Here's why I've left you for so long, blog

I've been trying to write something publishable (silly, I know), but the uncomfortable set of literary splits I've been having to do between my usual voice (highly, sometimes too, personal) and what I think would appeal to others (ruh?) has had me occupied. By occupied, I mean lying awake in bed at night trying to read the text of my brilliant Opening Shot off the nubbly text of my ceiling. I wasn't able to do it, so instead I wrote this:


The Summer Reading List of a Bored, As-Yet Unemployed Navy Wife

It’s 105 degrees outside and I’m crouched low in our study, peeking through the Venetian blinds at the third Jehovah’s Witness to tap lightly at my door in the space of a week. It’s a fairly typical day since our fourth military move, this one landing us in California’s scorching Central Valley—I’m home alone, trying to fly under the radar of religion-peddlers and my husband is out screaming over Death Valley at 400 knots, trying to learn all the creepily neutral sounding commands on the touch-screens of the F-18 Super Hornet. The plane itself is so highly computerized that pilot inputs are treated as “suggestions,” which must pass for approval by the main system, which will then decide how (and whether!) to interpret and carry out those suggestions. My life these days has no such overarching plan—if [Pants] is cradled in the certainty and forethought of the Super Hornet and the Navy at large, my guiding mechanism is closer to that crazy bicycle-looking thing with the dragon fly wings from the early days of aviation.

I am, for the third time in as many years, starting fresh in the job hunt. With several applications set out, baited hooks on as-yet still lines, I wait. Is this what all military wives do? I wouldn’t know, really. The wives out here have so far been like spiders—you know they’re around, but they seem to melt into the shadows whenever I start looking. I’ve heard tell that there’s a show on TV about Army wives (in my already indoctrinated state I immediately thought, “Yeah, but the Navy’s so much different”), but since we’re still austerely eschewing cable, yet another model of how I could possibly be handling things right now is off limits.

So far, all I’ve got is the Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbuster model: I get that slow close-up shot right at the beginning of the movie where I suddenly drop what I’m doing and get that shocked, middle-distance stare as I take in the blooming mushroom cloud/ alarming TV news report and utter my slow monotone line, “Oh my God…” And then the action, of which I’m not a part, starts. Obviously, this leaves me with quite a bit of extra time on my hands while the world is being saved, so lately I’ve embarked upon an intensely codependent relationship with the San Joaquin Valley Library System.

Without further ado, I offer you the Summer Reading List of a Bored, As-Yet Unemployed Navy Wife:


Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

“…[A] woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” Such is the twisted logic of David Lurie’s seduction of his young student, Melanie, in this tale of a horny professor’s downfall set in modern South Africa. A must-read for nubile co-eds, leering professors, and lesbian dog-lovers, Disgrace opens with a sex scandal and closes with dog euthanasia, both events which neatly encapsulate some really compelling metaphors about the lingering impacts of colonialism and racism, and how no debt can ever really be repaid. There’s not a spare word in the whole book, and when I finished it I wondered how Coetzee was able to fit so much into such a slim novel. I actually ended up pissed off at writers like John Steinbeck, who seemed to take pages and pages to move their characters around and make a point with metaphor. Which brings me to…

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Probably every one of my former English professors would drop their faces into their hands in exasperation if they read this, but Jesus Cornpone Christ, does Steinbeck know how to belabor a phrase. I felt I should reread this classic under something less than AP English duress since I’m now living in the book’s fabled Land of Plenty, but I found myself counting the times the phrase, “the men squatted on their hams” appeared. Perhaps it was all a clever literary device to make the reader feel like she actually traveled every mile of the whole miserable trip with the Joads, but often it felt like Steinbeck’s wife and editor at the time, Carol Henning, could have been a little more aggressive with the red pen.

Steinbeck said of the novel, “There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can, and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” Well, la-ti-da. One has to wonder if the Nobel panel heard some version of this quote and thought, “Shit, guess we missed a few layers… well, can’t appear intellectually shallow, can we? Prize for you!”

In all, yes this is an important book, and yes, for sheer beauty and one-of-a-kind impact, you can’t beat that last scene where Rose of Sharon breastfeeds the starving man in the barn as the floodwaters rise around them, but maybe this is one best left for academic reading.

