I bought this out of desperation at Bradley Airport, early one Sunday morning, as the best of maybe 10 trade paperbacks available. I had just finished another Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason, and it is not Fraser's fault I am not 300 pages' worth of interested in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. I thought, going in, that I wasn't 450 pages worth of interested in the Bourbons, either, but she was half Hapsburg, only married to a Bourbon, and that helps.
Fraser paints a much more sympathetic picture of Antoinette than I had ever considered. The author points out that if the queen was extravagant, she was no worse than the rest of the court; yet also that that doesn't excuse the extravagance as a whole. Also Fraser describes her courage, motherly devotion, and a flawless composure that served her in appalling circumstances.
As in Henry VIII: the King and His Court, the focus is on the person, with only glimpses of the political, economic, and other pressures on France. Just the glimpses sufficed to explain the Revolution: One, the average person spent 50% of their income on bread (in contrast, only 5% on fuel). Two, immediately after the birth of Antoinette's first son, a new color emerged in high fashion named caca-dauphin.
I'm only 115 pages into it, but I love the combination of baseball, the Usan myth, and what I consider regular old myth of a Grimm or Lang, and native American myth of a Pacific Northwest flavor. It might be a children's book, but in my opinion a fairly advanced one. A couple of details I remarked on: after page 50, someone's vest is described as orange as the protagonist's father's Volvo. That's a detail I ought to have remembered from the first page, but I didn't. Also, a character arrives called Padfoot. Chabon must have read, or heard about, or had an editor tell him about, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Prongs, Wormtail, Padfoot, and the other one. My copy is very far away though. All the way downstairs, and this evening my legs are shredded.
Oh, I like this book, which is not as advanced a children's book as I first thought, just long and multi-layered. The new reason for the liking is that Chabon includes bits from other books in it. A pair of glasses that someone uses looking for his father (A Wrinkle in Time), a midget giant (like Glew in the Prydain Chronicles), and someone being madly crazy about liverwurst (The Cricket in Times Square). There are all the tropes, too, of course: quest for parent, travel in the Lands Beyond, and Reading Is Useful. Also, copious use of the verb "scamper."
Oh! I can add two books to the Invisible Library, How to Catch Lightning and Smoke and The Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook.
I was going to say that there was only one thing, but that's not true, and I'm superstitious enough, or too well taught by the Island of Conclusions in The Phantom Tollbooth, to say there's only one thing. The fact is, only one book thing could stop my reading more Michael Chabon today. I finished Summerland over lunch, leaving myself bookless, so scarpered early to go to the 'brary before my bus. I got another José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and two more Chabons, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, which last I began on the bus.
Eschewing mittens despite the 15-degree cold so I could turn pages at the stop and walking home, I read its first chapter. Shades of Straight Man, and his referring to Three Rivers Stadium reminds me of Wally Lamb (his thinly-disguised Norwich in I Know This Much Is True is called Three Rivers), even though I know that that's Pittsburgh's thing, the three rivers.
I babbled at RDC about Summerland and Chabon and Wonder Boys and my new trove of books without particularly noticing the Amazon box on the table until RDC said, "Plus you have another book." I had forgotten what I had ordered.
A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. The one book thing that could make me stop reading Chabon.
What I said before:
Chapter 1: Noo, not italics! Don't begin the book in italics. Empire Falls might not have disappointed me if it hadn't soured me at the start with the overlong section in italics. No (whew), Byatt uses them for a reason, as she did in Babel Tower.
Chapter 2: A perhaps not overly warm father of three (pertinent) children, Carla, Ellis, and Annie, in Yorkshire of course. I love it when Byatt is obvious, because only then do I follow her.
I just learned the word phlogiston, which might be spelled differently in British English since in A Whistling Woman it is "phlogistin": the hypothetical principle of fire regarded formerly as a material substance.
At least, I hope the spelling is deliberately different, because just a few pages farther on someone is described as having been to Haight-Ashbery [sic].
However, I also just learned (not from the book, but from looking up a name that appeared in the book) that Vivasvat is "the Hindu god of the sun as divinity, also regarded as the architect who built the cities of the gods. His consort is Saranya, and his children are Yama, Yami, Manu, and the Asvins." Also that the name Agnes means "lamb" and thus "pure." Of course: the French for lamb is agneau. I did already know that Agnes is much more attractive pronounced frainchly than Englishly, more like "Ahn-ngay."
It's a second printing. I am going to believe these are editors' rather than Byatt's mistakes.
Later. There is always something of the last book you read in the next. Here's a bit of Summerland in Woman: "Telling stories, like making graven images, made loopholes for evil and the Father of Lies to enter the world."
Saturday. "He had asked his father, once, as a little boy 'Why is there something, and not nothing?'"
I asked RDC if he was familiar with the phenomenon by which the last book you read turns up in the next. He answered, unkindly as well as wrongly, "That's probably because you read a lot of the same sort of stuff."
What I took note of throughout (sans spoilers:
Eek. The full moon never rises before sunset. She knows everything else. It's such a simple oversight to correct, though, and there's a short story by someone whom I dislike at some remove, with the same error.
Another book connection! Frederica feels the ground beneath her feet. And twins throughout, John and Paul Ottokar from Babel Tower continue here, and much reliance on syzygy.
I also wonder if Byatt responds to Girl with a Pearl Earring or if the discussion of Vermeer's View of Delft is coincidental.
And she does know everything or at least thinks about it. Snails and the link between mind and matter. Songbirds and how they learn. The Great Gatsby. A Winter's Tale. Middlemarch. Peacocks and how males attract mates (echoes of "Morpho Eugenia"). Meiosis and the energy cost of sexual vs. asexual reproduction. All this set against university upheaval, religious sects, psychology, feminism, the impact of television.
An Amazon reviewer said that Whistling Woman doesn't stand alone. This is so. The jacket declares it does, but all of a sudden Winifred appears without introduction, and Jude Mason and Babbletower, and Alexander's "Yellow Chair." It's wonderful, a joyous intellectual romp in which Byatt thinks and wonders and examines and encourages her readers to do the same. But I don't think it stands alone.
I would have been pleased to know more about what happens to everyone, especially Frederica, but I really like how and why Byatt doesn't tell.
I figure if I'm going to go cutesy by using "heart" as a verb, I might as well go all the way and eschew capitals. Really Chabon is a better influence than that.
