things we purchase must satisfy some need, allow us to live the way we think is best.  Most importantly, the constraints we face force us to choose. The story of Lacey Yeager, the main character in Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty, is very much the story of a choice.  At twenty-three, “Lacey joined the spice rack of girls at Sotheby’s [where] majors in art history were welcomed over majors in art making, and pretty was preferred in either sex.”  Lacey Yeager has pretty to spare.  Daniel Franks, her friend and one-time lover, narrates her story.  He notes, “It was apparent to everyone that Lacey was headed somewhere, though her path often left blood in the water.” Lacey crosses her subtle Rubicon after a chance invitation to an auction, four flights upstairs from the dusty basement where Sotheby’s puts her to work.  There a Tissot painting, valued at five hundred thousand dollars, is sold for two million.  “Lacey noticed that as the pace of the bids picked up, she felt a concomitant quickening of her pulse, as though she had been incised by an aphrodisiacal ray.”  Someone has made some serious money – and why shouldn’t she? Her dusty basement and menial tasks become a source of knowledge.  “The endless stream of pictures that passed through the...

If you’re worrying about traveling home this holiday week, afraid of the salt-in-old-wounds feeling familial criticism can generate, be thankful at least for this: you’re not Frank Mackay.  Frank is the narrator of Tana French’s new novel Faithful Place. He ran away from his family at nineteen, desperate to escape “the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest.”  He never intended to come back.  But one evening he comes home to an answering machine blinking full of messages from his baby sister Jackie.  The family has found a suitcase hidden in an abandoned apartment.  It’s got Rosie Daly’s birth certificate in it. Who is Rosie Daly?  In the ‘seventies, “Dublin was brown and gray and beige all over, back then, and Rosie was a dozen bright colors: an explosion of copper curls right down to her waist, eyes like chips of green glass held up to the light, red mouth and white skin and gold freckles.”  Rosie was Frank’s first love; they were going to run away together.  But she didn’t show up that night, leaving Frank with a note and hope.  “That bitch Rosie, see” Frank recalls, “I believed her, every word.  Rosie never played games; she just opened her mouth and told you, straight out, even if it hurt…So when she said I swear I’ll come back someday, I believed her for twenty-two years.” In the interim, Frank has been living in modern Dublin, “on the quays, in a massive apartment block built in the nineties by, apparently, David Lynch.”  This amused me, of course, because my own living style since the grand move has been a feminized version of Frank’s “divorcé chic” in a similarly creepy carpeted urban hive.  His life consists of his job, as a police...

It seems like a strange thing, a children’s book chronicling the rise of a totalitarian regime, but when I reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there it was.  The comes out November 19; Stephen Fry claims it’s the “best one yet,” and I wanted to be properly prepared. I’d read the novel when it came out, of course.  The series became an addiction as soon as I first broke down and purchased the initial four books on a trip to Paris in 2002.  Despite my general distrust of collective wisdom, whatever James Surowiecki might say, the British versions of the Harry Potter series looked too much like gift-wrapped candy on the shelves at Shakespeare and Company to be left behind.  I started reading The Philosopher’s Stone on the sleeper train back to Bologna and found myself unable to stop.  I read all the way through the night, until we reached home.  And then I read them again. In grad school, that horrible first year, I returned to Hogwarts over and over.  The beautiful school, the friendship between Hermione, Ron and Harry – it was such an escape from my misgivings and homesickness.  But I haven’t needed the books in that way for a while now and I returned with a slightly more critical eye. Harry, for those of you under a rock since 1998, is “the boy who lived.”  The fiendishly powerful wizard Voldemort attacked Harry as a baby, fearing a prophecy that claimed neither could survive if the other lived.  But Harry lived through Voldemort’s black magic, although his parents did not.  When we meet Harry in the beginning of The Deathly Hallows, he is four “stupid, pointless, irritating beyond belief” days away from being able to practice magic unsupervised – a...

“No one’s gonna love you the way that I do.”  From Cease to Begin, the 2007 album by Band of Horses, I heard the song “No One’s Gonna Love You” first on NBC’s Chuck.  I loved the song, but I’d heard the refrain before.  One of the few constants I’ve found in relationships is that when “things start splitting at the seams,” love seems inherently unrepeatable.  I don’t know why nostalgia sets in – an effort to remain in control, generate sympathy, break down defenses?  But the inability to recognize that life contains many options seems to be a symptom of broken relationships, and from long, long experience, I’ve learned to recognize it as time to bail. It’s a lesson that the characters in Wuthering Heights would do well to learn.  The advent of Heathcliff, an orphaned “cuckoo” found starving, silent and parentless by Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw’s father, begins a fateful enmeshing of two families’ fates.  After the death of her father, Catherine and Heathcliff “promised fair to grow up as rude as savages; the young master being entirely negligent how they behaved.”  No matter how they were punished, “they forgot everything the minute they were together again: at least the minute they had contrived some naughty plan of revenge.” But through their misbehavior, Catherine meets Edgar and Isabella Linton of Thrushcross Grange.  These spoiled and petted children introduce Catherine to an entirely new idea, that of civilization.  Heathcliff’s Cathy becomes Edgar’s, exchanging her passion for wealth.  Catherine explains: “if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars…My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.  My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little...

Nostalgia is dangerous.  Our memories burnish the sunshine of ages past into fool’s gold.  It struck me, coming across a Wall Street Journal article discussing the unusual sales of costume wigs to Tea Party aficionados, how especially ridiculous is this apparent yearning for a historical time period in which there was no indoor plumbing, women couldn’t vote and the majority of black people in the United States were enslaved.  What country imagines itself better off in its infancy than with an infrastructure — of educational institutions, police and fire fighters, efficient roads and the rule of law, all paid for with taxes, by the way — fully developed?  It’s heartbreaking, really, how venal people can be. Also heartbreaking?  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s elegy to English Catholicism, which I’ve been reading this week. The novel opens with one of my favorite transitions in literature.  Disillusioned Captain Charles Ryder, our narrator, embroiled in the bureaucracy of his British platoon, arrives to a posting at a private house.  Off-handedly, he asks the second-in-command the name of the town, “and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in [his] ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed…he had spoken a name that was so familiar to [Ryder], a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.” That name is Brideshead, the family home of the Marchmains.  Charles met Sebastian Marchmain when they were students at Oxford, many years before.  Sebastian is the younger son of an aristocratic English Catholic family, eccentric, beautiful and utterly enthralling.  Befriending Sebastian launches Charles into a mystifying world...

I attended a wedding this weekend.  It was the best kind of wedding, blissfully happy, held in a sunlit field in western Massachusetts, full of good friends from childhood who have grown up even better.  The wedding bore no resemblance to anything that happens in The Worst Intentions, by Alessandro Piperno, which I picked up immediately upon returning to my apartment. It was the comment of one of these friends, though, that made me think of it; an actor flown in from LA, he mentioned that the groom and his brother had formed his sense of humor, that trying to make them laugh had been his first experience with comedy.  Piperno’s novel is an immersive study in the ways that other people’s needs and actions shape our development. Owing (and acknowledging) a great deal to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Piperno’s narrator, Daniel Sonnino describes the many generations of his Roman Jewish family, the formerly wealthy Sonninos.  His grandparents, survivors of the Holocaust, squandered their riches in a life of wild, amoral voluptuousness and a cascade of swindles.  “Frivolity, sarcasm, impudence; a penchant for sophistry, deceit, and false pretence; imprudence, incapacity to evaluate a single act, prodigality, sex mania, lack of interest in anyone else’s point of view, reluctance to recognize one’s own failings, feigned strength of character that is only weakness, and above all a peculiar variety of optimism spilling over into irresponsibility: that is only a tiny fraction of the mixture with which they habitually take you in…the germ with which they poison your body, but also the cocaine with which they intoxicate it.” The language of the book has an addictive rhythm; it is a triumph of translation by Ann Goldstein from The New Yorker. Bepy, Daniel’s grandfather, flees the victims...

