A friend of mine keeps a list of every book she reads. I think that's a nifty idea, so I decided to start doing that, too, and I'll note them all here. My thinking is that I won't necessarily comment at length on each one, but we'll see what happens. As RaptorMage said, "Mark never writes bite-size".

My typical reading habit is to have three or four books going at once, and it's not uncommon for some of them to get pushed to the backburner half-finished, maybe to be taken up again later and maybe not. Another thing I tend to do a lot is reread a book. (This is especially true with fiction: Most of what I read is non-fiction. The fiction I do read consists mostly of about two dozen that I read over and over again.)

With all that in mind, I've decided my list will include only books that I read from beginning to end complete, regardless of whether I've read them before, and counting from the date when I finished. I began at the beginning of the year, and I took some notes, so these first few are backlogged.

January 1
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Gore Vidal (2003).

This one came as a Christmas present from my mother, mailed directly to where I was staying in California. The timing was right, because, for logistical reasons, I was obliged to return the books I had checked out from the local library a day and a half before we were due to head back to Seattle, leaving me with nothing else to read in the interim.

Mom knows that I like Gore Vidal as a fiction writer. There are, in fact, only two authors whose historical fiction I read, but I read them avidly. With those two -- the other is Robert Graves -- I'll eagerly read their entire corpus, including mediocre stuff like Graves' Sergeant What's-His-Name. (What is his name? I want to say "Preston" but I know that's wrong.) Historical fiction by anyone else has never interested me -- either because it's really just plain old fiction which happens to be set in a certain historical era, or else because, like Michener, it's just too boring.

Vidal's plain fiction and his non-fiction have never grabbed me much. His political screeds are sometimes amusing, in a thought-provoking-but-wacko, Noam Chomsky sort of way, but not really the sort of author I like best for political commentary.

I can't recall ever seeing anything by Vidal which is just plain history, so this was something new. Of course, he can't resist tossing in frequent little jabs about the current political situation. I was able to enjoy these for a change, since I was actually reading the book while it was current. More often I read this sort of book 10 or 20 years later, so that I end up wondering why an author is spoiling a perfectly good historical analysis with stupid little references to, say, Vietnam.

The book was pleasant enough as a light read, with not much new to me. The subject matter covers much of the same ground as in Burr, the new twist being that we now get to see the characters through Vidal's unique view but separated from the unique view of the Burr character. To some extent the two are the same, but sometimes they are not. Vidal, for instance, seems to have a much higher opinion of George Washington than his Aaron Burr character did.

(Burr, by the way, is my favorite of Vidal's historical novels. I still want to read more about that strange fellow who lived out on the island in the Ohio River with his incestuous wife (was she sister? cousin? I forget). What was his name? I want to say Vallandigham, but no, that was the guy who got exiled during the Civil War.)

One thing I couldn't help wondering while reading Inventing a Nation was whether Mr Vidal had a decent editor for this book. He's a witty and literate man, with plenty of success as a writer. Maybe he figures he no longer needs an editor.

If so, he is mistaken. This book was difficult to read. Vidal has a penchant for long flowery sentences with lots of parenthetical clauses set off by commas, which is fine. He also has a tendency to write incomplete sentences which lack the customary pairing of subject and predicate. That too can be OK, particular if said sentences kept short à la Hemingway. The problem is when the two come together. As you read, you wind your way through the maze of commas, waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of a predicate. When you reach a period before this happens, you figure you must have misread something, so back you go to the beginning, parsing more consciously this time, only to find that ... no, the sentence really doesn't add up. I have no real objection to breaking the rules of grammar. I do object to writing that causes a cognitive double-take, forcing one to stop and reread for non-content reasons.

There was a lot of that in this book. There were also some typographical errors that got through. For example, somewhere I saw a reference to "Celisthenes" instead of "Cleisthenes". A proper editor would have spotted that. A workaday copy editor/proofreader might not have.

[Update, Feb. 14: My friend Pete, who is a book editor in real life, explains to me that my attempted distinction between different types of editors is hopelessly muddled. I think he still agrees with me that someone should have fixed the things I complain about.]

9:00:18 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

Cruising around the Blogosphere, reading reactions to President Bush's interview on Meet the Press, I see that the general opinion on both left and right is that the President gave a poor performance. I dissent. I think he performed quite well.

Here's how I see it: The purpose of this interview is to be able to tell the public that he isn't afraid to face his critics. He has no real message that he has to communicate here; he only needs to get through it without a gaffe. The President has several issues right now where he is vulnerable and is dodging criticism only through lack of candor. On any one of these points, he runs the risk of getting tripped up and providing the media with a "gotcha" story. Instead, he came out of the interview unscathed. True, he fumbled and stuttered a lot, and some of the questions he didn't answer at all, but in the end he got through it without any incident that provides for a good anti-Bush scoop for the reporters.

Go ahead, you who think Bush did so poorly. Tell me what the story is to slam him that wasn't already there before. Basically every potential anti-Bush story is exactly where it was before, except that now Bush can roll his eyes and say, "Jeez, you guys, haven't we been over all this before?" True, most of his answers don't hold up to scrutiny, but that's not the point. The point is that any person who wants to believe Bush has something superficially plausible to hang on to for every criticism.

Challenge: Bush went to war on false pretenses. Response: A president has to make tough judgment calls. He felt there was a threat so he acted on it. Maybe he got some of the details wrong, but the basic gut instinct was right. It was a good choice, and now the world is a better place.

Challenge: There's a huge deficit and the budget is a sham. Response: The deficit went up because of 9/11 and the recession. Now Bush has a plan that will cut the deficit in half in five years. If Congress doesn't mess it up, the plan will work.

Challenge: Bush didn't show up for his National Guard duty. Response: Maybe the evidence isn't there, but he did show up. He's not concealing anything. It's not his fault if the records were all lost. That's no reason to call the president a liar.

Challenge: Jobs are way way down and the '01 tax cuts were supposed to create them. Response: We're not seeing all the results yet because times are tough, but the President's plan is working. Just be patient and give it time to kick in.

Suppose you're trying to reason with an earnest but non-wonky person who thinks Bush is a good man. In simple terms that don't sound like lawyerly bamboozling to him, how do you persuade him otherwise on any of these points? It's tough. As far as he's concerned, the President has already answered everything that you have to throw at him.

That's why I say the President did a good job in the interview.

12:08:34 PM  [permalink]  comment []