Wonder Boys. Holy mother of god, what a great book. It reminded me of Richard Russo's Straight Man because of its vaguely academic setting with a creative writing professor and of Russo's Nobody's Fool because it was such a fantastic book. Not as good: the minor characters don't leap from the page the way, say, Ralph does in Fool, and also just not, but pretty damn good. The entire tuba side story cracked me up, not least because I am not above being haunted by inanimate objects. Also, the word tuba.
I have to stop watching "Buffy" if it's going to make me say "also" and "not so much" and especially "not so much with the [x]" quite so fucking much.
I'm swearing more than I usually let myself because I've been up since 3. I'm going to lie and date this the 13th, but I'm writing it Friday morning at 6:50. It's what I wrote from 3 to 6:30 that's pissing me right the fuck off and has been for the past week.
Anyway, a word with whose overuse I am by contrast completely comfortable.
What is the meaning of the name Feld to Chabon? Didn't an editor say, during Summerland, "Look, you already used this name in Wonder Boys, though for a minor little character who only cameos"? I like how he described someone's reading level as having not progressed past comic books, because that's what the character saying so would think.
I have to ask CKC if she's ever read any Chabon, if Pittsburgh meant enough to her during four years at CMU to give him a try.
To be honest, one reason I woke at 3 is that I was asleep by 9. Six hours is not so much. Again with the "not so much." "Again" being another Buffyism. Christ. Anyway, the book I started before I fell asleep was Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
Michael Chabon is a genius. Now I'm convinced that the name Feld is deliberate and just comes up, in a minor way, in all his books, and if I reread Kavalier & Clay I would notice it there. Someone eats a slice of bread "whitened with margarine" which shows so much about the character in so few words I am bowled over. (It reminds me a scene in Straight Man in which someone is given a sandwich into which a puny amount of the disgusting substance called "pimento loaf" has been "massaged.") Also, someone has a poster with the gibbous face of Greta Garbo.
When we first moved in together, in Storrs, we each had our books. I had two bookcases, one wee and one regular. We had a collection of milkcrates. The apartment had shelves built into an alcove, and someone had added a wider piece of wood for a desk which became mine; RDC had his own desk.
When you walked into the apartment (this is the one we call the tenement), RDC's desk stood to your left, then the bookcase, then nine milkcrates in a 3x3 square under a window. On the short wall, a double closet (with the bikes in front of it) and my desk with the wee bookcase. On the long wall, the kitchen doorway, the dining table (with Percy's cage), the bedroom doorway, two milkcrates as an end table, the futon couch. On the short wall, under another window, another 3x3 square of crates, and then along the rest of the wall, five columns of crates four high. Behind the door on the long entry wall, the television sat on another set of three crates.
We moved to Denver soon enough after marrying that we didn't marry our books until we unpacked here, and the first furniture we bought and built was bookcases. We used the dining area as an office (we didn't own a table; the tenement was semi-furnished): two tall ugly laminate bookcases and RDC's desk. In the living room, and therefore what assailed the eye when you walked in, were two short bookcases under the bar, Blake's cage, turn the corner, the opening into the hallway, a homemade bookcase, the futon, a bookcase, turn the corner, a bookcase, sliding doors to the deck, a bookcase, turn the corner, the television cabinet flanked by speakers, the external door.
And we didn't marry all the books. My usual excuse is that I didn't want Hemingway to Make Way for Ducklings with a shotgun and a dog. But most of them. Many of them. The fiction started under the bar, alphabetically at A, and wrapped around the room. We segregated my favorites and some Themes and picture books and poetry and plays and nonfiction and reference.
Then we moved into the two-bedroom apartment, bought a couch and a chair and had a fireplace in the living room, used the small bedroom as a bedroom, and arranged the "master" bedroom as a study. The only bookcase in the main living area was a short one under the bar for cookery and hobby books. It's how the space worked out, I told myself. It's not as if the living room was ever tidy and bookless anyway: there were library books stacked near the door to be brought home, and whatever either of us was reading strewn on and under the furniture. It would be different in the eventual house.
Except it's not. Right now when you walk into our house, you see one bookcase filled with cookery and hobby books that actually belongs in the sunroom (but the sunroom is being painted). Three shelves flank each side of the fireplace and a mantel spans that entire short wall. The shelves contain stacked coffee table books (an atlas, A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, Thomas Hardy Country, Medieval Art, A History of the Grateful Dead), gardening books (The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty, Dry-Land Gardening, the Sunset Western Garden Book), tour books (Seattle, Glacier National Park, England, France, Tuscany), back issues of American Bungalow and Wine Spectator, stereo components, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County collections, Pictionary, Taboo, Balderdash, Trivial Pursuit, Twister, binoculars, photo albums (all covered in Morris paper or, in the case of our wedding album, a gift from RDC's grandmother, kind of upholestered in white satin), and a tea chest. The mantel has plants and photographs and some tchotchkes and a miniature Rosetta Stone and right now a card with an image from the Lindisfarme gospels because ABW just wrote me about reading Tolkien for the first time.
(Hee! Kind of like Keats "On First Reading Chapman's Homer"! I'll have to tell her that one.)
I asked a booky someone what he would think walking into someone's house and seeing all this nonbook or maybe quasibook stuff. He paused. I hate the pause. The pause is one of those tactful things that I can't abide, marking time as you think of the polite while not dishonest thing to say. I called him on it. He decided that these might be interesting but not necessarily booky people.
He suggested some high-end porn, just to intrigue people. I could put out Torn Shapes of Desire, which would amuse me because of the online connection. In a nonporn vein I suggested Arkham Asylum, partly because of whom I was speaking with and partly because it's not what you would think of to look at me.
So now we'll have one bookcase, just one in immediate sight until you go into RDC's study with its tall bookcases or the bedroom with its stacks of books or the sunroom with its eventual shelves. I could say it's how the space worked out; I could say it's how we prioritized the space. I'm glad we have all the windows we do, even though they're so low we'd have to design and build cases to fit under them and it wouldn't be overly efficient to place anything over the heating registers anyway. I might wish we had removed the old heating system's register, which sticks out two inches and would require, upon its demise, the replastering of its wall. (When we painted the room in 2001 I think furniture was still such a pipe dream that we didn't consider its intrusion.)
One bookcase.