Growing up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, next door to infamous Salem, meant that our high school English teachers were contractually obligated to cram a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel down our throats every September, followed up with a yearly breeze through The Crucible.  Once I’d escaped that dreary tradition I assumed I would never read any Hawthorne (or Miller for that matter) again.  But this Friday I saw a movie that changed my feelings for Hawthorne and even high school entirely, a movie that I am so eager for you to watch that I am willing to do the unthinkable: read The Scarlet Letter again. The movie is Easy A, starring Emma Stone, a young actress whose charm and adorable smile makes you want to try being eighteen again, but this time with even a tenth of her confidence.  Seriously, imagine high school lived as a glorious madcap romp.  I’d have thought it was impossible, but then I watched Easy A on Friday, and its afterglow floated me through the weekend.  Frankly, I may, like Barney in How I Met Your Mother, tell my new friends in DC fictional stories about my teenage years that begin, “Well, my gay friend was being picked on, so we decided to pretend to have sex at the popular kids’ weekend party to make him look straight.” The story that follows this premise does such an amazing job of examining the modern resonances within The Scarlet Letter about the role of reputation and the damaging power of secrets that I’d really rather that you stop reading my column and head to your nearest movie theater.  However, as many of you are gainfully employed (Hi fellow cubicle dwellers!) you’ll have to put up with me instead. Hawthorne begins his morality tale in...

The start of the new fall television season is the perfect time to read Ape House, Sara Gruen’s recent novel following a group of Bonobo apes kidnapped by a porn magnate and plopped into a “Big Brother”-style television program.  The apes are certainly more interesting than the cast of Jersey Shore. We meet our stars in the Great Ape Language Lab, watched over by human scientist Isabel Duncan.  The apes form a tribe both content and generally amused by their awkward human companions.  “They know they’re bonobos and they know we’re human,” explains Isabel to John Thigpen, a visiting reporter, “but it doesn’t imply mastery, or superiority, or anything of the sort.  We are, all of us, collaborators.  We are, in fact, family.” The playful, happy simian family John meets contrasts strongly with his own combative relationship with his mother Patricia and mother-in-law Fran, and his increasing frustration with his depressed wife Amanda.  After her failed career as a novelist, Amanda takes to her bed, allowing the housework to pile up like stacks of unpaid bills, despite John’s rather futile efforts and her in-laws’ displeasure.  “Sunday after Sunday John watched as Patricia shot smouldering blame rays in Amanda’s direction.  John knew he should do something to shield his broken wife, but his family dynamic was not such that he could address his mother’s assumption about … the slide toward squalor.” When Amanda’s own evil mother arrives unexpectedly to John and Amanda’s broken home, with her “Schadenfreudic glee [disguised ] as helpfulness,” there is no way for their marriage to survive the misery inherent in remaining.  The couple flees, John to Kansas and his story about the apes and Amanda to Los Angeles and a job writing for a sitcom. In the interim, the Language...

The phone rings, and the woman on the line asks Toru Okada for “Ten minutes, please.  That’s all we need to understand each other.” This phrase caught my eye; whenever you move to a new city, your days are full of meeting new people, learning what role each of them will play in your new life.  You spend so many afternoons going to coffee shops with people you have nothing in common with, missing the people at parties who’ll be your favorite dinner companions only a few months later.  There’s so much sitting alone on weekends, before you have anyone to make plans with.  How much easier would it be if you could synthesize that almost agonizingly slow process down to ten minutes! So that’s how I started reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami.  Ten minutes was too good an idea to pass up.  The woman doesn’t get her ten minutes with Toru that first call; her interest, it appears, is sexual.  Toru hangs up on her. When we first meet Toru Okada, the recipient of the mysterious phone call, he is making spaghetti for breakfast.  He’s thirty years old and a little at loose ends.  A few months back, Toru quit his dull job at a Tokyo law firm not in order to “realize any particular hopes or prospects” but rather in the certainty that he would never want the life that career offered.  Remaining at home, his days are full of mundane chores: ironing, paying bills, depositing and collecting the dry cleaning, making dinner.  Kumiko, his wife, works as editor of a health food magazine, and her hours begin to run late into the evening. When their cat disappears, Kumiko insists that he search for it.  “So now I had...

I made the mistake of recommending a book to my Dad that I hadn’t read.  This, you’d think, is rather a beginner’s error; surely there are enough old adages to keep someone with a reader’s reputation leery of speaking before reading.  So this weekend, with an extra bit of time on my hands, I set forth to read the Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt. Nikola Tesla, “world-famous inventor, once celebrated, once visited by kings, authors and artists, welterweight pugilists, scientists of all stripes, journalists with their prestigious awards, ambassadors, mezzo-sopranos, and ballerinas” is the nominal subject of novel, whose revolutionary ideas carried him from Smiljan, Croatia to that center of the modern world, New York City.  But, as our narrator makes clear to us immediately, “that was some time ago.” Now Tesla is an old man, visited only by pigeons.  In sixty-odd years, “I’ve nearly perfected my relationships with the pigeons, the sparrows, and the starlings of New York City,” Tesla reports.  “Humans remain a far greater challenge.”  His devotion to invention meant that Tesla feared love as a distraction.  “Love is uneven.  There is no science to it, no formula.  One party loves more than the other.  Pain ensues.”  The scientist replaced love with ideas, “just science, pure engineering… I want people to understand that things they never even dreamed of are possible.” The electricity that we think of as electricity, which is alternating current, is Tesla’s invention.  Tesla’s alternating current won the ”Battle of the Currents,” wresting the victory from direct current’s more famous proponent, Thomas Edison.  “If we wanted to power the world with DC electricity, we’d have to build a power plant every two miles,” Tesla explains.  My Dad has similarly outlined the concept of alternating versus direct...

. a favorite blogumn by Amy Brown Amy Says: I’m missing Los Angeles like crazy.  Here are my two favorites LA reads in rerun. From February 2, 2010 One of my favorite things to do in Los Angeles is to watch the sun set from the bar at the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica. I’ve lived here for five years now and still feel a tremendous sense of awe looking out over the curve of the shoreline stretching up to Malibu. Somehow the view of the stucco and the roofs feels timeless, as though nothing has changed since the early days of civilization here. It seems like I could walk out and meet my father in the ‘sixties, going to work at Ramo Woldrich, now TRW, while Anita, his first wife, took care of their children in a ranch house on Euclid Avenue. It’s the same feeling I have reading Raymond Chandler, a lingering nostalgia sinking me as a reader so deeply into the time of the novel that when I draw up my head, I expect to find the people around me wearing gloves and carrying guns, rather than Ugg boots and Macbooks. The High Window, published in 1942, opens on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena. Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock, “the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper Murdock who had made a lot of money helping out the community,” has lost an antique coin, the Brasher Doubloon. She’s quite certain the culprit is her disliked daughter-in-law, who has mysteriously disappeared. This is not Philip Marlowe’s first case, and from the wealth of Pasadena, the detective is soon drawn into Bunker Hill, where “there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles...

