When you think, in theory, that going back to grad school sounds fun...

Remember this post. My day today.

5:45 Alarm goes off. Although sleep was elusive anyway; Eddie had a headache and decided to medicate by watching football on our giant bedroom tv, lighting up the whole room like the sun at noonday.
6:00 On the treadmill. Too tired and sore for a tempo run, so I pound out 8 miles while listening to This American Life's Petty Tyrant. Fantasize about becoming a petty tyrant myself.
7:00 Open shades, empty dishwasher, strip a bed, convince a child to actually practice the piano instead of just sitting on the bench half-asleep, gather laundry, make two pans of brownies and a batch of pudding for trifle, make some beds, rouse some kids. You know, the usual.
7:42 Jump in the shower for my morning beauty routine.
7:50 Jump in the car to take Annie to French (the first of four trips to her school today).
8:10 Home. Scriptures, prayers, throw Bryce's lunch at him and send him out the door.
8:15 Maren to school. She wants me to do it, even though her father is willing and just sitting there, surfing the internets.
8:25 Home. Read two papers. I got 19 8-page research papers in class yesterday and they need to be handed back in conferences tomorrow; I also have to read six graduate seminar papers for workshop tomorrow.
9:05 Drop Isaac (who had the day off) at a friend's house. Run back to Annie's school
9:15 Teach Annie's class about Gary Schmidt and take them through a writing exercise.
10:00 Home. Assemble trifle while talking to Mom on the phone. Change laundry loads. Read a few more papers. Swear at the computer, which keeps freezing up.
11:15 Pick Maren up at school with the intention of taking her to dance class. Bag dance class when she starts to cry.
11:20 Home again. Lunch for Maren and me. More papers. A drink for Maren More papers. Another drink for Maren.
12:30 Isaac home; his friend and the friend's little sister stay to play. I finally get some reading done without interruption.
2:00 Friends go home; interruptions resume. Isaac manages to eat a whole can of pringles and a pint of raspberries while I'm not looking. Starts complaining of a stomachache. More reading.
3:30 Bryce home. Take off to pick up Annie at school. Drive her to used ski shop. Glare at her while she cries because the used skis and ski boots aren't pretty. Promise to cover skis with pretty stickers instead.
4:15 Swing by car wash. They kept our car seat when we had the car washed the other day and I have to retrieve it. I get some guy in trouble and don't really care.
4:40 Drop Isaac in the driveway (he's going to the BYU basketball game with Ed) and back out to go to Annie's Parent-Teacher Conference and book fair with the girls.
5:00 Drop by Great Harvest to buy bread for tomorrow's dinner. Sneak in Baskin Robbins to let Annie redeem the free scoop coupon she got at her conference.
5:20 Home. Pick up. Throw chicken nuggets at the kids.
5:40 Parent Teacher Conference for Bryce at the other elementary school
6:00 Second book fair of the day
6:20 Isaac's parent teacher conference
6:40 Home in time to give Maren a sniff, proclaim her clean enough, and stick her in jammies. Read her the new book she got at the fair.
7:00 Watch a movie with the big kids while reading the last nine papers of the day. Two are on how movies and video games will permanently damage my kids; try not to feel too guilty.
9:30 Finish the last paper. The house is a disaster. Do the dishes. Yell at Bryce for spilling milk. Send him to bed mad at me.
9:45 Blog about it all.

Do it all over tomorrow.

Book #114: Sh*t My Dad Says

Title: Sh*t My Dad Says
Author: Justin Halpern

I should have gone to Stake Conference this morning. Maren has a raging case of pinkeye and an earache, and the other kids all complained of various (imagined?) maladies, so rather than drag all four of them for what would undoubtedly be two painful hours of struggle in the primary room (Eddie was working), I decided to stay at home in bed and read this book.

If you're squeamish about bad language, this isn't the book for you. It's a hilarious read, but the majority of the humor derives from Halpern's father, Sam, saying completely foul and inappropriate things to his son, in a totally loving way. That probably doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense or that it could be funny, but trust me, it is.

Book #113: Glimpse

Title: Glimpse
Author: Carol Lynch Williams

Of all the books I read for the Whitney Awards this year, Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One was my favorite. I loved the way it was a book intended for young readers, but it dealt with hard issues and didn't talk down to an audience. I loved that Kyra, the protagonist, was strong, sympathetic, and imperfect. I loved the way Williams captured the sense of place in that novel.

