I’m off to San Antonio for an indeterminate length of time (regular readers know that my sister lives there ); the earliest I’ll be back is July 22nd, but since I’m driving I might stay until my future brother-in-law kicks me out.

I’m not sure what my computer/internet access will be like, or how much time I’ll have to blog/read other blogs, so I might disappear for awhile. In the meantime, here are the audiobooks I found at the library today to keep me company on the drive:

• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson: I love it when a book is read by the author. I just read my first Bryson earlier this year, a bio of Shakespeare, and I’m curious about his more humorous writing.
• The Rebels of Ireland by Edward Rutherford: my mom got me the book on CD of Princes of Ireland; this is the sequel.
• Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James: love the Dalgleish series, and I read them completely haphhazardly, so no worries about the series order.
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis: time travel! the Middle Ages! women writing sci-fi!
• Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: I already have this one from the library, and talked about it in my Library Loot vlog.
• Stardust by Neil Gaiman: he reads it himself. He’s one of my very favourite authors. Enough said.

I’m overwhelmed by how many comments I got on my post on Ella Minnow Pea! I wanted to hear other people’s thoughts, since I was surprised by my reaction, and I’m glad I did.

Today, we return to normal scheduling, which is Eva gushing about a great book she just read. That book is Normal by Amy Bloom. Last year, I read Bloom’s short story collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You and very much enjoyed it. One of the features that stood out to me was that the title story featured a mother helping her transgendered daughter became a man. So when I discovered that she had written a nonfiction book about similar issues (the full title of this book is Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude), I put it on the TBR list.

And it languished there, with the hundreds (thousands?) of others, until Amanda’s GLBT Challenge. But when I got it home from the library and saw how small it was (135 pages), I decided it’d be a great way to kick off the challenge. (A quick note: occasionally, I’m using asterisks in this post, especially when I talk about transsexual surgery. This isn’t because I’m five years old, but to avoid creepy p*rn searchers.)

Rather than a full nonfiction book, this is a collection of three essays, the first of which was published in The New Yorker, each addressing one of the issues in the subtitle. Bookending these are a short, thoughtful preface and afterword. Each of the essays is the perfect length; not so long that I get bored, but long enough to cover all of the essentials. And I love the way Bloom approached this book:

There are shelves and shelves of academic, clinical, ideological, and autobiographical books on one or more of the subjects I address here. I didn’t want to add to them; I wanted to tell the stories of the people I met and how it was to be with them, to offer readers a chance to see what I saw, perhaps to see further and better, and to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share.

The first essay is about female-to-male transsexuals, especially those who have gone through surgery to become men. Bloom points out that when our society looks at transsexuals at all, it’s almost always male-to-female, so she was curious about the other side of the coin. At first, she’s prepared to find very disturbed people, who loathe being women, and who have been taken advantage of by surgeons out to make a quick buck. But soon she realises that that’s simply not the case;

I met men. Some I liked, some I didn’t. I met bullshit artists, salesmen, computer programmers, compulsive, misogynistic seducers, pretty boys inviting seduction, cowboys, New Age prophets, good ol’ boys, shy truck drivers saving their money for a June wedding, and gentle knights. I met men.

She also explores the difference in views between the surgeons, even the most sympathetic, and the patients. For the ‘bottom’ surgery, there are two options: a phalloplasty will “create a full-size ph*llus and t*sticles” while a metoidioplasty “frees the testosterone-enlarged cl*toris to act as a small p*nis” There’s much more emphasis on creating a ‘p*nis,’ and not a small one, from the surgeon’s corner. The patients had a different take.

Many of the men I interviewed preferred metiodioplasties, but never for the reasons offered in the literature or by the surgeons. The gender professionals say that patients choose metoidioplasties because they’re older and don’t want to go through the more complicated surgery, or because they have other medical conditions that contraindicate surgery, or because they were lesbians before transition and their partners don’t like the idea of sex with a man (as though if your partner had a beard, a deep voice, and no breasts, you would think were you in bed with a woman). But every transsexual man I spoke to who’d chosen metoidioplasty said, in essence, “I don’t need a big, expensive p*nis; this little one does just fine, and I can use the money to enhance my life.” It was like interviewing a bunch of proud and content but slightly bewildered Volkswagen owners and, across town, some slightly miffed and equally bewildered Mercedes dealers.

