Books - Kate Degelau-Pierce

A real unreliable narrator

What’s it about?
Oh, The Glory of It All is a memoir about growing up in one of San Francisco’s elite families. There is a headline-grabbing messy divorce, a possibly narcissistic mother, a father who cares far too much about his position in society, a step-mother who may or may not be evil, and the son (the author) who fell through the parenting cracks. He does not hide how messed up he was, and a good chunk of the book is him figuring out how to become a normal person. How much blame to put on everyone… that’s an open question.

Why should you read it?
I read it because I have an idea for a character for a NaNoWriMo book, and she needs to be both a) messed up and b) from an elite San Francisco family. So this was great research for that.

You should read it if you like Vanity Fair articles about society people and their weird, weird lives. Or if you enjoy books like Crazy Rich Asians, which poke fun at Society and show how money can distort otherwise normal people. It’s also a portrait of San Francisco before the tech boom of the late 1990s started to change the entire SF Bay Area. If you’re interested in any of those things? This is the book for you.

Know what you’re getting into, and a rant about climate change

What’s it about?
Seveneves is about the end of the world. In short: something very odd happens and the moon breaks into seven chunks. At first, no one really realizes what’s going on, until the Neil DeGrasse Tyson character figures out that those chunks are going to keep hitting each other, breaking up, hitting each other some more, keep falling to Earth and causing lots and lots of damage. Thus ending the human race. So how do we react? What do we do? How do we use our current space technology? How do we use our other technology?

Why should you read it?
The book above sounds kind of interesting and problem-solve-y, right? Too bad it wasn’t what I thought I was getting into. I thought it was: the world ends in the first two chapters, and the substance is going to be about rebuilding the world. Nope. Not in the slightest.

I would never have picked up Seveneves if I’d realized that it was about the breakdown of society instead of the rebuilding. I don’t like those kinds of books – society has all kinds of troubles already. It didn’t make me reflect on how the moon chunks hitting the Earth are like climate change and how people are (or aren’t) adapting to or planning for that. I read enough about the fights between countries and the politics of reducing carbon emissions and get frustrated by not being able to do enough.

Ultimately, it made me feel powerless and impotent. I wouldn’t be able to do anything if the world were ending (say, because of climate change). With the systems we have in place, with our old-school electrical grid and society formed around consumption (which still requires that we use carbon-based fuels to produce all that *stuff*), I can only do so much. The system needs to change – more electric cars, less consumption of stuff more of experiences and services, especially in the United States, communities need to be built around walking and biking, not around driving – and I can buy fewer things and get an electric car when my old one finally gets used enough to warrant replacing and maybe eventually move to a city where I don’t need a car. But that’s just me. There are over 7 billion people on the planet. I can only do so much.

I don’t like feeling powerless and impotent. So I put the book down. Maybe I’ll pick it up at a different time. Maybe not. We’ll see.

A story

In lieu of a review for The Little Paris Bookshop, I’m going to tell you a story. There’s nothing particularly unique about it. But it has Paris and death, and so does this book.

Once upon a time (in 1997) a young woman of 22 was backpacking across Europe by herself. She had grown up in a college town and then gone to that college and she was desperate to have a major life experience or two outside her town. This trip was something she had been dreaming about for years. It would get her said experience. Nothing big happened, nothing dramatic. But there is something about ten weeks on the opposite side of the world from your family and friends to make a person grow up and figure out who they are. Especially when you’re 22.

Halfway through her ten-week trip, she got tired of being in a new city every few days, converting money (this was pre-Euro), finding a place to sleep, and making new friends. She’d stayed a couple of nights at a hostel in Paris where there were some long-term tenants. She was going back there.

She enjoyed Paris, much to her surprise. She’d been there previously and found it dirty and gray and not at all the shiny romantic vision she’d been presented with in her high school French class. But this time, she hadn’t been looking for shiny and romantic, and instead she found a city that was dynamic and had great beauty in places (but not everywhere, and the contrast made the lovely parts moreso) and had friendly students, many of whom were also confounded by the not-so-friendly French. A couple of them even got the local baker to actually return their smile after a few weeks.