Fiction could start there, Edwin Abbot, Achebe, Alcott, Alexander, Allende, and that makes the most (or the most linear) sense. Breaking up the fiction between floors might be disruptive but could work. RDC doesn't like this idea because House of the Spirits, fr'instance, is in pulp and pulp is unattractive. I say dividing books by ugliness is not a valid sort criterion.
We could do a Selection of Authors: DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, O'Brien, Pynchon, and Snyder are in his office, with a little duplication in the main collection. Their absence from the main collection doesn't bother me excessively: I don't actively miss Dharma Bums when I cast a dragonish proprietary eye over it. So that might work.
Also, a Selection of Authors could conveniently be Pretty Authors as well, since I have not restrained myself from buying every new Atwood and Byatt immediately and therefore in hardcover. Except instant book gratification also means that I have fucking Shelters of Stone in hardcover and the cliché of the compleat Harry Potter. I don't admit publicly to Jean Auel--if Clan of the Cave Bear sits among my favorites, the other three decently hide, and as soon as I notice that Shelters is in pulp I'll buy it again so I can donate the hardcover (which does not fit among the Hidden but does not sit between Maya Angelou and Julian Barnes in proper alphabetical order, no no no). Also except that Atwood and Byatt are Favorites and therefore next to my desk in my study with the Cynthia Voigt and Watership Down.
See, I had to write all this out. It reminds me that Haitch gave me a lovely Annotated Alice and I think that would work with my properly, Tenniel-y illustrated Alice and my improperly, lisa-illustrated Alice coloring book (also a Haitch gift) and Jeff Noon's Automated Alice and therefore Vurt and hey, Nymphomation looks vaguely pornographic, and there you have it, the beginning of a web of books, better than a selection or a range.
I came home from the gym, ate a dinner comprising--hey!--pasta and cheese en famille except I should say en flocke, and then Blake and I read on the couch and pet his little buddy head and he tucked and I might have snoozed a little bit because if there's anything more peaceful than a buddy tucked and one-footed under my chin I have yet to experience it. And I finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
I had no idea how he was going to end this. He ended it well, in a tone so apropos for its character that yep, that's the only way he could have closed it. Its population of beautiful, ornery, unique characters reminded me a little of Secret History.
Before bed I actually put away laundry, though it was only dry this morning, instead of letting it age on the floor. Really, I was proud.
In bed I began another José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Its title in Portuguese is O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo, which threw me. Ignorant of Spanish as I am, I read about half of One Hundred Years of Solitude before realizing that José and Arcadio Segundo were juniors, seconds. I know Spanish and Portuguese are much less closely related than I assumed for my first 2.5 decades, but I don't get "segundo" here. If it means something like "following," that would account for both the "junior" and "according to" meanings.
In 2001 I assigned myself the various lists. In 2002, I meant to read a lot of nonfiction and I did read more than usual for me but then read more from the lists. Starting late last year--after A House for Mr. Biswas struck me, after four chapters, as being more depressing than I needed and I actually gave up on it--I have been reading more current fiction than I have for a long, long time, it seems, and I am glad of it. I'm not allowed to claim as a favorite author anyone whom I read in translation, but if I ever either relax that rule or learn Portuguese, Saramago will be on the list.
Last night at 9:30, RDC suggested we go to bed, since I was already snoring through "8 1/2." So I uncurled myself, brushed my beak, got in bed, and bingo, I couldn't sleep.
I had fascinating reading though. In addition to "8 1/2," I borrowed Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts: the Art & Science of Keeping House from the 'brary yesterday. I was interested in the first 150 pages or so: her (pedantic) reasons and theory and how and why. The home is important: yes, I can get behind that. Some ways are better than others to do stuff. Yep. Then all of a sudden she threw herself into Germs Will Kill You Dead and Here's How to Pronounce Fabric Names and I was bored.
Though not yet asleep, so I continued with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
Which is why I was so proud to be in the gym at 9:30 this morning.
Burble burble burble. I am not sure my comprehension of this book would decrease if it were narrated by Hawking himself. Usually I would read-read such weighty matters, and read and reread and rereread certain sentences until either they penetrated (for the nonce) or I decided my brain couldn't handle them. The audio format doesn't work well for this kind of material. Also I think there are formulae, not many, that can't be narrated, and illustrations. I really want Mrs. Who to show up with her skirt and an ant to explain it all to me.
I don't get it. Albert Camus claimed The Postman Always Rings Twice as an influence on The Stranger. This is another of those Modern Library Great Books that leaves me totally cold. I understand why, fr'instance, someone would think Deliverance is an important Usan novel. I do. I don't think it's as important or as great as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can see its import.
James M. Cain's appeal eludes me. Because Dalton recommended him, I read Double Indemnity and two others of almost the exact same plot in one volume. I disappointed him when I found them boring. I think "Mildred Pierce" is a great movie and I'd still like to read it. But why Postman is all that and a bag of chips, I don't get.
In Postman, I could get past the misogyny to understand that the denouement is a masterwork of plotting. I couldn't get past the insurance stuff, because while he hadn't yet written Double Indemnity, why did he write it, since it's all here? Great plot twist or not, still I don't understand why Cain is anything more than a hack.
I've only read Maltese Falcon of Dashiel Hammett, and I expect calling him a hack just because he wrote detective stories is unfair. It might be genre prejudice, but I don't understand how any mystery or detective story can be Great Literature.
Huh. And I read Camus's The Fall in the same class as Maltese Falcon. I loved The Fall, much more than I had The Stranger four years before. I liked Falcon okay, but would I have without Humphrey Bogart?
From Word-a-Day, an online subscription service:
agelast: someone who never laughs
edited to add,
sciolist (SAI-uh-list) noun: One who engages in pretentious display of superficial knowledge. Huh.
anopsia: absence of sight, due to a missing eye or other structural problem.
From Forgotten English, a page-a-day calendar my sister gave me for Christmas:
anteloquy: a preface, or the first...turn in speaking; also, a term which stage-players use, by them called their cue.
cunnythumb: in grasping, having the thumb aligned with, rather, than opposed to, the fingers.
volentine: birds, fouls [sic?]; alterations of Old French volatile, perhaps influenced by volant...capable of rapid motion or action.