Additionally, Bloom talks to the women who date/marry the men she interviews. I loved how she included this sometimes surprising view; it made everything feel more well-rounded. As you can tell, I found this essay absolutely fascinating; it truly opened up a new world to me.

The second essay was the saddest, in my opinion. It’s about heterosexual men who enjoy crossdressing. Bloom goes to several events for such men, whose wives often come along. And that’s where the sadness came in; almost all of the wives Bloom talked to didn’t enjoy the events, and found their husbands’ preference difficult to handle. They were trying to deal with it and keep their marriages in tact, but I found their distress to be quite depressing. There’s also an irony in the fact that the husbands argue cross-dressing is a way of worshipping women even more, but as one wife says:

“Me femaleness is not something [her husband] adores-it’s his femaleness that this is all about.

As a feminist, I have to admit I was annoyed by these husbands who were making life so much harder on their wives and refusing to even see that. That being said, not all of the crossdressers were like this, and Bloom describes one very happily married couple.

Dixie and Rebecca are standing across the room, both of them in black lace cocktail dresses, Rebecca’s floor-length and very Scarlett O’Hara, his mid-calf and rather 1930s, with a dropped waist. Just in case you didn’t see him, at six feet, four inches and about two hundred and thirty pounds, he wears a large black polished straw hat with velvet band and dyed black feathers. Dixie and his very pretty wife seem to having a hell of a time.

I also found the disconnect between the way that psychologists and gender experts explain the men’s desire to crossdress and the way the crossdressers themselves explain it fascinating. And as with the first essay, I felt like I had peeked into a world I hadn’t even realised existed.

The final essay is about hermaphrodites, specifically babies or children born with ‘ambiguous g*nitals’ and the medical community’s response to them. About two thousand such babies are born every year in America. It used to be, doctors would take almost immediate invasive action that was essentially cosmetic (and sounds incredible painful). But Bloom discusses how Cheryl Chase, a businesswoman turned activist, has “almost single-handedly changed both the dialogue on the subject and the surgical practice itself.” While Bloom does include several profiles of individuals, this essay felt less personal than the other two, and more of an overview. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it did make it the least strong. Still, Bloom’s a wonderful essayist, and once again I found myself sharing fascinating facts with my parents that I hadn’t known before.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, I recommend every should go read this book. It challenges society’s view of ‘normal,’ it challenges assumptions about transgendered and crossdressing communities, but most of all it really let me spend ‘a day in the life’ of people completely different than me. And isn’t that what reading is all about?

I read Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea in a single afternoon. However, I didn’t enjoy it. I consider this my own fault, because somehow although I’ve read a couple reviews of it, I didn’t catch that it was dystopian fiction.

I am not a fan of dystopian fiction. But I think that’s an understatement. If Neil Gaiman woke up tomorrow and took it into his head to write a dystopian novel, it doesn’t matter that he’s one of my very favourite authors, I wouldn’t read it. Whenever I accidentally read dystopian fiction, even if it’s a wonderful book that everyone else loves (like How I Live Now), I don’t enjoy it. The one exception to this is 1984, which I read for a Sociology of War class in college with a Russian professor who said it captured the feeling of living in a totalitarian state better than any nonfiction he could assign. So I think that has to do with circumstances.

Somehow, I latched on to the word ‘charming’ in the reviews, thought the title was too adorable, and believed this to be about a quirky little Southern island.

Not so much. This is about a crazy totalitarian government wrecking people’s lives, about the gradual descent into insanity of a society, and about the ones who try to resist. It’s not as dark or depressing as 1984, but it’s oppressive. And I didn’t find it particularly funny or charming or quirky.

Also, since it’s written entirely in letters by the island’s citizens, as they become restricted in their letter use, the text begins to devolve. At first it was fun to see the different word choices, but on page 162, there are so many banned letters that the Council allows its citizens to

espress themselphs when warrant, threw yoose oph proxy letters, yet only as hear-twins.

