Books of 2005

This is an on-going summary of the books I read this year, and, when I can, my thoughts and/or quotes from them. They are listed by month of completion, with a running list of mid-read or future titles at the very bottom.

JANUARY:
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Heinemann [1967] 1988.
Said the "classic novel of Kenyan independence," it travels through the years leading up to Uhuru and after it through descriptive and intimate psychological portraits of young people coming of age in their autonomy as much as their nation. The first chapter is arresting -- we instantly encounter the mental torment of protagonist Mugo who we later discover betrays the leader of the revolution, as well as a brief but shocking vignette of the dumb and mute muscleman Gitogo who is shot as just "another Mau Mau terrorist" while running to protect his mother when their town is under seige. We are placed in a very tense and politicized time, where survival is not necessarily reserved for the strong, and where private choices have significant public consequence.
The novel grows in intricacy this way, but soon there is little distinction between major and minor characters -- everyone gets the opportunity to disclose their emotional states, and the narration becomes monotonous and unnatural. The style shifts from imagistic and montaged to mid-afternoon psychological-melodrama. The problem is one of tense -- so much falls in retrospect that all events are memory, not action, and no specific conflicts are ever laid out, so they are never fully resolved either.
The voices are so frequently in third-person that it soon becomes apparent that the author is judgmental against all his characters, never quite embodying them, so that he has to explain away their failings in serving the independence movement rather than have us, the readers, understand them as if they were our own. And when the expositional voice is needed, neither does Ngugi succeed in stepping away from the characters to indicate what is symptomatic of the tragedies that do occur -- most pointedly for me is the vignette of Mumbi's momentous decision to "let Karanja make love to me" after years of his pursuit when he reveals to her that her husband has not indeed died in police detention and will return home. This incident remains Mumbi's mistake, resulting in her having a child that devastates her marriage with Gikonyo who only sees personal betrayal and not the greater injustice of Karanja's position of power under a system of oppression, if not torture. Ngugi's main characters all act out of compulsion, and it is unclear whether he chooses them to have no agency as a critique of reality or if this is a literary flaw.
There are gems. Everyone is crazed by upheaval, and it is enjoyable to hear Ngugi's sardonic tone beneath the voices of the confused British displaced at Kenya's achievement of self-rule, such as Dr. Lynd in "a sudden upsurge of pure holy self-pity." Ngugi is also above all concerned with the British, specifically, Christian legacy Kenya inherits (Mugo plays Judas, after all), and the cross as the symbol of both oppression and salvation, rebellion and sacrifice, is the unstated heart of the struggle for true self-governance in post-colonial states.

Lim, Richard, Got Singapore - Bits and Pieces from a Dot in the World, Singapore: Angsana Books 2002.

"Like it or not, we live in a state of perpetual insecurity. That is our karma. ... In our modest way, we must have our own sense of destiny." -- Brigadier-General George Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry and former Minister for Information and the Arts

p.26 "And yet, underneath the pragmatic sophistication, there is the immigrant mentality -- do not waste what you can save.
I look around me: all this modernity, all this gloss, yet as a people we have not learnt to flush our public toilets. A law has to be imposed to teach us to do it.
But reflecting on it now, I guess it shouls not be such a rude revelation. After all, we phased out the nightsoil system, which had served us for about a century, as recently as January 1987, when the last of the nightsoil carriers -- by then only 78 were left -- hung up their yokes and buckets."

p.90 "The Buddhist mind is an open mind, ever prepared for change. It goes with the flow ... to go with the flow and not against the grain [may be] to submit oneself to the political order of the day, even if it is dictatorial or inhumane.
But submission is very different from openness and preparedness...Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on inquiry, is subversive in the eyes of those who believe in the perfection of dogmas and ideologies.
Some people have also told me that Buddhism is a passive religion. They understand the word karma as fate ...
But karma is not fate, it is the seed one plants when one chooses a course of action and, to be simplistic about it, one reaps afterwards what one has sown."

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." V.S.Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)

p.167 Lim on Naipaul: "the ultimate exile, the prototype of today's global souls who carry the world within them, but who belong to no one particular society."

