46. Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bantam Books, 153 pages, 1864, translated by Mirra Ginsburg in 1974

I put off reading this forever and ever and ever because of Dostoevsky's reputation as a dense, difficult, cerebral novelist, but finally the book challenge forced me to give in because it was one of the few short books I had left to read and now I wonder what took me so long.

I swear to God I read somewhere that the Beat Generation was heavily influenced by Notes from Underground, and now I can't find any reference to it, which is too bad because reading it gave me a new way of approaching the main question I had about On the Road: if Jack Kerouac honestly believes in the Beat way of life (as he seems to), why does it come across as so repugnant? (Or, since he's apparently self-aware enough to realize how destructive it is, why does he believe so fervently in it?) At the time I read it I came to the conclusion that he was just painting a picture of the Beat Generation in the entirety of its glory and despair. In Notes from Underground, though, the underground man prioritizes freedom and self-expression over happiness and well-being, saying that "man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere preferred to act according to his own wishes rather than according to the dictates of reason and advantage." He goes on to portray base, random, irrational acts as a sort of rebellion against 18th-century ideas of human nature as essentially good and rational, saying that "though [human nature] may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive." I think this is what On the Road is getting at--freedom at any cost; putting authenticity and ecstasy and experience above stability and order and well-being.

(This is not all I got out of Notes from Underground, by the way--it's just the only thing I can say that somebody else hasn't already said better.)

Top 5 books I'm dying to read when the book challenge is over

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (a classic of city planning)
2. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (woooo impulse buy)
3. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray A. Brechin (about San Francisco's elite and the political and environmental havoc they wreaked on California)
4. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang

Being on a nonfiction kick is slightly inconvenient when you're in the home stretch of the dumbest New Year's resolution you ever made and trying to finish 6 books in just over a week. Unlike Matt, though, I'm totally willing to sacrifice content for bragging rights and an opportunity to shit-talk. Hello, The Niigata Sake Book!

38. The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Allyn & Bacon, 95 pages, 2000 (originally published in 1959)

Okay, I have two shocking and embarrassing things to admit here. The first is that I've actually never sat down and read The Elements of Style cover to cover. (Yes, despite the number of times I told you to read it instead of directly critiquing your writing. People who worked with me on [X]Press, feel free to draw and quarter me now.) And the second is that now that I have read it in its entirety, I completely understand why many people think it's outdated.

The trick is in knowing which rules to follow and which to ignore--and if you're the kind of person most desperately in need of this book, you probably don't know the difference. Unfortunately, this makes it useless to tone-deaf writers. The Elements of Style is most useful to teachers and editors who are trying to verbalize principles that come intuitively to them. I've seen so many writers fail to follow even basic principles such as "Keep related words together" (not to mention pretty much all of the ones involving comma placement and usage), and White clearly and simply explains the problem and how to fix it where I could only sputter incoherently and/or drink as I edited. Many of the rules in the "Misused Words and Expressions" chapter have become obsolete by descriptivist standards, if they were indeed ever correct in the first place and not just personal quirks of William Strunk Jr. (as E.B. White's preface seems to indicate). But certain sections of the book are pure gold. It is itself an example of the principles it outlines; it's beautifully written, often funny (though always understated), vivid and fresh. It can improve writing at all levels; some principles ("Write with nouns and verbs") involve a bit of finesse, others ("Be clear") are deceptively simple, but all of them make me realize just how far I still have to go. Reading it makes me want to be a better writer and editor.

Oh, and guess what? This is my blog and I can make a post consisting almost entirely of quotations from The Elements of Style if I want to. Suck it.

"It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color."

Two examples for Principle of Composition #16, "Use definite, specific, concrete language": "He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward." vs. "He grinned as he pocketed the coin."


On parallel construction for related concepts: "The unskilled writer often violates this principle, mistakenly believing in the value of constantly varying the form of expression."


An example of the consequences of not keeping related words together: "New York's first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday with semen samples from eighteen men frozen in a stainless steel tank ... In the lefthand version of the third example, the reader's heart goes out to those eighteen poor fellows frozen in a steel tank."


"Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs but load their attributives with explanatory verbs: 'he consoled,' 'she congratulated.' They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing." (In English classes from elementary school on up through high school, we received a handout of a list of synonyms for "said" to use in our writing. I think Mrs. Hillesland might have even given us one.)