On the other hand, for reading that feels as fact-licious and edifying as a graduate seminar, but still makes you read until way too late at night, try…

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager

The miracle drug is sulfa—the world’s first antibiotic—and boy, did things suck before it was invented. This book is a fascinating account of all the wretched, ghoulie things that can happen when bacteria get up in your business and do their thing unchecked. For instance, did you know Calvin Coolidge, Jr. died from a blister on his foot from not wearing socks while playing tennis? Or that the reason so many women died of fever directly after childbirth was that bacteria was spread to them by doctors who trotted in to attend them directly after performing an autopsy—without washing their hands?

While this was reason enough for me to read the book, Hager goes on to give a detailed and engaging account of how German scientist Gerhard Domagck, after witnessing the horrors of trench warfare and the limits of battlefield medicine, hunts down the elusive chemical combination that will stop strep, even as Allied bombers and Nazi Party officials get in his way. Hager takes a few interesting detours to explain the downfall of patent medicine (Dr. Loosetooth’s Magical Heroin Toothache Tincture!) as well as the rise of drug-resistant bacterial strains.

A perfect read for that interminable wait in the doctor’s waiting room or the ER. You can finally greet your caregiver with the proper derision, knowing that most of the truly hard work of figuring out how to heal people was done back in the 1930’s.

Don’t look for a transition here because there’s not one leading us to…

What is the What by Dave Eggers

Is it fiction or is it some kind of facilitated autobiography? The librarian and I had a long discussion about this: Valentino Achak Deng is a real person, one of the Lost Boys of the Sudanese Civil War of the 1980’s and 1990’s (the predecessor to the current bloodbath in Darfur), but his story, as told here by Dave Eggers, is a composite of many stories, the characters composites of many real people. But that’s not the only odd thing about this captivating narrative—the other is that the author, whose two previous books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! manages to subdue disguise his thoroughly postmodern, ironic, and often device-laden prose with a simple, authentic, and emotionally powerful voice.

The result is an unforgettable account of a young boy’s trek across Sudan to the refugee camps of Ethiopia, and then to Kenya when the Ethiopian government falls, until he is eventually resettled in the U.S. Throughout, Valentino becomes part of various temporary families and communities, always searching for a place to belong and to be safe, but a sense of home eludes him. The novel opens with Valentino being attacked and robbed by Atlanta thugs, and the story of his past is told in reflection as he navigates the local police and the ER waiting room, trying to put his life back together yet again.

Despite what it sounds like, the story isn’t incredibly depressing—Valentino’s life is told as a whole, with good memories, crushes, even some really funny bits. I spent quite a long time reading this in the local Starbucks over my “socially responsible shade-grown coffee,” which felt distinctly less so after the third militia recruiting raid on Valentino’s group of starving boy refugees. Maybe read this one at home.

And now, my favorite so far…

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I’ve got nothing witty to say about this one because it’s just that beautiful and complicated. In fact, if I ever developed enough excitement and faith in something to compel me to go door to door like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’d probably be books and writing, and if you were dumb enough to answer the door, I’d start my pitch with this book.


The Inheritance of Loss is a story about the emerging New India, and is peopled with characters that represent nearly every period of India’s growth. First we meet the Judge, a grumpy old Indian Civil Servant who hated his Indian-ness enough to powder his face pink and white and affect British slang. His granddaughter, Sai, comes to live with him as a nation-less product of parochial schools, an orphan whose future is uncertain, and who falls hopelessly in love with her science tutor. The science tutor, Gyan, eventually joins a violent Nepali-Indian insurgency that threatens to destroy Sai and her grandfather’s way of life (again, the question of who pays the debt of colonialism). Against this backdrop, we also take frequent breaks to check in on the Judge’s cook’s son, Biju, who has gone off to America to make it and finds he can do anything but.

Desai’s writing sparkles with original phrasing and I found myself reading many paragraphs two and three times over just for the pleasure of the wording. The characters, even the minor players like Father Booty and Uncle Potty (seriously), are knife-sharp and brilliantly illustrative of an India struggling with modernity, diversity, and identity. My door to door pitch for this one would end, “read this or I’ll be back in two weeks to break your fingers.”

So there you have it-- what I do all day conveniently justified and crystallized into a few recommendations of what you should do in your spare time, all lovingly subsidized by the U.S. Navy. Who said the military industrial complex never did anything for you?