Month: January 2012

The Taliban Shuffle, Kim Barker’s memoir about her time as a foreign correspondent, is dedicated to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, ‘who are still waiting for the punchline’.

It’s an interesting dedication and one I, having read the book in its entirety, both do and don’t understand. That elusive, edge-of-mind understanding perhaps sums up what we know about the war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Abstractly, we have a sense of what’s going on. In practice, we have none at all.

The title, The Taliban Shuffle, is what initially got me in. I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a book with that as its visual, apt hook? The complexities of both the author and the countries she covered are what kept me.

I’ve long puzzled over its myriad issues of this dysfunctional region and the contribution we in the west have made to them through bumbling bureaucracy, cultural insensitivities, and general divide-and-conquer and rape-and-pillage habits that date way back. I want to know: Can it ever be functional?

The Taliban Shuffle isn’t a breathless tale of being embedded with the frontline troops in these war-torn places. In fact, there’s very little frontline action at all. Instead Barker spent extended periods of time living in these cities, unprotected by flak jackets and closer to the truth of what’s happening in these countries than we or, arguably, and of the troops sent there will ever know.

She went to ‘babysit’ the foreign correspondent role in Afghanistan, then the war that no one cared about because all eyes were on and adrenalin was pumping through Iraq. She emerged from the region some six years later having reported on suicide bombings, elections, and tsunamis, and had friends and co-workers die or be kidnapped. She doesn’t favourably portray what happened in between.

Barker includes some so-dark-they’re funny moments, including the acronyms for IEDs (improvised explosive devices), BBIEDs (body-borne improvised explosive devices), and DBIEDs (donkey-borne improvised explosive devices, ‘otherwise known as a really stupid idea’ because, really, who can trust a donkey to walk where or do what you tell them? Some would-be bombers learnt some hard lessons early on and not all of them lived to tell the tale.). Then there were the operations names, such as  ‘Operation Turtle’ and ‘Operation Mountain Thrust’ (with the latter run together to be pronounced as ‘Operation Mount and Thrust’).

Those moments, though, are wedged between bleaker ones, which include the deliberately invasive security searches Barker was regularly subjected to, the groping she copped in Pakistan, and how not even punching the offender dissuaded them from their inappropriate actions. Other moments included inadvertently standing and putting her hands in the remains of a person or people blown up by a bomb, seeing corruption first hand, worrying about friends who were kidnapped.

Warzones attract war-junkie cowboys, who may neither be the best people to send nor the best ones to report back, and I did wonder about Barker’s intentions and state of mind. By her own admission, she took the posting in part to abscond from her mundane Montana upbringing, relationship, and fast-track conveyer belt to marriage and babies.

The Taliban Shuffle is warts-and-all honest and Barker’s acutely aware, in retrospect at least, that she crashed around oblivious to cultural practice, but I did find myself thinking ‘Oh no, you didn’t; oh no, you did’ at various stages throughout. The book also left me feeling that neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan will ever be war- and corruption-free and functional. Maybe that’s what Barker’s eluding to in the dedication: that war can be blackly comic, and that Afghanistan and Pakistan have a bunch of material and are simply waiting to hear the ever-elusive punchline.

Speaking of good books I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to finish…Michael McGirr’s The Lost Art of Sleep is another casualty in the polygamy disaster. It’s not that it’s not a good read—it is. It’s just that I’ve needed something with a bit stronger pull of late—something that shoves the rest of the world away and forces you to concentrate on nothing but the words on the page.

McGirr’s book, which muses on the history of sleep through time and marries it to his own experiences of sleeplessness brought on by the arrival of three young children, is fascinating and well wrought. Perhaps, though, my own unhappiness at not being able to sleep (which is also what compelled me to pick the book up) also prevented me from being able to fully finish it (I cheated, skipped about a third, and lobbed back in a few chapters from the end).

Anyone who’s had the (mis)pleasure of speaking with me in recent times will know I’ve developed something of an obsession with sleep. Specifically, obtaining sleep, which is eluding me not because I suffer from insomnia but because I suffer from shrieking, serial-killer neighbours.

They’re not literally serial killers, of course, but for reasons that are too long to go into here and that involve, of all things, a former neighbour who was a butcher, who kept toothy, rabidly angry dogs, and who would crack out and crank up the whipper snipper when his housemates locked him out at 3am, the term ‘the serial killers next door’ has effectively become shorthand for ‘neighbours you’d really, really, really rather not have’.