Um yeah. The next forty pages were hellish to me. It hurt my eyes to see English butchered that way, and I stopped caring about anything but when it would be over.

I do think the book is a relevant exploration of absolute governments, both religious and bureaucratic, and I liked how there was a focus on how even emigration can destroy your life. The main plot driver as the government moved forward, the Resistance’s attempt to come with a sentence that used all twenty-six letters of the alphabet with only thirty-two letters total was interesting. And Dunn is a skilled writer. But overall, this book simply wasn’t for me (perhaps if I’d had a different mindset going in). I’d only recommend it to people who don’t mind dystopian lit and reading in dialect. And let me repeat, it’s not a light, charming way to spend an afternoon. I was expecting something like a Southern version of The Uncommon Reader. I couldn’t have been further from what the book’s actually like. (Since Dunn is from Memphis, and the island is off the coast of SC, this is my fourth Southern Reading Challenge book.)

Have you ever read a book that wasn’t at all what you expected it to be? Did you enjoy it anyway?

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by myself and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

Want to share your loot?

Here’s mine! I barely got anything this week, because last week’s haul was so big. But for the vlog, I’ve combined both weeks, so if you see a book that interests you, be sure to check out last week’s list as well. The video was 11 and a half minutes, so I split it up into two equal parts.

And here’s the covers and links:

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (for the Classics Challenge), The White Earth by Andrew McGahan (for the Orbis Terrarum Challenge), The Claudine Novels by Colette (for the GLBT Challenge)

Normal by Amy Bloom (for the GLBT Challenge)

I know, today’s blog post title is ridiculously long, but I’m discussing my four favourite stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection (The Thing Around Your Neck; this is the British cover, since I used the American cover yesterday) and the alternative was “Four Adichie Stories.” I’m not good at titling posts! I’m publishing my thoughts on the stories today as part of John Mutford’s weekly event Short Story Monday. For those who don’t read my Sunday Salons, she’s one of my very favourite authors and I loved this latest book but at the same time I found it uneven. All but one of the collected stories have been published over years, and some of them felt like experiments made by a young author, i.e. not quite perfect. So I don’t think this book is quite as incredible as her first two (which were both novels and, quite frankly, so stunning it would have been difficult to live up to them), but the good stories far outweigh the not-quite-so-good and make it well worth the read (it came by its five stars honestly). Fortunately for those who have yet to read Adichie, one of these stories is available for free online, so you can get a taste. I promise you’ll want to go out and read Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (her two novels) right away!

“Cell One”

That story would be “Cell One” (I’ve linked it through to the New Yorker), which opens the collection. To me, this was a perfect short story: it completely inhabited its form, and I can’t imagine it would be nearly as powerful as a novella or novel. It’s apparent rom the opening sentences that Adichie is in complete command:

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry.

Look at how much she’s already told us about the narrator, while completely drawing us in, to find out why Nnamabia would do such a thing! While the story begins as a family story, with the parents and younger sibling trying to figure out why Nnamabia is acting out and how to stop him, it soon broadens in scope.

It was the season of cults on our serene Nsukka campus. It was the time when signboards all over the university read, in bold letters, SAY NO TO CULTS. The Black Axe, the Buccaneers, and the Pirates were the best known. They may once have been benign fraternities, but they had evolved and were now “cults”; eighteen-year-olds who had mastered the swagger of American rap videos were undergoing secret and strange intiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead at Odim Hill.

In a sweep of the cults, the police arrest Nnamabia, and the rest of the story is about the family’s visits to him in jail and efforts to get him released. The dynamics slowly change, and Nnamabia himself undergoes the most dramatic change of all. But I’ll leave you to discover what it was; needless to say, by the end of the story I was simply in awe. The final paragraph is so powerful, although I won’t quote it hear. Seriously, this one’s available for free, so there’s no reason for you not to go read it! Then come back and tell what you thought of it in the comments.