"When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax." 


"Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable."

37. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Signet Classics, 215 pages, 1876

I decided to read this because after finishing Huck Finn I wanted to hang out with Mark Twain and his wonderful narrative voice for just a little longer, and it was already on my shelf. Mark Twain (like Haruki Murakami) is one of those authors who could write about anything and still have my interest. I kind of wish I had read it before Huck Finn, just for the extra insights into Huck's character, which were really all I got out of this. I wish I had more to say about it but being unable to finish this post is keeping me from posting about other books that I have LOTS to say about, so up this goes.

36. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Google e-book, 313 pages, 1885

Earlier this year, a publisher decided to print an edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that substituted "slave" for a certain infamous racial slur that occurs 219 times in the novel. This is not all that interesting in and of itself, but around the same time, this jackass decided to attempt to turn around a lifetime of violent racism by "apologizing" for it on national television, and a comment on Metafilter decided to pull the two stories together and set a quote from said jackass ("And I found out there is no way I could be saved and get to heaven and still not like blacks") against the climactic scene in Huck Finn, in which Huck decides that he will go to hell rather than turn Jim in to his owner. That comparison alone was enough to make me reconsider the novel I'd read as an 11th grade AP English student and completely dismissed because it was written in dialect and was about a bunch of hicks and, like, slavery was over anyway. (Oh how embarrassing it is to recall this.)

Upon rereading, I still don't think Huckleberry Finn is a watershed moment in the history of American race relations. The climax is a truly life-changing and dramatic moment, but there are so many problems in the rest of the book (particularly the portrayal of Jim as a servile buffoon) that it loses some of its impact, and overall the messages are mixed. I do admire it for other reasons, though. Huck's voice is charming and expressive, and signified a break from proper British prose and the beginning of a genuine American literature. The book works best as a coming-of-age story, the story of Huck's search for freedom and developing sense of right and wrong (not only regarding Jim and slavery but also in scenes like the attempted swindle of the Wilks sisters, from which Jim is completely absent).

Among all the book endings I've read this year (or ever, really), the last paragraph of Huck Finn is one of my favorites:

"Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more.  But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it.  I been there before."

(Note: I read this Google ebook, which seems to be the only free copy in Google Books that is plain text instead of a scanned PDF. I think they used some kind of text-recognition software to convert it--most of it is okay, but there are times when it tries to turn dialect into "real" words [for example, "clumb," the past tense of "climb" in Huck's dialect, becomes "dumb"], and it really, REALLY doesn't like Jim's speech and periodically turns it into sprays of random letters and punctuation marks. I had to consult the print version a couple times to figure out what was going on. Probably worth paying the 5 bucks for a paper copy, if you don't live in Japan.)

22. East of Eden

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Penguin Classics, 602 pages, 1952


Like most Americans my age, I read my fair share of Steinbeck in school--Of Mice and Men in the 9th grade (which was a total waste of time with the teacher I had) and The Grapes of Wrath in the 11th--but I must have been too young to appreciate it because I don't remember either of those novels being anywhere close to this stunning. Giants like this are hard for me to write blog posts about because I don't feel like I can say anything about a book so great and ambitious, but I can say that it made me so, so homesick for California, and proud to be from a state with such a rich and varied heritage, not to mention its literary tradition (Steinbeck! Henry Miller! The Beats! Just about every Asian American author I can think of!). Steinbeck is a master of the grand and the epic, and I think East of Eden also shows how well he knew and loved California and its history--the towns that sprang up out of nowhere overnight, the whorehouses, the character of its inhabitants. I loved Lee as a character--his insistence on being a servant for the Trask family despite other opportunities makes him less than ideal as a token minority, but what the hell, Steinbeck understood Asian Americans and their place in California history better than most white authors today. As he puts it: "Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." It is probably a sign that I've been in Japan too long that that is getting me all choked up with patriotic fervor, that or I'm getting sentimental in my old age. 


