The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

I set a calendar reminder for myself. People have been talking about it all week. Sean even woke us up an hour early this morning, and we still blew it.

Mission fail.

Well here we are, down in Virginia, back in Norfolk, where it’s already feeling like spring. I actually did yard work today (which I personally have been referring to as “gardening,” because it sounds less like drudgery).

It’s good to be back.

We turned on the Oscars by mistake tonight, and we’re actually being entertained!

Await Your Reply: A Novel by Dan Chaon


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I defy anyone to read the first page of this novel and not be compelled to finish it.

Await Your Reply is about identity theft and high-tech criminal enterprises. Think Tom Ripley, if he were alive and at large in today’s world.

But, and I don’t want to scare anyone off, it’s also about something much deeper: it’s about the very notion of identity itself, the impermanence of it.

It’s got the pacing and plotting of a good thriller, but it’s populated with very believable characters, and it’s written in beautiful prose. A very satisfying read.

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Instapaper is a godsend for Kindle users.

I’ve written a couple posts about my search for an application that would make moving web content to the Kindle a simpler process. I have found that application.

With Instapaper, you get a little “bookmarklet” (a little button that goes on your browser’s bookmark toolbar or in your bookmarks drop-down menu) that, when clicked, grabs the text from the website you’re reading (a story in the New Yorker or a long blog post, whatever) and saves it for later reading.

Later, when you’re ready to spend some time reading and digesting, you surf over to the Instapaper website, and there are all your saved articles. You can either read the text right on the website (it’s very readable once all the obnoxious webpage-y stuff is stripped out), or you can click the little button on the right side of the screen that will download all your saved articles into a nice little Kindle-formatted package. It takes the three or five or 25 articles you’ve saved, formats them for the Kindle’s screen, puts them into one file, and creates a table of contents. You can even create different folders to organize your saved articles before downloading them.

As a bonus, Instapaper has a “Browse” page that lists popular and recommended articles from around the web that you can add to your “Read Later” list.

Brilliant. I’m in love. Screw you iPad.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you’re looking for some hard-edged, well-written science fiction, you’ll like Iain M. Banks. This was my first Banks novel. He showed up on my radar when I read a particularly favorable cover blurb on his latest book, Transition, from William Gibson. So I did some checking.

Turns out, Banks is quite well-regarded by readers of science fiction (Consider Phlebas is 100 percent space opera–frak-tastic space opera) as well as his more, er, literary efforts, which he writes as Iain Banks (no middle initial).

In fact, everything I read about his work was so positive that I began collecting his sci-fi books before I read even one of them. The problem was, Consider Phlebas is hard to find, and I wanted to read it first.

Finally, it came out in a Kindle edition, which I had preordered. One day it just showed up on my home screen, and I jumped right in as soon as I finished The Blind Side.

It’s a good book. The imagination on this guy and his willingness to see things through to their gruesome conclusions make for a sometimes jaw-dropping reading experience. It’s a quite good introduction to his work. I gave it four stars instead of five because it felt a little like he painted himself into a corner toward the end of the book, but even then he kept me interested.

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Succubus

Last night I woke up at about 12:30, and I wasn’t wearing any pants. This is curious because I was wearing pants when I went to bed. After that, I did not sleep well. I just kept waking up.

And so this morning when the alarm spun up at ten past six, I actually got up. I heard the compact disc spindle motor whir to life well before any music played, giving me ample time to sit up and hit snooze before the opening notes of U2’s “Beautiful Day” or Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire” or Tracy Chapman’s “Change” vibrated forth, which makes me wonder why we have an alarm clock that can play compact discs in the first place. I knew the coffee would be finished soon in the auto-drip, and I’d only been about a quarter asleep for the past hour anyway.

Father and Son

I have a lot on my mind. We’re winding down our time here in Newport, and I’ve been thinking about my career and what potential opportunities I’ll find after the move. So yesterday I took Sean to the bookstore to have a look at some magazines on parenting to see if I might find a new venue for my work there.

Alas, no.

The idea I’d had was for a sort of “Father and Son” monthly column about my adventures with Sean. Sure, it would be another parenting column, but it would also be a traveling column and maybe a cooking column. It could be a lot of things. It could be really interesting and fun.

But America’s big child-rearing magazines—Parents and Parenting—don’t seem to have the space for something like that. They are almost indistinguishable from each other at a quick glance, and like many magazines, they are full of numbered lists and bullet points and subheads. It’s the website-ification of printed matter (he writes on his website), the “we’ll think for you” school of writing.