She drank a lot of wine and read poetry for the first (and only?) time in her life.

After she came back to the States, she went to graduate school. She moved away from home, away from the town she grew up in. A few weeks afterwards, she got a phone call: her mother had died in a car accident. She was devastated. She drank too much and made unwise late night phone calls.

She cried – a good friend called her one night and she was crying but happy about it because it was the first time in months that she could see there would be a light at the end of the tunnel. That someday she wouldn’t be devastated that her mother was dead. Someday, it would be a scar, part of her life. She would never not miss her mother, but it would be a fact she could live with. An ugly part of her life that made her appreciate the beautiful parts that much more.

It’s not an especially remarkable story, but it is one that happened. And it is somehow reminiscent of The Little Paris Bookshop and its story of Paris and death and recovery.

Queen Elizabeth is better than this

What’s it about?
Queen Elizabeth has just taken the throne. Much has been made about her ability to play many suitors off each other, and about her ultimate “marriage to England”, as it were. But what was she thinking? Why did everything work out the way it did? The Marriage Game is a fictionalized version of the story of Elizabeth and not getting married.

Why should you read it?
Don’t. I read it, but I got really, really angry about halfway through. The politics and the power is the interesting bit here – who was she courting and who was courting her and why and how did that play into what was happening in England and Europe? That was what I wanted, not some schmoopy love story between her and Lord Robert Dudley. A love story, I might add, that doesn’t follow traditional narrative structure and so fails on the romance story level as well.

Basically: I should have either read a history or something totally made up. Not this weird in-between hybrid. Elizabeth was an incredible woman who was an amazing ruler. The Marriage Game made her so much less. Blech.

Freaks. In the best possible way.

What’s it about?
Just so you’re aware, elite athletes are freaks. They have genes that not very many people have that allow them to do things not very many people can do. And then they have to have the heart and determination to work as hard as they can on the thing they do (e.g. run, jump, swim) so they can do it even better than the other freaks like them. This book is about the genetics of all of those things.

Why should you read it?
The Sports Gene is quite a good overview of the science – well, not being a sports nerd or the right kind of science nerd, it seems like a good over view of the science. And it is very readable. Comprehensible without ever making me feel dumb. I’m sure I could have felt dumb.

I’m never going to be better than a decent runner: my hips are too wide, I’m too middle aged (read: too much weight), I didn’t grow up at 6000-9000 ft above sea level, and I just don’t care enough. (And, I’ve recently discovered, I have a vitamin D deficiency – I have rickets! [not really, but I have started on vitamin D pills.]) But now I understand so much better why I’m never going to be a good runner. I could be, if I cared more. But there are too many books to read in the world. I care more about that. I run to stay in shape; I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t read.

Teenagers are weird

What’s it about?
The Teenage Brain is a book about brain development, especially through the teenage years. It came recommended from someone in my book club who has three kids, one of whom is in college. “It was so helpful.” It’s very science- and fact-based, as you’d expect. There’s a chapter on sleep, another on alcohol, another on stress, one on gender, another on mental illness… It’s comprehensive and clear and I learned a lot.

Why should you read it?
Maybe you, like me, have children who are on the cusp of becoming teenagers. Maybe you’re interested in the brain. Maybe you are a teenager and you want to know what’s going on inside your head. Whatever, I’d recommend The Teenage Brain. The author hits the right amount of data vs stories, and there are a lot of diagrams to explain chemicals and synapses and receptors (oh my). I feel like I have a better grasp on how to be a parent through my kid’s teenage years, honestly. And that’s what I was going for.

Action books need action

What’s it about?
Armada is about a kid named Zach. A kid with anger issues. A kid with a missing father. A kid who likes to play video games. And then he sees one of the video game ships in the sky outside his classroom. Then things get weird.