. a favorite blogumn by Amy Brown Amy Says: Sweden cast the most perfect actors in their movie version of the trilogy, out this summer.  Go see them before Hollywood ruins Blomkvist by casting Brad Pitt. From November 24, 2009 Vacations in my house have always involved cleaning and mystery novels. This Thanksgiving has proven to be no different. My mother has embarked on a massive construction project in my childhood home. In order to maneuver, we are required to reorganize all our accrued literature, including my Dad’s old Optics journals and my baby board books. It’s been four days, I’ve culled the contents of fifty cardboard storage boxes to fill nine plastic tubs, and I top off my evening with Motrin each night. Adventuring into the past can prove hazardous, as the eponymous heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and her sidekick, Mikael, discover. Mikael Blomkvist, an Encyclopedia Brown of Sweden, grown up, is asked by a retired industrialist to investigate a mysterious disappearance forty years ago. The magnate’s niece, Harriet vanished from an isolated island on a day when an overturned oil truck blocked the only bridge. Each year, a framed pressed flower appears by post, Harriet’s perennial birthday gift to her favorite uncle. Is it a taunt from her murderer? And who on the island hated a young girl enough to kill her? Described this way, the story sounds like a classic Agatha Christie – the kind Mom and I sorted by what seemed like the hundreds into yard sale boxes. I love Agatha Christie novels, and this book lives up to the comparison. But in the modern twist Larsson introduces, Blomkvist is not a detective, but a financial journalist, disgraced in a libel suit and out of a job. The...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown I’ve been invited to a book club.  To preface, I’m desperately eager to meet new people in this new city of mine; Washington, D.C. seems endlessly foreign to me since I’ve moved, a city with free parking unassociated with shopping malls, with subways, a city where there is an assumption you’ll head out to the bar after a day at work rather than to the beach for a volleyball match.  It’s a very different place than Los Angeles.  I haven’t quite gotten my sea-legs. So when a friend from my younger years with whom I’ve been so lucky to catch up invited me to her book club, I jumped at the chance to meet some fellow young professionals.  “We’re reading light fiction,” she insisted, “for summer.  Nothing too strenuous – you don’t even have to read it if you don’t want to.”  This piqued my interest; what book is too embarrassing to force a friend to read? It’s Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes.  “But I’ve read it!” I exclaimed with glee.  “I’m all set.”  And it’s true, I have read the book.  In middle school, when travel porn was having a fashionable resurgence, I would eagerly consume whatever was the latest Peter Mayle Province book.  I even managed the slog through Henry James’s Italian Hours, which could put Ambien out of business.  Travel to the earth’s lovelier regions replaced my disturbing obsession with Star Trek spin-off fiction. These books nursed a longing within me to live in the golden countries they described in violently purple prose.  It would be six years, though, before I’d get to discover that travel abroad usually resembles Me Talk Pretty One Day far more closely than it does A Year in...

. a life in books by Amy Brown Watching the recent hullabaloo surrounding the wedding of Chelsea Clinton, it occurred to me that I had not yet read Curtis Sittenfeld’s novelization of the life of another political bride, American Wife.  I’d been looking forward to the book for ages; on a cross-country flight I’d wept openly over a friend’s copy of Prep, Sittenfeld’s first novel set in a flossy prep school in Massachusetts.  Sittenfeld’s voice made the travails of a homesick Midwestern girl come alive for me so completely that I felt transported back in time, to that raw hopeless loneliness of adolescence, a reading experience as unexpected as it was visceral. The American Wife in question is Alice Blackwell, a former librarian married to the leader of the free world, into whose insomniac musings the reader abruptly steps.  The first lady narrates her personal history with an emphasis on her serious reservations about the politics surrounds her life: “As with so much else,” she notes, “I tell myself it is our positions that are being deferred to, that we are simply symbols; who we are as individuals hardly matters.  It would embarrass me otherwise to think of all the expense and effort put forth on our behalf.  If not us, I repeat to myself, then others would play this same role.” Self-effacing, observant and above all kind, Alice Lindgren grew up in a household with loving parents and a wild, charming grandmother.  “Without anyone in my immediate family saying so, I came to understand that my mother had chosen us” over her harried and poor relations, “and the fact that she’d been able to choose made her lucky.”  Alice is shocked by the “crudeness and volume” of other families; when you could choose...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown When I was little, I thought my Dad knew everything about the world.  There was never a single question I could think to ask that he didn’t have the answer for, from why the sky is blue to how the human eye functions to why the sound of a siren would change as the fire truck passed our house.  Later, he could tell me about how a car’s clutch works, about global warming and acid rain.  To some extent, this might explain why I chose to study a social science rather than a hard science; I never felt the need to solve life’s physical mysteries because Dad has always been able to explain them to me.  There are very few people that I’ve met with as comprehensive and curious a mind as my father’s, though considering how particularly I have been blessed with science teachers, you’d think I’d have retained more of their knowledge. Two weekends ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the Museum of Natural History on a visit to Manhattan.  My friend and I were rushing through the minerals collection as the museum was closing when I was transfixed by the sight of a huge chunk of sulfur, gleaming yellow in its case.  Looking down, I saw an excerpt from the periodic table, which I dimly recalled from a chemistry class in high school.  The course was taught by a wonderful woman who made the structure of atoms come alive, convincing thirty teenagers to dance in circles pretending to be electrons. In the minerals room, it was exasperating in a particular way not to know more: how the crystals were formed, why they were shaped as they were, what the composition could do.  I’m often...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown I am the queen of plans that go awry.  If I need to drive two-hundred miles for a business trip, inevitably that will be the time my car air conditioning will go on the fritz.  Given the choice of freeway exit A or B, I will choose the wrong one, every time, and circle my desired location like an enraged buzzard.  The cap falls off my pepper mill when I’m cooking; my skirt seam splits when I bend to pick up my dropped keys.  I’ve never arrived at a hotel elegantly in my whole life. So it is with a sense of awe that I watch Edmond Dantes lay his plans for what’s left of his blighted life in the second half of The Count of Monte Cristo.  (Speaking of things going haywire, I’m going to Anglicize all the names, as I noticed last week’s column didn’t handle the accents aigu or grave particularly well.) After Dantes found his friend, the Abbe Faria, “the sight of an old man clinging to life with so desperate a courage, gave a fresh turn to [Edmond’s] ideas, and inspired him with new courage.”  The pair plot their escape.  When those plans are foiled, the Abbe reveals to Dantes, “the child of [his] captivity,” of the existence of a vast treasure hidden in the Island of Monte Cristo.  “The abbe did not know the Island of Monte Cristo; but Dantes knew it, and had often passed it…a rock of almost conical form, which looks as though it had been thrust up by volcanic force from the depth to the surface of the ocean.”  Just so is Edmond Dantes thrust into action by the wealth the Abbe described. The wealth Dantes discovers on the...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown From the Girl Scouts’ logo to the countless starlets trying to be the next Madonna, it might seem that reinvention is a current national obsession.  Having just experienced a rather significant personal rebranding, this week I started to read an epic saga on that subject, The Count of Monte Cristo.  The 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas p?re describes the adventures of Edmond Dant?s, a simple Castilian sailor forced through the villainy and ambitions of others to become someone vastly different than what he planned to be.  He’s like an object lesson for Lindsey Lohan, a man who finds good fortune and innocence turned suddenly into dark imprisonment. When first we meet Dant?s, he is the first mate of the Pharaon, who assumes command after the death of her Captain Leclere.  Upon his return from the otherwise-successful voyage, his ship’s owner, M. Morel congratulates him.  “There’s a providence that watches over the deserving,” Morel notes, promising that Dant?s will soon be captain himself.  His good fortune means that Edmond will be able to marry his beloved Mercédès, a Catalan woman with only “a few ragged nets, [as] the miserable inheritance left by [her] father” to sustain her. Edmond’s success awakens the jealously of the Pharaon’s supercargo, Danglars.  “On turning around the owner saw Danglars behind him, apparently awaiting orders, but in reality also watching the young sailor, – but there was a great difference in the expression of the two men who thus followed the movements of Edmond Dant?s.” Danglars schemes with Fernand, Mercédès’s cousin who desires her for himself.  While the death of Dant?s might mean the suicide of Mercédès, “Absence severs as well as death, and if the walls of a prison were between Edmond and Mercédès...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown Having moved across the country in a dizzy week, I find myself cast ashore in sweaty northern Virginia.  The capital beltway maintains the traffic but none of the charm of southern California.  My desperate hatred of both the current humidity and temperature seems rather histrionic to my family, given that I grew up on this coast, but I’ve arrived with a mere carful of belongings to an empty apartment in a town where I know no one.  It’s a disaster.  How could I not think of Twelfth Night? In Shakespeare’s play, first performed in 1602, our heroine, Viola, is shipwrecked upon the shores of Illyria, ruled by the love-sick Duke Orsino.  In the wreck, she has lost everything from her former life, including her beloved twin brother Sebastian.  “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures,” and Viola believes that he is drowned.  She appears on the stage full of questions and grief: “And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium.” Unlike me though, Viola does not succumb to despair, but instead decides to reinvent herself.  “Conceal me what I am, and be my aid,” Viola asks the sailor she has befriended, “What else may hap to time I will commit; Only shape thou thy silence to my wit.”  Dressed as a man, Viola becomes Cesario, and heads off to serve the Duke.  When the play next returns to her, Orsino “has known [Cesario] but three days, and already [he is] no stranger.” Cesario and Viola’s secret, though, brings along complications.  Duke Orsino is in love with the Countess Olivia, and in an effort to woo the lady, the Duke sends his new page to “unfold the passion...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown Santiago’s luck is bad.  The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s 1952 novella, opens after the fisherman’s apprentice has left him: “after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky” and ordered Manolin to another boat.  Forty days in the desert is a long time to retain hope.  Christ nearly didn’t manage it, so it’s certainly too much to ask a boy. Santiago is poor and old, and the life he leads is growing old as well; “younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats…spoke of [the sea] as el mar which is masculine.  They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy.  But the old man always thought of her as feminine….”  Santiago fishes following the birds, the plankton, the turtles, the porpoises.  He fishes with concentration and faith; even on his eighty-fifth day without a catch, Santiago insists on “fish[ing] the day well.” The animals that Santiago loves reflect the code of this life he has chosen.  “He loved green turtles and hawk-bills with their elegance and speed and their great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their love-making, and happily eating the Portugese men-of-war with their eyes shut.”  Santiago cannot respect the cowardice inherent in living within the protection of a loggerhead sea turtle’s hard shells.  In his boat, he has no radio to distract him with his beloved baseball, nor will he sleep waiting for the tuna to bite.  And he does not have anyone to help him when at last he...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown I’m homeless, at least temporarily. Despite my adoration of the west coast and general desperation to remain here, an exhaustive eight month job search convinced me that my sole option for employment is located in Washington, D.C. As graduation approached, I arranged to release my apartment in Santa Monica a few weeks before my lease in northern Virginia began. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d pack up early, send off my car, hop on a plane and head out to a new life. The boyfriend and his roommates would simply have to put up with a squatter for a few nights. Unfortunately, being unmoored to a lease has rendered me rather petulant. Without an apartment to call my own, with my favorite vintage plates, my books and my Dad’s original oil paintings packed away, it feels a little like I’ve lost a part of myself. In particular, that part of me that I present to other people seems as boxed away as the rest of my belongings. This feeling made me eager to read the Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by H.F. Saint, a novel about a man, “right in the middle of [his] rather ordinary…life” who experiences an “extraordinary scientific mishap [that] rendered a small spherical chunk of New Jersey utterly invisible.” Unluckily for our narrator, he formed part of that chunk. An investment banker, Nick Halloway is visiting MicroMagnetics to determine its potential profits; instead, after a fierce altercation between a group of students protesting nuclear power and scientists more wrapped up in their experiments than reality, an explosion devastates the plant. Our narrator wakes from this explosion invisible. “I shut my eyes to gather my wits,” Nick reports. “This produced no change whatever....

