Interlude: Other People's Bookshelves

I don't want to make my shelves jealous, but I love browsing through other people's book collections, especially if they're readers like me. I can spot a kindred spirit by their books: by the variety of theme and type, by the way the books are organized, and by the person's willingness to talk about their books the same way others talk about their pets or their kitchen.

Get ready for an onslaught of library porn. I found a tumblr on the subject.

 There's an indefinable something that distinguishes a book lover's from a layperson's collection. I can tell at a glance who has a true library and who just has a place where the books go. The presence of so-called genre writing is a big clue. If there's a lot of sci-fi and fantasy hanging around, that person is probably a reader; ditto for comic books and graphic novels, especially if they're prominently displayed where visitors can see them. There's still a big of shame and stigma attached to enjoying genre writing, so a willingness to display such works and invite comment says the reader ain't give a damn what other people think of her interests.

Why yes, I do own every book every written about Rubicks cubes.

Variations on theme are another clue. Readers who are really in to reading tend to go for depth and completism. The BF has "The Sun Also Rises," "This Side of Paradise," and "The Great Gatsby"; he also has many books on the subject of the Great Depression and the art and design aesthetics of the 1920s and 30s. R's bookshelf has "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," so it's not surprising she would also have a non-fiction book called "Teaching Race in the Classroom."

I'm a bit hard-pressed to explain my own thematic elements. Maybe it's like tickling: you can't do it to yourself. I may have to get someone in here to look at my shelves and explain them to me.

And finally, a true reader and book-lover will always have something to say on the subject of organization. My friends J and L organize alphabetically by authors' last names, like a proper library; the BF shelves his books (and DVDs) chronologically by the year they were published/produced; right now I'm shelving by height, though I may organize them by color in the near future, just for a change. It's never haphazard. There's always a reason the books are set up like that, and the book-lover desperately wants you to comment on it so she can explain her system.

It all began when I saw "Beauty and the Beast" as a child...

 This post was originally going to be a review of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," which I borrowed from R's library. But while I enjoyed the book and could probably mash my brains into saying something witty and profound about the text, what I'm actually thinking about this morning is the fact that I'm going to R's apartment later today and will be able to browse through her books again. That's what I'm really excited about: other people's bookshelves. It got me to thinking about the people I've known and the book collections I've had--no other way to put it--relationships with, and decided to say something witty and profound about that instead.

I may just be a hawa'e maoli (collector urchin) when it comes to books and want to pick up every book I see and glom it on to my body to conceal me from predators.

Turtles and sharks will be baffled by my impenetrable armor of cornflakes

But there's more to it than that. I like other people's bookshelves because while reading tastes are a very personal thing, a bookshelf is rather public in nature. A bookshelf is an open display of a person's inner world and imagination, what they like, what they think about, what they desire. It's a strange mixture of the public and the private that endlessly fascinates me for its potential to both reveal and conceal the truth of a person's being.

Sauron knows what you think about at night. For shame.

Now why do I get the feeling other people are going to stop showing me their bookshelves?

Review: "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is one of those secret-famous authors. Say her name and you're likely to get back a lot of blank stares, but say the title of her work or an adaptation of her work and watch their eyes light up. "That's who wrote it? What was her name again?"

Most schoolchildren in America are familiar with her short story, "The Lottery," about a small town that ritualistically murders an individual every year to ensure good harvest and good fortune. It's such a classic that you might know it by heart without remembering the first time you read it or saw it referenced in other TV shows and movies. "The Simpsons" referenced it in their golden years ("Dog of Death," season 3, episode 19), and even "South Park" took a stab at it, no pun intended because the townsfolk use rocks ("Britney's New Look," season 12, episode 2).

