Reading Les Miserables in Chicago

I finally finished reading Les Miserables (an English translation, obvs) this month--more than three years after I started it.

I had such high hopes when I first ordered the free Kindle version. It's only 959 pages, I thought to myself. I can handle that. After all, I'd already plodded through Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame--all 550 pages--including an entire novel's worth of narrative about the history and architecture of the cathedral; and 750 pages of Herman Melville's Moby Dick--including 30,000 words about whale blubber. That is not a lie.

The difference between the reading of those two novels and the latest novel is that I read with others in a reading group, with a deadline. I read Les Mis on my own, with no time constraints; and during the duration of my reading of I Am Miserables, I read 49 other books (according to my LibraryThing book tags), one of which, Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, was almost as unreadable as I'm Still Miserables. 

OK, that's a bit harsh. It's just that I'm a simple person, with lofty intentions but with the attention span of a toddler hopped up on Twix at Halloween. So when I encountered the 19-page table of contents (again, not a lie), I thought to myself, "Oh, crap." 

You know you're in trouble when some of the chapter titles are longer than entire chapters of some books. For example: Volume II, Book Second, Chapter II: In Which the Reader Will Peruse Two Verses, Which Are of the Devil's Composition, Possibly, and also Chapter III: The Ankle-Chain Must Have Undergone a Certain Preparatory Manipulation to be Thus Broken With a Blow from a Hammer.

You also know you're in trouble when you don't understand a single word in some of the lengthy chapter titles, as in Volume III, Book Eighth, Chapter XIII: Solus Cum Solo, In Loco Remoto, Non Cogitabuntur Orare. Apparently, they only had a budget for for French-to-English, not Latin-to-English.

Barnes and Noble claims that Les Miserables is the home of the longest sentence ever written, clocking in at 823 words. But the Victor Hugo Internet Hub debunks this risible impertinence, citing five novels with longer sentences. I remember that sentence, however; it caused my undiagnosed aneurysm to throb.

The beautiful thing about reading on the Kindle is that you can look up words you don't know as you go along, without having to stop and pick up your unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. This is fortunate, because Victor Hugo is a vocabulary beast -- I encountered unknown lexical combinations on virtually every page. I am determined to find many opportunities to use recrudescence and fulgurating and matutinal in everyday conversation.

It was disconcerting, however, that many of the words I highlighted did not have definitions in the Kindle dictionary--such as pterigybranche, poignarded, emphyteuses, and arondissement. As it turns out, Hugo's narrator does not hide his linguistic snobbery, and his disdain for anything but the most precise and standard vocabulary and usage. He refers to 

...that abject dialect which is dripping with filth when thus brought to the light, that  

pustulous vocabulary each word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the the night which has just been torn from its cesspool...what is slang, properly speaking? It is the language of wretchedness. 

Awesome.

Victor Hugo's middle name is digression. He admits this in the third sentence, after introducing the character Myriel, Bishop of D--: "Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous...to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him..." Hugo then spends the next 63 pages introducing the Bishop, who plays a key role in Jean Valjean's life even though he only appears briefly in the book. The Bishop gives Jean Valjean valuable silver, and urges him to use it to become an honest man; and after this encounter, the Bishop never returns to the story. 

The trick with reading Hugo or any prolix classic author is to figure out which digressions you can skim over without losing track of the main characters and plot lines, and which digressions contain indispensable facts and connections. I failed miserably at this task, which is why it took me three years to finish the book. I probably could have flipped past the entire Volume I, Book Third, or at the very least the first chapter of said Book entitled The Year 1817, which is a single seven-page paragraph name-drop. I could have spurned the entire Book First, Volume II, which comprises 19 chapters (47 pages) about the Battle of Waterloo--which the title of Chapter V refers to as The Quid Obscurum of Battles. (I googled quid obscurum. It means something like what darkness. It's also the name of a famous thoroughbred horse.)

Hugo wrote six chapters about the sewers of Paris in Volume V, Book Second. The Intestine of the Leviathan describes in torturous detail the history, construction, geography, and putrescent contents of the French sewer system. There's some interesting, even quotable, material in there--such as the passage that describes the sewer as "the conscience of the city:"

All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. They are there engulfed, but they display themselves there. This mixture is a confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end...All which was formerly rouged, is washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything.

But if I had neglected this section, it would not have diminished my understanding of the story.