“On Monday of Last Week”
In case you think there’s a certain order, I’m following that from the Table of Contents; I can’t really rank these four, since they’re all amazing in completely different ways. “On Monday of Last Week” follows Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has immigrated to America to join her husband. Despite her master’s degree, she takes a job as a nanny in an upper-class household. The father, who is the involved parent, is a Jewish lawyer, while the mother, an African American, is an artist who locks herself away in her studio. The son, Josh is seven. I loved this one, because while it dealt with ‘themes’ (race, liberalism, sexuality, etc.), Kamara and her story were still completely authentic; there’s no statement making. Once again, the opening lines immediately grabbed my attention:

Since Monday of last week, Kamara had begun to stand in front of mirrors. She would turn from side to side, examining her lumpy middle and imagining it flat as a book cover, and then she would close her eyes and imagine Tracy caressing it with those paint-stained fingers.

I also found Kamara’s thoughts on Josh’s mixed heritage fascinating:

Kamara watched Josh slot in a Rugrats DVD and lie down on the couch, a slight child with olive sink and tangled curls. “Half-caste” was what they had called children like him back in Nigeria, and the word had meant an automatic cool, light-skinned good looks, trips abroad to visit white grandparents. Kamara had always resented the glamour of half-castes. But in American, “half-caste” was a bad word.

Once again, this showed the real power of short stories, to capture people and situations in such a short amount of time, to make us care for them and drive us along with a plot, then end it appropriately. The ending felt spot on here. I just Adichie’s subtlety, her willingness to trust the reader to fill in the blanks.

“Jumping Monkey Hill”
Ok, I know I just said I couldn’t rank them, but I’m pretty sure “Jumping Monkey Hill” was my favourite of the favourites. In an Adichie interview I read, she called it the most auto-biographical, and I guessed that just from reading it. The emotions, the energy is a lot more raw (Adichie said she wrote it from rage), a total kind of ‘f you’ to certain types of Westerns and their approach to Africa and African literature. I adored it. It’s set in Cape Town, at a retreat called the Africa Writers Workshop. Writers from several different countries (Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa) have been brought together with the expectation that they’ll each produce a short story under the direction of Edward Campbell, a Brit who has created the workshop and whose ‘lifelong passion’ has been African literature. Ujunwa is a young Nigerian author, and the focus of the story. As the week goes along, she gets more and more angry at the racism and sexism she encounters. Additionally, once they begin workshopping stories, Edward shoots down those that are based on every day life and applauds the violent ones. While most of the African writers bond over their disgust at Edward’s behavior during breakfast and dinner, they remain silent while he’s around.

“But why do we say nothing?” Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. “Why do we always say nothing?”

I can’t capture the magic of the story without simply typing out the entire thing, but trust me, it alone is worth grabbing the collection for.

“The Shivering”
The last of my favourites is the only one that hasn’t been previously published: “The Shivering.” It’s about a Nigerian student at Princeton who, after a horrific plane crash occurs in Nigeria, bonds with one of her apartment neighbours who is also Nigerian. This is also the most difficult one for me to discuss, but as the story unfolds who learn more and more about each of the two characters, and way its revealed is just magical. So I’m hesitant to talk about it at all. Here’s what I will say: the dialogue in incredible. The characters felt completely real, as did their relationship. And you should get a hold of the book so you can read this story.

The final story in the book, “The Headstrong Historian,” was also wonderful. But I’d already read and reviewed it (it’s available for free online as well), so read my review if you wish. I hope I’ve convinced you that Adichie is one of the finest writers I’ve read, and that you too should become acquainted with her work. Sooner, rather than later!

I had to give a shout-out for my country’s birthday, didn’t I? This has been a much better reading week than last, since it included five five-star reads in a row! So let’s get talking about them, shall we?