. a blogumn by Amy Brown My mother made me the best birthday cake when I was little.  It was tiered, pink-frosted and decorated with gummy candies; it looked like a sugar palace and is still the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever eaten.  I thought of Mom’s cake as I read the opening of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender.  “Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles.  A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges.”  It’s our narrator’s ninth birthday, and her mother is baking Rose a cake.  “Mom was stirring eggs; she was sifting flour.  She had one bowl of chocolate icing set aside, another with rainbow sprinkles.”  It’s a lemon cake with chocolate frosting: “warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar.”  It’s also the flavor of discontent, misery and emptiness. Rose can taste emotions.  She discovers the skill on her ninth birthday, but soon it expands outwards.  “The recess milk carton was fine.  But almost everything else – the cake, the chicken dinner, the homemade brownie, the craving in the peanut butter sandwich – [leaves Rose] with varying degress of the same scary feeling.”  Rose discovers her mother’s stifled dreams in her lovingly packed school lunches and home-cooked dinners.  The terrifying world of adult emotion reveals itself through every meal. Her scientifically-inclined brother Joseph and his friend George take Rose to experiment; can she taste the emotions of people other than her mother?  At a bakery, Rose is startled to see George eat the other halves of her experimental cookies “without tasting even a speck of the hurry in Janet’s oatmeal, which was so rushed it was like eating the calendar of an executive, or without catching a...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown Does anyone watch CASTLE besides me?  In the television show, the eponymous hero, a ridiculously famous and charismatic novelist portrayed by Nathan Fillion, plays a weekly poker game with his literary rivals, James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Stephen J. Cannell.  The authors banter, trade stories and assist with plot lines.  It’s an adorable riff on brainstorming amongst friends, TV guest-spot style. Now imagine that fictional friendship transported to Victorian times and real life – such was the relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.  Both were extremely popular serial novelists, with liberal views regarding the extensive social injustices of the day.  The authors published in the same magazines, with Collins’s The Woman in White following Dickens’s The Tale of Two Cities.  As their long friendship extended, their families became interwoven together, as Collins’s brother wed Dickens’s daughter Kate. I’ve been looking forward to reading Drood for some time now thanks to a glowing review in The New Yorker.  Drood, a 2009 novel written by Dan Simmons, tells the story of a bitter rivalry behind the friendship of Dickens and Collins, and the terrible mystery of Edwin Drood, who is alternately a criminal mastermind, an opium nightmare or the incarnation of Death itself. The Woman in White is one of my favorite mysteries, creepily atmospheric, with a fiercely intelligent female protagonist, written in the voices of multiple authors in an epistolary style.  Collins’s oeuvre formed a model for later detective fiction, was the progenitor of my favorites Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.  So it pained me a little that the Wilkie Collins depicted in Drood is venal, vicious, and deeply jealous of his more successful friend. Collins narrates the tale of Dickens’s life after the train wreck at Staplehurst,...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown This weekend I had to do something I didn’t want to do.  Every year, the UCLA Economics Department puts on a skit party in an effort to emulate other, higher ranked academic departments.  Why don’t I like to go?  Take a look at the following.  This is what economists think is funny: Yeah.  Picture that but with lower production values.  That was from Stanford’s economics department, a department of a private university with a $12.6 billion endowment.  UCLA can’t afford dry erase markers.  Need more proof that skit parties are the opposite of fun?  Lose ten minutes of your life to Columbia’s skit. I had to go to the skit party because I missed my friend Marc’s birthday.  Marc is finishing up his dissertation, and dissertation writing requires lots and lots of party breaks.  When asked what I could do to make up for my absence, Marc cheerfully replied, “Come to the skit party!  We can celebrate there!” Cuthbert Banks would have sympathized with me.  The eponymous hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s 1922 collection of golf vignettes accidentally knocks a ball into a meeting of the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society.  The accident causes Banks to discover Adeline Smethurst, who stood out from the other club members “like a jewel in a pile of coke.”  Cuthbert is immediately smitten, but upon applying for the fair Adeline’s hand, he discovers she requires an intellectual man, a man, perhaps, who is a member of the Literary Society.  So Cuthbert agrees to join. “Even as [Cuthbert] spoke the words his leg was itching to kick himself for being such a chump, but the sudden expression of pleasure on Adeline’s face soothed him…  It was only in the cold, grey light of...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown When I went to Bologna, in the summer of 2001, I didn’t know that Italy has a history of political terrorism.  All I knew about Italy was contained in two semesters of Italian classes and a videotape that my father recorded of our family’s Italian vacation when I was in the fifth grade.  I was well versed in Italian foods as presented in restaurants, able to order said foods and make polite comments about their quality with reasonable assurance of success, and perfectly competent to point out a Botticelli in a museum, as long as I could see the curator’s comments. It turns out these skills are not as useful to being an Italian university student as I, piling onto the airplane with fifteen other twenty-year-olds, thought they would be.  During my first week in class, the instructor opened up a discussion about capital punishment “negli Stati Uniti.”  Baffled by the tenses of the verbs, I caught only a few words in ten, but found my classmates staring at me in anticipation.  Evidently, as the lone American, I would be propounding the “for” position. I don’t have a lot to say on the benefits of capital punishment in English, to be honest.  It’s more expensive to the state to put a prisoner to death than to hold him for life, which to me, as an economist, frankly ends the argument.  Lacking the proper vocabulary to express the idea of deterrence, my defense of the barbaric American custom ran somewhat along these lines.  “Fa paura gli criminali.  Non fanno le cose cattive perché hanno paura morire.  [Make fear the criminals!  They don’t do bad things because they are afraid to die.]”  There were few converts to the American point...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown My boyfriend won’t stop playing the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack.  You know, the musical created from the rather alarmingly anthropomorphic 1991 Disney movie?  That I listened to every nerdy afternoon of my exceedingly nerdy adolescence?  You’ve never heard the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack?  You must not have been a 13-year-old girl with a martyr complex/daddy issues in 1994. About fifteen years ago, I would wander home from middle school, simultaneously fantasizing about chastely kissing Jean-Luc Picard when I grew up to be the chief medical officer of the Enterprise, and humming tunelessly along to my Walkman about rejecting the village beefcake in favor of books and wedding an overgrown pet cat that can talk.  (That is, of course until, the deeply disappointing end when the Beast changes back into an insipid blond prince.  Oh, spoiler alert, sorry.) Yes, I know.  It’s amazing that I was a virgin until after college. I’d forgotten about this charming component of my childhood until one fateful evening, stumbling back to the apartment after an obscene amount of Sapporo and sake, the boyfriend started serenading Burbank with the strains of “Belle”.  Why does he know the song?  Don’t ask. Even then, I could have kept my secret except that he forgot the words, so I had to chime in where the villagers begin singing.  “This bread – these fish – it’s stale! – they stink! – Madam’s mistaken,” the townspeople bellow, and Belle cries out, “There must be more than this provincial life!”  It’s the universal cry of the suburban teenager, and I can’t understand why today’s children rebel by playing the hip hop music instead of the superb strains of Alan Menken. Anyway, the boyfriend thought this was so funny...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown When he was little, my Dad would worry about the sun going supernova, instantly killing all of the Earth’s inhabitants.  From that worried little boy, Dad grew up to be a physicist, because he wanted to understand the world around him, to discover and preserve the beauty of creation through his work.  His choice of work has always been an inspiration to me, and influenced my own choice to study economics. Of course, the noble choice does not always (or even usually) lead to the noble life.  I have frequently cursed my simple-minded desire to make the world a better place while suffering through various projects that were more difficult than I anticipated.  I always saw physics as the noble profession.  Michael Beard, of Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar, does not delude himself in this way, at least not anymore. “A childless man of a certain age at the end of his fifth marriage [Beard] could afford a touch of nihilism.  The earth could do without … Michael Beard.  And if it shrugged off all the other humans, the biosphere would soldier on, and in a mere ten million years teem with strange new forms, perhaps none of them clever in an apish way.  Then who would regret that no one remembered Shakespeare, Bach, or the Beard-Einstein Conflation?” The Conflation, a brilliant piece of physics written years before we meet Beard, garnered him a Nobel Prize and has been Michael’s ticket to a series of sinecures with stipends attached.  “It sometimes seemed to Beard that he had coasted all his life on an obscure young man’s work, a far cleverer and more devoted theoretical physicist than he could ever hope to be.” At the National Center for Renewable...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown On my spring break in Mexico this past week, I’ve been gorging myself.  On piña coladas, guacamole and arrachera, yes, but also on Sherlock Holmes.  Vacations are the perfect time for re-reading, I’ve found.  With no pressure to accomplish anything, I feel no guilt at all swimming back through my favorite stories.  So this past week I spent part of the time in Puerto Vallarta and part ensconced in the lodgings at 221B Baker Street. I’m starting a new job in a few months, and it was difficult to avoid mining the stories for lessons about working life.  After all, what is the collection but the history of a brilliant career?  Consulted by kings, governesses, heads of state and pawn brokers, Sherlock Holmes chooses his cases with a single rule: let them be interesting.  Without stimulation the mind rebels, and can easily fall prey to vices.  For Holmes, cocaine or morphine.  For me?  Facebook. Holmes’s famous ability to deduce from impossibly tiny details the massive whole of a problem has a funny flaw.  Once the great detective explains, his listeners demote him immediately from magician to casual observer.  In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, Holmes opens the story by noting out of the blue that Watson will not be investing in South African securities.  Watson “gave a start of astonishment.  Accustomed as [he] was to Holmes’s curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into [his] most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.”  But Holmes predicts that a mere five minutes time will convince Watson this statement is “absurdly simple.” “You see, my dear Watson,” says Holmes, “it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself.  If, after doing...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown People on the west coast don’t wear cocktail dresses.  This is a lesson I learned early in my tenure in Los Angeles, walking into Bar Nineteen 12 at the Beverly Hills Hotel.  My Pasadena-raised friend Tracy was with me, dressed immaculately as ever in skinny jeans and charming print top.  But to my east coast-raised mind, going out to a bar, going out at all, meant wearing a dress. Tracy had tried to help me; “You’re awfully dressed up,” she’d say on various occasions.  “I’m just wearing black,” I’d think and quietly ignore that everyone else wore color, and jeans, and jewelry of an entirely different stripe.  But usually these were graduate student occasions, and standing out in a crowd of graduate students feels rather like dressing appropriately. Venturing into the hotel bar that evening was my first exercise in Los Angeles adult society.  I’d always looked appropriate in Boston, in LBD and heels, wearing the pearls that Wellesley girls sport at every occasion.  But that evening as I walked in, it felt as though the entire room stopped to gawk at me, so entirely was I out of place. Looking back at this now, the reaction seems more ordinary.  In LA, someone who’s dressed oddly is likely a celebrity, so the bar patrons needed to check and make sure I wasn’t one.  But at the time, I felt more stodgy and matronly than I could believe; I might as well have worn my hair up in a bun with a pince-nez to make the picture of dowdy womanhood complete. It was this memory that came to me as I was reading The Custom of the Country on my vacation in Mexico this week.  Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown There are quests you embark on because of the desire for adventure, for personal growth, to gain a kingdom.  Then there are quests you start because some dude shows up out of the blue and shoves you out of an airplane.  In the case of Freddy Finney, Prince of Wales, that dude is Mr. Neil, “a mould maker in a rubber sex toy factory in Naples.”  It may seem odd that such a man would determine the fate of the heir to the British throne, but Freddy isn’t just any prince.  He’s a prince with a terrible PR problem. Mr. Neil explains: “You have betrayed your God, your country, your family and your dignity…In being an ass.  You are supposed to be a king, not an ass.  …Your explanations are irrelevant and demeaning.  A king is not a hapless idiot.  He does not allow such things to occur.”  And Freddy has allowed quite a few misunderstanding to fester through the British tabloid press: he’s a character based on Prince Charles, married to a socialite wife, Fredericka, resembling a vapid Lady Di. As Mark Helprin’s 2005 novel opens, the eponymous duo — not in love, not well suited — have taken their wealth and privilege for granted, and as punishment, Freddy and Fredericka are pelted from an airplane into New Jersey, tasked with subjugating the former colonies. Needless to say, the two celebrity royals don’t find New Jersey to be “the bucolic flat land where vegetables are grown” they are expecting.  The banks in the new world refuse to change their smuggled pounds sterling, and the haute couture Fredericka fashions out of their parachutes does not allow the castaways to blend in with the motorcycle gangs and Jamaican emigrants...

