i'm a very very complex person

When I started this journal, I had a rule against making friends-only posts. My thinking was that if there was something I wasn't comfortable with sharing with the entire world, that thing did not belong on the internet in any form in the first place. I still think there may be some merit to that. But the way I use this journal has changed a lot since then, as I've connected with people here and discovered that I like posting the occasional personal update. Recently, I've been friended by a number of people whom I don't know, who don't comment to tell me who they are, and whose journals are not English so I can't get a sense of them or their journal. I don't know where they're coming from, and the journals often end up disappearing again not long after they add me. Very mysterious.

The result of all this is that it has made me think once again about the degree of personal information I reveal here, and who I reveal it to. I'm not interested in going to back to my strict ban on friends-only posts; in fact, I'm going to go the other way. Posts that are strictly about books will still be public, but everything else will be locked. I've been locking more and more posts lately anyway--I just figured that maybe it was time to make it official. I'll also begin gradually combing through old posts and locking the ones that need it. Does anybody know of a way to do this more efficiently than clicking through seven years worth of livejournal history, post by individual post?

This announcement mainly exists for the sake of people who are reading this journal and are not on my friends list. If you'd like to continue reading, please say hello. It's likely that I will be more than happy to add you. I will probably be happy to add you even if your journal is not in English--I don't really care about that and I have several friends whose journal are not in English (or not entirely in English). It's really not a language issue; it's much more a question of whether or not I can interact with you and get to know a little bit about you before we become "friends," even in the sometimes limited and misleading way that livejournal uses that word.

I finished Sarah Waters's Affinity last night. I ended up liking it quite a bit, but it wasn't at all the book that I expected. I expected it to be more along the lines of Fingersmith, a "lesbo-Victorian romp" as Waters herself once described her work. While Affinity is certainly both lesbo and Victorian, the romp part of the equation seems to be missing. Fingersmith is all fast-paced complexity, shocking plot twists, and suspense, whereas Affinity develops much more slowly and manifests its complexity not in the plot but in the layers of unreliability that cloud the narrative. There is tension in Affinity, certainly, but it takes much longer to develop than the tension in Fingersmith; I dawdled for two weeks through the first 300 pages of the book, and then read the last 60 in a gulp.

Affinity is a very dark book--Waters is not a writer who is afraid of the Gothic! The story is set mainly inside Millbank, a huge and grim prison on the banks of the Thames, and is woven throughout with themes of class, sex, desire, and betrayal. Spiritualism plays a major role in this book, and we are given glimpses into strange, sexualized séances in which the medium is bound to her chair with velvet restraints and spirits appear for the sole purpose of breathing on the necks of pretty girls. The darkness of the book is not all fun and sexy, however. Suicide, isolation, mental illness, and desperate loneliness all come into play as well.

I was most interested and impressed by the uncertain elements of the narration, and the way Waters allows that uncertainty to build slowly throughout the novel. First we wonder how much to trust Selina Dawes--does she truly believe what she says about spirits? How much of her work as a medium was a hoax? Margaret Prior, on the other hand, seems trustworthy: she seems sad and intelligent, sympathetic, terribly misunderstood by a world that can't comprehend that a woman might rather be a scholar than mistress of a house. And she is sad and intelligent and all the rest of these things, but as the novel goes on and we read more and more of her journal, we begin to wonder whether her perceptions match up with reality, or whether her mind has been so influenced by laudanum and her own desperation that she no longer sees things as they are. This is brought home by a lovely subtle moment when Margaret and Helen both look at the same painting and see very different things...

The biggest flaw of Affinity is the fact that Waters sometimes seems to let her research show a bit too much. She devotes long passages to the workings of the prison, describing in detail everything from the laundry room to the infirmary to the kitchens. This stuff is interesting, but bears no real relation to the story and I couldn't help but think that Waters just included it because she had read all about it herself and didn't want that to go to waste. On the plus side, there is some really beautiful writing in the book. I'm thinking particularly of an evocative passage describing the prison in winter--surprisingly lovely for such a bleak subject.