I’m being glib. Those magazines are in the business of service journalism, and that’s what a lot of parents are looking for. (Help me raise my kid! Please!) It’s just that they’ve gone so far into the realm of service journalism that they’ve left no room for anything else.

The January Thaw

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I left the bookstore with Sean to do some exploring. There is a road—Reservoir Rd.—that I’ve been itching to hike for months. It all started when Danielle noticed it on the map while we were out for a drive. But we couldn’t find the actual road sign. What we presumed to be Reservoir Rd. proved to be nothing but a two-track that was unsuitable for the Raptor, all-wheel drive or not.

What made this road even more mysterious to me was a conversation I overheard while waiting in line for coffee. One man was telling another that he’d been managing a “gentleman’s farm behind St. George’s (School).” That had to be off Reservoir Rd.! I had to see it.

So finally I was going to take Sean on an exploratory hike. The January temp had soared above the freezing point, and the sun was shining. We drove as far as we could along the paved portion of Reservoir and parked. Then I put Sean on my shoulders and set off.

The two-track was muddy and gashed by truck tires. Lumps of unmelted snow and patches of grass were the only safe places to step. Sean held onto me by the hair as I walked past empty fields. I saw the campus of St. George’s to the East.

And that was all there was to see. The house was not magnificent, and there was no livestock. I don’t know what I’d expected to see on a “gentleman’s farm,” but it was more than empty fields and rusted tractor parts. Is it just an excuse to own a lot of land? Maybe the recession’s been hard on them, too.

Nevertheless, I felt good as I walked back up the track with Sean on my shoulders, my hair in his fists. Clouds were moving in and snowflakes were floating down and it was a good morning.

Filling in the Blank Spaces

When Danielle got home from work, I finally got around to telling her that I had woken up in the night pantsless. She swore she had nothing to do with it. Some mysteries are doomed to never be solved.

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Michael Lewis is one of my favorite non-fiction writers: a great storyteller and a great “explainer.” He’s written several books about the business world (Liar’s Poker), and he’s also written about sports.

The Blind Side is obviously in the latter category, but that’s not all it is. It is also a fascinating story about the human spirit, class, and the American dream, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s not cheesy at all (I’m paraphrasing Malcolm Gladwell’s blurb a little bit here).

If you enjoy football at all, you’ll enjoy the discussion about the changes in defensive and offensive strategies. But you’ll also enjoy the unfolding of Michael Oher’s story.

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I’m on one of my occasional short fiction kicks. I’ve discovered a great podcast, the New Yorker fiction podcast in which one of the magazine’s current fiction contributors reads one of their favorite stories from the archives. It’s a great way to sample some of the classics.

I’ve also been dipping into Richard Ford’s A Multitude of Sins and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. I downloaded Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It for the Kindle, but haven’t waded in just yet.

I’m enjoying Ford because I take a certain comfort in his style, and I appreciate his subtlety. Hemingway, of course, is always good. I was going to get to one of Meloy’s stories during the nap today, but Sean just didn’t sleep long enough. Maybe tomorrow or tonight…

Or, to put it another way, who has time to pay significant attention to the staggering amount of “serious” writing effervescing into the ether from the brains and fingers of Writers?

To put it still another way, who has time to pay all that significant attention and still write?

Because I pay a lot of attention. I listen to Bookworm, I read the New York Times Book Review. I read the midweek book reviews (sometimes). I read Motoko Rich’s coverage of publishing and book trends. I read fiction. I read essays. I read interviews with authors. I forage on the Internets for rare clumps of green grasses.

But I haven’t been getting any fiction writing done myself.

A while back, a blogger for one of the London papers wondered if we (the reader-types) were spending too much time reading about books, and not enough time actually reading books themselves. Well, I wonder if I’m spending too much time reading in general, and not enough time writing.

Because the reason I do all of this reading is that it provides a sense of accomplishment and enrichment, even if the results are only noticeable to me and exist only in my own head. The drive to seek out the sort of accomplishment and enrichment reading provides is a result of a nagging feeling that I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing.

I don’t know enough about narrative structure. I don’t know enough about human psychology. I don’t know enough about how things work. And etc.

The answer, however, is probably more writing. There needs to be a balance, I suppose. It’s just that reading is so much easier to get done than writing…

(This is all a lot of navel gazing, I know. O, it’s so hard to be a writer. Wahh. This is just me sort of thinking out loud.)