The subject of today's post, Jackson's 1959 novella "The Haunting of Hill House," has twice been adapted as a movie called "The Haunting." The first movie from 1963 is supposed to be pretty good, a classic of horror cinema, which is why I haven't watched it. I'm a pansy. I saw the 1999 remake on TV one night, but only because it's too shitty to be scary, even for me. I don't recommend it, though I do recommend this Nostalgia Critic video review that compares the two versions.

As I mentioned, I'm a pansy when it comes to horror. I actually read "The Haunting of Hill House" in the day time because I was too afraid to read it at night. Was my fear justified? Yes, but maybe not in the way Jackson intended. Horror and ghost stories depend a great deal on atmosphere, and Jackson certainly knows how to create that brooding sense of danger and fear. But for me, the book was a bit defeated by her own premise, which is that the characters are gathering in the big scary haunted house specifically to study and observe the phenom of a haunting. Some of my fear immediately goes out the window when the characters know that they're being haunted and talk openly about their impressions and observations of the ghosts' activity.

I think Jackson was trying to show how the power of ghosts and fear can hold up even under scientific scrutiny, and while it's an original premise that raises a lot of interesting questions about the concepts and conceits of the ghost story genre, it doesn't necessarily make this ghost story any scarier. The scariest parts of this book are the bits that veer away from the scientific and dive right in to the cliche: the whispers of the townsfolk and caretakers, the knockings and voices in the night, the disorienting dimensions of the house itself.

Where "The Haunting of Hill House" really shines is the character development. Jackson is great at creating dialog that feels both natural and revealing, if a bit archaic to modern readers, given the time it was written. She's a master of the "show-don't-tell" technique (which is why teachers love her work so much), and she gives these stock characters depth and dimension, making them fully realized individuals instead of just archetypes. Two characters that bumble in toward the end of the book--the pushy psychic and the Teddy Roosevelt-esque headmaster--are referred to in the narration only by their names, but their dialog is so wonderfully descriptive and personalized that I knew as much about them after three pages than I knew about the other four characters after spending an entire book with them. All writers aspire to that level of skill, but few will ever reach the heights that Jackson did.

Maybe that's why more ordinary readers don't know Jackson by name. She's a great example of a writer's writer, known to those who write and those who study and teach writing, to the point that you might read something of hers and think it feels every familiar, because so many bigger, more famous authors are inspired by her *coughStephenKing*. I consider her one of the Great American Writers and highly encourage you to check out her oeuvre, which is widely available at your local library and online for free in my cases.

Final Grade: B+. It gets a few points deducted because it scared me. Recommended for those who like horror or ghost stories, meta works that skew the genre, and writers who could learn a thing or two from a hidden gem of American literature.

"The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin

I don't normally read non-fiction outside of my comic books.

This happened. And then they hushed it up!

But I was in LAX after my sister's wedding, killing time before my LA to New York City flight by browsing the airport bookstore because all bookstores are a siren call to me even if they're showcasing "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "50 Shades of Gray" (Grey? I have too much personal integrity to look it up). Airport bookstores always stock books of the zeitguiest, so I was unexpectedly exposed to a whole new set of reading material I would never seek out for myself. "The Happiness Project," by Gretchen Rubin, was one of those books. Since it was my inspiration for re-starting this blog, it feels fitting to dedicate my re-inaugeral post of Big Island Rachel's Books to a review of "The Happiness Project."

Did I like it? Yes. Am I incorporating some of it's material into my life? Absolutely. But was it perfect? Of course not. I had some major problems with the way the author presented her project, and it will surprise no one that the things I found most problematic were--wait for it--gender roles.

So "The Happiness Project" is one person's attempt to optimize her happiness. I like this sort of thing. It's lifehacking, shortcuts to making things easy for yourself, and as I said, I found a lot of stuff in the book useful. Rubin did tones of research into what happiness is and what makes people happy from a scientific standpoint. This wasn't a touchy-feely spiritual book (though there was a chapter on spirituality), it was a fact-based attempt to be the happiest person the author could be in the circumstances she was currently in.

