MarysLibrary

My Comments on Your Comments - My Heroine

Nan, you are so right. We should apply the Rule of 50 to every book and have the self-discipline to put aside a book that isn't up to snuff. I can do that with most books, but I find it hard to do with books that have little redeeming social value but that I'm enjoying anyhow, like Confessions of a Political Hitman.

Wilhelm, Fay, and Lynn, you have spent altogether too much time with the Archie McPhee catalog and need to get a life.

Lynn, I see what you mean about the Dickens figure. Puzzling. Wilhelm, I was kind of hoping for a dashboard hot-rod devil duckie for Valentines Day. Maybe next year. And Fay, I can think of lots of uses for the bucket of rubber chickens but whatever would one do with remote control, hopping, yodelling lederhosen?

Hmm. Maybe I'm the one who needs to get a life.

My Comments on Your Comments - My Reading List

Jill, If you are following my reading list updates you will have noticed that I'm struggling to stick to my New Year's resolution. I find myself enamored of a book that isn't on the list and, just as I've always done, I read it immediately. (I'm a LIFO kinda gal.) Then I add it to the list as having been read. This is not what I intended.

I haven't been writing all the Trollope group summaries of our reading in Framley Parsonage. Someone different does that every week. I should have made it clearer on the reading list that those weekly entries are the chapters I've read. It was only on 14 January that it was my turn to write the summaries.

If you're interested in Trollope and would like to read the postings for Framley Parsonage, you can go to the Yahoo group site and read them. (Or better, join the group.) The summaries and discussion of the current reading of Framley Parsonage began with posting 24784 on 15 December 2007. If you're really interested in Trollope, you can read summaries and discussion of the novels we've read going back to John Caldiagte in June of 2000.

We are about to begin reading Orley Farm with the first summaries to be posted on 10 March.

My Comments on Your Comments - US Elections

You will have noticed that my blog has been a little unfocused lately. Or rather, it's focused almost exclusively on politics. In addition to reading many books about the candidates, the political system, and politics in general I've also been reading the newspaper more closely, following the commentators and the polls on www.realclearpolitics.com, and watching a lot more TV news, talking heads, and election returns.

So I haven't been responding to comments recently. I thought I'd do that in a couple of posts and get caught up.

Daphne and Sarah. The American presidential primary system is Byzantine. The parties control the process and each state party does as it likes more or less. Seeming chaos results. ("I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.")

Voting for a local MP and letting the winning party chose their own PM is a much simpler way to go, at least on the surface.

Hitman

Once in a while I get my hands on a book that I should never have picked up in the first place, that I should not continue reading, and that I certainly should not bother to finish. But like watching a snake eat a rabbit, reading a really trashy book can sometimes border on mesmerizing.

And so it is with Stephen Marks' Confessions of a Political Hitman: My Secret Life of Scandal, Corruption, Hypocrisy, and Dirty Attacks that Decide Who Gets Elected (And Who Doesn't) (2007.)

Marks worked for more than a decade doing what is euphemistically called "opposition research." The job description basically says, "Find dirt on the opponent." Sometimes it also says, "Find dirt on our candidate, too," since some candidates don't let on to their own people about the skeletons in their own closets and a professional campaign team needs to know what might be coming so they have a response ready.

Some of the dirt that Marks shares with us is hilarious, like the Florida candidate who had a hardcore pornography web site and didn't bother to take it down, even for the length of his campaign. Some is puzzling, like the internescine GOP wars in Kansas, where the losing Republican primary candidate always campaigns for the Democrats. Some is old hat, like Clinton's taking enormous campaign donations from Chinese businessmen and then approving sale to them of military quipment classified Top Secret.

Marks predicts that in the current presidential contest we will be hearing about how Barack Obama pushed "for more federal spending to combat the avian flu at the same time he purchased stock in a speculative company developing a drug to combat that flu." And then there are McCain's tasteless jokes: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."

I have a lamentable tendency to gravitate to this sleazy stuff. Witness my enduring love of Hollywood Babylon. Marks at least has the decency to put the names of the misbehaving folks in his book. This is not rumor and innuendo. It's on the record.

The Race Card

Richard T Ford, a law professor at Stanford University, has written a provocative book about race relations in the US called The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (2008.) The book has four parts in which the author discusses racism without racists, racism by analogy, defining discrimination, and contested goals.

An example of the first is Hurricane Katrina. The plight of black New Orleanians is not attributable to the racism of government officials. It's a combination of federal unreadiness and the residue of the racism of the past which has left so many poor blacks living in those parts of the city most prone to catastrophic floods.

In the second section of his book Ford discourages those who would use the terms "as bad as racism" or "like slavery." He holds that sexual harrassment, ageism, opposition to gay marriage, and other perceived discrimination are not usefully compared to the brutal racism of the past. I found this part of the book too long and detailed and Ford spent much too much time on the plight of homosexual couples forced to settle for a civil union instead of being allowed to "marry."

Ford tells us it's a mistake to confuse racism with discrimination. We all discriminate every day in every part of our lives, he points out. But racial discrimination as it was practiced in the days of Jim Crow was a much more evil and destructive discrimination than other sorts.