I finished The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and now I'm somewhat at a loss of What Next. The Home Despot Kitchen and Bath Remodel Book doesn't count. Right now I have Donna Tartt's Little Friend ready to go in my bag but I have lost some of my urgency about that. I guess I should have read it immediately, but I flew twice in the weeks after and it's large for a plane book. I also have Postmodernism for Beginners in my gym bag, because it's slim and easily interruptable.
I'm listening to David Denby?'s Great Books, about his experience taking Columbia's literature and humanities core classes again, 30 years after the first go. It's abridged, but it was RDC's last month's choice, and it's read by Ed Asner, which makes the narrator sound to me like he's 78 instead of 48.
Right now on my bedtable are Mary Anne Mohanraj, Torn Shapes of Desire; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Paradise fucking Lost; Don Quijote, ditto; the King James Bible (Cambridge UP); Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, which I am frankly not overly interested in; and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
I have gorged on Great Yet Accessible recently--Byatt, Chabon, Saramago--yet I still am intimidated by Great--Milton and Cervantes--while fearing that purely accessible--Zadie Smith--will disappoint me, as James M. Cain just did.
I had heard a lot of good things about this and wanted it to be as good as I hoped. It was the first YA book I've read in months and months. I really liked the Sarah Byrnes thread--it reminded me of Freak the Mighty and So Much to Tell You, the latter of which I really like, and of Ordinary People, what with the swimming and the older brother, and of Silent to the Bone, what with the not-talking. But I thought the author didn't do so well with his other plotlines, which overdominated the primary (or so I thought, given the title) and more interesting line. I was really afraid of the same sort of teacher-denouement as in The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, especially since the vice-principal was exactly that caricatured. Also, such an incredibly reductionist presentation of abortion with such exaggerated hypocriticism (or hypocrism, Haitch) weakened the book's integrity as a whole. I wanted to know Sarah Byrnes more.
Now, this I had no apprehension about. If Absolutely Normal Chaos isn't at the level of Walk Two Moons or even Chasing Redbird, well, how many books of that calibre can one author have in her? However, for her to be a step or two down from there is still better than most.
The protagonist is 13 again, and a girl again, but also this time a boy. Twins, though, so while two different people not exactly independent. She set up the Dickensian antagonists in an I hope impossible fairy-taley way, so their comeuppance would be entirely satisfying.
I would love to live in Ruby Holler, so I could chase a redbird and befriend Salamanca, or so I like to think. I loved Sal's grandparents, but I know details like the grandfather's driving and the grandmother's Peeby would drive me round the bend, since I'm intolerant like that. And even without them I would stand no chance against the accents. But I really want to know Sairy and Tiller in real life. (Of Tiller, of course, I was immediately fond in an automatic, Cynthia-Voigt-reflex, way.) But of course I already do, in Nisou's parents.
Michael Moore's right about a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, his rhetorical tricks detract from his credibility. He wants his book in politics instead of humor? Then he should stop the false causality.
Saturday I plied the junk and antique shops on south Broadway. I saw some really amazing quarter-sawn oak stuff and some not so amazing stuff. I bought a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook for two bucks. Something from it occurred to me a while ago so I looked it up to find that it's out of print. But it's so very very high school that I'm glad to have it.
Anyway, the author, Lisa Birnbach, lists preppy nicknames and suggests the given names they might spring from. She says "Bunny" might be for someone whose given name is Corcoran.
Huh.
A valid criticism I have read of The Secret History is that Donna Tartt has no idea of Californians, so the narrator rings false. I think she deliberately distances the narrator from warmth and regular human interaction, and that might make him, including his being from California and the California she places him in, ring hollow.
She was a classmate of Brett Easton Ellis at Bennington in the early '80s, when the Handbook came out. A main character in Secret History, set in an anonymous Bennington, is named Bunny Corcoran. I'm thinking she consulted the Handbook to make the New England seem New Englisher.
I bought the damn thing so I should read it. Three months of negative reviews have soured me on its prospects, though, and I can't believe that if Tartt didn't notice she had a twelve-year-old girl detective named Harriet her editor also neither did nor said so, and I understood about Harriet tipping someone the Black Spot not because I've read Stevenson (although maybe I should have after The Secret History) but because I've read Ransom. Also on page 82, "The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo."
I borrowed The Iliad from the Field branch on Saturday (this branch is located conveniently across the street from Bonnie Brae ice cream, where a double-dip of Triple Chocolate probably didn't help the weight issue). Maybe I should just stick with that.
where "fucking" is an adjectival modifier and not a verb.
Uberboss just excused me from reading any book that doesn't thrill me, like The Little Friend. I just can't get over that no one told Tartt to change Harriet's name. I mean, okay, it's only the protagonist, and it's not as if I have ever averred that someone's name affects their character, oh no. But damn. A twelve-year-old girl detective with that personality, named Harriet? This book might be a Louise Fitzhugh alternate universe.
Anyway, so I picked up Jane Eyre when I got home, because that book annoys me and I am insane. Because Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen. Because I'm not that much fonder of Jane Eyre than I am of Fanny Price. It doesn't annoy me as much as Wuthering Heights, which outright pisses me off for its overthetoppiness. I do like Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, so the Brontës aren't a total loss.
The reason I always come back to Jane Eyre, though almost never the whole thing, is that I continue to try to puzzle out Mrs. Fairfax. Have you read it? Why not? Spoilers follow. Mrs. Fairfax knows there is a madwoman in the attic. She loves Jane, or is fond of her, and respects her as a good and proper young woman. But does she know that the madwoman is Mrs. Rochester? Mr. Rochester says, after the botched wedding, "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts." Is her questioning Jane when she learns of their engagement meant as a warning? That is the last time we hear her voice directly; afterward when the wedding party return from the church Mr. Rochester rebuffs the congratulations offered by her, Sophie, and Adèle. Much later, after the fire, Jane tells her reader about Adèle but not about Mrs. Fairfax. She was such a priss to decent old Hannah that I wonder what her attitude to Mrs. Fairfax might be.
Lou Grant narrating Great Books made the David Denby seem even older than his attitude. He said a reason for women and minorities to read the traditional canon is that it is a body of knowledge traditionally denied to these demographics who now shouldn't deny it of themselves. Something occurred to me on my bike ride home that I've now forgotten, about how just because women now live in a man's world doesn't make the man's world such a hot one to begin with that anyone should clamor to be part of. Thought that's truth, I don't like that it might lead to no one's reading Gilgamesh or Othello anymore. The real problem is that with more texts (a word Denby despises) recognized and necessary and worthy and important, curricula are still constricted. Why not two courses of the canon rather than one?