. a life-in-review-through-books by Amy Brown When I was just about to go into the tenth grade, my mother; our mother-daughter friends, Betty and Katie; and I went to Paris on a house swap.  After our transatlantic flight, the beginning of our trip appears blurred with jet lag in my memory.  Photos from the night we arrived involve people sleeping and drinking wine in different configurations: Mom asleep on a chair, Mom and Betty vin rouge in hand, Katie and I lolling on a sofa. We were outside the inner ring of the city, in a Parisian suburb named after the Battle of Malakoff during the Crimean War.  In exchange for Betty and Katie’s home with its garden sloping down to the Atlantic Ocean, we took command of a tall townhouse; rooms stacked one atop the other, it overlooked a square city yard, the first I’d ever seen.  The house was full of what appeared to my adolescent eyes as cultural oddities, like the sticky deep fat fryer in the kitchen and the duvets on the beds instead sheet and blanket. The entrée into other people’s lives is what makes house-swapping so much fun, almost more than the chance to visit another city, (although, of course, Paris was miraculous).  We tooled around the Parisian Périphérique in a tiny green automobile; we ate so many baguettes the grocer met us by name and invited us to visit his family in Tunisia. I was reminded of this trip reading the first few pages of Martin Amis’s London Fields; Sam, our narrator, who arrives from New York to a swapped London apartment, describes his luck: “As for the apartment – well, it takes my breath away.  …Yes, I have well and truly stiffed Mark Asprey.  I tramp...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown Through a series of coincidences, I ended up waiting for The Wolfman to start this Sunday with a copy of Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow, in my paws.  In this age of the Twilight series, it is expected that once one has written about vampires, one must immediately turn to the question of werewolves.  And so, I did – and do. What if werewolves lived in Los Angeles?  Sharp Teeth presents in free verse the struggles of three rival lycanthrope gangs centered in east L.A., the dogcatcher who chases their wolf-forms and the police officer who chases their human ones.  But much more than the gangs, this is the story of a dark, beast-like version of Los Angeles.  “This is a violent city,” describes a werewolf, “and I don’t mean rapes and bloodshed.  I mean the existence of every ounce of it.  This entire vast urbanity was bludgeoned from the earth, torn and wrought, piece by piece … to the desert, to death itself. “Not to mention the water, oh yes, the water/ pilfered from hundreds of miles away, where birds and tree roots awoke one bleak day reaching for moisture once easily known/ and now finding only empty dust, because that moisture’s all been pulled here, to be with us/ shimmering in the sweat of porn stars….”  In this portrait of the city, it is not difficult to imagine men shifting into beasts, because the humans themselves are monsters, fighting for territory with a barely hidden animal fury. The book is full of lovely moments.  Lark, the deposed leader of one of the gangs, gets himself picked up by the Pasadena animal shelter.  A Starbucks-drinking man and yoga mat-carrying woman flirt as they call animal control; “Lark listens...