Some of the excursus distracted from the heroic storyline but proved germane to contemporary social and political discussions--such as the analysis of the political stage in France in the early 1830s, described in Volume IV, Book First, Chapters I - IV. These are the kinds of passages that get books banned in the red states:

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy,and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.

So. I finished reading Les Miserables. I'm glad I read it, in the same way I'm glad I ran a marathon back in the '80s when I was young, energetic, child-free, and motivated by sibling competition. I have earned my bragging rights, but thankthelittlebabyjesus, I will never have to do it again.

What ridiculous book are you laboring to finish?

Celebrate! Win! Book Giveaway!

I went to a short workshop on SEO tonight, sponsored by Independent Writers of Chicago. I am now equipped to Optimize for Search Engines. So there.

And in other news, I have decided to celebrate the fact that this blog now has 20 followers. Count 'em: 20. Thanks, Igor! I am so thrilled to have such an astonishing level of popularity on this newfangled Internet that I have decided to sponsor a book giveaway.

I will randomly draw the name of someone who comments on this post, and send that lucky winner three (3) books from my library. You can see what kind of books I have in my library at my LibraryThing page.

I have too, too many books, and if I don't start giving some away soon, I will have to move. I love my neighbors--most of them, anyway. I love my city. I love my church. I don't want to move.

Hence: the book giveaway.

All you have to do to win is leave a somewhat relevant comment on this post, and I will put your name in a hat. On November 15 I will draw one of the names, and I will contact you to find out where to send your books. Be advised that if I have no other way of contacting you, I will contact you through replying to your comment on this blog post, so check back after November 15 to see if you won the Big Book Giveaway!

If you want, you can tell me in your comment the kinds of books you like to read, and I will take this into consideration when I pick out the three books I will be sending your way. They'll probably be paperbacks, and they'll probably be fairly current titles.

Rules: I will only send books to a U.S. address. I will give you another entry in the contest if you direct another reader to The Green Room, and they mention your name in their comment. Contest closes November 14 at midnight. Sometime on the 15th I will draw a name.

Oh! Oh! Isn't this exciting! My very first giveaway! Comment away. Tell me what you've been reading lately, and if you like it or not. Recommend a book to me, even if it's something you read a long time ago. Tell me what your kids are reading.

Who can resist FREE BOOKS?

Book Review: Joker One

Joker One by Donovan Campbell is a love story, a war story, a leadership guide, and a Marine recruitment narrative. It's a military memoir, and a little bit of a faith memoir. Joker One is an amazing true story, brilliantly told. I have never before read any memoir like it, and I urge you, when it comes out on March 10, to pick up a copy, read it, and pass it along.

I received my copy through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer (ER) program. In the past, I have had mixed luck with the ER selections I have snagged. This book made up for the duds.

Donovan Campbell completed the ten-week Marine Corp Officer Candidate School ("ten weeks of uninterrupted screaming") as a college junior, after which he swore that he would "never, ever join the Marine Corp." He graduated from Princeton and promptly joined the Corps, looking for "a pursuit that would force me to assume responsibility for something greater than myself, something that would force me to give back, to serve others." This earnestness struck me as a little too heavily played--but not for long.

Campbell's compelling story begins in the middle of a firefight, just after a rocket attack on an abandoned hotel that Campbell and his men were using as an observation position. Surrounded by rubble, choking dust, and pieces of exploded rockets, with a friendly machine gun firing full-bore a few feet away, Lieutenant Campbell calls in his position, burns his fingers on the still-searing-hot hockey puck of a warhead, and eventually discovered that the enemy had failed to kill or wound a single Marine.

That's just the first six pages.

Campbell's memoir covers the seven months that he spent with his company in Ramadi, Iraq, plus the four months of pre-deployment training at Camp Pendleton, California. He introduces fifteen men, the main characters in his deployment drama; and over the next 300 pages we learn to love and admire most of them as much as Campbell himself does.

Yes, most of them. Campbell uses real names in most cases, but two characters remain anonymous: Ox, the arrogant executive officer, with an astounding lack of self-awareness; and the inexperienced platoon sergeant who, "in theory...should be a lieutenant's right-hand man." Early on, Campbell described a field exercise which "highlighted the Ox's greatest strength--his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness--and his greatest weakness--his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness."

Campbell writes like a philosophical memoirist. As he tells the story of the baby-faced, inexperienced soldiers heading into what would turn out to be fierce and unrelenting guerilla-type combat, he takes time to examine the challenges of platoon leadership and his own evolution from a green, book-educated lieutenant with "zero real-world infantry experience" to a battle-experienced leader who had earned the love and respect of his men.