I don't know quite what to make of the ending of Affinity. I don't mind the fact that it's not a happy ending, but there's something about it that's unsatisfying entirely separate from the question of whether it's happy or not. I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps too much mystery is dispelled by the ending, and things that had seemed powerful and strange are shown to be ordinary. Or perhaps it's that I was able to piece things together just the tiniest bit ahead of reading them--not far enough ahead to call the ending predictable, but enough so that none of it truly shocked me.

So, Affinity was different than the rollicking good time I thought it might be, and the ending was just a little bit off, but it was still a very good book. Atmospheric, sensual, subtle, and then wonderfully tense near the end. I definitely intend to read more Waters. I have Night Watch sitting on the shelf upstairs, but Ms. E read that last summer and said it wasn't very good... Perhaps I will have to seek out Tipping the Velvet instead.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to make a dent in my to-read shelf. I think I'm going to read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go next.

It feels like it's been a very long time since I've posted a proper book review. Perhaps that's because it has been a long time. A quick look back at my journal reveals that it's been over two months since I've even posted one of those little improper book reviews that I was writing during the semester!

I had my top two wisdom teeth out on Friday, which meant that I spent a large portion of the weekend lying on the couch, which in turn meant that I had plenty of time to finish reading Moab is my Washpot, the autobiography of Stephen Fry. The same qualities--wit, charm, candor, and a highly engaging voice--that made Moab is my Washpot ideal post-semester reading also made it ideal reading while recovering from oral surgery, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The book tells only the story of Fry's first twenty years, but there is more than enough drama in those years to fill up 350 pages. I found it easy to identify with Fry's portrait of his younger self: a child with high verbal intelligence, but one who is also withdrawn and sometimes painfully ill at ease in the world. Fry is quite open about the unpleasant aspects of his youthful persona, and he freely admits his penchant for stealing and his ugly willingness to manipulate friends for his own ends. Fry seems to have ready access to the emotions of his early life, and he's able to bring to life the strange mixture of pride and shame that his behavior inspired in him, as well as the inexplicable compulsion that drove him to repeat these behaviors again and again. It sounds rather dark, summarized in this way, but Fry tells it with such humor and sparkling language that it doesn't seem heavy. There's some very nice material mixed in as well--for example, an instance when a teacher intervenes at just the right time and in just the right way to save Fry from cruelty and ostracism at the hands of his schoolmates. This event is rendered so lovingly, with such carefully recalled detail and obvious gratitude--it's a glowing moment, and I couldn't help grinning when I read it.

The central event of the book (and of Fry's emotional life, it seems) is his experience of falling in love at the age of fourteen with a boy at his school. This event gets rather a lot of buildup in the book, but then doesn't deliver quite the emotional punch I was expecting. There's emotion there, make no mistake--Fry is lovely when he describes his devotion to and idealization of Matthew--but the whole thing lacks the tension I need to really feel it. This lack of feeling cropped up at a few other points in the book as well. Fry seems very willing to share his emotions with his readers, but less willing to probe or interrogate them. The book favors narration entirely over introspection; Fry covers some unpleasant territory in the book (particularly a self-destructive downward spiral in his late teens) and I can't blame him for not wanting to delve deeply into those parts of his history, but it does leave the reader with odd gaps in understanding...

Stylistically, Fry seems to be trying to keep his prose as close as possible to the tone of his speaking voice, and the result is usually quite readable. There are sentences that seem to get away from him, instances when he injects so many modifiers and qualifiers that the whole thing crashes into the guardrail and becomes a massive adjectival pileup. But those sentences are outnumbered by the ones that are witty or trenchant or self-deprecating or otherwise spot-on. The book is conversational not merely at the sentence level, but also in structure. It's a VERY digressive read. For the most part the digressions were fun, and gave insight into other sides of Fry, but every so often they got in the way of the narrative or interrupted a story that would have been better left uninterrupted.

I feel like I've just pointed out a lot of flaws about the book, but I really did enjoy it. I think a large part of my enjoyment of the book stemmed from my enjoyment of Stephen Fry as the narrator of his own life story. I was absolutely charmed by him. I reacted to this book in a way that was quite common for me when I was younger, but has become quite rare as I've gotten older: I wanted to be friends with him. Seriously, if would be so cool if we could hang out. There would be so much we could talk about! From the frustrations of being a music lover who lacks all musical ability to the experience of searching, as teenaged queers, for the deeply coded hints of homosexuality in Forster and John Knowles... At several points in the book, I found myself thinking that Stephen Fry is exactly who I would be if only I had been born male, British, and 25 years earlier than I was.

