We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

it is difficult to write about this book because you really don't want to say too much to anyone who has yet to have the pleasure of reading it, except to say that it is about a family in which the father is an experimental psychologist and the narrator is one of the daughters. The family has fallen apart and the pain of her siblings' disappearance is constantly in the mind of the daughter. But there is great humour and wit in the telling of the story which makes it quite an addictive read. It also has an interesting structure - the narrator starts in the middle and then has to tell the beginning, and as she says, the ending is also a beginning. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but it didn't win.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: funny and serious

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him and love never solves any of his problems."

He is 38 years old, he has come to terms with himself and he is doing well, professionally, but he wants more. From the first chapter:

"When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym's racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse."

The dismal lighting! Yes!

"Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints' days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother."

Here you get the general tone of the piece. Paul is flippant (the writing is very funny), gets very angry sometimes, and yet he is serious. He wants to believe but he doesn't and doesn't want to be the sort of person who does believe. He is envious of those who believe, and when he has a Jewish girlfriend, he longs to be part of her family. He longs to be an atheist Jew.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order....

So there's the plot, he wants a religion that has all the benefits of religion but he doesn't want to believe. The book is a bit sprawling and many people who write it up on Amazon find the ending very unsatisfactory but in these serious matters of belief, a happy ending is not possible.

Terry Eagleton - How to Read Literature, Young People, and Voting

If I find a book that's clever and witty and tells me something new I am so happy. Or even a book that's shown me something I know from another point of view. I want to share it with someone I love. (If you've received a book from me, and you didn't like it - I am philosophical. I still think it's better to try to share than give up hope.) I loved sharing books with the children when I had children, and we still go back to the old ways when we stumble upon a Dr Seuss, (as we did in the Youth Hostel) or a Mairi Hedderwick.

I really like the cover art too.

Anyhow, here is Terry Eagleton explaining how to appreciate literature, and I'm finding it really helpful. I always suspected, when I did my degree, that I didn't quite understand  how the writers had mixed form and content to create meaning, and this book is very helpful with understanding that, giving plenty of examples from classic literature to consider.

But this is Terry Eagleton and rejoice with me, for Terry Eagleton is witty. He is so un-pompous.

On stereotypes:

A type is not necessarily a stereotype. .... Stereotypes reduce men and women to general categories, whereas types preserve their individuality but lend it some broader context. A cynic might take this to mean that Irishmen are forever engaged in drunken brawling, but that each does so in his own unique way.

We can identify objects only by language, and language is general by nature. If it were not, we would need a different word for every rubber duck and stick of rhubarb in the world. ... there is no special word for my particular pair of eyebrows or fits of sulkiness. .... In fact, there is nothing that does not resemble something else in some respect. The Great Wall of China resembles the concept of heartache in that neither can peel a banana.

Character:

It is not that Aristotle thought Character unimportant in general. On the contrary, he regarded it as supremely important, as another of his books the Nicomachean Ethics, makes clear. this work is all about moral values, qualities of character, the difference between virtuous and vicious individuals, and so on. Aristotle's view of character in the real-life sense, however, differs from some modern versions of it. Here too, he sees action as primary. It is what men and women do, the way they realise or fail to realise their creative powers in the public arena, that matters most from a moral viewpoint. You could not be virtuous simply on your own... Ancient thinkers were less likely than modern modern ones to view individuals as existing in splendid isolation. They would no doubt have had some trouble in understanding Hamlet, not to speak of being utterly bemused by the work of Marcel Proust or Henry James....

Actually, I think you can still divide people into ancients, who naturally fulfill themselves in the public sphere, (e.g. my husband) and the moderns, who are interested in their own consciousness and the way their own perceptions of the world add up to what they know. I guess we are readers. There are fewer of us now, as Will Self wrote in the Guardian not long ago, young people don't read novels.

But you can't say they don't like a good story! Look at "Game of Thrones". I am not able to comment on this work because I haven't read it. I know S gave up on it but F's friends discuss it excitedly and she says she is going to read the whole multi-volume saga as a post-exam chillout.

But they don't want to have to work at anything. I saw on the news yesterday clips of young people explaining why they hadn't voted, and they said: we don't know enough about it. Well, I felt the same so I went and searched for info on the web, the way that's so easy and natural these days. then I was able to brief my daughter while walking to the polling station (her first time voting, we insisted that she vote for something, - anything!) But if the young people feel that they can't make important decisions for themselves, it's as though they are saying; "We are children, please decide for us, because you know best." They are passengers, and modernists, with their headphones on blocking out everything but their own consciousness, and they need a more Aristotelian point of view.

In the end I voted Green in the hope that there would be enough Green people acting in concert in Europe to protect the fish. Yup, I voted to save the fish.

My two German girls don't want to continue English lessons with me. I think that's because I kept wanting them to discuss things they have no ideas or opinions about. It is amazing that these intelligent young women (20+) have no ideas or opinions, and I'm not sure I will really miss them. But I said I would. Of course, they gave other reasons for not continuing, :- their plans had changed and they were returning to Germany earlier and they had decided not to take the Advanced exam after all.