Before the Marines even boarded the plane for Iraq, Campbell describes a discipline dilemma which highlighted "the tension between justice and mercy, and, to some extent, between respect and love." As the officer responsible for a Marine facing discipline for the charge of under-age drinking, Campbell understood the need for consistency and accountability in the situation; but he also believed that

there are moments when simply following the letter of the law is a cop-out, and ultimately hinders your efforts to pull the best out of your men. ...the latter requires a love founded on humility, self-sacrifice, and in some cases, mercy.

Campbell wages an internal philosophical debate, asking himself, "What, then, should a young officer do to navigate the delicate tension between justice and fear, between mercy and love?" (Just the fact that Campbell even asked this question made me shake my head in wonderment. This to me displays a rare level of self-awareness, decency, and humility to which all of us should aspire.)

"The way to satisfy both justice and mercy," Campbell concluded,

is, quite simply, to take the hit for your men, to divert whatever punishment they may rate onto your own head if you believe that mercy is warranted...If you wear the bars on your shoulders, then it is your job to practice the greater love principle.

The "greater love" principle, if you're not familiar with it, is a reference to Jesus' words in the gospel of John: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." It's not the only time Campbell references a Biblical principal, and in fact, his narrative describes a faith journey almost as much as a military journey. "Deep in my heart," Campbell writes,

I believed that prayer would work without fail, that if together Joker One prayed long and hard enough, God would spare all of us...What I know now, and which didn't occur to me then, was that by praying as I prayed, and hoping what I hoped, and believeing what I believed, I was effectively reducing God to a result-dispensing genie who, if just fed the proper incantations, would give the sincere petitioner (me) the exact outcome desired.

There's plenty of shooting, swearing, exploding, bleeding, and sweating in Joker One--but it contains far more sensitivity, humility, and tenderness than you would expect in a book about soldiers and war. It's kind of a military memoir for girls, really--except that in the best of all possible worlds, these characteristics would be honored and admired in men as much as in women. This book must feel like a gift to the men of Joker One and to their families. It felt like a gift to me--and I'm grateful to Lieutenant Campbell for his service to our country, both as a soldier and as a rememberer.

Book Review: The Cross

I'm not really sure what to think of The Cross, by Arthur Blessitt.

On the one hand, the story is compelling: A guy carries a 12-foot cross for 38 years over more than 38,000 miles because, he says, God told him to. The book recounts the vicissitudes of his travels and travails, from the first opposition he encounters within the first few minutes of carrying the cross in Hollywood, California; to meeting Yasser Arafat in West Beirut; to climbing Mt. Fuji in Japan.

On the other hand, the book raises theological, doctrinal, and practical questions and problems that are kind of hard to avoid. Like does God talk to us the way Arthur Blessitt believes He does? And isn't there the hint of an inherent problem when a believer's God-calling causes so much stress that his marriage breaks up?

Finally--and I know I'm out of hands, here, but please allow me to put up a third one--there's also the matter of the actual quality of the writing itself.

Arthur Blessitt's story is compelling. There is no doubt (in my mind, at least) that he loves Jesus, and that he is willing to put everything on the line in order to follow him. He endured heat and cold, persecution and arrest; he even faced a firing squad in Nicaragua. His devotion and sacrifice has resulted in literally millions of people hearing the Gospel as Blessitt dragged his 45-pound cross. Whether you are a Jesus-follower or not, don't you have to admire this kind of single-minded commitment?

Does God talk to people today the way Arthur Blessitt believes he does? I have a super hard time believing and understanding this, which could totally be a function of my own immature faith. I want to know how a person can objectively verify that what they are "hearing" is God's voice, and not their own imagination or their own desires.

But Blessitt has no such problem. Early in the book he describes getting specific guidance from God as a seven-year-old. He was carrying water across his father's field to migrant workers picking cotton, when, he said, "I felt Jesus speaking to me...I was to walk forward thirteen steps, then turn right and go another twenty steps, and then turn to the left four more steps." This random "guidance" continued for days, until one day his dad spotted him and furiously reprimanded him.

For the rest of the summer, Blessitt said, he "went straight to the workers whenever my father was nearby. But when he was in town...I would listen for God's prompting and go where he told me to go." This whole anecdote strikes me as a very clear example of someone who wants very much to hear the voice of God, and who ascribes his own thoughts to God. "It is difficult to explain exactly how I knew [it was Jesus speaking to me]," Blessitt said, "but I felt within my spirit and my mind that Jesus was telling me to follow him."

