I–I swear, this has never happened with any of the other books I’ve been with. I’m not the kind of gal that does stuff like this! But I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I got to quit you.

It’s not your fault. I loved Kavalier and Clay. I was so excited to read you, but I guess I just wasn’t ready.

I’m at a weird time in my life right now! Lots of changes, lots of uncertainty. And I guess the hardboiled, nouveau-noir prose was just too much for my frazzled nerves. The deluge of Yiddish phrases that I couldn’t keep up with probably didn’t help. But I hate feeling like a quitter! I’ve stuck through more difficult books than this! But I was younger then, and my free time was less precious, and my brain could take the taxing.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago. I had invested almost 6 hours into the FX show Rescue Me, which I know is a good show and I know I should watch it. But watching it was just so hard. It made me sad, and I’d rather not feel sad on the weekend. Does this mean I’d rather feed my brain fluff? You bet your Ayn Rand it does.

Maybe this is just a phase and I’ll be back to tackling heavy books in a month or so. But maybe it’s not; maybe this is the reader I really am: impatient, whiny, easily hurt or confused, and given to massive headaches at the sight of lots of consonants all jumbled together. And as much as I hate to surrender, I’ll just have to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Currently reading: The Runaways graphic novels

I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I had read his Virgin Suicides back in college, but I didn’t remember much of that book. So I went into Middlesex as a kind of blank slate.

One sentence summary: Cal, who is affected by a rare form of hermaphrodism, tells the epic story of his Greek family’s history and his rocky childhood as a girl. (I like one sentence summaries because it’s probably the thing that got the agent, editor, sales coordinator, and bookstore buyer all riled up to begin with. So there you have it, the simplistic thingie that got the book on shelves.)

Cal is a disarming narrator, and he makes good use of his hermaphrodite body to tempt us through the century of backstory he slogs through. I say “slog” because it’s the anticipation of The Reveal that keeps you reading. You feel disgusting thinking it, but the truth is our innate curiosity about people who are different–especially if they’re different below the belt–makes us do crazy things. Like root for incest. But Eugenides gives us all a pass when Cal performs in a sideshow as a sexual freak, only to realize the audience is genuinely attracted to him. It frees him from thinking there’s anything wrong with him, and it frees us from thinking we’re going to hell. Hooray!

Through the wonders of Teh Internet, I happen to know some people who are trans or intersex or eunuch-identified, and it’s a very difficult thing not to run to them and say, “So heeeeeey, Middlesex. Thumbs up or down?” It would be the equivalent of walking up to a British person and saying, “So heeeeey, new Doctor Who. Are you guys for him or no?” One would hope one could form one’s own opinion about the value of a work that could so easily represent or misrepresent a segment of the population. So leaving all my quasi-normative guilt aside, I say thumbs up for Middlesex. It was good in a way that the narrator’s voice followed me around for a little while, and that’s pretty neat.

Also, did I mention the rooting for incest thing? It might sound creepy, but props to anyone who can get a reader to do that!

The moral of the story, if we dealt in one-sentence summaries for our lives themselves, would probably be: Good books make you feel things you didn’t want to feel, and they’re so good, you can’t even feel guilty about it.

Currently reading: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

I finally hooked up my GoodReads account to Facebook.

It’s working out pretty well! I was a little frustrated for years and years because there doesn’t yet seem to be a clear “winner” in the Social Network for Books title. GoodReads, LibraryThing, BookCrossing, there’s just so many. I went with GoodReads because (as with most things on the internet) my friends were doing it, and it’s more fun to be sharing bookish info with friends than just posting into a voice. Unless you really like announcing to all your non-reader-type Facebook friends, “Look! I read books!”

Which you are totally entitled to do. But some of us don’t like being jerks, is all I’m saying.

You can get the GoodReads Facebook app here. It’s pretty nifty and addicting to see all the recommendations from the people I know. I especially like that you can separate titles into read, to-read, and currently reading piles.

Maybe there’s a better bookish SM tool out there, but chances are I just won’t use it until oodles of my friends do too. But if you know of one that’s seriously better and should take over, let me know.

Image CC timetrax on Flickr.

The other day I was fortunate enough to find a book in the office’s vast collection that had somehow escaped the cutter. For those of you unfamiliar with how physical books are made, it’s rather fascinating. Or at least, I think it is, because it hasn’t changed overly much in the time since the printing press was invented and there isn’t much you can point to and say that about these days.

Maybe horseshoe crabs.

Anyway. Books are constructed by folding their folios, or leaves, together in little packets and then sewing or gluing those packets together. Grab the nearest book at look at the base of its spine and you’ll see what I mean. Hardcovers are more obvious. See? All those pages folded up together, not laid linearly. That would make the book far too bulky (and far, far too easy for poor book designers to lay out the pages).

So okay, a book is composed of a set of leaves. Just a few centuries ago, a new book would be bound and sold uncut; that is, the folios would not be sliced open on the open side. The person who bought the book would make the purchase without ever opening it and flipping through. Once the person had it in his possession, he would cut the leaves open himself.

It’s all very romantic (in a Byronic sense, not an ooey-gooey sense), thinking that the first consumer of that physical artifact was the first human to really look at that set of pages. One presumes that educated readers of the time knew what the books they were buying contained. There weren’t many choices, after all. A Bible was a Bible, a tract from Tom Paine was a tract from Tom Paine, etc. Try to imagine it: a bookstore without browsing. Or maybe there were sliced-open “shelf copies,” like the art books of today that have been taken out of their shrink wrap.

At any rate, I can tell you that taking a penknife and cutting open your own copy of a book just feels nice. I would compare it to something approaching the preparation of a leg of lamb or something; you feel like this is it, this is your food, and you’re opening it up to consume. It’s very visceral and very personal. Now, I’m as ready for eBook adoption across the board as any liberal-minded environmentalist and general tech-head. And I know I make fun of people who sniff paper books and say they could never give it up. (You know that’s just the smell of a semi-hallucinogenic mold, don’t you?) But there is something good about feeling connected to a book in a way you’re not used to, and I think being involved in that small, extra, old-fashioned step of readership is one way to do that.

If you’re interested in how books are made and the history of the printing press, it’s honestly very nifty. And there just so happens to be a documentary starring my hero, Stephen Fry, on this very subject. It’s called The Machine That Made Us from the BBC. Here’s a short intro.

Image CC Oskay on Flickr.