. a life-in-books by Amy Brown For all that my degree requires quite a lot of research, I spend a fairly minimal amount of time in the UCLA libraries.  It’s especially unfortunate given how much I love libraries.  UCLA has quite a lovely one in Powell Library, despite the contingent of smoking and cell-phone-operating undergraduates usually clogging up its steps.  Actually, I’ve been quite jealous of my colleagues who must head off to foreign countries, visiting collections at libraries in Rio and Kiev; my own work centers on information easily available from any computer attached to the World Wide Web. So I was rather envious of the characters in The Historian, who jaunt cinematically from a mysteriously anonymous city in eastern Europe to Tuscany to Istanbul (once Constantinople) in search of Dracula.  Our unnamed heroine, teenager-y and consequently both petulant and eager, discovers a sheaf of ancient letters with which she extracts from her father a story of such juiciness that one would assume it fiction, but for the fact that her father disappears soon after its telling. Dracula is alive, her father Paul, who has spent much of his life in search of Dracula’s unknown tomb, tells her.  Not only alive, but willing to send minion after minion in search of Paul’s careful research – one must be careful, too, because only three bites, and Dracula will control you, as well. It’s troublesome, actually being a graduate student reading this book.  Kostova evinces a wild excitement regarding research that suggests, a little bit, that she may never have done any.  A librarian Virgil into the arcane world of the undead describes the collection of vampire literature in Istanbul: “‘This is the last document…I have never been able to make sense of it.  It...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown I thought I’d write this Valentine’s Day week about the first man I fell in love with.  He appears in a novel; such heroes often do.  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre represents to me the end of my childhood and beginning of my adolescence.  The last book my father read aloud to me — my impatience to get to the end of novels spoiled that evening tradition– I probably colored Mr. Rochester’s character with some of my Dad’s own traits, and undoubtedly, hearing the words read aloud fixed the gothic descriptions formatively in my mind.  But beyond my personal connection to Jane Eyre, the story itself has a richness of imagery and plot unsurpassed, to my mind, by anything in modern literature. As did our own past week here in California, Jane Eyre begins in rainfall.  “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.  We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner … the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.” From the first sentence, the reader plunges into cold and discomfort.  Belittled and begrudged, our orphaned heroine Jane flees into books, dreaming of “the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland … death-white realms” all more hospitable than her current guardianship. Jane’s passion and intelligence, so unnerving to her aunt, eventually earn her a happy exile to charity boarding school.  Even there, Jane confronts the same terrible inequity that torments her amongst the Reed family.  Mr. Brocklehurst, the school’s miserly treasurer, describes his teaching philosophy: “Humility is a Christian grace, and one peculiarly appropriate to the...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown One of my favorite things to do in Los Angeles is to watch the sun set from the bar at the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica.  I’ve lived here for five years now and still feel a tremendous sense of awe looking out over the curve of the shoreline stretching up to Malibu.  Somehow the view of the stucco and the roofs feels timeless, as though nothing has changed since the early days of civilization here.  It seems like I could walk out and meet my father in the ‘sixties, going to work at Ramo Woldrich, now TRW, while Anita, his first wife, took care of their children in a ranch house on Euclid Avenue. It’s the same feeling I have reading Raymond Chandler, a lingering nostalgia sinking me as a reader so deeply into the time of the novel that when I draw up my head, I expect to find the people around me wearing gloves and carrying guns, rather than Ugg boots and Macbooks. The High Window, published in 1942, opens on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena.  Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock, “the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper Murdock who had made a lot of money helping out the community,” has lost an antique coin, the Brasher Doubloon.  She’s quite certain the culprit is her disliked daughter-in-law, who has mysteriously disappeared. This is not Philip Marlowe’s first case, and from the wealth of Pasadena, the detective is soon drawn into Bunker Hill, where “there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets.  They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown Trust none of the dishes at dinner: Those pies are steaming-black with the poison Mummy put there. Whatever she offers you, make sure another person Tries it out first. . . . What I can’t stand is the calculating woman Who plans her crimes in cold blood. —Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green. I borrow this epigraph from Venomous Woman: Fear of the Female in Literature, because I am recuperating from a bout of food poisoning this weekend and I wish I’d taken Juvenal’s advice.  Only in my case the “pie” is a broiled pork chop with sautéed broccoli rapini, followed by an almond tapioca pudding, and “Mummy” is, well, me.  I’m not sure which of the above is the culprit; despite my usual lackadaisical attitude towards expiration dates, these products were fresh from the store.  Just another reason not to shop at Whole Foods, in case you needed one. Anyway, Juvenal’s warning applies as well to the protagonists of Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of my Thumbs, published in 1968.  The lesser-known of Christie’s sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford won me over with their high spirits and good humor in an earlier mystery N or M?, a wild spy drama set in World War II.  In By the Pricking of my Thumbs, Tommy and Tuppence are back home in England, a little bored, and visiting Tommy’s aged aunt in a nursing home.  “After all,” says Tuppence, “I married you for better or for worse and Aunt Ada is decidedly the worse.” Aunt Ada feels roughly the same about Tuppence.  After banishing her to the lower regions, Ada confides to Tommy – “I’m told there’s a lot of poisoning going on here.  To get hearts for the...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown The worst part of my ongoing academic job search is an odd one.  I don’t mind the interminable sameness of the questions asked by interviewers and job postings alike, each one just different enough that the last application effort doesn’t quite fit.  Constructing cover letters has become a mere bagatelle in my repertoire.  Even asking for reference letters, the bane of my undergraduate existence in years past, was this time unmarred by disapproving silence, uncomfortable conversations regarding my general unfitness for employment or sudden disappearances a week before the deadline.  When the time came to apply for positions, I cheerfully asked the department secretary to send out my recommendations, fully anticipating the response, “Well, I’d love to, Amy, but they haven’t been written yet.”  Instead, the reply came: “Done.” No, the part I most hate is writing down the title of my paper.  So it was with a deep sense of recognition that I watched Jim Dixon, the eponymous hero of Kingsley Amis’s 1953 novel Lucky Jim, dumbfounded by “the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written.  It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems.  Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worst than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance.”  It is exactly that sad earnestness I see in my own introductory paragraphs, and the shame of their inadequacy nauseates me every time I have to send them out again. Jim is a lecturer in a two year trial period at a middling English university, and he is rather in a fix.  He’s made...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown In my experience, there is no one in high school who isn’t a wad of wretchedness.  My college roommate tells a story about a classmate in her chemistry class whose pencil fell off her desk and who subsequently burst into tears.  So when I met Quentin in The Magicians, I couldn’t help but admire how perfectly author Lev Grossman captured teenage depression. Quentin Coldwater is a dejected high school student in Brooklyn.  “It seemed to Quentin like the world was offering up special little tableaux of misery just for him: crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.”  He escapes from the bleakness of real life into the magical world of Fillory, described in a set of books by the C.S. Lewis-like author Christopher Plover. Quentin, “trapped in his own private individual winter,” stumbles through a portal into the spring-warm glens of Brakebills College, where his seat at the entrance exam is waiting.  Magic, the magic Quentin has dreamed about for so long, is real. I haven’t fallen so completely in love with a book since I read the first Harry Potter on a sleeper train from Paris during my junior year abroad.  Instead of my expensive coffin-sized berth, I could have just sat up in coach because I didn’t sleep all night, just read and read, immersed in the magical world.  Reading The Magicians I had the same feeling of glorious discovery. Students at Brakebills learn to transform themselves and spend afternoons “as polar bears, wandering clumsily in a herd over the packed snow, swatting harmlessly at each other with giant yellow paws.”  They command fireflies and catch...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown Perhaps it is a tad ironic that during this season of all-encompassing love and blind commercialism Hollywood turns to “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen,” but Sherlock Holmes is too exciting a property to leave undeveloped for long. Indeed, since the events of the final Doyle case in 1914, the famous resident of 221B Baker Street has been portrayed by such greats as John Barrymore in 1922, John Gielgud in ‘50s BBC radio dramas and even John Cleese in a 1973 television episode, as well as the more readily identifiable Holmes played by Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. My father still refers to Brett as “the new Holmes,” the Rathbone version of his childhood still being his definitive detective.  I don’t know how pleased Dad will be with the choice of wry Robert Downey, Jr. to play our hero come Christmas day. Downey certainly has the experience to portray Holmes’s cocaine addiction; it is another question whether the actor can manage to summon the combination of cold brilliance and dramatic arrogance that makes Doyle’s most famous character so enjoyable to read. Our shared love of this great detective led me to my Dad’s Christmas gift this year, a collection of “new” Sherlock Holmes stories by contemporary writers.  Only because I am reasonably sure that he won’t read this column before Christmas day (stop reading now, Dad!) will I share this grouping with my Fierce and Nerdy compatriots. The first book is The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon, which describes an aged Holmes drawn away from his beekeeping into the life of a mute, displaced Jewish orphan during the Second World War.  The theft of the boy’s pet parrot leads to murder and...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown I’m deep in the world of academia this week, reading Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein.  Bellow’s roman à clef outlines the final years of Abe Ravelstein, a professor of philosophy with a “need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, … for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in – or to have it served.”  In the days before his book was published, Ravelstein’s expensive tastes resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, wheedled from former students and faculty friends. Our narrator, Chick, one of said friends, notes that after the publication, Ravelstein had “become rich and famous by saying exactly what [he thought] … his intellect had made a millionaire of him.” Ravelstein reminds me of nothing so much as Professor Slughorn from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with his taste for sweets and love of gossip, his clique of students shaped by the force of his personality.  I must admit that these qualities did not initially endear the professor to me.  Perhaps it was the five bags of old clothes I’d just lugged to Goodwill that made me so unsympathetic to a clotheshorse or, more likely, my own irritation at the credit card debt I’ve accumulated in graduate school making me impatient with an unrepentant debtor – and an intellectual success. Also, Professor Ravelstein’s lectures, described by Chick, “took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment, and then – by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche, Heidegger – to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech America….”  I’ve sat through that lecture, that terrible, disorganized lecture, where the blowhard up front pontificates on topic after topic, dropping famous names, full of sound...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown Last week, my high school class gathered to celebrate ten years since our graduation.  Ideally, in preparation for these things, one goes to the gym, practices the stump speech, drags along the significant other.  I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  Travelling into the bleak vileness of the human heart, well, it seemed applicable. Our narrator, Marlowe, begins his tale on the deck of the anchored Nellie, swaying on the Thames.  “Lights of ships moved in the fairway – a great stir of lights going up and going down.”  From the center of the civilized world, Marlow travels to another world with another river “resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.”  To repurpose a friend’s statement about the cash bar at the reunion, a malaria- and cannibal-filled jungle?  What could go wrong? His aunt maneuvers Marlow into his posting there as a steamboat captain, a favor that immediately pushes him into a web of politics and intrigue.  Surrounded by scenes of devastating human misery, the captain finds himself negotiating against colonial administration both incompetent and actively malicious.  Which is how I remember high school policies precisely. Marlow’s task is to bring back, from the interior, a legendary agent, Kurtz, who has “collected, bartered, swindled or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together.”  Despite Kurtz’s grand success, or because of it, the wilderness surrounding him “had taken him, loved him, embraced, him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.”  Something has gone terribly wrong with Kurtz.  His travels...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown Vacations in my house have always involved cleaning and mystery novels.  This Thanksgiving has proven to be no different.  My mother has embarked on a massive construction project in my childhood home.  In order to maneuver, we are required to reorganize all our accrued literature, including my Dad’s old Optics journals and my baby board books.  It’s been four days, I’ve culled the contents of fifty cardboard storage boxes to fill nine plastic tubs, and I top off my evening with Motrin each night. Adventuring into the past can prove hazardous, as the eponymous heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and her sidekick, Mikael, discover.  Mikael Blomkvist, an Encyclopedia Brown of Sweden, grown up, is asked by a retired industrialist to investigate a mysterious disappearance forty years ago.  The magnate’s niece, Harriet vanished from an isolated island on a day when an overturned oil truck blocked the only bridge.  Each year, a framed pressed flower appears by post, Harriet’s perennial birthday gift to her favorite uncle.  Is it a taunt from her murderer?  And who on the island hated a young girl enough to kill her? Described this way, the story sounds like a classic Agatha Christie – the kind Mom and I sorted by what seemed like the hundreds into yard sale boxes.  I love Agatha Christie novels, and this book lives up to the comparison.  But in the modern twist Larsson introduces, Blomkvist is not a detective, but a financial journalist, disgraced in a libel suit and out of a job.  The varying motives, financial and personal, hidden and disclosed by the characters form a fascinating web. Our girl of the title, Lisbeth Salander, punkish and antisocial, is drawn into the web through her...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown I live in a studio apartment.  Four walls that could nicely serve as a squash court make up my entire (rented) domain.  Needless to say, I don’t have a pet.  But I do believe the world can be separated into two groups: those who involuntarily purr at the appearance of a cat and those who drool back at dogs.  Yes, yes, I know.  You love both!  Or neither!  But deep down, genetic-level deep within yourself, you know that there’s one you like more or despise less. I coo at cats.  Actually, I have what many friends have called a “cat voice,” which makes them able to identify, even via telephone, when I see a cat in a street or window or magazine.  And a big dog bit me when I was about three. While I don’t love dogs, I do love Hamlet, so the retelling of Shakespeare’s play by David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, seemed like a fun idea.  I should have known that a book containing an index of “Canine Classics” at the end of it might not be right up my alley. The story begins with a set of puppies.  These dogs are special, bred to be companions through the careful “Mendelian” calculations of Edgar’s grandfather and father.  Our hero, Edgar turns out to be special as well: the long-anticipated child of another Edgar and Trudy. However, he is mute.  Unable to speak, he proves unable to help when his beloved father dies unexpectedly, and his uncle Claude moves in to take his father’s place. I don’t mind books that draw their reason for being from another (usually better) work of literature.  I’m looking forward to reading Dan Simmons’s new thriller Drood, which is...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown When I left off reading The Hobbit last week, Bilbo Baggins had stumbled across a ring belonging to Gollum, a slimy little creature, hidden in a dark cavern of the Misty Mountains.  Discovering Bilbo has a knife, Gollum “became quite polite.  ‘Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciouss.  It like riddles, praps it does, does it?’”  And the battle of wits is enjoined. Gollum asks “What has roots as nobody see, Is taller than trees Up, up it goes, And yet never grows?”  As Joshua correctly noted, the answer is a mountain, just like our Mt. Shasta, which in daytime is rather glorious.  In his first battle, Bilbo prevails.  He also discovers that the ring (a rather large feature in another set of books by the same author) has certain magical properties that come in rather handy. Besides that first stroke of good luck, no one has ever had a more thoroughly disaster-prone road trip than Mr. Baggins.  Bilbo hits his head a lot.  The dwarves, who loudly doubt his usefulness, leave the hobbit behind at nearly every opportunity.  He’s harassed by trolls, chased by wolves, nearly burnt by goblins, entrapped by giant spiders, doused by several rivers and bewitched by a dragon.  He frequently has to go without the lovely “bacon and eggs and toast and butter” available in his hobbit-hole pantry. Such, as well, was my unhappy fate on our drive home.  This past weekend I had the pleasure to watch some new friends get married in Ashland, OR.  It was a delightful time, but inevitably the end arrived, bride and groom packed off to Seattle, best man toast given (to great acclaim).  The boyfriend (and aforementioned best man) and I...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown In general, when confronted with a long car trip, I tend to react much like Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of The Hobbit.  “‘Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!  Make you late for dinner!  I can’t think what anybody sees in them,’ said our Mr. Baggins” to his unexpected wizard visitor, Gandalf.  Of course, Gandalf, it turns out, was proposing a road trip to raid a dragon’s lair.  My boyfriend was merely suggesting that we drive up to Ashland, OR for his friend’s wedding. But any proper road trip is an adventure, so I brought along Tolkien’s beloved adventure story, written in 1937.  The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, opens in Bilbo’s cozy “hole in the ground,” where the hobbit stays nestled and well-fed behind a perfectly round green door.  Gandalf’s unexpected return to The Hill and the election of Bilbo Baggins as “burglar” for a crew of dwarves uproots Bilbo from his comfortable life.  “I don’t want any adventures, thank you,” he protests.  But when adventure calls, Bilbo “found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out…running as fast as his furry feet could carry him….” That was rather how the boyfriend and I left Burbank, although stuffed into his clown car with us were hundreds of dollars of booze, seven morning suits and a crate of red bull (the boyfriend is the best man at said wedding and in charge of planning the bachelor party.)  Along the drive, I discovered that, like Bilbo, I was without a few essential items.  Any shoes without four inch heels.  Any pants besides the sweats I brought to jog in.  Cash.  My phone charger. As Bilbo’s merry band begin...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown NPR has been waking me the past few weeks with dire warnings about the swine flu.  Their reportage (and a discussion on – the shame of it, readers – the conservative talk station KFI AM 640 by Bryan Suits regarding Los Angeles’s free H1N1 vaccine) made me think of re-reading a book I first encountered in middle school, The Plague, by Alfred Camus. Camus’s plague opens in a suburban wasteland.  Oran is “a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves – a thoroughly negative place”, full of inhabitants dull and quiet.  The description reminds me a little of Encino, where LA’s first free swine flu vaccine clinic was held last Friday. The story starts with rats.  Or rather a single rat, dead under the good Dr. Rieux’s foot.  Later another totters and dies in the hallway of the apartment complex, spurting blood.  If I recall correctly, this rat’s death was the first indication I had that this would be no ordinary school reading assignment. Despite his concierge’s indignation, the animals keep coming out, dying in great piles to be carted out with the refuse.  “From basements, cellars, and sewers [the rats] emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horrified onlookers.”  As the rats die around them, we meet some of our main characters: Dr. Rieux, an idealistic doctor, his concierge M. Michel, Raymond Rambert, a young Parisian reporter, Jean Tarrou, a mysterious observer. Oran’s radio reports are more “vaguely menacing” than those broadcast by my NPR, enumerating the thousands and thousands of rats daily collected...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown This week, in anticipation of a night out at the theater, I picked up the Dover Thrift Edition of Euripides’ Medea.  It’s difficult to form expectations of a piece first produced in 431 BC.  I’d kind of imagined that Euripides would have created an early version of a morality play for the Athenian set.  But instead, I found myself reading the Greek version of the tabloid story “Jon and Kate Plus 8.”  That is, if Kate responded to Jon’s cocktail waitresses by stabbing all the kids to death. When the play opens, Medea has been left by her husband Jason for the daughter of the king of Corinth.  Her nurse describes the queen’s fury: “poor Medea is slighted…she has discovered by her sufferings what it means…to have lost one’s own country.”  Medea is alone, in a country not her own, surrounded by regrets and enemies.  “She will never put up with the treatment she is getting,” warns the nurse.  “She’ll not stop raging until she has struck at someone.  May it be an enemy and not a friend she hurts!” Euripides writes Medea with gentle comprehension of her social isolation.  “We women are the most unfortunate creatures,” she cries out to the Chorus of Corinthian women, “A man, when he’s tired of the company in his home, goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom…But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone.”  And the eight progeny, as the case may be. The Chorus sympathizes, which is a funny undercutting of Medea’s loneliness.  However, when Medea decides the best way to revenge herself on Jason is by killing his new bride and her own children, they turn against her, trying to make...

