okay. let me try. first i’ll explain my feelings about goodreads. i like goodreads. i love lists. i’m a list freak. there are some people who are like this. i am like this. it’s a visceral pleasure that cannot bear the burden of an explanation. it’s the way i am.

but also i like a way of keeping track of the books i read. because i have no capacity whatsoever for remembering. i have never kept a journal in my life — i can’t, it’s an impossibility — but a few years ago i started keeping a book journal in which i’d write only the books i read and the books simon read, so i would know. now i can do it online. i love leaving all my documents online, because my paper documents litter my house in piles i don’t have the courage to begin to look at. they are everywhere, fossilizing, transforming themselves into different objects, maybe bones, maybe rocks.

i enjoy the vast online community less than mike does. i love exchanging thoughts on the books i read with my friends, but strangers, eh. and i do stress about the fact that we are leaving so many traces of ourselves in a totally searchable cyberworld. i stress about the fact that “online” offers such fake privacy and we are so thirsty for exchange with other humans that sometimes we forget this privacy is incredibly fragile.

but these are random personal thoughts.

blogs feel sometimes like a lot of responsibility. i have abandoned this for a long while because i didn’t feel very good at bearing that responsibility. apologies to my fellow bloggers, in particular to michael, who hates goodreads and lists and ratings.

i just finished sherman alexie’s flight and am knocked senseless and also incredibly exhilarated by how a YA book can be so simple and so incredibly complex at the same time. as mike points out in his goodreads review, which you can read somewhere here, the moral of the book as the narrator states it (and he does state it, in words not much dissimilar from we all hurt, we are all falling, we all carry terrible burdens, we should be kind to one another) couldn’t be more commonplace, but, well, is there any other, really? does any writer who engages with the problem of pain and suffering and the way people can either succor or damn each other to earthly hell have another message to convey?* it is a sign of alexie’s tremendous power as a writer that he can say it and not make us cringe. i, for one, did not cringe. this simple message is put on top of such a harrowing cumulative display of the horrors of history that, frankly, it seems quite inevitable, and stating it simply and straight seems the only way to state it without being coy or silly or pretentious.

* there is always “this sucks ass where is the booze,” but i guess i was thinking of a slightly more cheery approach.

flight uses the word “beautiful” a lot. i like writers who can pull that off. the language is very guileless, in some ways, direct and forthright and perfect for a kid narrator (maybe a younger kid narrator than a 15-year-old), but the astonishment at the pain humans pile on each other, at the forgetfulness of history, at the (seemingly inevitable) misery of adults’ personal interactions, and the hope that things might be different, maybe, a little, are far from guileless. they are clear-eyed and heartbreaking and make you want to put your face in your hands and cry (which i would have done, if i weren’t frozen into tearlessness by all the news that comes out of our american torture chambers and our american wars, and by feeling submerged by the untold human pain caused by centuries of out-of-control political, economical, and environmental imperialism: but let’s not go there because there isn’t anything good there).

i also read porochista khakpour’s astounding debut novel sons and other flammable objects, which also deals with the terrible pain life puts on the shoulders of kids (and parents), in this case a first-generation iranian-born called xerxes (pronounced zercsis). the magic of this particular book is partly in the exuberant, uncontainable language (khakpour is not afraid of very long paragraphs: good for her), and partly in its refusal (till the very end, but that’s a minor slip for a first novel) to name the origin of the pain. i love that, like other recent not-quite-from-here writers — i am thinking of kiran desai’s the inheritance of loss, but also, strangely, of james baldwin’s the fire next time, which i just finished teaching — khakpour spends a lot of time and a lot of thought and heart on the generational and hard-to-pin-down pain of dislocation. i’ll come right out and confess that, as someone who knows dislocation first-hand, i melt inside whenever writers find words for the pain of those who leave their countries and come to This Very Strange Place. i love it when they describe the coldness of suburbia, the aridity of fake community life, the insipidity of the food, the plastic entertainment, the cement and neon cities, the maddening freeways, the soul-destroying loneliness. i love it because i feel understood. but it’s more than that: i feel that someone is drawing attention to the fact that, here, and maybe somewhere else too, but here, all of us, almost all 300 million of us, live deeply inhuman lives. we live deeply traumatized lives. the fire next time talks to this with a soulfulness and sorrow that i haven’t seen anywhere else. our traumatized lives are the direct result of our power and the immense daily efforts we make to maintain it. in order to maintain in, in order to forget the price of maintaining it, we cut ourselves off both from pain and from pleasure (not that we could cut ourselves off from one but not the other), we numb ourselves totally and then, and then, put so much damn effort into pretending to be fine.

which we are not.

khakpour is no baldwin, but maybe desai is a little baldwin, and in any case all these people are trying very hard to talk about the deadly malaise of our late late days, and make you wish for some sort of cleansing apocalypse, because, if you feel like me, you feel that nothing short of that can give us — all of us, not only those of us who can afford expensive therapists and organic food, as if that changed anything — our lives back.

hey michael, you asked.