To pick up from last week’s Sunday Salon, I read A Guide to Elegance by Genevieve Dariaux and loved it, as you can tell from my review. Then I finished Tony Perrottet’s Route 66 A.D.. This was a very interesting travelogue; Perrottet decides to follow the Ancient Roman tourist trail. He mixes chapters of Roman history and culture with chapters from his own trip, which he’s taking with his pregnant girlfriend. You can tell he’s used to backpacking-style trips, so he and his girlfriend find themselves in some amusing places and situations (well, amusing for the reader!). Meanwhile, the parts about Ancient Rome are engagingly written and kept me interested. While the beginning of the book felt like too much history, after that there’s a good balance between history, travel, and Perrottet’s personal reflections (obviously, impending fatherhood occupies his mind). Perrottet is strongest at character sketches; the various people he meets along the trip, and many of the Ancient Romans he’s discussing, spring to life. I’d say his ability to bring the actual places to life is weaker, and the ending was rather abrupt, but it’s still a solid read. I’d recommend this for anyone interested in travelogues, quirky ancient history, or planning a trip around the Mediterranean (they visit Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt).

Next up, I opened Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. She’s one of my very favourite authors, so I had high expectations. For the most part, these were met, although like any collection it had its weak moments. There are twelve stories, and judging from the ‘credits,’ page, all but one had been published before, so they span quite a few years in her writing career. They also confirm that she is an incredible, talented writer, and I had no hesitation giving the book five stars. While the stories always felt complete, I often fell in love with the characters she created and wished there were whole novels about them! I plan on discussing my favourite stories tomorrow, so if you’re curious look for that. And if you haven’t read Adichie yet, you need to.

Then I finished A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam. Set in Bangladesh during the war of independence, I adored everything about this book. The setting was brought wonderfully to life; from the smells and tastes, sights and sounds, the feel of wearing a sari, I lived in Dhaka with Rehana (the protagonist). The writing was stellar, including the opening line:

Dear husband,
I lost our children today.

The characters all felt so real, especially Rehana (we’re in her head for the whole book). The plot made me want to race through the story, to see how everything would work out. And then there were the issues: motherhood, love, war, honour, survival. I didn’t know anything about the book going into it, except the setting, and I think it’s better that way. So I’m not going to tell you any more details. But you should definitely, definitely pick this up. The whole experience was just exquisite; I was perpetually torn between being pulled along faster and faster by the narrative and trying to slow down so that the book wouldn’t end as soon. It’s Anam’s first novel (published in 2008), and I only hope she’ll write much more.

Continuing the awesome-writing streak, I picked up Oliver Sacks’ Oaxaca Journal. Sacks is one of my favourite nonfiction authors, the one I recommend whenever I meet someone who ‘never reads nonfiction.’ This book felt a bit more raw than his others; he explains in the introduction that he always keeps journals while travelling, and he decided not to edit it much before publishing. I think that really works; I felt like I was inside Sacks’ brain as he explored Oaxaca, Mexico with a bunch of fern enthusiasts. And his brain is a wonderful place to be! There are musings on plants (of course!), his fellow travellers, the Mexicans he meets, the landscape and history of Oaxaca, and it’s all written in such a refined, curious, intelligent tone. As if all of that weren’t enough, there are sketches of some of the ferns! (Certainly I’m not the only one who adores botanical sketches.) I loved this one so much that as soon as I finished, I had to go put another Sacks on hold (his memoir, Uncle Tungsten). Also, it’s part of a National Geographic travelogue series, so I’ll be looking into the other titles!

And then I reread To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. What is there to say about such a book? I’ve never heard of anyone who didn’t like it, whether they read it as required reading in school or for fun as a child or adult. It one of those ‘must read before you die’ books that is perfectly written in every particular. It was fascinating rereading it, since last I read it (for fun, we never read it in school) I was 11, so younger than Jem for half of the book. It’s a book I could happily reread for the rest of my life.

Next up was another awesome nonfiction book: Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters. I already wrote a gushing review.

The last three books I’ve read this week weren’t as rave-worthy, but I still enjoyed them. Inspired by my first reread, I then turned to Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery, a book I really enjoyed when I was 13. It’s a philosophical fable kind of book (by the same author as Sophie’s World), and this time around it just felt too heavy-handed for me (although not in the same league as Coelho). I still think all of the things with cards are clever (especially the calendar! 52 cards in a deck=52 weeks in a year), but I found myself rolling my eyes more than once. And the ending felt a bit too haphazard. That being said, I know when I first read it, I was really curious about how everything would turn out, so perhaps people reading it for the first time (who don’t know the ending!) even as adults would enjoy it. Have any of y’all read it as an adult? What did you think?