I am so absolved from reading this book. Not only p. 82's passive "compose" thing and UberBoss's dominus-nabiscoing yesterday but today on p. 289: "You look like one of the Odum's to me."
RDC suggested this is meant to be possessive. Nah. We know Mrs. Odum is dead, and even the redneck speaker wouldn't say "the Odum" to refer to a single person, the father.
However, I am more than halfway through.
I did ask UberBoss what he is reading these days. Twentieth-century political history and commentary as usual, and he didn't like Summerland, which I lent him. But no good new novels.
I feel like I'm in the long dark tea-time of the soul here. Barbie was on the (local, daytime) news Thursday promoting Good Books Lately, discussing spring's new paperbacks. Even she was fishing, naming We Talk Pretty One Day (which I read in paperback in Haitch's pool in the summer of 2001 and Four Corners, which on her recommendation RDC gave me for Christmas 2001 (in hardcover)). One sounded good, a memoir of a white African growing up in Rhodesia. I forget the fourth. But I did remember to record the 11 a.m. hour.
Later. I remember the fourth: Atonement, which I read in paperback in September and which was wonderful but which isn't a new book for spring.
Torn Shapes of Desire, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Seamus Haney's Beowulf, two M.F.K. Fishers (Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me and Last House), Peter Ackroyd's English Music, the His Dark Materials trilogy next to Paradise Lost, House of Leaves, Don Quijote, The Lecturer's Tale, the King James Bible, Madeleine L'Engle Herself, The Name of the Rose, Jeff Noon's Vurt and Automated Alice, my Alice in Wonderland coloring book, an Annotated Alice, and Alice herself; and Mad Madge (the first woman to publish in English, from Molly). This is PLT's suggestion of high-end porn, books that I haven't read yet or need to reread or that (like Pullman) go with books I haven't read yet (Milton). In the oversized bottom shelf, the oversized books previously in the Pooh bookends downstairs: The Music Pack, The Art Pack, The Arthurian Book of Days, Sisters, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Oh the Places You'll Go! The Father Christmas Letters, Granddaughters of Corn, Good Morning Captain! a pop-up Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a lavish Kings and Queens of England and another less lavish, and Geoffrey Ashe's Mythology of the British Isles; plus three unread books large enough not to look dwarfed among such tall companions, Infinite Jest, PrairyErth, and a book of 20th century short stories by women.
And I guess I do consider "that I haven't read yet" to be a valid sort criterion. "That don't look dwarfed among tall skinny companions" is less valid but I'm going with it. Unfortunately, those three also happen to be predominantly blue, which could seem like a cover rather than a content choice--as if size were okay but color were too base. Oh, The Places You'll Go! doesn't belong among the picture books, not being a children's book; and Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters might really belong among the Christmas books but it's too delightful a volume to be only seasonal.
One good book, one really not.
More Harriet the Spy: Harriet loses her Ole Golly, and her parents are as distant as the Spy's. She has her Little Friend Hely (pronounced Healy; is this some sort of Southern thing, not that that would excuse it?) as the Spy has Sport.
More copyediting errors: Tartt confuses "repetitious" and "repetitive." Is Allison's note "IDAJ..." a typo or does the J mean something elusive? "Part of the reason was because..."?! Pot, kettle, whatever; I am, very obviously, not even proofread here, which is not a published book.
One of the criticisms I've read of The Secret History is how much more like a stage set than real life Tartt's Vermont feels. I didn't remark this, and on reread it didn't bother me, because I thought she was going for a mood more than for verisimilitude, the way (I know I'm almost alone in this) the impossible generations in The Corrections didn't bother me because Franzen was going for archetype (I thought).
I wouldn't know how fake her Mississippi is. I did wonder why a felon whose offenses were state would have wound up in Angola, but that might be a regional prison rather than a Louisiana-only institution. The attitudes really seemed to bend back and forth between '50sish and '70sish, and that really got to me. If she named a year at the start, I missed it; for ages I read thinking it was set in the '50s but then something--a TransAm, mention of Vietnam--would make it '70s. The boy Hely imagines himself as Bond in "From Russia with Love" and that was 1963. How would a boy not yet born in 1963 know a movie from that year, before VCRs and in a town probably lacking in rerun movie houses? I guess it could have been on television. Would it have been more credible for him to refer to a '70s Bond film?
Yeah, I was fed up anyway, and fed up more because I woke at 3 in the morning and ended up reading in the living room, finishing the book just after 7:00, but at the end Tartt really got clumsy. Though I'm still not certain of the year, it had to be after 1977 because a boy has a "Star Wars" toy. Since it's set in summer, it might even be 1978. Yet Tartt has a character mention the Indianapolis and the sharks as if no one would have known about it, as if, therefore, "Jaws" had not yet been released. "Jaws" came out in 1975.
I am impossible to please lately. I spent the morning in the really blissfully comfortable reading chair with The Iliad, a sweet-tempered cockatiel, and the propensity, after the sleepless night, to nap (despite a delicious vanilla latte that I drank soon enough after breakfast to enjoy rather than be drugged by).
After he listened to Great Books, RDC looked for audio versions of The Iliad and the ones he found through Audible were all abridged. I told him I wouldn't worry about it: the abridgement would leave mostly only the begats on the cutting room floor. What, like cataloguing the boats and warriors isn't equivalent to the begats of the Old Testament?
Anyway, now I'm reading all the begats, a bunch of people and cities with unpronounceable names, and wondering what I got myself into. Did I read this in English 112 with Tom Roberts or not? I remember clearly his saying that there are two types of people, those who prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey and those who don't know enough to prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey. I probably wouldn't remember that comment if I had read more than only the inferior one at the time--so was he only mentioning it in passing or introducing it in lecture? I would have read it, even freshling year, if he had assigned it, however minimal my understanding might have been. (I was damn stupid about my college papers and notes and syllabi, early on.)
I'm ready for Achilles's anger and Agamemnon's nobility and the gods' capriciousness and so on, but right now all I see is a bunch of people sticking it to another bunch of people.