Why should you read it?
I don’t know, really. I’ve fallen out of love with science fiction lately, which is part of the problem. But the other part of the problem is that I was on page 100 and I felt like the story hadn’t started yet. We were still being introduced to characters and the world was still being built. Zach had seen the video game spaceship. But NOTHING had happened as a consequence of it. NOTHING. So I put it down.

And that’s ok. I’m still convincing myself that, no really, it is ok to not finish a book I started. In fact, not finishing a book I’m not enjoying or learning from is a good thing.

Physics and Gender Studies

What’s it about?
Galileo Galilei was, in many ways, the founding father of modern science. He was one of the first people to insist that you needed to both know theory and experiment to confirm that theory. He, famously, refined and popularized the telescope and wrote a treatise on motion that inspired Newton.

He also had a daughter. Two daughters, actually. But her half of correspondence with the eldest lives and frames this biography of Galileo as a father with responsibilities to his family as well as tells the story of his struggles with the Catholic Church.

Why should you read it?
You should read Galileo’s Daughter because it humanizes the scientist and goes into detail about his conflicts with the Church. Which I only knew some of, honestly. It’s a solidly written biography of an interesting person during an interesting historical era.

It also, if you choose to look at it that way, highlights the different ways men and women behaved in Reform-era Italy. Galileo was brilliant and was allowed to be kind of a cad when he was young – fathering three children without marrying their mother. He is defined by his science and the whole religion-science debate.

Maria Celeste had to become a nun because her mother died and Galileo couldn’t raise her on his own. She was intelligent and hyper-competent; she clearly loved and supported her father. Today, she might have been a famous scientist. In 1600s Tuscany, she was a supportive family member and near-abbess. It’s a pity, really, that she wasn’t allowed to flourish as a scientist. I bet she’d’ve been great at it.

People and food and immigration

What’s it about?
It’s 2007 or early 2008, and Arturo, Alma, and Maribel Rivera have left Mexico to live in Delaware. Maribel had been in an accident a year or so earlier, and she needs to go to a special school. Alma finds that the best place is in Delaware. So they leave their village where they’ve lived all their lives, Arturo has found a job and a company who will sponsor him, all for the betterment of Maribel. They live in a run-down apartment building, full of other Hispanic immigrants. The Book of Unknown Americans is about the Riveras and their neighbors as they live their lives. There is a plot – Mayor is the boy next door who likes Maribel, and there is a bully at school; the market crash happens in 2008 and Arturo loses his job – but it’s mostly about making you see individuals.

Why should you read it?
It’s a lovely little book full of touching vignettes. And it made me SO HUNGRY. All that delicious food described – so much of how people are doing in this story is shown through what they are eating.

But also it’s about reading/telling stories that we don’t often see: poor people, immigrants, working class, brown skin. It’s about showing what’s universal – we all love food and we all love our families and we all work our butts off. Sometimes that breeds more success than others. If you have a few hours, it’s worth it.

Death and the family

What’s it about?
It’s the 1970s, and a teenaged girl has died. Lydia Lee doesn’t come down for breakfast. Her family breaks a little bit. Her father, James, is the son of Chinese immigrants – he was the only Asian child in the small town in Iowa where he grew up; his family is the only Asian family in small-town Ohio where they live now. Blond, white Marilyn grew up in a traditional home in Maryland – and was whip smart in science and was determined to be a doctor. In the 1960s. Instead, she gets pregnant with Lydia’s older brother, Nathan. So James and Marilyn get married – and Marilyn’s mother never speaks to her again. And then there’s Hannah, the littlest sister, who gets used to being an afterthought. How does Lydia’s death change them?

Why should you read it?
It’s an amazing character study. Very little actually happens in the main plot line of the book: Lydia dies near the end of the school year, when we wrap up, it’s about six weeks later and everyone is mourning. How do they mourn? It depends very much on who they are and how they related to Lydia. James wanted Lydia to be popular and social. Marilyn wanted her to become a doctor. Nathan wanted to help her keep the family together. Hannah just wants someone to see her.

Everything I Never Told You is a lovely book. I’d highly recommend it.