Ford makes the point that admitting a black student to a college rather than a white student with better test scores is not reverse racism and argues that affirmative action is necessary and productive of better race relations and greater fairness for blacks, achieving a goal that most Americans agree is worthwhile.

I disagree with about half of what Ford says and heartily endorse the other half. I learned some things from his book, but I was at times glassy eyed from the unnecessary detail, way too many examples, and his lengthy discussion of homosexual "rights."

Nonetheless, I think this is a valuable book and one of the few written about the dangers of crying wolf - crying racism. People like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Johnny Cochran who play the race card when no racism is present only encourage insensitivity when the real thing appears.

Life's a Campaign

Chris Matthews is a well-known commentator on MSNBC's Hardball where he pulls no punches in his loudly voiced opinions about the political goings-on of our day. He has had a long and varied career holding jobs ranging from Capitol policeman to Jimmy Carter speechwriter. In recent years he has taken to writing books about his interpretations of the great events of our day.

Matthews' new book, Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success (2007) is a bit weak coming from such a forceful character. He dispenses advice gleaned from the people he has worked for and with, like famed house speaker Tip O'Neill.

And his advice? Listen to people. Keep in touch. Don't hang out with sleazeballs. We could have picked up most of this from Machiavelli. The book is repetitious and the advice self-evident, but Matthews shares with us his adventures working on the hill and in journalism and those vignettes are entertaining.

If you're going to read a political memoir, I'd say stick with Novak's Prince of Darkness.

Oprah, You've Let Me Down

Alas, Oprah has chosen for her next book club selection an unreadable book full of silly nonsense, written in imitation of the sappy style of the Dalai Lama. It's by Eckhart Tolle and it's called A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005.)

I am an unabashed admirer of Oprah Winfrey. When Oprah first started her book club I was working as a bookseller at Border's and the impact was immediate and lasting. People who had apparently never been in a bookstore before were arriving to buy her first selection. They came back to read later Oprah picks and other books as well. Regular readers were created by Oprah's Book Club.

I haven't read all of her choices and I haven't liked all of the ones I've read. But she has not chosen trash; she has maintained her standards. This time, however, she has gone off the deep end with an unreadable book full of New Age gibberish. I'm very disappointed.

The Prince of Darkness

I've been reading a lot of books about politics lately and the best of them is the columnist and TV commentator Robert D Novak's The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (2007.)

Mr Novak is very (very) conservative, is deeply opinionated, and has always been totally unafraid to tell politicians and everybody else exactly what he thought of them and their policies, in print and to their faces. This, of course, has made for a lively column and lively TV over the years; it makes for a lively memoir. Novak has been the linchpin on Crossfire, Evans and Novak, The McLaughlin Group and other political talk shows during his career in addition to writing his newspaper column, shared with Rowland Evans, Evans and Novak.

He has covered it all, met everybody, had a falling out with almost everybody, been everywhere, and opined about everything. He has been first to report some stunning political developments, and he has been over the years entangled in some other people's nasty agendas. He's still going strong at 75.

You need not agree with the author and you need not believe his take on every controversy to enjoy this tell-all book about political Washington from the days of Eisenhower through today's McCain and Obama.

Reading List Update

Alice of Old Vincennes by Maurice Thompson (1900)

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (1606) (read 2/20/08)

A Broken Mirror by Merce Rodoreda (1974) 218 pages (abandoned at the end of part 1, about half way through the book ***)

A Buyer's Market by Anthoy Powell

Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success by Christopher Matthews (2007) 202 pages (read 2/19/08 **)

Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare

Framley Parsonage, chapters 43-45 (read 2/16/08)

Sonnets 19-21 by William Shakespeare (read 2/17/08)

The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington by Robert D Novak (2007) 662 pages (read 2/20/08 ***)

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse by Richard Thompson Ford (2008) 388 pages (read 2/17/08 ***)

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol 1) by Robert Caro (1982)

Framley Parsonage, chapters 46-end

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Sonnets 33-34 by William Shakespeare

Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac (1843)

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

The Well of Lonliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)

The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West (2007) 290 pages

Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles' 1964 and 1965 Tours that Changed the World by Larry Kane

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (2007) 624 pages

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll (2003) 717 pages

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (2007) 320 pages

Theodore Roosevelt (The American Presidents Series) by Louis Auchincloss (2001) 155 pages

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen (1935) 269 pages

Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham (1915)

Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas (2005) 353 pages

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1937)

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

Obama: From Promise to Power (2007) 406 pages

My Heroine

Nancy Pearl, librarian extraordinaire is, so far as I know, the only librarian with her own action figure. She is shown at left with a good friend.

Some years back Nancy created a stir when she voiced the opinion that you don't ever have to apologize for what you read. You are entitled to read romance, sci fi, or even graphic novels. And you don't have to finish every book you start.

Nancy's Rule of 50 formula for how many pages of a book you ought to read before giving up on it is simple. If you are younger than 50, read 50 pages before making up your mind. If you are older than 50, subtract your age from 100 and that's the number of pages you should read before condemning a book to the discard pile.

This means if you are 51 you only get a one-page break, 49 pages. If, however, you are 80, you can reach a value judgement after only 20 pages. This I suspect is based on the theory that age brings wisdom.