Girl With A Pearl Earring

Girl With A Pearl Earring

By Tracy Chevalier

Hi there.

Please allow me to apologize. You see, I have lured you here to my blog under false pretenses.  You have, most likely, come to my blog in search of a review of Tracy Chevalier's charming novel Girl With a Pearl Earring. And while it is most assuredly the most recent novel I have finished, I have very little to say about it that hasn't already been said. It was, after all, a New York Times Bestseller and hardly needs my help as a reviewer. It was a fine novel. I enjoyed it. You might too. Read it. If you only came here for the review, hopefully the above words have satiated your need for literary criticism. I suspect they haven't and therefore the apology. I don't care about this book, but I care about you because I'm hoping you might help me. Please bear with me as I explain.

See, my blog has a certain consistency to it. Every single entry save two (Year in Reviews) have been posts pertaining to the book I have most recently finished. I read one book at a time and blog about it after I finish. Each post title is the name of said book and it is accompanied by an image of the cover of the book and I try to write something witty along the way. I like the consistency. I've been doing this for almost two years now and I've never stopped along the way to introduce myself or explain exactly why my blog is the way it is. It would have ruined the continuity. I don't intend to break that so I've been waiting patiently for a book to come along that prompted minimal feelings for me. I planned to co-opt that book's blogpost and use its space as a way to ask a question to all who visits.

That blogpost just happens to be Girl With A Pearl Earring. Fine book, like I said.

Anyway, enough about all that. I have an agenda today and I need your help. So let me get right to the point:

I'm thinking about changing the name of my blog.

When I first started this blog I was totally unaware that there was an entire world of book bloggers out there. In my blissfully ignorant mind I was a pioneer! I would be the first person to read books and write about them when I finished. I was going to bring literature to the unwashed masses of the Internet. When Blogger asked me to type a name, I did so without much thought and barreled forward toward posting. I had a mission, people, and it did not wait for a witty title! My Life in Books. Good enough.... moving on!

Since then, of course, I have discovered the multitude of wonderful book blogs out there, I realized how entirely inadequate both my blog and my blog name really was. My Life in Books? Atrocious. I aspire to greater creative heights that that! The name simply has to go.

Worse still is that it doesn't reflect what I do here, which is read any and all books that I can get my hands on.

For those unaware, I live in Taiwan. I'm neither Taiwanese nor ethnically Asian. I'm Canadian by birth and identify myself as such, but I live here nonetheless. How that came to be is a decidedly longer and more personal story so it may have to wait for another book that elicits zero feeling in me. I promise, however, that I will write it at some point. Rest assured that it's not important to our task at hand.

Taiwan has very few English bookstores or libraries. Most of the few are relegated to the largest urban centers: Taipei, Kaohsiung and Taichung. I do not live in any of those cities. I live about as far away from those cities as one can on this island (Hualien if anyone is Google Mapping it). The closest city with an English bookstore is Taipei, three hours north by train or 2.5 hours by car... if the road is open. There are no English bookstores in my town. Imagine that.

There are, however, English speakers in my town, many of which read. So there is a good collection of novels that have trickled down to my town via current and former expat residents as well as books left behind by tourists making the circuit of the island (it pays to befriend the owners of local hostels!). A lot are cheap romance novels, a fair amount of science fiction and way too many Penguin classics. So finding books in my town isn't impossible, but you rarely find exactly what you want.

I do go to Taipei a couple times a year and always buy books. I get shipments of books from my family back home a couple times a year, which is really sweet of them to do and I have a Kindle which means I can get books online. So, if I really want something, I can get it. It will just take more time (this is why I tend to read books that are a bit older than the books most other book bloggers read). I do miss browsing book stacks, though, and I develop fits of jealousy when I see other book bloggers blogging about their trips to bookstores, book shows or libraries and showing off their stacks of new books. I miss that a lot. For those counting, I have seven unread books on my shelf right now. That number will get much smaller before it gets bigger. But don't cry for me or anything. It's not as bad as it sounds. Just different.

Anyway....

I need a new name for this blog!

I would like a blog name to reflect my circumstances but I have not, as of yet, thought one up. This is disconcerting to me because I pride myself on my ability to be creative and yet...

I have been toying with the name Just Reviews to reflect my affinity to posting reviews only (and my attempt to be honest about everything I read), but it's just not capturing me. I thought I'd open up to everyone who visits to see what you think and whether you have a name suggestion. I can't promise I'll use it, but I'll take each and every suggestion seriously.

So, what do you think? Please take the time to offer your comments or suggestions. I'd greatly appreciate it...

