To be fair, I pretty much adore Amy Tan. There is something about the way she writes that touches a nerve with me every time, and I fall right into her books no matter how many times I read them.

Saving Fish from Drowning, though, is a whole new ballgame.

It’s amazing. It’s perceptive, intuitive, and breaks from her mother-daughter disconnect mold entirely. And it’s genuinely funny in parts. Touching, political, with hints of satire, but not enough to make your average north american world traveller more than just a little squirmy.

I mean… it has hints of Life of Pi about it. She claims at the beginning of the book that it is based upon both the real disappearance of some tourists in Burma, and that it’s based on a story narrated to a woman via automatic writing. So who knows – could it be true? 10 minutes of googling is inconclusive. But it could very well be.

The narrator, and indeed most of the characters, are delightfully sympathetically unsympathetic. There may be a few too many points of view… I had a hard time keeping characters straight at the beginning. But it all ties up so nicely, so happy-sadly… that I don’t mind at all.

I’m delighted by this book. Entirely.

Undistinguished biography/memoir of the type where the young protagonist goes through a difficult time and learns a valuable lesson. Set in Montreal during the depression.
Yep.

Sometimes I loved this book, sometimes I hated it. I liked the tone of it… and then found it maddening and mysogyinstic. Overall though, it was an entertaining romp through a variety of generally-amusingly-overdescribed settings.

Fore and backshadowing abound. Overblown language, ditto. Sweet characters with whom to build a bond… check. Random cast of amusing secondary characters who somehow manage to have lives and backgrounds of their own regardless of the paucity of lines devoted to them in the text…. check.

All in all, a worthwhile read, though… yeah… that sort of thing…

Desmond Morris is a zoologist, and he’s spent a good chunk of his life studying a very particular animal – man.

So when he talks about sending our children to war being ‘inefficient’ he’s not really suggesting anything along the lines of A Modest Proposal, but rather pointing out that war is one of those ways where modern man acts against his own best interests.

And, he says, this boils down, basically, to overcrowding, and the ‘unnatural’ situations we’ve technologically evolved ourselves into. It’s not that human evolution in the terms of the world we create is bad – after all, we’re now mostly well fed and safe from predators. But now, you see, we haven’t much to do, and we’re thrown into constant contact with all these people outside our ‘tribe,’ and, when it all boils down to it, we haven’t, biologically speaking, evolved into the environment we’ve built ourselves, and, at the rate we keep changing it, we’re never going to catch up.

And that makes us neurotic and wacky, just like animals in a zoo. So we act against our own and society’s interests.

Huh.

It was definitely an interesting and entertaining read, and hey, isn’t this hypothosis so much better than many of the others?

This book kind of makes me want to puke. Terrible, but true.

It’s a sort-of-memoir from a woman who spends a year or so ‘passing’ as a man in several all-male enclaves: bowling teams, strip clubs, monastaries, men’s retreats. And it’s a sort-of over-written, over-analyzed, overwrought, over-generalized pile of random imagined observations.

I feel like it’s sort of transgressive in a good way sometimes to infiltrate spheres usually outside your reach. I also feel like it’s transgressive in a totally evil way to tell the people you find there how they’re feeling.

Also, contains writing like so:

“We let out all the hateful air in our balloons like mad monologists with a cogent form of Tourette’s.”

Need I say more? I could, you know.

Comprising:
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

My friend Carlotta told me I just had to read these books. She swore they had her rolling around the floor with tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks. I should have known to tone down my expected response. After all, she’d claimed similar things for the exploits of Don Alonso Quixano (that is to say, el Señor Quijote).

And this trilogy is much in a quixotic vein, or really, a sort of modern-day(ish) Candide. Though the modern day seems puzzlingly anachronistic, and the exploits of our Candide-esque scholar, Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igenfeld (of the hedgehog), are a little less life-changing and devastating for those involved.

I enjoyed it for the most part, though I can’t claim to have actually laughed aloud, particularly. Perhaps my sense of humour is stunted. It was diverting, and interesting, and I’m not quite sure at what aspect of society McCall Smith was trying to poke fun.

Hm. It had it’s moments.

But now, onward.

This book was even more intensely personal than misconceptions, somehow, while still being grounded in solid research.

It approaches the way young girls in our society learn to be women, in particular addressing how they deal with sex. And I would have to say that I really agree quite strongly with her central message – to whit – we don’t tell them enough, while bombarding them with too much.

The healthy rituals to introduce girls into womanhood are completely missing. And because they get sex ed that tells them that abstinence is ideal, desire abnormal, and sex mysterious and dangerous, and because they get bombarded with ‘the perfect woman’ on celluloid and billboards, and because parents don’t know what to say any more… Girls get mixed up. And it gets them into trouble.

I know it got me into trouble.

Some parts of the book were squirmy, though not nearly as many as The Beauty Myth or Misconceptions. The message was more hopeful than not, too, which I appreciate. Of girls of her muddled-up generation, she says, they were confused and bewildered, but none of them failed to reach a womanhood they could appreciate. And even the darker recollections were tempered with a sort of nostalgia.

So if you read this book, and if you plan to have children, especially should they turn out to be daughters, you probably should, let’s pledge, together, to institute the sort of rituals of coming of age that will let our future adults come into that stage of life with poise, knowledge, and a mutual respect.

Are you in?

This is not a book. This is a brick. A tome. A great hunk of densely-covered pages.

And it’s about ettiquette.

But fear not, gentle readers, for it’s etiquette with a bite. (From the late 80s, so there’s a level of entertaining disconnect, too.)

Exhibit A:

Dear Miss Manners:

How do I introduce people who are living together but not married without embarrasing them or offending my other guests?

Gentle Reader:

What type of entertainment do you give, that everyone’s sexual affiliations must be declared at the door? Introduce people by their names.

Exhibit B:

Dear Miss Manners:

My wife objects if I use her bath towel when mine isn’t handy by. Don’t you think that kind of “formality” is a bit much?

Gentle Reader:

Certainly not. Your wife is quite right. Marriage is no excuse for that sort of intimacy.

Exhibit C:

Dear Miss Manners:

What is the proper way to walk in high-heeled shoes?

Gentle Reader:

Left, right, left, right, left, right.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m insuffrably geeky but I enjoyed every minute of this. If you really must have more samples(and I, personally, must), she’s syndicated on MSN – http://lifestyle.msn.com/Relationships/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=27876

This movie is so fabulously fun from moment one to moment 89.

Just watch it, already.

I have to say, and keep in mind that I read Beautiful Losers last year around this time, that Cocksure is quite possibly the strangest book I have ever read.

The thing about satire, you see, is that if you don’t have intimate knowledge of the cultural context being referenced, a lot of things come off as simply bizarre.

That said, there were points in the narration where I was laughing out loud, and I’m not ashamed to admit it… and overall the whole thing was somehow satisfying and definitely a pleasure to read.

I just couldn’t begin to tell you what, exactly, he was trying to say…