I put Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace on hold on a whim, and I didn’t realise it was a children’s book until I received it. I have a theory about children’s books (vs. YA). The ones that I first read as an actual child and reread now, I still love and adore. But the ones I read for the first time always feel a bit too juvenile. So I might stick with children’s book rereads from now on! Anyway, Betsy is a 21-year-old aspiring American writer who spends a year abroad (beginning in June 1914) in Europe. I loved how perfectly Lovelace captured the whole excitement-depression-excitement cycle of living abroad. And Betsy was cute. But it lacked the complexity that would have made it marvelous. Still, my ten-year-old self would have loved this one.

Finally, I read Danial Wallace’s Ray in Reverse. Of Wallace’s four novels, I’ve now read three. And while this was very well-written, it didn’t have that magical spark the other two did. Wallace is still one of my favourite authors, though; I’m chucking this one up to him experimenting. And even less-awesome Wallace still writes a solid four-star novel! It’s pretty much like a novel-in-stories; Ray has died, and then each chapter looks at his life, moving from death back to birth (the last episode occurs when he’s around 9). While some of the same people are in more than one story, and of course the chapters build on each other to create Ray in the reader’s mind, each one could still stand alone. I thought the format was very interesting, because it mimics how we get to know people. First, we know them as they are in the present, and then as we hear more stories about their past, our idea of them becomes fleshed out. Of course, unlike in real life when people choose what stories to tell, Wallace has chosen episodes that, for the most part, are unflattering to Ray. I didn’t like him much as a person (although I liked some of the other people in the stories), which was part of why I didn’t adore this book. Also, it didn’t have a Southern Gothic feel to it, as I’ve come to expect from Wallace. Still, I’m glad I read it because Wallace’s story-telling power is as strong as ever: he sucked me in immediately, and the way he chose to conceal and reveal things about Ray was masterful. Part of what makes Wallace a favourite of mine is his willingness to trust the reader and leave some things ambiguous, which makes this novel really strong despite Ray himself (and I know Ray was supposed to be a flawed person…I just didn’t care for him or how he dealt with those flaws. What can I say? I’m judgmental sometimes.).

And there you go! Now I’m off to get back to my current reads: Country of My Skull, Shadow of the Silk Road, and A Suitable Boy. You can always read my thoughts about them in the side bar if you’re curious!

Thanks to everyone who voted on which South African book I should read! A Beautiful Place to Die and A Time of Angels tied for first at 7 votes each, while Bitter Fruit and The Madonna of Excelsior ran a close second at 6 votes each.

So how to choose between the two first placers?! I’ve decided to read A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn for the Orbis Terrarum challenge, and since A Time of Angels by Patricia Schonstein deals with a delicatessen and food stuff (as I said in my description, it’s compared to Like Water for Chocolate and Chocolat), I’m taking it as the universe’s way of telling me to participate in Rebecca’s The Spice of Life Challenge.

The challenge is all about combining food and reading, which definitely works for me! And isn’t the button gorgeous?! It was just a matter of time until I succumbed. I’m going with the first level, ‘A Taste,’ which requires me to read two books from two different categories (fiction, cookbooks, nonfiction, and memoirs/essays/autobiographies) by the end of the year. For fiction, I’ve chosen A Time of Angels by Patricia Schonstein (obviously) and for nonfiction (the other category that really appeals to me!), I’ve narrowed it down to: Hunger: an Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell (Rebecca herself gave this a good review), Chocolate: a Bittersweet Saga of Light and Dark by Mort Rosenblum (which I first came across while doing research for my Science Books Challenge list), or Red, White, and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean (which the wonderful Dewey reviewed, but I can’t link to it because her blog’s down).

Being peer pressured of course.

I was planning on writing a post about how awesome A Golden Age was and how it’s the next best thing to a flight to Bangladesh. But then I discovered that people are talking about me on Twitter and want me to join. And I really enjoyed the interview Stephen Colbert did with the founder. So I decided to bite the bullet.

