Born to Read about Running

You will no doubt wonder why I am reading Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen by Christopher McDougall when the only time I ever ran was senior year in college when we had to run a mile to pass the Physical Ed requirement. I think my wheezey panting burst of speed in that final mile when I saw the coach looking at me was one of the highest physical achievements ever in sports history. So I chose to go out on top and retired---some might say with dignity---from the sport. Let others have a chance at running greatness, I was content to lie on my sofa with a Diet Coke reading a book. Preferably not a book about running.
I heard this book was about the Tarahumara indians in the Copper Canyon in Mexico though so was interested. It turns out it is a fascinating book about running: the crazy people who do 100 mile marathons, scientists, the people who design sneakers, people who run barefoot, Olympic athletes and the mysterious Tarahumara who really are still all a mystery by the end of the book.
McDougall is no anthropologist, he's a sports writer and the writing is pretty awful in a magazine writing sort of way with lots of manufactured cliff hangers and devices to keep you reading. One of his most typical phrases is "And the worst was yet to come...". But in spite of his writing some of the stories are truly very engaging and some of the thinking on different styles of running are pretty convincing.
McDougall himself is a runner and he set out to discover why he kept getting injured and other people, the Tarahumara for instance, never get hurt and run huge distances. I think he answers that question. The question as to why anyone would go out to do a 100 mile run while they could lie on the sofa reading a book about people doing 100 mile runs goes unanswered.

Marblehead Used Book Sale

Next week the Friends of the Marblehead Public Library have combined my two favorite things into one: their book sale and free alcohol. They are having a private sale for members with a $25 limit of book buying, meaning NO BUYERS will be there elbowing me aside, plus free wine and snacks! I am dizzy with excitement.

A Far Cry from Kensington

This book kicked bottom! I loved it. Not sure what it was about it that I loved so much...it's British as everything I seem to read lately is, it postwar, it's about a young woman who works in publishing and lives in a rooming house. It's quick, it's light; there's not a false step. I think any Muriel Spark character could kick anyone's bottom in a Anita Brookner's book in a heartbeat. It's about someone actually living rather than thinking about living.
Like Brookner she can write too:
Sir Alec was thin and grey and his voice matched his looks. It sounded like a wisp of smoke wafting from some burning of leaves hidden by a clump of lavender.
Who comes up with these things? Why do I like it so much?
Or this bit:.... for Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending with a big wave which washed up the main idea. So that you didn't have to listen at all, just wait for the big splash.
Brilliant. What a joy!
Ugly cover though.

Brookner Redux All Over Again

Just finished Anita Brookner's Making Things Better. It's not her latest but I don't think that matters. It is the same novel over and over again with the same painfully self aware protagonist failing to connect with the world. This is about an older man, alone, retired, trying to come to terms with his final choices. It's very sad but at least the character this time is more aware that his decisions led him to where he ends up. He is timid as all her characters are but not passive.

A typical reflection : "From this he gradually deduced that his relations with women were still inchoate, that good manners had, time and time again, disguised desire, and in disguising it, or in keeping it in its place, had denatured it." The whole book is, as all her books are, lots of thought and reflection no action. maybe that's why I like her so much; I am so the opposite that anyone who thinks so much fascinates me.

Her books are like the Narnia Chronicles where whole life times go by but when the children tumble back into the non-Narnia world no time has passed at all. In Brookner pages and pages of his tortured musings go on while no one has even done anything yet. As always I long for E.M. Forester to come in and slap her characters around shouting "Only connect!". But then although they never connect they are more self aware than I or E.M. will probably ever be.

"He ordered coffee, looked about him with no particular shock of recognition, realized that the true balefulness of age was an inability to bring those memories back to life, to rekindle the intensity of the past as it surely once been felt."

The Children's Book

I really liked this book----it was big and old fashioned stuffed with plot and characters. Maybe too many characters? By page 50 I think she had introduced as many characters as pages. I didn't know who I was supposed to remember who I could forget...well actually it turned out she wanted me to remember all of them since she drags them all on through the next 600 pages. It's not an interior sort of book, it can't be with so many people to keep track of, it's too crammed full for that.

It's the story of some loosely interwoven bohemian families set at the end of the Victorian age in England, right into the Edwardian age. It's a story of the time as well as the characters. It reminds me of the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao where you learn all about the history of the Dominican Republic in the margins. I know a lot about the intellectual artistic life late 1800's early 1900's in Britain now. Less brutal than the Dominicans by the way.

It's also about fairy tales which A.S. Byatt has a lot of opinions on. Like Possession where you had to read quite a bit of poetry supposedly written by the characters, here you read a lot of fairy tales written or told or acted out by the characters. The grown ups are writers, artists, potters and thinkers, but the story is more focused on the children. The pivotal character, if there is just one, would be Olive Wellwood, a children's book writer, who is loosely based on E. Nesbit.

I remember seeing A.S.Byatt at the Brattle right after she won the Booker and her talking about the satisfaction of the ending of Possession and how it tied in to our primitive need for 'closure' in our stories. Closure wasn't such a overused term in those days and I like that about her books. She gives good closure. The only problem this time is that I expected 50 points of closure rather than the neatly tied knot in Possession. There were so many characters that it didn't have the omphh of just one big knot; it was more of a Fisherman Knit Sweater.

Note: I ordered this edition from Canada since it won't be printed in the U.S. until the Fall. Canada is on a British printing schedule.