Next up: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Book challenge progress

It's been a while, and there's too much to say, and much of it has already been said. (Last year brought two major relocations and the end of a five-year relationship, but after the earthquake and its physical and emotional aftermath, I think I can safely say that this year has already equaled it in insanity. Then there was that date I went on)

Anyway, as usual, the only way I feel like I can dive back into blogging is by talking about books. I'm still behind on the 50-book challenge (I've read 15 books when I should be at around 20), and even more behind with the blogging, and some of these books deserve much more attention than I've given them here, but if I try to do an individual entry for each book I'll never get this done.

6. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Penguin Books, 314 pages, 1928
I was quite disappointed by this, to be honest. I hadn't expected that the controversy would stand the test of time, but I didn't expect it to be downright sexually conservative, either. I did find the social commentary and anti-industrialist themes interesting--more interesting than the characters, to be honest, which is probably why I didn't enjoy the book. (Apparently it's been criticized in the past for being too transparent in its social commentary, at the expense of storytelling.)

7. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Vintage Classics UK (Random House), 337 pages, 1961
This book works quite well into the post I'm writing about Rabbit, Run by John Updike, so I won't say anything about it here except that it is very nearly the perfect novel.

8. The Book of Tea, Kakuro Okazawa
IBC Publishing, 135 pages, 1906
I started taking lessons on tea ceremony recently, and decided to read this as a way of immersing myself deeper into the meaning and spirit behind tea ceremony. The book easily delivered on that promise and really brought the ceremony alive for me, with the unexpected side effect of making me understand finally this aspect of Japanese culture that I have been rejecting for all these years as cliche. I'm a little ashamed to admit that despite all my Asian American studies coursework, I once had a tendency to thoughtlessly consider the Japanese cultural arts (tea ceremony included) to be sort of outdated and inauthentic, something white people tried to push on me without understanding that Japanese America has long since moved on. But after learning and reading about tea ceremony I understand exactly why the Issei generation continued practicing it in the internment camps, and exactly what was lost when subsequent generations abandoned it to become more American. This is all just my personal baggage and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the book itself, but it is a wonderful introduction to the philosophy of tea ceremony.

9. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Random House, 349 pages, 2009
This one took a while to draw me in--I didn't find the initial group of characters especially compelling. But gradually McCann brings in more characters and sketches out the connections between them, creating an intricate web of incidental attachments and people passing in the streets. After those slow first pages, it's a wonderful story.

10. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
Vintage International (Random House), 180 pages, 2007, translated in 2008 by Philip Gabriel
When I picked this up, it had been a while since I had read anything; instead, I had been spending a lot of time at the gym, and I thought this book would be a good way to connect all that physical effort back to something mental. I love Murakami's style and would enjoy reading him write about just about anything, but what impressed me with this one was how well he knows himself, how intimate and concrete is his knowledge of his own strengths and shortcomings.

11. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Vintage Canada (Random House), 354 pages, 2001
Life of Pi is just excellent storytelling--funny, sad, smart. I don't know what else to say about it; I avoided reading it for years because of all the buzz and finally became interested in it due to this (really old, major-spoiler-containing) Ask Metafilter thread. It has its flaws, which this review does a better job of describing than I could--the one that bothered me the most was that Pi's religious fervor, so important in the early chapters of the novel, is almost completely dropped as a theme once the survival story begins. But it was still a thoroughly enjoyable read.

12. A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
Vintage UK (Random House), 299 pages, 1982, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED this and I can't even explain why. Like I said, I love Murakami's style and would read him writing about almost anything, but this time it was the story that captivated me--following the nameless protagonist deep into the desolation of northern Hokkaido, passing through sad hotels and forgotten train stations, all in pursuit of a magical sheep. It's like the protagonist says to the black-suited secretary who sends him on the assignment: "This all has got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard. Somehow coming from your mouth, it has the ring of truth, but I doubt anyone would believe me if I told them what happened today."

13. The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
Picador USA, 321 pages, 1997
The Red Tent re-imagines the life of a minor female character in the Bible; it's a beautiful, rich, sensory novel. My one problem with it was that after spending the first half of the novel with Dinah's four strong, funny, fascinating mothers, the story of Dinah's exile in Egypt (and her meekness and devotion to her controlling mother-in-law and absent son) is almost disappointing and definitely anti-climactic. Despite that, though, it was a pleasure to read.

I've finished two more books since I started writing this post, but I think I want to give them individual entries. Next up: Rabbit, Run by John Updike