I had the hardest time coming up with a name, y’all. I never before realised that my blog’s initials are ASA.

Here were the possibilities:
Eva (obviously taken: boo!!)
EvainanArmchair (looks weird)
EvaReads (succinct, but doesn’t have much catchiness)
EvaLovesBooks (maybe too long? Don’t want to make people type out a sentence just to talk to me)
EvaASA (lmao)
EvasArmchair (at this point I was Very Annoyed with not being allowed to use punctuation marks)
ArmchairEva (sounds vaguely perverted)
EvaLit (it’d been taken)
Yevinka (realised only works with Eastern European language speakers)

At this point I was thinking about quitting Twitter before I even began. But finally I decided to just pick one and go with it, and that one was

BiblioEva (I don’t like how my name is in the second half, but I do like all of those vowels!)

Then it took me three tries to type the security words in correctly. (Tell me I’m not the only one that’s awful at that!)

And now I’m on twitter. And have no idea what to actually do. But I’m here.

Many years later, William James marveled at the ineffectiveness of such scientific strikes against the supernatural. “How often has ‘Science’ killed off all spook philosophy, laid ghosts and raps and ‘telepathy’ away underground as so much popular delusion?” he would wonder ironically. As James noted, the ghosts kept coming back, the visions yet glimmered, the voices yet sounded. No matter how many times scientists evoked mental illness, dreams, fantasy, and stupidity as explanations for bumps in the night, people kept reporting them as though they were real.

I picked up Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters. on a total whim. I was looking up some other book-I can’t remember which one-and suddenly this popped on to my screen. It sounded intriguing, so I popped over to my library’s website and put a hold on it. As most of you know, though, I have quite a stack of library books asking for my attention, so I didn’t get around to actually opening it until three days ago.

And I found myself completely entranced.

The book is about a circle of Brits and Americans (mostly men, but there is one woman!) who in the last few decades of the nineteenth century decided to bring a scientific approach to the question of the afterlife. The most famous of those today is William James, one of the founders of psychology and brother to Henry (one of whose novels I’m listening to right now!). But there were also the creators of the British Society for Psychical Research: Henry and Nora Sidgwick (husband and wife), Edmund Gurney, and Frederic Myers. And the Australian Hodgson, who becomes the most dedicated researcher. It delves into everyone’s personal lives as well as their intellectual ones, which makes the book feel like a fascinating group biography as well. Since Blum is a marvelous author, though, she includes the larger pictures: the ongoing conflict between religion and science and the refusal by most scientists to even consider applying the scientific method to ’supernatural’ questions.

I discovered by reading the jacket that Blum won the Pulitzer Prize, for her book The Monkey Wars, which might explain why the book opens with a brief discussion of Darwinism! However, the vast majority of it looks at the efforts of these men and woman to try to get their research taken seriously, to try to pin down anything concrete about the afterlife, and the various mediums they met with along the way. As I already mentioned, Blum’s writing is wonderful. I’ve read quite a few science books since I’ve been blogging, many by science journalists (instead of actual scientists), and Blum has the best style of any I’ve read. There are no corny jokes here, or awkward moments of dry explanation. Instead, she really brought all of the people to life, and I felt as if I’d been able to pop into a time machine and visit with these late Victorians. When they struggled against the unexpected, unreasonable automatic rejection of their work by most scientists, I was right there with them.

Like Wallace before him, Crookes was naive about how his colleagues might see his paranormal investigations. He’d expected demands for replication, perhaps competition from those who wanted to conduct their own studies of [the medium]. He had anticipated criticism of the equipment he’d used, suggestions for better tests. He’d not expected to be slandered by anonymous report-or to see his friends slandered with him.

When they went to a sitting with one of the amateur mediums whose detailed knowledge was seemingly inexplicable or collected so many similar stories of ghostly visitations it defied probability, I marveled with them.

