Books, in 420 Characters

The death of a blog rarely means anything more than just another collection of rambling thoughts and blurry photographs mercifully shut down and left to drift into the online ether. Every once in a while, out of either curiosity or boredom, I'll take advantage of the helpful "Next Blog" option at the top of most Blogger-sponsored sites, and will be treated to endless screens of totally unrelated examples of the odd thematic choices people settle upon when launching a blog of their own. Plenty of food blogs, of course, but plenty more mommy, parenting, or "family" blogs that often sprinkle random advice with page after numbing page of family photos and close-ups of the pet dog. A personal favorite remains a quilting blog I stumbled across a few months back after a friend pointed it out to me. The sight of the aging quilter's vacation photos, including one in which somebody joyfully plunges down a mild waterslide, is not something I'll soon forget.

This blog is not dead - yet, as the Pythons said. Not quite willing to inflict baby tips and infant photos on the world, I've found that my free time is best served reading rather than ranting - that as fun as it may be to highlight political nonsense, both my blood pressure and my intellectual health might be better served spending time with people whose minds I respect rather than disdain. In addition, a possible new outlet for writing and critical thought has recently opened up, and while the project may be some weeks or months away from beginning, that material will necessarily be occupying most of my writing time.

So rather than let this space sit vacant for weeks at a time, I'm going to begin filling in the dead space with much shorter bursts of thought. Epigrams, not essays. Thoughts, not screeds.

Being the primary caregiver to a six month child has left me with more time for reading than I'd suspected (yeah, I know, this may change), so I've begun trying to awkwardly force the strict limitations of social media into some sort of critical discourse. Simply put, is it possible to use the 420-character allotment bestowed on Facebook users to try and sum up a recently read book, without falling back on banalities like "this was a good read" or the like? Can 420 characters (spaces included, man!) encompass deeper thoughts than where one is in relation to Friday or how good a cup of coffee sounds right about now? Of course it can - in fact, it often does. But not often enough.

Each Friday, the reviews I've posted over the past week on FB will be dumped here. Those are the rules. We'll see how long this continues. But even dribs and drabs of thought are better than no thoughts at all.

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Patti Smith, Just Kids

The only rock poet worth parsing takes her Dylan obsession one step further, and tops his “Chronicles” as rock autobiography, rescuing Robert Mapplethorpe the artist from the culture war pawn he’d been turned into. Tender, smart, funny. Also: reminds us that NY bohemia at one point was so small and self-contained it encompassed The Chelsea Hotel and a few bars. Wish I had been there.

Cathleen Schine, She Is Me

Quick read, with brains. Funny, too. But don’t tell V.S. Naipaul the plot. Three generations of women, two battling cancer, two having affairs, one a late-life lesbian awakening, one a vehicular romp after a mate fails to bond with a stray dog. Also, lusting after the producer for Mrs. B, a Madame Bovary screenplay. “It was as if her entire life had been leading her here,” it says right before the Sapphic plunge.

Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat

German-speaking Jew, refusing to write “in the language of the murderers,” offers in his eleventh novel an unsettling extended metaphor – a remote alpine retreat outside Austria training Jews to pass as gentiles. The 1937 setting grounds the metaphor in reality, even if the murderers are rarely specified. In the end, the retreat fails, the inhabitants having already been exiled. Holocaust and diaspora, in 164 pages.