. a blogumn by Amy Brown It’s been serial killer book week, chez Brown.  I started the week off finishing Mindhunter, an early courtship gift from my boyfriend.  John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s book summarizes Douglas’s really interesting FBI career spent profiling serial killers, rapists and arsonists.  Luckily for the boyfriend, there have been no other warning signs of derangement. Mindhunter outlines some clear symptoms.  A guy demonstrating a history of childhood abuse, cruelty to animals and frequent fantasizing (not the good kind) is not a guy with whom we want to spend a lot of time.  Luckily for the human race, John Douglas has been willing to take one for the team, so to speak.  Over 25 years, Douglas has interviewed and studied criminals such as Charles Manson, Son of Sam and Ed Gein – the creepy guy who made an appearance in Silence of the Lambs wearing a size 14 skin dress.   Now, I don’t totally buy into the concept of profiling.  It has a whiff of the “psychic,” where people hear what they want to and ignore the rest.  But the book sure is fascinating, and worth wading through the boring bits about Douglas’s failed marriage and abortive college career. The police force is sorely lacking in The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, where our narrator is also the killer.  Diggs, the town policeman, spends much of the story tracking the narrator’s brother Eric, recently escaped from a mental institution, while the serial killer remains cheerfully at large.  He kills animal (and human) victims with an artist’s precision.  John Douglas would never have overlooked him. The narrator’s main prey, the source of the novel’s title, are wasps, trapped and released into a killing “factory” imbued by the narrator with god-like properties. ...

