BiblioAddict

On seeing Watchmen, a feminist writer, an anti-feminist cop, and a couple of books in between:

BiblioGuy and I are dipping out after work to see “Watchmen” and then I’m off to St. Louis tomorrow morning to celebrate my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary.  So I figure it’s best to get this week’s status update out of the way before it goes the way of last week’s (nonexistant) status update.

First things first, I’ve managed to finish two whole books. Wahoo!  Cue the confetti and the Rocky music.  The first one I finished last week: Katha Pollit’s Learning to Drive.  Remember when I wrote that I suspected it would be the perfect complement (antidote?) to Sloan Crosely’s funny but lacking in introspection I Was Told There’d Be Cake?  Well my suspicions were confirmed.

I’ve earmarked page after page of Learning to Drive.  I had no idea that Pollit is normally considered a feminist writer who was raised by Marxist parents.  When she didn’t have some very poignant things to say about aging as a woman (See: “I Let Myself Go”) and the exhilarating give and take between men and women (See: ” When All the Men Are Gone”), she wrote very entertainingly about her experiences in a Marxist book club and what she learned when she read her parent’s FBI file.

Speaking of feminism, let me digress for a just a bit to say that yesterday I read the most infuriating page and a half I’ve read in a very long time.  It was a page and half full of jokes about women as told by a misogynistic male cop in Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

Have you ever been so mad that you feel steam coming out of your ears?  Well then you know exactly how I felt.  I was unfortunate enough to read this when I was riding the bus home yesterday, and I’m sure the other riders were wondering why I was glaring at the page so furiously.

I’d provide a full excerpt, but really I don’t want to ruin your Friday.  Suffice it to say that all of the jokes were in the vein of, “How many parts does a woman’s brain have?”  Answer: “It depends on how hard you hit her.”

Yeah.

It’s been a while since I’ve despised a character as quickly and as violently as I did that unnamed cop.  Speaking of 2666, I may as well say that I’m almost finished with book 2, “The Part About the Murders.”  Honestly, I can’t wait, because the catalogue of the various young girls and women being murdered (ranging in ages from 9 -35 years old) is killing me.  It’s one heartbreak after another, compounded by the fact that few of the people in the novel who should care actually seem to.

On to that other book I finished: John Harwood’s The Seance.  This was an entertaining, quick Gothic read.  Still, there was something that I found vaguely disappointing about it.  I think I was hoping for a greater, more harrowing conclusion to the mystery than I received.  The ending, though it did tie up all of the loose ends, was kind of lackluster.  I was expecting a greater confrontation with the arch villain than the one I received.  But that’s all stuff for the review which I hope to do one day some time soon.

You already know from my last post that I’ve begun reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  I’m still not very far along so I don’t really have a comment on it yet.  I’ve also started reading The Best American Travel Writing ed. by Anthony Bourdain.

This morning I read “Next Stop, Squalor” by John Lancaster, in which he examines the moral questions surrounding a tourism company that offers tours of the Dharavi slum of Mumbai.  Is this exploitation or education?  Of hand, I would have said the former and a part of me still does.  The thought of western tourists venturing to a slum in India to gawk at its dwellers like an expensive trip to the zoo… it sticks in my craw.

But the founder of the tourist organization says that the idea isn’t to exploit the slum dwellers, but to “dispel the myth that people there sit around doing nothing, that they’re criminals… We show it for what it is – a place where people are working hard, struggling to make a living, and doing it in an honest way.”

Even if that is a bunch of scam talk (what I’d call “game”), Lancaster rightly points out that the criticism coming from many of Mumbai’s city officials and journalists is also questionable:

Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation.  I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty – an image at odd with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park.

I’ve also read a bit more of Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.  He’s getting into the nitty-gritty of linguistics, and the growing use of linguistic jargon is starting to cross my eyes a bit, but I’m making it.  Slowly but surely.

Lastly, I’m thinking of starting Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I know – as if I don’t have enough on my plate, but I have an opening for one more fiction book and if I’d done yesterday’s Booking Through Thursday this would’ve been at the top of my list. Either way, I won’t be able to make up my mind until Sunday, which is a ways off yet.

And that’s it guys and gals, excepting for the two magazines I also managed to finish which was like removing two M&Ms from a jar full – no effect whatsoever.  Eh, what can you do but keep reading, right?

Have a great weekend everyone!