recent reads

I gave up on The Brothers Karamazov after about 60 pages. I had thought it would make a good way to do something enriching during my unemployment and the long Canadian winter, but I just couldn't hack it anymore. I generally have trouble with novels where the characters speak in full paragraphs, and this one had pages and pages of dialogue without enough of a narrative voice to keep my interest. So now it sits on my bookshelf and makes me feel like a Russian literature poseur.

Barbara Ehrenreich's non-fictional Bait and Switch, however, was very engaging and very well written. I had read one of her early books for a research project, and had come across a short feature she wrote on trying to survive on minimum wage in one of those liberal magazines (Utne?) a while back. This time she went "undercover" as an experienced white-collar unemployed PR person who is trying to land a decent corporate job. Over the course of about eight months, she meets career counselors who throw schlocky personality tests at her and charge her outrageous fees for resume polishing, fellow middle-age job-hunters who have absorbed a blame-the-victim mentality that excuses businesses for downsizing and the trend toward contract work, and organizers of networking events who have an ulterior agenda to proselytize the unemployed. What she describes is pretty appalling, especially since she comes no closer to getting a job after eight months than she did when she started. There's a surreal, Kafka-esque element to devoting full-time hours to a futile search for a job that doesn't offer much security now anyway. For some reason, though, I like reading books like this (and No Logo and Generation Debt) that tell the awful truth without the kind of sugarcoating you find in career manuals like What Color Is Your Parachute? that want to reassure you that you'll be okay if you follow some advice and have lots of faith in the divine plan. It allows me to despair of my own chances of finding a decent job without actually taking more action to improve my own situation. But in all seriousness, these books have been helpful in how they have made me want to work on constructing my own "brand identity." Really. I need to define myself with the right mix of professional buzzwords and distinctive characteristics.

Also, I just finished a short tutorial book on chess by Bobby Fisher that goes through a lot of examples and asks the student whether the white side has a possible "mating combination." I still titter like a schoolgirl when I read that.