I really like the translator's and editor's notes, from which I learned that Homer's Greek is not a Greek that anyone would have spoken. Like, ever. It's more than just archaic and rarefied, as the English of the King James Bible seems to a contemporary reader. Or something. But I do have this expectation of high-blown language, so in the text whenever someone, mortal or deathless, uses a contraction, I cringe. I feel like the translator uses a contraction for meter, not because it's akin to the original language. Well, that is the dilemma of translation.
A while ago I noticed "1984" on Sundance. I had never seen it so skipped to it, realizing for the first time that John Hurt plays Winston Smith. In the moments I watched, I decided he's wonderful in the role (however unfilmable the book is) and to record the next showing of it.
I had the Eurythmics soundtrack and loved particularly the song "Julia." I watched part of the movie last night and I am really glad the music is as toned down as it is. I watched a cinematization of The Chocolate War once and in addition to how changes in the denouement completely altered the theme, the Yaz soundtrack totally detracted from the movie's--integrity? timeli- and timelessness? The book is dated but not impossibly so; Yaz makes the movie scream mid-'80s.
Last night and today I reread bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four. How Orwell combines the satire and dystopia with a compelling plot continues to impress me. Minor nitpicking: Winston wouldn't know who St. Sebastian is when he plots what he would do to Julia should she ever fall into his clutches.
Katherine Mansfield, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel"
Willa Cather, "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament"
Virginia Woolf, "Solid Objects"
Elizabeth Bowen, "Her Table Spread"
The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women, edited by Hermione Lee, is a good collection as far as I can tell, of first-rate female authors. I liked the first two stories I read, not so much the second two; I skipped the Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton (for now, I hope).
What intrigues me is how this book got into my house. I have no memory of having bought it, and for me that's unusual. I could unless forcibly stopped tell you when and how I came by my books. UConn Co-op, Coventry Books, UConn Pound Sale, Tattered Cover, on vacation, naughtily at a big box, Capitol Hill Books, remotely, yep. And this is a British book, Brit edited, published, and printed. But it looks quite new, as if it didn't come from a used bookstore.
Anyway. It was a good choice to put in the bookcase, because as I sat this morning rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, I noticed it and picked it up instead.
I have no idea how I learned about this book. It is a series of vignettes, memories of maybe the author's or author's mother's time as a refugee, and the stories themselves are charming but don't add to a cohesive whole. I thought of both Journey to America, whose family is in much more danger in their emigration, and From Anna, in which Anna grows as a character against the backdrop of emigration. In Rabbit, mentions of atrocities and tragedies appear without context and the purported theme, that the family can manage as long as they're all together, isn't strongly developed.
Or maybe I was just horrified that when they left Germany, hoping and intending to return within a year, the protagonist took her new stuffed animal instead of her constant, lifelong companion of Pink Rabbit. The theft is, of course, that the Nazis confiscated their possessions in storage immediately. She's a child, and she thought both that they would return quickly and that their belongings would be safe. But she left Pink Rabbit behind. I know this is unreasonable of me: I still feel guilty for taking Melvin the raccoon with me to Florida when I was 10 instead of Booboo.
Perhaps because I read the form so seldom, a short story seems like something to be studied as much as read, so the absence of individual introductions seems pretty bizarre to me. There is a general introduction, though short, and the collection is arranged chronologically (I think by story publication date, which would explain the seven-story gap between the two Elizabeth Bowens, though not why there are two by her when only one by everyone else). I want some context; but that's what the web's for.
Kate Chopin, "The Storm." Less depressing than "Story of an Hour" or The Awakening.
Edith Wharton, "Souls Belated."
Katherine Mansfield, "The Man without a Temperament."
Pauline Smith, "The Sisters."
Dorothy Parker, "Here We Are."
Henry Handel Richardson, "Two Hanged Women."
Jean Rhys, "Let Them Call It Jazz."
Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the PO."
Elizabeth Bowen, "The Happy Autumn Fields."
Antonia White, "The House of Clouds."
Katherine Anne Porter, "Rope."
Marjorie Barnard, "The Lottery."
Anna Kavan, "An Unpleasant Reminder."
Stevie Smith, "Sunday at Home."
Doris Lessing, "The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange."
My new audiobook is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I tried to listen to this a few times before, but it seems to curse whatever audiotapes it's put on. I'm skipping the tape this time, which might help. Or maybe I previously tried to listen to Les Misérables, because I remember whatever Hugo it was beginning with a trial, which this doesn't. It's read by George Guidall, which is all I need to know.
I don't remember the name of the late '80s cat in Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street. I remember hand-drawn signs in the store, "Please do not stick your tongue out at the cat." Even I wouldn't do that.
Last night,
Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street"
Flannery O'Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge"
Bessie Head, "Looking for a Rain God"
Elizabeth Taylor, "Mr. Wharton"
Jean Stafford, "A Summer Day"
Nadine Gordimer, "Six Feet of the Country"
Grace Paley, "The Loudest Voice"
This morning,
Alice Walker, "Everyday Use"
Muriel Spark, "The First Year of My Life"
Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson"
Anita Desai, "Private Tuition by Mr. Bose"
Jane Gardam, "The Weeping Child"
Janet Frame, "Swans"
Angela Carter, "Peter and the Wolf"
Alice Munro, "Miles City, Montana"
Ellen Gilchrist, "Revenge"
Ahdaf Soueif, "The Wedding of Zeina"
Jayne Anne Phillips, "Mamasita"
Bobbie Ann Mason, "Shiloh"
Fay Weldon, "Weekend"
Suniti Namjoshi, "Three Feminist Fables"
Rachel Ingalls, "Third Time Lucky"
A.S. Byatt, "The July Ghost"
Jamaica Kincaid, "What I Have Been Doing Lately"
Lorrie More, "Places to Look for Your Mind"
A.L. Kennedy, "Friday Payday"
Amy Bloom, "Sleepwalking"
Georgina Hammick, "The Dying Room"
Rose Tremain, "The Candle Maker"
Shena Mackay, "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land"
Helen Simpson, "Labour"
Marina Warner, "Ariadne after Naxos"
Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings"
I've only just started this but it starts well: "I'm not licensed for suicides!" I am so in the mood for some gallows humor after Little Friend and a bunch of really good but not excessively light-hearted stories.
Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard won the 2002 Newbery. It was the first time in several years I had never heard of the author and I came to this book with absolutely no expectations.