Sigh. The first line of McGirr’s book sums up my experience entirely: ‘Fatigue fatigue is when you’re tired of being tired.’ I’m not a grump or a bore, honest. I’m simply zombie-walking proof that sleep deprivation temporarily makes you both.

McGirr’s simple yet previously unstated ‘aha’ (to quote Oprah) observations are perhaps what most impressed me about his book. They include that ‘a horse at sleep is a statue of itself’, that giraffes sleep with their eyes open and that ‘the only rule of thumb for the uninitiated is that if a giraffe looks like it is asleep, then it almost certainly isn’t’, as well as the astute note that the ugly coffee mugs are the ones that never break.

Likewise, I practically said ‘amen’ his observation that people will play almost anything for a decent night’s sleep. Why yes, they will. I’ve recently, sadly, entered the vast and complicated world of sleeping tablets not—I feel it’s important to note—because I have trouble sleeping, but because with neighbours like mine it’s impossible to either get to sleep or to stay there.

McGirr necessarily charts the awful accidents that have befallen some people who’ve taken sleeping tablets in recent times and who’ve had sleepwalking reactions. He also notes the bemusing side effect for those of us who haven’t had such horrific experiences on them—the speed with which those suckers take effect.

He writes about a woman who wasn’t in bed at the time she took the tablet and woke up the next day with her head on her alarm clock. I can personally attest that one shouldn’t take a tablet then attempt to pack a bag for a three-day work trip. Fortunately for me, Melbourne has stores that sell crucial things like underpants.

McGirr takes too the obligatory look at famous insomniacs throughout history, but also kyboshes that oft-peddled martyrdom of only sleeping [insert ridiculously small figure here] hours a night. He also includes a bunch of facts that I mentally attempted to store away for trivia nights and first-date small talk. Say, for example, that ‘mortgage’, a word of French origin, literally and fittingly means ‘death grip’.

Thanks to McGirr, I now know that James Barry, AKA he of Peter Pan authorship fame, likely invented the character as he himself became stuck in a kind of perpetual boyhood—his grieving mother mistook him for his deceased brother and he took on that persona rather than disappoint her.

I now also know that caffeine is actually a naturally occurring kind of insecticide and we humans are the only creatures who seem to find it palatable; so much so, that there’s caffeine in the water courtesy of what we excrete that gets flushed into the oceans.

McGirr’s wry observations and the out-of-the-mouths-of-babes moments, of which there are many and many of which made me smile, are the subtle gold of this book and why it’s well worth a read. For example, his son’s response to their encouragement that he make his bed: ‘“If God made the world,” he asked, “why can’t he make my bed?”’

Sure, I struggled to finish this book and cast it slightly aside for some others, but I’d still recommend it. Something tells me my inability to wholly concentrate on it had less to do with its content and more to do with my current (seemingly perpetual) state of sleep deprivation.

Monogamy and polygamy aren’t, admittedly, terms that are often applied to how many books we have on the go at any one time, but it’s the best way I can explain my reading relationship. Although I’d like to say I always have a bunch of books on the go, in truth I’m a pretty vanilla reader and can really only comfortably cosy up to one book at a time. Bizarrely, it’s taken me a long, long while to realise this. Or maybe I’ve just been in denial because juggling books sounds so much more intelligent and exciting.

I’ve tried reading polygamy plenty over the years, and still do have the occasional crack, but it never ends well. I could even say I’m monogamous because I’m the faithful type, but it’s actually more because I’m unable to wholly focus on or retain information about more than one thing at once. Polygamy for me equals lots of squinting, scanning, page shuffling, sighing, and re-reading, and, ultimately, a reduced reading pleasure.

Adding to my reading complexity is the fact that I don’t use bookmarks—I can’t stand them; think they’re a rubbish invention, and can’t believe we haven’t come up with anything less naff and less likely to fall out of a book. No, really. I get that dog-earing isn’t ideal, but I’ll take it over a kitten-themed, tasselled, lame quote-bearing bookmark that drops onto the floor the moment the book pages slacken any day. Long story short, without a foolproof method of marking my place, I often struggle to remember where I’m up to in a book—multiple books on the go compounds the issue.

The truth is that the times I’ve been polygamous are the ones when I’m just not that into a book. You might call it polygamy or you might call it cheating. Either way, I’m hedging my bets or finding fun elsewhere in order to return to the book I know I should read but can’t quite bring myself to.

That happened with Word Freak, the book that featured in my previous blog and that I desperately wanted to love. It’s also happening with The Lost Art Of Sleep, a book I haven’t yet blogged about but that I’m skimming and reading every second chapter of when I do, eventually and out of some inexplicable moral obligation, get round to it.