I. Recent reading

June Jordan's Poetry for the People edited by Laura Muller and the Blueprint Collective: I don't really know what to make of this book, or even how to describe it. The book grew out of the famous poetry class that June Jordan taught at Berkeley for many years, and it's something of a hodge podge. The book is essentially a compilation of materials for and by the class: student writings (both poetry and personal reflections), a sample syllabus, lists of classroom ground rules, tips for staging readings, etc. The book came out in the early nineties, and often feels a bit dated in some of its earnest political correctness and focus on identity politics. But June Jordan was an incredibly impressive poet and activist, and the book is definitely imbued with her sense of poetry as a real tool for change. It's an interesting book, I'm just not sure how useful it is unless you happen to be trying to initiate your own version of the Poetry for the People course.

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta: Oh my god, this book is so bad. Everything about it is bad. Perrotta's prose has no style whatsoever, I didn't care about the characters, there are preposterous holes in the plot...I could go on. Perhaps the worst thing about this book is the fact that every time something is done or said, Perrotta is right there, explaining it to us--there's no room for interpretation, imagination, or even involvement on the part of the reader. The other worst thing about it (too many bad things to pick just one!) is the way it gestures towards big topical issues (the power given to right-wing Christian fundamentalists, abstinence-only education, gay marriage) but refuses to take any kind of stance on those issues. They just sit in the book taking up space while Perrotta tiptoes around them trying not to offend anybody. Bah. My workshop professor perhaps described the book best: "It's like oatmeal. Or milquetoast... Oatmeal with milquetoast on top."

I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope: Every teacher and every writer who's reading this should go out and get this book. It's great. It occasionally veers a little into the sentimental, but it's still great. The book tells the story of how Sam Swope, a children's book author, spent three years teaching fiction and poetry to a class of elementary school kids in Queens. He followed the same class through third, fourth, and fifth grade, so he got to develop relationships with the kids over a long period of time and watch the changes in them as they grew up, worked with different teachers, etc. There is quite a bit of the students' writing reproduced in the book, and I was amazed not only by how good it is but also by how easily these kids are able to access their imaginations. This is also a super-quick read--I got through the whole thing in a day, and I'm no speed reader.

II. Birds!

I love my bird feeder. It's so much fun, and it allows me to indulge my interest in wild birds even when I don't have time to go hiking and look for them. I'm amazed at the variety of birds that I get, too! I regularly see juncos, chickadees, titmice, a mated pair of cardinals, nuthatches, and white-throated sparrows, but I've also seen house finches, blue jays, and today I even thought I saw a fox sparrow! (Fox sparrows are rather uncommon, and I wasn't able to be quite certain of my id before he flew away.)

A few weeks ago Ms. E came to visit and brought her camera, which allowed me to take some bird feeder photos. They're slightly dark because of being taken through the window, but a few of them came out pretty well.


( More photos )

Nuthatch on the tree

So long ago that I don't even remember when it was, I asked for recommendations of graphic novels to check out. I have now finally followed up on some of those recommendations. In the days between Christmas and my birthday, I read both Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry (I have a vague recollection that these two books were recommended by slowlyawake and glazed_glitter, but I could be wrong...) This now brings the total of graphic novels that I've read up to three, and while I'm nowhere near an expert on the form, it's obviously an area where some really cool work is happening. Oddly, all three of the graphic "novels" I've read have actually been graphic memoir--it's sort of funny that there's no distinction in terminology to distinguish between the fictional and non in this form.

Anyhow, the first of the two books that I read was One Hundred Demons. Lynda Barry calls her book "a work of autobifictionalography," thereby perhaps resolving the terminology question mentioned above. The book is a series of short stories, each relating to a demons like "My First Job," "Girlness," and "Dancing," demons that haunted Barry in her childhood and into her adulthood. There's a lot of text to these stories, the art often squeezed into just the bottom third of the panels. But Barry manages to pack a lot into that bottom third--the paintings are colorful and vivid, with an energetic, outsider-ish quality that I find really appealing. Also appealing is Barry's conviction that anyone can make this art. The book has an intro and an outro, both of which encourage readers to pick up a brush and start painting their own demons--I love that.