Some things I took away: if you ACT happy, you will FEEL happy. No more walking around with slumped shoulders and a sour look on my face, no more "I'm too tired" to smile at my customers. Do things you're passionate about. You get more energy from doing something you love than you do from sitting around doing nothing, even though you think the sitting-around time is what's going to energize you because hey, what's more energizing than resting? On a related note, there's more happiness in "project happiness" than there is in "instant happiness." Hence the increase in my blogging and the decrease in my cartoon watching. I'm going to get more happiness from updating my regular blog, my books blog, and my Tumblr--and of course the radio show--than I am from re-watching "Sherlock" (which I'm actually doing while I type this, because shut up, it's a good show).

So those are the things I liked about the book: practical advice for optimizing your happiness with the life you have right now.

Here's what I didn't like, and like I said, it has to do with gender roles, so I'm about to off on one of my famous feminist rants. You've been warned.

Rubin says at the beginning of her book that fifty percent of a person's happiness is genetic and can't be altered. Twenty to thirty percent of happiness is based on things that can't be altered, like birthplace, age, and gender. Her project was focused on the ten to twenty percent of happiness that a person can directly affect. Which is all well and good, but back up a second--gender? Are there measurable differences in a person's happiness depending on whether they are male or female? To me, that's very interesting, but Rubin never brings it up again, even when she clearly needs to.

At the time she wrote the book, Rubin was a professional writer working from home. She had a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, and was happily married to her husband. There was a whole chapter on how she tried to be happier in her marriage, which in my mind was the perfect time to bring up the issue of happiness varying between genders. She states at the onset that she tends to nag her husband and get resentful of the fact that she does more housework and childcare than he does without getting the praise she wants for it. Her solution was to stop nagging, do what had to be done herself without waiting for her husband to do it, and stop expecting praise.

Excuse me while I bang my forehead against the keyboard. \g9i u09349qutqn 39804uoeiuar9082%. There, I'm done. I'll give Rubin credit for saying in her wrap-up chapter that she was afraid this approach would lead to her husband doing even less household word, and I'll give her husband credit for actually doing the opposite and stepping up his game when Rubin changed her approach. But there is something HUGELY problematic about a woman asking herself how she can be happier and determining  that more housework and less recognition for it are the answers.

Happiness is a complicated issue for women. We don't have the same cultural space that men do to be unhappy and angry. Women are trained to please and we're expected to be happy all the time, whereas men are allowed to have their teenage angst and their quarter- and mid-life crises. If Rubin found happiness in re-establishing traditional gender roles in her marriage by just shutting up and doing more housework, more power to her, especially if she got the end result she wanted, which was for her husband to pitch in without her nagging him. But there wasn't a single sentence in this book devoted to exploring the complex relationship between gender and happiness, and considering that one of her chapters is about marriage and another is about her children, it should have come up.

The lack of discussion around the issue made me furious a couple of times. Rubin relates a difficult Saturday when her kids aren't getting along, and she snaps at her husband because he spent time at the gym and then took a nap, leaving her to deal with the fighting, crying kids all day while he had leisure time alone. After she snaps at him, she feels bad because one of her happiness resolutions was to stop saying mean things to her husband. And damned if I didn't want to throw the book across the room, not because I disagreed with her handling of the situation--it was her happiness project, not mine, and I'm neither married nor a mother, so what do I know?--but because she didn't take the opportunity presented by that story to bring up any number of studies done on how many more hours a week women spend than men on housework and child-rearing, and how that affects the happiness of women and the stability of marriages. In a word: problematic.

Sometimes I wonder if people get tired of me pointing out sexist shit. And then I wonder why people don't get tired of all that sexist shit instead. Because I sure do. I'd love to wake up tomorrow to a world where I don't have to point out that it's problematic to write a book on happiness and not explore gender roles. Until that happens, I guess I'll just have to keep pointing it out.

Final grade: solid B. Good writing, well researched, but not feminist enough for me.