Carol Lynch Williams is coming to my Young Adult novel workshop on Tuesday, and since I loved The Chosen One so much, I decided to read Glimpse. All of the elements I appreciated in The Chosen One are also present in Glimpse. This isn't a book for readers who don't want to read about hard things-- the book opens with Hope's sister Liz attempting suicide, and we later learn that she tried to kill herself because the girls' mother, a prostitute, had been selling Liz to the men who came to the house.

Although the book is 496 pages long, I was able to read this book in a single sitting, in the bathtub, all before the water grew cold. The length is deceptive, since each page of the book looks like a poem, with two or three words on a line. I'm not sure why Williams chose this format, but it works well. She chose her words with such care that the story felt rich and fully drawn, despite the spareness of her prose. We've been talking in class about how most authors can cut their word count by 30 or 40%, and it seems like Williams was able to do that to an extreme level. I'm eager to hear her talk about her process of writing it on Tuesday.

Book #112: Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies

Title: Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies
Author: Brian Doyle

Essayist Brian Doyle is coming to BYU this week and he'll be visiting my Creative Nonfiction graduate seminar. In preparation for his visit, our class read Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, a collection of musings, mainly on faith and fatherhood, but also (strangely enough) about 9/11.

One thing that I admire about Doyle's work (aside from his marvelous prose) is the way that he manages to write about his faith. He's a devout Catholic, and his religion infuses most of what he writes. In that way, he's similar to many of the Mormon writers I've encountered, who feel that they can't write essays about subjects that are close to their hearts without talking about religion. While Leaping was published by Loyola Press (Loyola is a Catholic University) and is now out of print, it doesn't feel that it was written for an exclusively Catholic audience. As a Mormon trying to write, I feel torn between writing for a Mormon audience, talking about things like Fast and Testimony meeting and Youth Conference without needing to explain them, and writing for a wider audience, where many of the small details about my culture will require explanation. I like that Doyle doesn't make excuses for being a man of faith, and seems to feel that his faith adds to his humanism rather than detracting from it.

I wish I could keep myself from harping on this, but the way Doyle doesn't use commas between lists of adjectives drives me crazy. If I were a more generous spirit I'd learn to understand his motivations, or at least appreciate his differences.

Book #111: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

Title: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
Author: David Sedaris

When I heard that a new collection of David Sedaris essays was scheduled for publication, I preordered it from Amazon immediately. It wasn't until the book arrived and I started reading it that I realized that it was not a series of stories from Sedaris's own life, but a collection of fables about animals. Think Aesop, only dirtier.

I've always had an irrational prejudice against stories where there are talking animals (I blame it on my ninth-grade English teacher, who made us read Watership Down one miserable summer), so I wasn't excited to discover that this was a book about talking animals. Ugh.

But I'd paid for the book, I might as well read it, right? It's a relatively short book beautifully illustrated by Ian Falconer (of Olivia and The New Yorker fame). And it's not terrible. Actually, it's pretty funny, with anthropomorphized animals doing all of the horrible and evil things usually only humans are capable of. But at $22 for 175 small pages with big type and even bigger margins, the book feels pretty pricey for what you actually get. Next time I hear that a book by Sedaris is coming out, I'll check and see if it's about animals-- if it is, I'll reserve it at the library, but I'd still pay full price for a book of his essays.

Book #110: Faithful Place: A Novel

Title: Faithful Place: A Novel
Author: Tana French

I really enjoyed Tana French's two previous Dublin-based mysteries, In the Woods and The Likeness, so I was eager to read Faithful Place once I heard it was being released. In general, I liked the story-- Frank Mackey, the protagonist in this story, was a secondary character in The Likeness (which seems to be a trend for French's novels-- she used the same technique in her second novel), an undercover cop who discovers that he wasn't stood up by his girlfriend twenty years ago on the eve of their escape from the Dublin slum where they both grew up-- she had actually been killed.

One of the hallmark's of French's previous works was the complicated motivations of police officers whose work and personal lives intersect. She does a great job with the characterizations of the various people living on Faithful Place. Since I signed up with Audible several months ago, I've listened to lots of audiobooks, and sometimes the readers ruin the books, other times they're merely serviceable, but this time the reading, by Tim Gerard Reynolds, was fantastic. In fact he won an audiofile earphone award for the reading. He does a great job handling all the different characters (ranging from a young child to an old man) and captures all the intonations of Dublin's various social classes.