As much as I enjoyed One Hundred Demons, I think I did the book a disservice by reading it all in one day. The stories are somewhat similar in tone, and reading them all back to back allowed a sameness to creep in. I was also a little disappointed by the way the stories sometimes seemed to wrap up a bit too neatly and easily. I don't think I would have even noticed this as a flaw if it weren't for the fact that at other times Barry digs so fearlessly into the real and painful stuff of her childhood. Next to that, the occasional dollops of wisdom and perspective from Barry's adult self are bound to pale in comparison. Still, there's a lot of really great stuff in this book. My favorite story was dancing, which seems to strike a perfect balance between the personal and the universal, between poignancy and humor--great.

Persepolis could not be more different from One Hundred Demons in terms of art. Where Barry's illustrations nearly pop off the page with energy and life, Satrapi's are restrained, stylized, and black and white. Reading the two books in a row made Persepolis seem very stark at first, but the style grew on me as I read. There are certain images from this book that have lingered with me in the weeks since I read it, like the drawing of the rows of veiled schoolgirls in Tehran forced to line up in their classroom and beat their breasts in mourning for the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war, the girls' round white faces staring out from the black of the background and the black of their veils. Like the art, the story also grew on me as I read. At first I wished for a bit more structure to the narrative, but by the end I was fully immersed in Satrapi's story. And the end of the story is absolutely heartbreaking. I wish that everybody who was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran for a glimpse of life in Iran during the troubled '70s and '80s would read this instead. It's such a compelling portrait of the ways people find to survive their circumstances.

So thank you to Nora and Cynthia, or to whomever else it was that suggested these titles to me--both were excellent and very worth reading.

I'm joining the list-posting crowds and offering my fourth annual compendium of the best stuff I read during the past year. As usual, re-reads are ineligible, as are things that I failed to read in their entirety.

( First, the list )

Best short story collection: This is not a particularly strong category this year. I guess the award will go to Stillness by Courtney Brkic, which was uneven, but had a couple of real gems.

Best short story: It's always so hard to choose just one story (partially because I don't do a good job of keeping track of the short fiction I read in magazines, etc). Anyway, I won't choose one, but will give you three stories to run out and read right now: "Thailand" by Haruki Murakami, "The First Sense" by Nadine Gordimer, and "Stillness" by Courtney Brkic.

Best nonfiction: Oh man, I only read one nonfiction book this year. I read a lot of fragments of interesting nonfiction this year (most notably A.C. Haddon's Head-hunters Black, White, and Brown) but only one book in it's entirety. That's a new low, even for me! I guess that means that Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever is the winner.

Best young adult novel: This is another category where I have only one entry. And it's not even a very good entry. I grudgingly give the award to the disappointing Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Best graphic novel: I read two graphic novels in a row right at the end of the year, and haven't even had a chance to properly post about them yet. Both were excellent, but Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis wins by a very narrow margin--if you want to know why, you simply must wait until my next post! Ah, the suspense!

Best novella: "Morpho Eugenia" by A.S. Byatt. Wow, really good!

Best novel: I have two nominees this year, and they couldn't be more different: The Road, and The Remains of the Day. Shall it be Cormac McCarthy's desperately grim post-apocalyptic vision that enthralled and terrified me, or the beautifully restrained novel of British repression that broke my heart? Impossible to choose. They both win. (And honourable mentions go to Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Sarah Waters's Fingersmith--both were just a hair away from making it a four-way tie.)

I had a somewhat lighter reading load last week due to the fact that my Indian fiction class spent the whole week on class presentations (apparently presentations are quite the done thing around here—I’ve done one on Italo Calvino, one on R.K. Narayan and the history of India, one on Henry Spencer Ashbee, the great cataloguer of Victorian pornography, and one on Henry James’s ambiguous relationships with men. I don’t know whether this is a Penn State thing or whether presentations are some sort of academic fad that has caught on since I was last in school, but to the best of my recollection, I have now done as many presentations in one semester as I did in my entire undergraduate career.)