It was lovely. I really liked how she pulled back the curtain in the endnotes and spoke more about the pottery and explained some of the choices she made, altering or guessing at history. It reminded me a bit of Girl with a Pearl Earring in the inventing the background for a piece of art.
Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.
The blurbs kinda threw me--Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington, Ann Coulter and Al Franken. The last asked that his blurb be as far from Coulter's as possible. That might have been the funniest thing in the book.
I thought the whole thing was going to be a take-off on WWII posters, like the title one (when the object of the preposition was Hitler). But different wars need different posters.
At first I didn't see the Libertarian stuff that annoys RDC about him--I didn't know anything about him but "Politically Incorrect," which I never watched, and why he was fired. He seemed to understand the social contract, which seems to be generally absent from the Libertarian mindset. ("Which should the government tell me to wear a seatbelt? It's my life!"--"Because if you die or are injured, society has to pick up your slack. Because you don't live in isolation. Because no one is an island.") He admires JFK's speech on asking not what your country can etc. He understands that individual actions have worldwide consequi.
I agree with him that They hate us because we don't even know why They hate us, that the States commits violence by negligence on the rest of the world, and that the States hasn't been as obviously violent in its domination as previous powers have been. I also think the last is meaningless, because you cannot compare 20th century America even to 19th-century Britain, let alone any earlier power. I said this of war but it's true of superpowers as well: that the point of earlier wars is to make subsequent wars less necessary.
I also agree that we're so paralyzed by political correctness that we apply the same precautions to tottering grannies as to the demographic that's actually done harm. I cannot agree with him--and here is where the Libertarianism reared its ugly head--that we must have security at any cost and that security is government's only function.
Overall he was more left than I intended to find him. He illustrated how sense and dissent both are now vilified and I hope by his format made himself accessible to the apathetic.
No, I still haven't finished it. Two-thirds through, and I'm enjoying it but not enough not to interrupt it, not enough that it compels me above any other activity or book. A reason for my unenthrallment is squirmishness: I feel guilty for reading something that seems so prejudiced. Every race and culture is shown warts and all; Smith is an equal-opportunity mocker. And it is not racist to mention a truth of racism.
It's really funny in lots of places. Joyce and her self-righteousness showing her racism. Alsanai's malapropisms. "Post class aberration consideration period" for detention.
Ah yes. My not-having-finished-yet point is the title of the chapter I'm on, "More English than the English." I'm sure I had heard this sort of phrase before I tried to watch a four-hour Jimmy Stewart epic about "pioneering," read colonizing, the American West, whose title escapes me. I got a few minutes into it--just past the overture--when the narrator began to describe Stewart's character as "more Indian than the Indians." Y'know, because it was a decent culture and all, but it took Whitey to do it right and better than the lazy redskins. I turned it off without regrets. Anyway, that phrase now reminds me of that movie, and if I'm supposed to think of ethnicism upon reading it yeah I get that. But it makes me squirmy.
I have no idea why this took me so long to read. I enjoyed it all the way through, and I thought the dramatic culmination of all the threads at the end really well done.
When we got back from the gym, we lit a fire, one whose smoke went where it's meant to. RDC turned the chair to face the fire, and I lay my neglected yoga mat on the floor with the coarse-woven Mexican blanket on top. I thought I might still want the fleece blanket, because I am insane. My feet, more than six feet from the fire, did want it; my arms and face, stretched toward the fire, baked as I finished my book.
I love a fire. A particularly true line from A Single Shard is that there are two things people cannot resist watching: fire and falling water, always changing, always the same.
I read Poisonwood Bible in the fall of 2001 and Prodigal Summer the next winter or spring. I've been meaning to read more Kingsolver, and when I recently came across an essay about genetic modification--about a lot more than that--that reminded me again. I started Small Wonder Wednesday night and Animal Dreams this morning. I got a late start to the day, watching the bedroom darken as clouds thickened in the sky, reading in bed. The child not understanding her parent's love and the relationship between the sisters is going to make this book hurt and work for me, I am sure.
I recently read a searingly loving and painful essay a friend wrote about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's. Homero's chapters reminded me of that, of Charles Wallace Within Chuck in A Swiftly Moving Planet and his slippery time, of dear Littlejohn in the eponymous novel. Cosima and Halimeda, a close pair of sisters who consider their parent unfeeling; Cosima, unable to see the love Homero demonstrates, avoiding responsibility, not remembering stories from her childhood. If Cosima had been the younger of the sisters, three years apart, this book might have devoured me instead of vice versa. Older Cosima doesn't remember something that younger Halimeda does; this reminded me uncomfortably of my not remembering family incidents that happened when I was 12 that were repeats of things that had happened when my sister was 9, when she remembers more from a younger age.
Twins have been a theme lately. Loyd and Leander here; Magid and Millat in White Teeth, Ormus and Gayomart in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, John and Paul? Ottokar in Whistling Woman. Why Loyd had only one L is never explained. Because he's not Welsh, presumably. But the name reminded me of the neighbor-widow's unmissed dead husband in the Anastasia books, of the woman's never being able to take her husband seriously after he asked her to pronounce his name "Yoyd" as if it were a Spanish instead of a Welsh invention.
Animal Dreams. Wow.
That too clever-for-my-own-good first-person tone. I managed it for To Say Nothing of the Dog and that was thrice as long. I can handle it in this, as long as there aren't too many names like Paige Turner.
Names to look up, because I assume none is without its joke: Landen Parke-Laine (I get the Parke-Laine part). Milton Keens. Lamber Thwalts. Acheron Hades. Fillip Tamworth. Buckett. Edmund Capillary. Filbert Snood.
Books to contribute to the Invisible Library: Millon de Floss, A Short History of the Special Operations Network and Thursday Next--A Biography; Acheron Hades, Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit; Landen Parke-Laine, Once Were Scroundrels; Thursday Next, A Life in Special Ops.
My sister asked me Saturday if I liked Wind in the Willows. "It's okay," I said, "not one of my special favorites." I am not doing so well with the Quelling Impulsively Honest Answer In Favor of Weighing Actual Import of Question Before Opening Piehole.
She wanted to give me a copy she found in a used bookshop in Marblehead, a 1968 British printing with Arthur Rackham illustrations. Last year she gave me a bubble machine for my birthday, and she was really disappointed I didn't consider it the best gift ever (she has been pleased to note that it has featured prominently in all my outdoor festivities since, though).