On the flipside, it never happened with Vampire Academy, The Hunger Games, or any manner of non-fiction books such as The Good Soldiers or Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures I’ve rabbited on about over time. Is it just me or is it the same for you? Is book polygamy really just another, non-confrontational way of saying to a book: ‘I’m just not that into you?’

I realise it’s a little odd to recommend a book that I’ve wholly, never-to-be-repealed abandoned after more than eight months of fits-and-starts attempts to read it. But in the case of Word Freak (and to borrow the trusty break-up cliché) I think it’s not the book, but rather me.

Word Freak is Wall Street Journal journalist Stefan Fatsis’ attempt to gain entry and insight into the complex, competitive world of professional Scrabble playing (interestingly, he did something similar with NFL with Few Seconds of Panic). Over the course of its 366 pages, Fatsis studies up on and is mentored in the key principles of Scrabble strategies, and then both applies these strategies in tournaments and achieves a near-expert ranking.

The book was recommended by a friend and fellow editor, Kirsty, who consoled me when I complained how Scrabble always has and always will destroy me. My suckfullness and inability to either improve at or wholly escape Scrabble has become a particular bone of contention because every man, woman, and their dog seems to challenge me to, and then take great pleasure in beating me at, the game. As though I’m some Scrabble giant they’ve toppled. Meh, I personally don’t consider it much of a victory worth celebrating—Blind Freddy could randomly lay down tiles and still beat me.

Word Freak, it seemed, held both the answers and the therapy for someone as Scrabble-constipated and winning-thwarted as me. I figured I’d finally understand why I was so bad and master the necessary skills. I managed the former but, well, never managed the latter. My reading attempts fell over at page 95. I then stole a skimming look at the final chapter, so in total read just over 100 pages.

Let me say this up front: Word Freak is good. Scrabble fans will enjoy it. I’m just not a Scrabble fan and, despite trying totes hard to get into the book, I was defeated by it for the very same reasons why I’m defeated by the boardgame itself: it’s about probability and stats and combinations and logical, mathematical puzzling out of which tiles are out, which are still to come, and what your move will potentially either set your opponent up to do or prevent them from doing.

Written with a sports commentary-like verve, Word Freak colourfully explains the potentially dry Scrabble stats. Unfortunately they’re still a bit too complex and there are a few too many for my simple brain to ingest, much less comprehend. But let me put it this way: Scrabble’s less about knowing lots of words and their meanings and more about knowing combinations of letters. The top Scrabble players memorise lists of combinations, something I find simultaneously impressive and depressing. Impressive, because they know extraordinary words. Depressing because they never (or rarely) learn the words’ meaning.

Scrabble is, Word Freak tells me, ‘…among the best-selling and most enduring games in the two-hundred-year history of the American toy industry. Hasbro Inc., which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, sells over a million sets a year. Around a hundred million sets have been sold worldwide since the game was first mass-produced in 1948.’ That’s a lot of players and sets out there. No wonder I regularly get challenged to a game.

It continues: ‘…say the word ‘Scrabble’ and everyone knows what you’re talking about: the game in which you make words. But it’s much more than that […] Scrabble is one of those one-size-fits-all totems that pops up in movies, books, and the news.’ In short, it’s something we’ve all had a crack at one time or another. See previous comment about no wonder I often get asked to play.

The characters who compete at the elite Scrabble level are precisely that: characters. There’s the drug-taking obsessive who needs to win comps in order to pay his rent and who even buys an oxygen tank at one stage to pump the maximum amount of thought-clearing gas into his body. There’s the zen master who does all manner of meditation-style preparation for tournaments and who mentors Fatsis. There are the OCD types in between. Regardless of their approaches, what they all have in common is their obsession with the game and the rote learning they do of lists of three, four, five, and so on-letter words.

If it sounds too hard to you (like it did to me), rest assured it did to Fatsis too, who confesses to his mentor: ‘“I feel overwhelmed by the words,” I say. “All the lists and sublists and potential lists. There’s just too much, so I don’t do much at all.”’

But the passage that most surprised and consoled me was this: ‘To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. If it did, I—an Ivy League-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud—would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn’t about words. It’s about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.’

With that in mind, I’ll recommend Word Freak to you, but I won’t (or wouldn’t) recommend it to me. My brain’s not built for either playing or even reading about Scrabble. It’s game over for me and any Scrabble book or boardgame.