While the book was enjoyable to listen to, there were a few places where I felt that French's story fell short. Mackey is flawed and hard-bitten, but when he gets around his daughter, he turns into a perfect parent. Yes, he does break a weekend date with her to work on the case, but in general he's all Whole Foods and homework and bedtimes, which doesn't seem consistent with his character. I think he'd probably be a pretty crappy parent. The girl alternately seems older and younger than nine. I figured out who the killer was about 1/3 of the way into the book, and it seemed so obvious that I kept waiting for a twist, especially after the person confessed to one of the murders but refused to confess to the other. But I can easily overlook those small problems because I felt like French transported me to cold December nights on Faithful Place.

Book #109: Freedom

Title: Freedom: A Novel
Author: Jonathan Franzen

I promised a review of Freedom, and although it's a little late (yes, I forgot), I'm back. My word is my bond and all that. Anyway, I really liked the first 300 pages of Freedom. I was captivated by the somewhat unlikely love story of Patty and Walter Berglund and the struggles they were having with their children. But about halfway through the novel, I realized that there wasn't one person in the story I liked: not unhappy, cheating Patty, not sanctimonious, boring Walter, not their cheating and sanctimonious kids, not Walter's potential fling or Patty's longtime man-on-the-side (who happened to be Walter's best friend). In the end, Franzen created a novel of such unlikeable characters that it was hard to finish, or root for anyone in the story. I do like how the story ended, with a note of hope, but my goodness, getting there felt like being trapped at a very dysfunctional family dinner at times.

Book #108: The Best American Essays 2010

Title: The Best American Essays 2010
Editor: Christopher Hitchens

Maybe my perspective on what constitutes an essay has changed since I started my creative nonfiction seminar six week ago, but it felt like there was a whole lot of nonfiction but not very many essays in Best American Essays this year. I wonder if this is because Hitchens is not known as an essayist-- he's written multiple works of nonfiction (and recently published his memoir). I'm not sure if the BAE people considered that the 2010 edition would likely be Hitchen's last opportunity to edit a collection for them, and while I hate the disparage a dying man, I'm not sure that Hitchens was the best editor for a collection of essays. More than half of the works included in the book feel like magazine articles or retrospectives rather than essays or personal narratives. 

Genre considerations aside, there is some great writing in BAE. I loved Jane Churchon's "The Dead Book," and John Gamel's "The Elegant Eyeball." In fact, all of my favorite essays dealt with the intersection of writing and medicine or science. I wonder if that was a particular area of interest for Hitchens, or if I have a particular interest in these intersections because it represents the collisions of my area of interest with Eddie's. While I'd use the term "essay" lightly in the categorization of the works included in this book, I can't quibble with the fact that the writing is good. 

Book #107: U and I

Title: U and I
Author: Nicholson Baker

(I wrote this review for my Creative Nonfiction seminar).

Just when I start feeling like I have a pretty good grasp on contemporary literature, Nicholson Baker shows me that I’m really not all that well read, after all. I’d never heard of Nicholson Baker, have read nothing by John Updike or Vladimir Nabokov, two of his favorite authors (I have had Lolita on my Kindle for the last six months, but I don’t think that counts), and I’ve read very little of his other main influences—Joyce and Proust. However, I have had literary crushes before, so I feel like I can identify with Baker’s obsession with John Updike, despite not being intimately acquainted with Rabbit Angstrom.

When Baker was in his early thirties and had earned critical praise for the two novels he’d had published, he learned of the death of Donald Barthelme, a writer who had mentored his young colleague. Baker considers writing about Barthelme, but soon realizes that everything he thought about his mentor is now colored by the fact that Barthelme was dead. He says, “The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar” (9). Instead of writing about Barthelme, Baker decides to write about the living author who has had the greatest effect on his life and career—John Updike. When Baker began his project in 1989 (originally conceived as an article for The Atlantic, but it soon grew too big for magazine publication and was published as a book in 1991), Updike, who died in 2009 at the age of 76, was still at the top of his career as a writer, turning out novels, book reviews, short stories and poetry with an efficiency that made Baker sweat.