One of the things that I did read last week was The Master, Colm Tóibín’s novel about the life of Henry James. This was a re-read for me, and some of you may remember how much I loved it the first time around. Sadly, it suffered in the rereading, not because it no longer seems to be as good a book as it did at first, but because I was forced to read it quickly. The first time I read The Master, I spread it out over two or three weeks; that is the kind of treatment that this book needs. One of the things I like most about the book is the way Tóibín’s story is unpinned from chronology, the way you can float back and forth through the events of Henry’s life as if being gently rocked by a warm sea. Hasty reading and pressure to finish prevented this lovely effect from developing. Sad. But even when read hurriedly, it’s evident that this book is a masterpiece. The beauty of Tóibín’s sentences, the utter complexity of his characterization of Henry James—these are the kind of accomplishments that shine through any set of circumstances. I haven’t read anything else of Tóibín’s, although I keep meaning to. I think perhaps I’m putting it off because I’m afraid that none of his other work will live up to this book. The Master seems like the kind of novel that only comes once in a career.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that prior to reading The Master, I read some of Henry James’s own work: “Daisy Miller,” “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Real Thing.” My only previous exposure to James was The Ambassadors, which I found ponderous, needlessly convoluted, and aggravating. These shorter works from earlier in his career were a revelation. The prose was so light, the plots so sprightly! I liked “The Aspern Papers” best (not least because of the way it resonated with The Master and the issues of privacy, legacy, the destruction of correspondence, etc), and was impressed by the way James built the story from the simplest of all narrative principles: someone wanting something that he doesn’t have. I doubt that James will ever become my favorite writer, but I’m interested in reading more of his work now, something I decidedly did not want to do after The Ambassadors.

Not all of my recent reading has revolved around Henry James, however. I also read After the Quake, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. The book contains six stories, all loosely connected to the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. My only prior experiences with Murakami were with isolated stories in the New Yorker which never managed to add up to a meaningful impression of Murakami as a writer. After reading this collection, I’m still not sure that I’ve got any sense of him as a writer. The collection is very uneven as a whole, with two real knockout stories, a few middling stories that I suspect I’ll forget in a matter of days, and couple of absolute clunkers. The worse of the stories was “All God’s Children Can Dance”: boring, misogynistic, and essentially empty. The best was “Thailand,” a quietly unsettling story that displays a careful control of tone and wonderfully strategic use of image. I feel like I should read more of Murakami, but I don’t know where to go next. Anybody have any suggestions?

Today marks the end of a banner week for me: the first week in the entire history of my academic career in which I have read every single word that was assigned to me for every single class that I attended. And all on time too! Unheard of! Anyhow, this means that I am now reading at a rate that is at least double the rate at which I was reading just a few weeks ago. This makes it rather difficult to keep as thorough a reading journal as the one I've been keeping, especially with all of the other new demands on my time. But I really like keeping the reading journal, and I find it really helpful to have the record of what I've read and what I thought. What to do? I don't know yet exactly how I'll resolve this dilemma, but for now I'm going to try to quickly sum up my reactions to my recent reading.

1. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: Lovely. A little, beautiful gem of a book, a masterpiece of restraint. The only other McEwan I've read is Amsterdam, and I was decidedly unimpressed with that book--it seemed like a rather mean-spirited novel. I'm glad I didn't give up on McEwan, though, because this little story is rendered with such careful sensitivity and flawlessly controlled tone, such care for the characters, for their various hurts, and for the eventual failure of patience and understanding toward each other that only hurts them further. There's not a trace of the mean-spirited or over-clever about it. I chose this as my last bit of unassigned reading before grad school got underway in earnest, and I'm awfully glad I did.

2. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald: Oof. This book is tough. The book seems to mirror its main character, Jacques Austerlitz: strange, erudite, impenetrable, cold. There are wonderful sentences, but they're buried in the middle of paragraphs that stretch on for fifty pages. (I'm not kidding. I'm halfway through the book at this point, and I think I've encountered maybe five indentations.) This books is not designed to be accessible or to draw the reader in; in fact, it seems to be quite the opposite. The first quarter of the book is devoted to Austerlitz's long monologue on the history of European architecture, and it is only after one has waded through this dreary passage that one is rewarded with the real substance of the book, the life story of Austerlitz. I'm totally unable to fathom why Sebald would set his book up in this way. Has anybody read this one? I'd love to know what any of you thought.