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue

By Anthony Keidis

I've never been a rabid fan of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. They've always inhabited a peripheral position among my record collection. I own a copy of Mother's Milk, Blood Sugar Sex Magic and One Hot Minute, but none of them have ever gotten heavy rotation on my stereos over the years. The problem being that, in my mind, the Chili Peppers are masters of the single but struggle to compile enough material to produce a competant album. The closest they came was Blood Sugar Sex Magic, but even that is a struggle to get through in one sitting.

So I was a little apprehensive about reading Anthony Keidis' biography, Scar Tissue. Couple that with my reservations about reading rock and roll biographies about known drug addicts and you have a very reluctant reader. But it came highly recommended, so I gave it a whirl. Since I went in with no expectations, I would rate the experience of reading Scar Tissue as good overall, but just barely.

Turns out Anthony Keidis is either one of the most genuine souls in rock and roll or his years of relapses has turned him into one of the best smooth-talkers in the business, able to sell ice to an Eskimo. While I was rooting for the former throughout the book, by the end I was fairly convinced of the latter.

The first third of the book chronicles Keidis' turbulent childhood straddled between Michigan and California. Growing up with his drug-dealing father exposed the young Anthony to a bevvy of sex and drugs at a very young age (and no small amount of jealousy from this reader). As with virtually every rock and roll biography, this is by far the most interesting part of the book. I had no idea that Keidis was essentially living with Sonny Bono through his junoir high school days.

The second third of the book chronicles the formation and emergence of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the L.A. punk scene in the early 1980s. I liked that they defined convention at the time and played a unique brand of funk in a scene dominated by glam metal and to hell with what the scene dicatated. The rise of the band co-incides with Keidis' descent into the world of heroin and cocaine addiction, which, as I have written before, is such a cliche it's almost boring if it weren't about the very real suffering of a human being. Before he finally kicks his habit (for the first time) prior to recording Mother's Milk the book reads like "Knock Me Down" on perpetual repeat.

The segment devoted to his first clean stint (the time period between the recording of Mother's Milk and the end of the Blood Sugar Sex Magic tour) is also a fun read. Keidis is a bit of a world traveler and I enjoyed is recollections about trekking through Borneo, touring Japan and his irrational and incomprehensible love for New Zealand.

It's when Keidis relapses for the first (of too many to count) times that this book derailed. I hate to complain about the narrative of a biography, but the story went from slightly repetitive to a broken record of scoring drugs, driving to a motel and getting high for a few days then flying somehwere warm, weaning off the drugs, playing a few gigs, attending to a few responsibilities, repeat. I'm not kidding, this formula went on for over 200 pages. In the meantime people were born, people died, he changed girlfriends and guitarists more often then I change my underwear and his band recorded two albums.

This is not to say that the book was without merit. In fact, I found myself revisiting a lot of Chili Pepper albums while reading this book. While I still maintain that they have never recorded a great album, I had forgotten how good many of them were. Also, I found that I had never really given them thir place among the great rock and roll acts of all time, which they most certainly are, if not in the studio, certainly for their brazen live performances. I was especially pleased to not that Keidis wrote specifically about a show in Toronto that I attended in the late nineties (a free show at the corner of Yonge and Dundas). That was kinda cool.

Also, the first half of the book was devoid of that smarmy self-help remorse that so many former addicts have. He's recollections of a childhood and early adulthood consuming drugs and playing rock and roll were entirely without regret or remorse. I liked that he could look back fondly on a time he would not necessarily like to revisit rather than spent that portion apologizing to everyone and their brother about the pain and suffering he put them through. That makes great psych couch conversation but terrible reading.

But the book ultimately falters. It was when the 12-step philosophies began to creep into the narrative that things really took a turn for the worse. While the recollections on band life, touring and his travels remained fun to read, his intellectual musings on the nature of addiction and healing got nauseating (granted, I have never had a heroin problem so who am I to talk). Lots of new-age, self-help mumbo-jumbo and psuedo-religious ramblings that only served to prove that his years of drug intake had done their best on his brain.

As I mentioned to the guy who leant me the book, you can't help rooting for Anthony Keidis throughout the book. He seesms so genuine. Each time he cleans up you are hoping it will be his final detox only to have him disappoint you time and again. But the end when he (supposedly) cleans up for the last time, I could barely manage to feel anything for a guy who had thrown away so many chances.

Anthony Keidis is a really lucky man. Not because he is the frontman of one of the world's most successful rock and roll outfits, although that is certainly pretty cool. He's lucky because he has continuously been surrounded by people that never gave up on him. Despite lying, cheating and abusing them, his family, friends and bandmates never abandoned him. Considering his behavior over time, he should count himself blessed to have a support network as dedicated. If only he was that dedicated to himself.

Scar Tissue. It's the One Hot Minute of rock biographies. Full of promise, an all-star cast, some really, really spectacular moments, but in the end fails to inspire much beyond a curt nod to say, "Yep. I've read that now. What's next?"