Baker decides that he won’t read anything Updike has written while he’s writing about Updike; he won’t even look up passages to verify their accuracy until he’s done writing (he later corrects his misremembered passages, using brackets to show Updike’s actual words—and while the differences are sometimes startling, so is the fact that at other times he remembers, nearly verbatim, long passages from Updike’s novels). He sits down at his typewriter and starts brainstorming every passage he remembers from the bits and pieces of Updike he has read, which probably amounted to about a third of Updike’s body of work up to that point. Then he writes about how Updike (who he’s met only twice, at book readings, until this point) has influenced him as both a man and a writer. While the book is ostensibly about Updike’s writings, it’s more about Baker, who isn’t shy about showing his own self-doubts, pettiness, and ambitions. For example, he talks about stalking Updike outside a reading at the offices of the Harvard Lampoon. He corners the older writer (using a phrase from Updike “life was too short not to” as justification), reminding him about the last time they met, lying about having attended Harvard. He says, “And yet if he hadn’t felt enough fondness for his old school magazine to show up that day, I wouldn’t have had my chance to wait for him near the ham tidbits, steeling myself to be pushy. I knew it was pointless, but I wanted to talk to him…” (160).  After that experience, Baker sees himself as a minor villain in one of Updike’s novels (tall, skinny, bad skin, pushy, just like Baker) but also takes away the idea that Updike may have borrowed an idea from a short story written by Baker. He concludes the book by saying, “For a minute or two, sometime in 1983, the direction of indebtedness was reversed. I have influenced him. And that’s all the imaginary friendship I need” (179).

As someone who had no prior interest in either Baker or Updike, I was skeptical about U and I. It ended up reminding me a lot of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. It’s true that U and I was much better written (there’s no way that Powell would have snuck Madonna references all the way through a 20-page chapter—relating them to herself, to Julia Child, to food, and Baker did it in a way that delighted me as a reader). Both Powell and Baker worry about what their living subjects will feel about being scrutinized. Powell is shocked when Julia Child dismisses her project, Baker says, “Updike could react, feel affronted, demolish me, ignore me, litigate” (20). Both authors also use the exploration of another’s work to explore themselves, and both are very forthcoming about their own weaknesses.  But Baker is funnier, and less whiny, and certainly made less money on his project than Powell did. Powell, who started her project as a blogger, also doesn’t experiment with the five- or eight-page paragraph the way that Baker does. I’ve never loved a long paragraph—one of the authors I studied for my first MA thesis was Henry James, and I always knew I’d have a headache after reading him for more than an hour, but Baker does the mega-paragraph better than anyone else I’ve ever read (including Proust, but that may be my limited French speaking). I loved following the twists and turns of his ideas, and how he always managed to bring back in what appeared to be extraneous strands of thought. Yes, he could easily have split up some of those paragraphs, but I loved watching him show off.  Baker also spends a significant amount of time on the process of writing—what he should say, what he shouldn’t say, and why (although he actually does say it all).

Interestingly enough, in the two decades following U and I, Baker’s career has followed a somewhat similar trajectory to Updike’s, in the breadth of his subjects. He’s published approximately 20 books, and upwards of 50 short stories, essays and articles. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction work, Double Fold. U and I is still considered his most important work.

Book #106: The Wednesday Wars

Title: The Wednesday Wars
Author: Gary D. Schmidt


It's been kind of a Gary Schmidt fest around here. All of the students in our Young Adult class were required to read a Schmidt novel. Then he visited our class last week and we had the chance to ask him questions, and then I had the chance to introduce him at a lecture he gave at BYU, and following the lecture my professor invited me to have lunch with him (which was SO cool, how often do you get to have lunch with a Newbery Award winner?). After that, I was on such a Schmidt kick that I decided to go ahead and read The Wednesday Wars.

The Wednesday Wars is the story of Holling Hoodhood, a seventh-grader living in Long Island who knows that his English teacher hates him. This knowledge is reinforced every Wednesday when half the class goes to CCD at the Catholic church down the street and the other half goes to Hebrew school, leaving Holling alone with Mrs. Baker, who makes him read Shakespeare. Over the course of the year, Holling discovers that Shakespeare doesn't have to be a punishment, that a teacher doesn't have to be an enemy, and that growing up can be complicated.

I loved The Wednesday Wars and think that Bryce would love it too. It has a perfect combination of humor, things to think about and preteen hijinks to keep even a reluctant fifth or eighth grader reading. My only criticism is that Holling's parents seem particularly absent, even though they both exist in the story. While I can see that having them portrayed as unsympathetic allows for more conflict within the story, it doesn't feel like an accurate portrayal of parenthood. Maybe I was just lucky to have really great parents.