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you have got the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have got the meaning, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?" Taoist sage Zhuang Zi

p.242 "In the post-ideological world, where even the leaders of developed countries have shifted their roles from statesmen to global salesmen, and where commerce and pragmatism rule, the new morality will be that of the market."

FEBRUARY:
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Vintage [?] 2004.
Too much to say, or too little, when so much is felt!

Reage, Pauline, Story of O, Ballantine [1976] 1981.
I finally read this just over a year after being somewhat provocatively propositioned by an older gentleman who told me to read it, and I finished it in just over an hour because I decided that was about as much supposed erotica (sick, sick, stuff, could be another description) I could afford to infiltrate my consciousness. I am only writing about it here because I actually don't think it deserves to be ignored by the non-SM community at large -- if read for its themes and its delicate illustrations of what is human and normal at the root of a woman's desire to be enslaved and tortured, I see it as a confrontational critique of those who abuse that root -- which is love. Love "too-thick," perhaps, like in the book (above) I finished immediately prior to this one, that led Morrison's protagonist to similarly disastrous ends.
A lot of the book is repetitive anyway -- OK, OK, O gets whipped, lashed, humiliated, oh, OK, she's taken front and back by multiple men while blind-folded, she is pierced and branded, OK, OK! Enough. I flip pages to look for new character names, or little plot asides that are actually the significant moments. I find O being asked to pleasure herself and she meekly responds that she can't -- aHAH, social critique number one: woman is not socialized to understand, respect, and engage her own sexual pleasure. OK. Then there is Eric who, as a new initiate to the castle of Roilly and the atrocities that occur within it, falls in love with O and wants to marry her and save her. O herself refuses by allowing her owner Sir Stephen to showcase her to Eric "spread-eagled and gagged," who was so sickened that not only did he lose his love for her, but his resistance to the perversity of Roilly and himself takes O for the next three days and abuses her the worse. A-Hah again! The pain and power of vengeance! How natural and human appears Eric's soppy attraction to the quiet nobility of O's vulnerability, yet how evil his disappointment! Worse than unrequited love, crueler was the realization of O's lack of desire to be saved. And importantly, how shallow Eric's love, which was proven simply a self-reflexive love still primarily about his ego, his ability to save or to dominate the same.
Then there is the chilling form of 15 year-old Natalie who herself professes love for O after witnessing everything in the pleasuring of Natalie's older sister, Jacqueline, by O herself. Untouched, incognizant of sensual pleasure, Natalie's perverse desire is blatantly a reaction to the severe kind of loneliness only adolescence can be, especially encased by the shadow of her supermodel sister and whatever else kind of depression regular 15 year-olds find themselves facing. Natalie in this story is kept as an observer to all exploitations of O in preparation for her becoming initiated into Roilly herself. It would be sick, were it real, and for me her entrance into the book is a firm ethical call, because one can almost save this girl.
Good God, I wish this book could stand as testament to the ultimate consequence to everything *wrong* about sexual relations between men and women; good God, please let relations between ours sexes be at the worst about sharing properties (mortgage, bank account, kitchenware?), and not, as here, where one is property to be owned and exploited by another. It is to be noted that Reage's women are not painted as victims, and I am glad for it, because victims are completely helpless but yes, ladies, we can help ourselves.
P.S. Good God, please let curiosity not kill this cat.

MARCH:
Hansen, Phillip, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship, Stanford University Press 1993.
In progress, on the edge of "lost interest," but it more or less seems to say in almost as rambling a way what it was I tried to relay in my senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and the Sublime: something else post-colon I can't exactly remember, and which I probably made up in a five am stupor the morning of its submission. We will return to this, because she (Arendt ... and myself) deserves more credit than that.

Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage Books 1999.
Also in progress -- I was happily "strung" along (haha!) when I was still able to comprehend the science through strenuous (almost painful) high-school-recall. I find this absolutely fascinating, and absolutely relevant to my work in movement, but I need a breather. We will also come back!

APRIL:
Moore, Julia, Fat Girl: A True Story, Hudson Street Press 2005.
"For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss."
Picked up by chance, and two (more?) hours later the book allows me to feel ... recognized, purged even? The author truly had a miserable childhood with little respite, but this gave her the startling courage to view and voice the truth of what it is to be obsessive, compulsive, lonely, ostracized, self-hating.