Blessitt does not tell tales about his first marriage; he only says that he and his wife mutually agreed to officially end their marriage, and that their divorce was the result of their own failure. It's hard for me not to believe that this failure could be directly linked to a mistaken understanding of divine guidance. Would God direct a man to pursue a path that would result in the breaking of the solemn vows of marriage?

I cannot find any information on the web about whether Blessitt submits to any kind of financial accountability, which is unfortunate. I'd like to just trust that he's using the funds he raises in a responsible way, but I don't roll that way. In fact, I think any organization that accepts individual contributions--and even moreso those who do so in the name of Jesus--should be completely transparent about their finances. I did send an email inquiring if Blessitt makes his ministry finances public, or if he has any kind of financial accountability with an independent group such as Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, but I haven't heard back.

Nevertheless, I believe the guy. I believe he does what he does because he loves Jesus, and not for fame or financial gain. I would find it more difficult to believe that he'd spend his entire life carrying a cross around the world if he were not internally, spiritually motivated.

Each chapter of the book relates a particular story about Blessitt carrying the cross, encountering obstacles, meeting world leaders and/or local residents, and telling people about Jesus. As part of his chapter formula, Blessitt includes a pastoral message of faith and discipleship, and occasionally an altar call for those who do not yet follow Jesus. Though formulaic, the tone is sincere and the style is never stiff. But the formula necessarily results in repetition and redundancy, and the preaching gets old. The Cross is not a book that will win awards for literary style--but then again, that is clearly not the author's priority.

My review is based upon an early galley copy of the book, which was scheduled to be published in January 2009. The Cross has already been made into a movie which opens on March 27; here's a link to the trailer.

So, there you have it. I'm ambivalent and conflicted about The Cross. I know I'm supposed to find it inspiring, but I don't. I believe, however, that many, many people will find it to be moving and inspiring. I'd love to know what you think about it.

Unread

Do you LibraryThing yet? What--no? Whazzamattayou?

Anyway, there's a fun LT meme going around: Start with the list of the top 106 unread books catalogued on LibraryThing. Bold the titles you have read. Italicize the books you've started but haven't finished. Asterisk those you own, but have not read.

Here's my list:

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hndred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
*The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
Middlesex
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
*Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
*Dune
*The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
*The Three Musketeers

Final tally:
41 Read
7 Owned but unread
58 Neither owned nor read

What a great list, right? As my LT friend Alaska Bookworm pointed out, lots of classics, but lots of excellent contemporary works, also.

I'm already in the middle of reading about four books, but the next one on the list that I'll be reading is The Three Musketeers, because I enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo so, so much.

How about you? What titles have you read from the Top 106 Unread Books on LT?

Book Review: Danny Gospel

Danny Gospel is a confused, well-meaning young man narrating his own confused, disjointed, but well-meaning tale in David Athey's debut novel of the same name.

Danny wants a normal, happy life, but "normal" is relative, and happiness is elusive. He's lost pretty much everyone he has loved, and he's losing himself. He wakes up one morning to see a mysterious, lovely woman in his bedroom, who kisses him and then disappears. Danny immediately embarks on a quest to find this angel, convinced she's real and that she holds the key to his dream of a normal, happy life.

This book has ADHD: it can't sit still and it can't stay focused. Danny's tangled narrative takes us through his memories: traveling across Iowa singing old tyme gospel hymns and spirituals; rescuing his sister from an online predator; and assorted family tragedies. The story covers Danny Gospel's present-tense adventures as well, searching for an old family friend across frozen cornfields and bumpy back roads; running from the law and hanging out with a band of strange, musical, unemployed partyers (sp?); and attending the bizarre wedding of his estranged brother.

This book has Asperger's Syndrome, too: It doesn't handle transitions very well, it is characterized by repetitive behaviors and odd obsessions, and the characters have difficulty with non-verbal skills. Emotions don't track very well with these characters; you don't really know why they're feeling what they're feeling.

Danny Gospel lost me in narrative transitions several times in each chapter. The narrative lurched backward and forward in time so often and in such unpredictable and disjointed ways that my brain felt like it was bouncing over winter-pot-holey Chicago streets in a truck in desperate need of new shocks.

