A Certain Slant of Light

I'm racing toward the end of The Count of Monte Cristo! Only about a dozen chapters left now - and so many threads to wrap up!!!

( How will the Count manage it all??? )

I found John Kim's The Angry Therapist: A No BS Guide to Finding and Living Your Own Truth super frustrating, possibly because I took the title too literally and believed that he was going to be angry about something. The growing trend toward giving patients medication without therapy? The high cost of mental health care? The fact that American prisons are stuffed with mentally ill people who really ought to be in treatment, not incarcerated? The difficulties of getting insurance companies to pay for mental health care? Stigma around mental health problems?

I mean really, there are a lot of things a therapist could be angry about. But as far as I can tell, the thing that most grates Kim's cheese is the fact that sometimes the strict guidelines of therapeutic practice where he works make him feel stifled, which is... well, I'm sure it's frustrating, but it seems like a weirdly self-centered reason to call himself "The Angry Therapist."

This is in fact something I felt about the book in general: it's weirdly self-centered. Kim wants to help you find your best self, but he also wants you to know that he used to be a screenwriter - a successful screenwriter! He didn't become a therapist because the whole screenwriting thing didn't work out for him. He just realized that being a screenwriter wasn't fulfilling his true self, so he went back to school to study psychology.

And also he ran a high-end nightclub where he rubbed elbows with film stars. And also he created a start-up company called ModelInABottle.com which was staffed with models who were friends of his girlfriend at the time. Who was a model. Just FYI.

Holy humblebragging, Batman.

He also has a deeply aggravating imagined scene where he creates a Genuine Emotional Connection (tm) with a waitress by breaking free of the chains of phatic discourse. She asks how he's doing and instead of saying "Fine" like a normal person, he's all - I have to transcribe this, I'm sorry -

JOHN
You know what?

She instantly looks nervous.

JOHN
You've been asking people that all day. So, maybe I should ask you how you're doing?

She looks a bit shocked, confused, taken aback. She fumbles her words.

WAITRESS
Um...fine, tired. Been here since 10 AM. I can't wait to get home.

PROBABLY BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO GET AWAY FROM NOSY CUSTOMERS PRYING INTO THINGS THAT AREN'T THEIR BUSINESS. If you make your waitstaff look nervous, shocked, confused, and taken aback, that is probably a sign that you are doing something wrong.

(But of course the scene ends with the waitress smiling and grateful that someone has taken the time to treat her like a human being instead of just handing her the credit card for the check. "Thank you," she says, and John replies, "You're welcome.")

Do you know what I dread at work? People trying to create genuine emotional connections with me when all I want to do is take their coffee order and then finish filling the caramel bottles, or emptying the trash, or doing literally anything else because everything in the world is less taxing than having an emotionally meaningful conversation with a total stranger. I get paid $10 an hour! That buys you phatic discourse and an empty smile! There's a reason therapists charge $100 an hour for this shit!

...Having said this, I have friends who work retail who love it when people treat them like a human being rather than a coffee dispenser, so who knows, maybe your friendly local barista is just dying for a chance to tell a customer her feet hurt.

Otherwise, it's basically a bog-standard self-help book (live in the now, surround yourself with people who support the real you, etc. etc.). There are probably five dozen books at your local Barnes and Noble that will give you the same advice. Read one of them.

After a string of subpar books, I was beginning to lose faith in Netgalley - is a title and a couple of short descriptive paragraphs truly enough information to make an informed reading decision? - but Joe Moran’s Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness restored it. The book is a melange of anecdotes from the lives of famous shy people (lots of authors, artists, singers), various theories both ancient and modern about the nature of shyness, and a light sprinkling of philosophizing on Moran’s part.

He promises at the outset that this book is not going to turn into a sideways biography of his own history of shyness, which I appreciated, and I think the fact that he doesn’t discuss his own shyness directly allows him to dig deeper into the nature of shyness as a whole. He’s interested in the amorphous nature of shyness, the way that it waxes and wanes in a life, and affects some people almost totally and other people only in small parts of their lives; the fact that it can coexist with other personality traits that might seem quite antithetical to it. “It is so dirt-common that no especially disagreeable or virtuous human attributes can be extrapolated from it,” he notes. “It cohabits with egotism and self-pity as readily as with modesty and thoughtfulness.”

He notes also that people are often paradoxically proud of their shyness, that we tend to believe that it makes us unique and perhaps deeper than other people - the irony being that many people consider themselves shy, that perhaps most people suffer at least occasionally from the feeling that they don’t belong, that there are few things in the world less unique than suffering from embarrassment and anxiety.

This quote struck me, although unfortunately it’s too long to stick on an inspirational post-it note somewhere:

Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexpectional and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.

Also it’s not exactly inspirational. But it struck a chord with me.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Nothing. :(

What I'm Reading Now

I'm about halfway through Pam Munoz Ryan's Echo, which is annoying me by piling cliffhanger on cliffhanger. We have one story thread which ends with the hero being arrested by the Gestapo, and then another which ends with a different hero falling out of a tree and I'm going to guess fainting, but it sure sounds like he might be dead, and now we're heading into story thread three without any resolution for the first two in sight.