The man jolted upright in bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. Someone had just gripped his hand. The touch was as cold and thin as water. He exclaimed to his wife, startled by the feel of those chilly fingers. He caught a glimpse of a woman leaving; there’d been something about the way she moved, the set of her dark head, that had reminded him of his aunt. But the man and his wife were in Nottingham, and on this early June morning in 1880, the aunt was supposed to be on a steamer heading for the United States. He leapt up to check the front door on the house. It was on the chain. He returned, saying to his wife that he feared his aunt was dead. “You’re dreaming,” she replied. Her diagnosis was that he’d eaten too large a supper before going to bed. Two weeks later, they received a letter from his aunt’s soliciter. She had died at sea on the day that he’d felt that ice-water hand in the middle of a summer night.

When they had a moment of private grief, or joy, or weariness, I felt it too. The book spans several decades, covering the death of most of the principals. And as you might imagine in a history of afterlife exploration, when the various friends die, things get even more interesting!

While the history-being-brought-to-vivid-life thing was awesome, it’s not what made me fall in love with the book. That would be Blum’s attitude. There’s a true respect for these people and what they were trying to accomplish that simply rings true. Unlike a certain book I could mention that I loathed for its mocking, holier-than-thou attitude, Ghost Hunters doesn’t try to say that modern science always knows best. While Blum discusses the mediums that were exposed as frauds by the researchers, she also discusses the ones that weren’t. She shares the kind of stories that make you wonder, that don’t seem to have a ‘rational’ explanation outside of something supernatural, the ones that the researchers compiled in their study. And she leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide for yourself. At the same time, she’s not like “look! ghosts exist!” at all. I think her account was balanced and intelligent, and I appreciate an author willing to give the readership credit.

I’m not being very coherent, but I loved this book to pieces, and I think a lot of people will too. If you enjoy history, the Victorians, intellectuals (Nora spends her Egyptian vacation doing math problems with her brother-in-law, hehe), or the history of science (and scientific revolutions) you should read this book. If you don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but you’re looking for titles that read like fiction and still teach you something, you should read this book. If you read non-fiction all the time and are looking for a new favourite author, you should read this book. And of course, if you’re curious about those unexplained, goose bump-raising experiences, you’ll want to go get this right away. Compassionate, intelligent, fascinating…Ghost Hunters is easily going to be on my top ten list this year. And considering it’s the 180th book I’ve read, that’s saying something.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by myself and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

Want to share your loot? Marg is hosting Mr. Linky this week.

I promise I’ll add a vlog tomorrow. My car’s been in the shop (boo!), and my parents are on vacation so I have no other car to borrow, which means I haven’t been able to get to the library and grab the books waiting for me. It’d be kind of weird to do a vlog with no books, but the shop has promised it’ll be ready either later today or tomorrow, so I’ll be zipping over to the library and then happily vlogging about all of the great books. I even painted my fingernails in preparation (actually, vlogging has helped to break the horrible habit of biting my nails, which I pick up whenever I move and am therefore stressed), hehe. Until then, enjoy the short version via covers and links. As you can tell, I’ve once again gone into a library binge phase. I do have a defense, but I’ll save it for the video!

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (originally for the OUAT challenge, now just for fun!), Black Juice by Margo Lanagan (because Tender Morsels was incredible), Tree: a Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady (for the Science Challenge)

Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr. (for fun!), The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson (the Carribbean Challenge), The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria (the World Citizen Challenge)

Pemba’s Song by Marilyn Nelson and Tonya Hegamin (it’s a ghost story!), You Can’t Get There From Here by Gayle Forman (love travelogues, especially by women), Flygirl by Sherri Smith (because I really enjoyed Lucy the Giant)

Scott Pilgrim Vol. One by Bryan Lee O’Malley (because of Chris), Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace (because of Kate’s shared excerpt), Ray in Reverse by Daniel Wallace (because I love him)

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong (the World Citizen Challenge), Freddie & Me by Mike Dawson (Dewey’s Books Challenge), The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (GLBT challenge)

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (Classics Challenge), A Guide to Elegance by Genevieve Dariaux (for fun!), Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte (Classics Challenge)

The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson (GLBT Challenge), Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (Southern Challenge)