3. "Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard: Fantastic, fantastic! Oh, the waltzing at the end! Fantastic! Maybe it's just because it stands out in such contrast to Austerlitz, but I loved this. How not to love it? When it had me laughing out loud by the second page? It's just as witty as can be, and extremely well-researched and learned without being oppressive about it (take a note, Sebald!). I could swear I read this in college, although I cannot for the life of me remember what class I read it for. Was it 101? I can't imagine any other class where it would have been relevant... I find it weird that I can't remember that, but the play itself is excellent.

Thus far, I have only read bits and pieces for my South Asian fiction course: a speech by Nehru, an essay by Rushdie, a short story or two... None of those seem worth commenting on in any particular way, but I'll soon have novels for that class as well.

I'm just over halfway through Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, and I am loving it! It is fantastically atmospheric, intense, suspenseful. It's been a long time since I've read a suspenseful book, and I think I had forgotten how much fun it can be. There has been one plot twist already--an absolute stunner that I never saw coming--and I suspect there may be more on the way. Waters does a great job evoking her settings, whether they are the slums of Victorian London or the rooms and grounds of a very strange manor house. Even more than that, though, I love the characters she has created. Sue, passionate yet unworldly, with that secret white glove pressed in the bodice of her dress, and poor Maud, repressed and damaged beyond belief, nursing her secret emotions, clinging to the remark that gave her hope, and both girls being manipulated by a scheming man whose real name is never known... It's a fantastic book. If all my class reading is this good, grad school will be fun.

And now I'm off to write some fiction, goddamnit.

I finished The Road yesterday. There is so much about this book that is incredibly powerful. I’ve heard people describe it as depressing, but my emotional response was by far one of horror rather than depression. I would sit up at night reading it in my comfortable living room in my pleasant apartment, and I would gradually find myself fully wrapped in McCarthy’s world of blackness and cold, where people crawl like ants across a wasted landscape in which the threat of violence is immanent. There were images in this book that filled me with a sickening dread: the emaciated people locked in a basement, the nightmare army that passes on the road with their scraps of red fabric and lengths of pipe. The whole book has the quality of a nightmare, emphasized by McCarthy’s fragmentary prose and the very short segments of narrative, but this is a nightmare that I found all too easy to believe. McCarthy says that he wrote this book after a visit to Austin, TX during which he stood at the window of his hotel room with his young son sleeping behind him, and looked out and imagined what the city would look like in 50 or 100 years. He saw Austin a burned-out ruin, with ominous fires burning on the ridges outside the city. It is a despairing vision, to be sure, but one that seemed frighteningly plausible to me. I was perpetually tense while reading, afraid for the fate of the father and son who seem always so close to death, but I also couldn’t help wondering about myself in the world of the book: How long would it take me to die? What would I have to endure before I did?

For everything in the book that provoked horror in me, there were also many tiny moments that were heartbreaking. Many of the moments between the father and son fall into this category, both those that demonstrate that tenderness still exists in this world and those in which tenderness fails, but perhaps the thing that moved me most was a passing reference to Baucis and Philemon. That the father is a man who knows a story from Ovid, that he thinks of it even in these extreme circumstances, that somehow this pretty little myth has survived and been carried forward into this shattered world—it made me want to cry.

I don’t know what to think of the ending of the book. As I was reading I couldn’t imagine how McCarthy would end his story, and when the ending came I found I couldn’t quite credit it. After being steeped for so long in fear, desperation, and suspicion, I can’t believe that it should be so simple. And is it so simple? I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of the ending; it seems in some ways to undermine what has gone before, but the only alternatives are complete devastation or no ending at all.

Whatever reservations I have about the ending, this is a book that’s worth reading. McCarthy is fearless in pursuing his vision, going farther and farther into everything that is bleak and grim, refusing to soften his language or turn his eye away from the horror. And his language! Amazing precision! I had to turn to the dictionary a few times in this book, and every time I did I found that McCarthy had discovered the single perfect word for his purpose. It’s an amazing book, one that actually lives up to its hype, and the most absorbing thing I’ve read in a very long time.