I'm also about halfway done with The Angry Therapist, which I still am finding disappointing. He just seems... so much less angry than I expected. No rants about health insurance/stigmas surrounding mental health issues/antidepressants (everyone has a rant about antidepressants, either pro or con)/the tragic state of psychologist training/something?

What I Plan to Read Next

I was alllllmost caught up on Netgalley books... and then I checked out the recently added books, and they had one about the history of shyness and another about the minds and social lives of carnivorous animals and another one about Abraham Lincoln (and also one about the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox church which I just barely managed to resist), so. Piles of books to read again!

This week's Caldecott winner is May I Bring a Friend?, but before we discuss it, a pause for Caldecott related business. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is having an exhibit called Make Way for Ducklings: The Art of Robert McCloskey, an artist who won the Caldecott twice (most notably for, well, Make Way for Ducklings.

If only I had a teleportation device! I'd love to see the exhibition. There's a slideshow of some of the highlights on the website, but it only whetted my appetite.

***

In any case! This week's book is Beatrice Schenk de Regniers' May I Bring a Friend? (illustrated by Beni Montresor), which I felt a bit dubious about - it's one of those books with black line drawings filled in with colors like a coloring book, and I wasn't feeling the color palette chosen. (Pink, orange, yellow, and red, with splashes of olive green.)

However, the story is totally charming. The king and queen invite a young boy to tea, and in response he asks, "May I bring a friend?" Well, the king and queen have excellent manners, so of course they say yes, and the little fellow brings... a giraffe.

One might expect this to put them off further invitations, but in fact they keep inviting him, and he brings a a hippo, an elephant, a troop of monkeys, and a pride of lions in quick succession. Cute and funny.

But I think my very favorite thing are the little vignette illustrations of the king and queen when they're alone together: picking flowers, dancing, fishing, catching butterflies, rolling a ball of yarn together. (The king holds a great bundle of yarn on his outstretched arms as the queen rolls it up.) Now there's a happy couple.

OH MY GOD THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO IS GOING TO KILL ME WITH SUSPENSE AND FEELS AND ALL I WANT IS MORE. All of the Count's plans are coming together ALL AT ONCE and it's so exciting and also MERCEDES.

( MERCEDES OH MY GOD )

When I was a child, I didn't like Where the Wild Things Are. Max was exactly the sort of boy I didn't like in real life, the kind who is always being loud and causing trouble and generally disrupting everything, and I didn't like the illustration style either. Too dark, too cross-hatched, and the Wild Things with their claws and horns and big teeth and giant mouths frightened me.

Looking at them now, the Wild Things seem weirdly cuddly despite their toothiness - they're all pudgy and soft and furry - but the world looks different when you're five years old.

I'm still not in love with the illustration style on a personal level, but I can appreciate the amount of skill that went into, say, crosshatching every single little leaf on each tree in the land where the Wild Things are. And - I just noticed this - Maurice Sendak uses quite a different style to illustrate the water in the ocean Max crosses in his boat, much more impressionist with great blobs of olive green and dark teal and white for foam.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turned to Silver, which was delightful, although it made me realize how vague are my memories of the earlier two books in the series. There are a lot of bits that I thought were probably callbacks to the other books (and is Pinmei’s Amah supposed to be Minli from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon?), but I don’t recall any of the details, only the general sense of enchantment and delight.

What I’m Reading Now

Lenore Newman’s Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey, which sadly I think is going to have less luscious food description than that title implies. Although maybe I’m wrong? Prove me wrong, book! Scale back the academic theorizing about the symbolic nation-building nature of constructing a cuisine and invest in food description instead!

What I Plan to Read Next

Netgalley has at last come through with a copy of Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge. Will it be packed brimful with fascinating Russian Revolution anecdotes? I can only hope!

Today's Caldecott book is most weather appropriate: Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, which is about, well, a snowy day. (The Caldecott committee seems peculiarly besotted by snow. This is the third or fourth book that is all snow all the time, and I know there are at least two more coming down the list. Here is my advice for aspiring Caldecott illustrators: snow. Lots of snow)

We had this book when I was a child, and read it occasionally, although it was never a big favorite: I preferred illustrations with lots of lovely fiddly detail, like Jan Brett or Brambly Hedge. Can you look at the picture for at least an hour and still find new bits in it? Clearly a sign of A++ illustration.

The Snowy Day also has lovely illustrations, but in the opposite direction: all big simply blocks of color. In a touch that I find particularly delightful, almost all the colors are plain blocks - red for Peter's snowsuit, brown for his face (The Snowy Day is the first Caldecott book with an African-American protagonist) - except for the snow, which is white with a watercolor wash of purple and pink and blue. It's quite lovely.

I'm about two thirds of the way through this book, and at last the Count's carefully laid plans are beginning to bear fruit! At least, his plans against Villefort and Danglars are; I'm not sure what his plan against Fernand is, and it's making me nervous.

And CLEARLY ( Spoilers! )

Still no word from Caderrouse, but given how tightly everyone in this novel seems to be bound together, I'm sure he'll show up again sometime.