I found the novel to be repetitive and odd, kind of like what Rain Man would look like if he were a book. Danny repeatedly prays for a normal, happy life, but instead he keeps encountering herds of runaway pigs, "perfectly lovely" but mysterious women in white, and confusing conflicts, car troubles, and hints of mail fraud. Gospel music winds through the story discordantly, like orange yarn in a white silk shawl.

(Danny is a spiritual guy who devours the writings of the desert fathers. But you'd never catch a desert father whining about not having a normal, happy life.)

The characters have difficulty with non-verbal skills--meaning, they're not fully fleshed out and well-developed enough to have non-verbal depth. They have dialogue, and some even have a little back-story--but most, including the eponymous Danny, are flat and somewhat surreal. Even when the author tries to flesh them out, you don't feel their pain or understand why they do what they do or say what they say, and sometimes, why they're even in the story.

The Atom Smasher, for example, shows up in the first chapter. We learn what he looks like, where he lives (Chicago), what he does for a living, what kind of car he drives; he and Danny have a surreal conversation about atoms and fireflies. This character disappears for most of the rest of the book, and then inexplicably reappears in Iowa eight chapters later, with no explanation for how or why he's there.

Even Rachel, Danny's fiance, has no depth. We know that he misses her and believes against all evidence in their soul-mate connection--but we don't really know what connects them, or what Rachel is like. Is she silly? Is she smart? Does she sing? Why did she come to Iowa from New York?

In the end of the story, we learn something completely unexpected that Danny did--but it seems to have almost no emotional connection to the rest of the story. It reads like it's supposed to be a big reveal of one of the suspenseful themes in the book--but it evokes a "Hmm. OK" rather than an "Ahhh!" or a "Wow!"

The bottom line with Danny Gospel is that there are too many characters, too many events, and not enough cohesion to make the novel work. There might be a really great story underneath the layers of unnecessary detail and extraneous characters. But all I got out of it was a couple of extra forehead wrinkles.

What I Read in 2007

The 34 titles on my 2007 book list have the following characteristics:

I enjoyed most of my reading this year, awarding four or five (out of five) stars to nearly 60 percent (20 books). Only one was a complete dud; I reviewed it here.

Nineteen are non-fiction, 15 are fiction.

Eleven are faith-related, and of those, five were commentaries or sermons specifically related to the Sermon on the Mount.

Nine books I had read at least one time before this year.

Nine have been made (or are being made) into movies. One--Candide--is also an opera by Leonard Bernstein. Nicole Kidman played Isabel Archer in the 1996 adaptation of Portrait of a Lady.

Seven are memoirs, or at least memoir-ish.

Four were gifts; 10 I bought for myself. The others I borrowed, stole, or already had in my library from long ago.

Four are classics, including the Christian classic A Short and Easy Method of Prayer by Madame Jeanne Guyon.

Three are novels by Jodi Picoult.

Three were book club selections: Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (actually, I’m still working on this one); Candide by Voltaire; and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Three were written particularly for a younger audience: Bridge to Terabithia, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Golden Compass.

Two are by Barack Obama.

One is a self-help book on organizing and decluttering. Not that I'm making any promises.

My award for number one new read of the year goes to The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This memoir was so good that I read it again about a month after I finished it the first time. The author relates the horrifying, mystifying, confounding, and unpredictable events of her life story with a sort of non-judgmental detachment, with a voice that is neutral and yet engaging at the same time. Any story that begins with the sentence, “I was on fire” has a lot to live up to—and this memoir did not let me down.

My 2007 book list does not include the dozens of little books I read with my kids, like the tales of Pippi Longstocking and Junie B. Jones, and The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (which makes me cry every single time I read it, and then that little stinker A. Peevie laughs—laughs!—at me.)

Being a LibraryThing-er has really enhanced my ability to track and categorize my annual reading lists and my library as a whole. If you’re a reader, or a book-lover, or a book collector, check it out if you haven't already.

Click here to view my online catalog; and click on the tag "2007" to list only the books I read this year.

What did you read this year? What are you recommending?

Book Review: Living SMART

Through LibraryThing I have received an Early Reviewer copy of Living SMART: Five Essential Skills to Change Your Health Habits Forever. As an early reviewer, I get a free advance copy of a soon-to-be-published book, and if I write a review of it, I have a better chance of getting ER books in the future. So here's my review:

Week One: I read the preface and the introduction, and form my first impression of the book: bleah. The writing and the concepts are like Gerber Rice Cereal for babies: pre-chewed, broken down to the tiniest bits so the lowest common denominator reader doesn’t choke on it. I don’t see anything truly new or creative about the approach. The five eponymous SMART skills are not so much skills as they are obvious tasks that I don’t really need two PhDs and some lame clip-art to help me figure out.