. a new blogumn by Amy Brown I don’t really like short stories.  After years of struggling through the New Yorker’s weekly fiction, I finally gathered up the courage to admit I couldn’t glean anything from it.  Beyond the fact that the spare prose and in medias res storytelling make each week rather indistinguishable from the last, the settings (two off my shelf: memories of African life and Midwestern hipster poverty) leave an office worker reader, like this one, with a vague feeling of inadequacy.  Real life is something that happens other places, the stories suggest.  Your daily grind is not anything compelling. Of course, office work often feels the same.  When I worked at an east coast consulting firm, my hours spent communing with Excel and lunches spent discussing WSJ articles often blended together in my memory.  My dreams at night involved sorting and merging datasets. So it was a particular treat to follow up on Richard Russo’s recent recommendation on NPR and discover Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the best description of office life I’ve ever read.  In our lawyer narrator’s Wall Street chambers, lit by windows offering “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall,” unfolds a crisp, funny drama, a real New York story, as relevant today as when published in 1853. Bartleby, a polite, quiet clerk, answers the lawyer’s advertisement for a legal copyist.  In days before Xerox, when documents needed duplication, people did it by hand.  Actually, one of my consultancy tasks was to copy and bind relevant documents for the perusal of my economist boss.  It wasn’t nearly far enough away from Bartleby’s assignments. At first grateful, and hopeful that Bartleby’s staid aspect will sober up his other two scriveners Turkey and Nippers, the narrator discovers that...