Week Two: I lose motivation and don’t even pick up the book.

Week Three: I feel obligated to read and review the book for LibraryThing, especially since I do want to be considered for future early review titles. So I pick up the book and try to have a good attitude.

Chapter 1--Let's Get Started. My bad attitude returns wearing leather and chains when I read that the three principles and steps to change involve the What, the Want, and the How. So far this book reminds me of a not-very-interesting article in a women’s magazine, one that might be titled, “Five Simple Steps to a New, Slimmer You!”

But even though I feel patronized, I plug on and read Chapter 2—The What: Know Exactly What Needs to Change. This chapter is even more obvious than the last. It lists places where you can get information about the behavior you need to change—as though you’ve been living in the jungles of Bolivia for the last 40 years and you’ve never seen another person, or a newspaper, or one of those new-fangled computer-thingies.

As a special bonus, the chapter ends with an action tip: If you want to get skinny, don’t buy cookies. That strikes me as just plain mean. The authors probably have hyper-thyroid disease and never have to watch what they eat in order to keep their girlish figures.

Week Four: I grit my teeth and promise myself I will get through two more nauseating chapters this week. I suggest to myself that, in the interest of fairness, perhaps I should try to have an open mind since I’ve only read slightly more than 1/10 of the book. Myself agrees, ditches the attitude, and plunges into chapter 3—The Want: Decide Whether You Want to Change.

Ah, feel the irony. I learn that motivation is the great stumbling block to change. (I’m still thinking about those cookies, and—call me Blobbo—I’m not really motivated to buy non-fat rice cakes instead.)

I do actually read an idea in this chapter that I have never considered before: that optimism is a behavior that can be learned. I do some research and find that these authors are not alone in this theory; and I make a note to blog about it in the future.

Chapter Four—The How promises me that if I know what needs to change, and I’m motivated, then the SMART skill set will ensure my success. The SMART skill set consists of Setting a goal, Monitoring your progress, Arrange your world for success, Recruit a support team, and Treat yourself.

The authors illustrate the concept of Arranging Your World for Success with a story about a dinner party at which one guest said she wanted to cut down on her salt intake. The good doctors moved the salt shaker out of her reach to the other end of the table, and “proclaimed with great satisfaction that this gesture had significantly reduced her chance of using excess salt during the meal.”

I know. I want to smack them, too.

Later in the same chapter, the Captains Obvious advise us to “maximize the positive influence of others by setting up a team of supporters.” They recommend that we recruit these team members from among friends and family, as well as from internet chat rooms, magazine pen pal clubs, and prisons.

Oh, they do not—but if they had included those last three, it would have made the chapter more interesting.

Week Five—I read chapters 5-13, having completely given up on even the semblance of neutrality and optimism about this waste of perfectly good paper and ink. I just shake my head when I read chapter six, in which the authors provide a detailed monitoring chart that they have cleverly dubbed “The Chart.”

One Action Tip recommends rewarding yourself often with small, frequent treats such as “a brief chat with a friend on the phone or taking the time to watch a sunset.” Really? Do these people really only allow themselves to chat on the phone or watch a sunset as a reward for behavior change? That’s just sad.

Part II: Your Game Plan applies the SMART skills to four specific issues: diet, exercise, getting better sleep, and remembering to take medication. There’s plenty of stuff to be bored and annoyed about in these chapters, too, like the recommendations to put gold stars on your monitoring chart to reward yourself and the one "for mothers only" to ask your spouse to watch the kids while you exercise.

This book reminds me of a class I took in graduate school. The professor, a tenured PhD, had authored our textbook on multi-cultural counseling. It was my first exposure to the notion that having letters after your name does not directly correlate with intellectual brilliance. To this day, 25 years later, I remember that textbook and that class—not because of what I learned, but because of what I didn’t. The book was padded with patently obvious and too-general-to-be-useful observations along the lines of “The counselor must be sensitive to the cultural background of the client.” The class was one "duh" after another.

That’s what’s going on with Living SMART. The authors have padded a magazine article based on a marginally clever acronym into 184 pages of obvious and redundant pop psychology. Save your $15. Put it in the bank, and in five years you’ll have around $18. That’s better than the return you’ll get from investing in this book.