I didn't say anything about Arthur Rackham vs. Original and therefore Right Ernest Shepherd decorations. I didn't go on about how the second half, with Toad getting all Napoleon-like (I don't mean Bonapartesque, I mean like in Animal Farm), depresses me. Ratty and Moley messing about in boats, that I like. Ratty and Moley finding Otter's child sleeping in the curve of Pan's arm as he pipes in the dawn, that I like. Toad driving a car and escaping from jail disguised as a laundress, not so much. I just left it at "not one of my favorites."
She wanted to give me a Foundational children's book printed in my birthyear, and probably all my recoiling is my own baggage. She didn't say anything about its being Valuable other than that it was a used and rare (so not necessarily both) bookstore.
I don't want to own a Valuable book. If a book is valuable monetarily, it had better be because it's someone or other's Book of Hours from 1361 and illuminated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. In which case it belongs in a museum (cue Indiana Jones). If a volume of Leaves of Grass is valuable because, I'm making this up, Wilfred Owen carried it into the trenches, it belongs in the Owen library. If a collector puts a dollar amount on it because it carries someone's signature, and you buy it for the signature not the content, then that's not true value. I love my copy of Possession more than I used to because now it has A.S. Byatt's signature on it, but that's emotional value to me because she spoke to me, we exchanged pleasantries, while she touched and held and signed the book. (It's also irreplaceable because for as much as I know you can only buy the book with Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Sir Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin on the cover. Aha--no, though the painting remains, the cover design is tainted witha Major Motion Picture thingie.)
Last year in Books of Wonder I saw a complete first edition of Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. Five or seven thousand dollars, if I recall. Now me, I'm dragonny with my books, bad at lending, bad at returning, prone to hoarding. But I can't imagine those four books being in any individual's private library, because what're you going to do, read them? Read them to a child, and risk the damage that makes cardboard books such a good idea for the very young? Read them in your armchair and risk losing one among the cushions? Read them with a stick of candy and drool all over the colored plates of precious stones and then not have Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle around to help you steam open the pages? Or, and this is the real sacrilege, "own" them but never ever read them because you might damage their physical selves, ignoring their content? I can't get behind that.
I feel guilty about Acquiring more children's books (when it's acquisition more than possession, a word I use deliberately). Especially picture books. I keenly feel the absence of Corduroy and, now that I rediscovered it, Umbrella from my library. But I do feel that it would be Wrong to Acquire books when they'll go mostly unread. There are many, many picture books that add to a Compleat or Representative Collection of the Necessary, but the only one I crave is The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
All that is because I just don't reread picture books very often (except Harold and the Purple Crayon). The Wind in the Willows is not a picture book. So maybe I was reluctant to be given it again for a different reason. As a matter of fact I have two reasons. One, I had it on my Amazon wishlist last year and my notstepmother gave it to me for Christmas (along with The Grapes of Wrath because she Understands the multifacetedness that is I. (She called that list intimidating. Sorry.)) Aiming for the G shelf with the book in paw, I laughed quietly at myself because, I now bothered to notice, I already owned it. It's heretical, isn't it, to own a book and not know it, to the point that you ask for it again because you're a grasping, acquisitive, dragonny sort? I'm going to pass my notstepmother's brand new book on to Emlet, keeping the used one because it's used. My sister's gift should be valuable for its sentiment--that she gave it to me, having selected it for her reasons--and it would be, except I would feel guilty for owning two copies of it (and I would have to keep the other for the illustrations).
Two, NCS gave a version of it to me, lo these many years. I finally read it the summer I lived with Nisou (another reason it's not sacred to me is that I didn't read it until 1988), and we loved the scene with Otter's child and Pan piping. She gave me a Picasso print of Pan piping (it's been on my wall ever since). I told NCS about that, and of course Pink Floyd, his favorite band, had an album entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. So he gave me a version, and I say "version" because the illustrations were just so wrong. The Rackham ones, from Amazon's sample pages, look okay; they're just not Original Shephard. Those in NCS's version I remember to be Off. (My memory could not possibly be tainted, oh no, especially considering the book did not long stay in my can't-say-possession--I think not even until I finally broke up with him nineish months later. Lord, but I was emotionally dishonest to us both.)
So anyway. Lots of baggage re Wind in the Willows particularly, assorted guilt about acquiring rather than possessing books particularly children's books.
I understand that a house designed for an individual is the most likely to be the best tailored to that person's quirks and needs, but jeepers.
She does clarify that she means "not so big" as "not necessarily small no sirree bob, merely smaller than you thought you needed," but some of these were gargantuan. The hiring of an architect and the building of a house from scratch makes the idea of such a house completely out of most people's grasp.
None of the McMansions in Highlands Ranch will, I pray, ever make it onto the National Register of Historic Places, while some of these domiciles could, but let's keep in mind that not everyone can afford a second house on Orcas Island for day trips from Seattle, or on Penobscot Bay, or in Westport, Connecticut, or Lexington, Massachusetts. I was not surprised that most of the houses were sited in the north, either New England or the Pacific Northwest, with an exception in Taos (another bargain community). One was in South Carolina and another was in the hill country around Houston (there were trees, so I wouldn't've ever guessed it was in Texas), but otherwise these were really desirable dream houses for the comfortably filthily rich.
I can't say the title misled me: Creating the Not So Big House. It didn't say anything about making the most space with what you have, which I would find more useful. Creating the Not So Big House was a big ol' exercise in architectural masturbation, and fun as such, but totally out of touch with normal people.
A fun romp, but an editor could have pranced around with a pair of garden clippers and tidied up a bit. I stopped noting characters because I never did get that inkpen implanted in my right index finger; at least the invisible books come conveniently packaged in the epitaphs. Braxton Hicks, fr'instance, was just amusing, like Linsey Woolsey in Auntie Mame. So I stopped hoping all the characters' names Meant something. I don't know Martin Chuzzlewit from a hole in the ground, though Quaverley is a great name; I was waiting for the Brontë stuff.
At the first mention of Jane Eyre the denouement is obvious and tantalizes you with satisfaction--eventually. That's good. Fforde does a decent job of briefly summarizing novels and integrating the summarizing into the action so someone's explaining Jane Eyre to a heretic nonreader didn't make me want to gauge my eyes out too much. That was fine. What wasn't fun was the tone. I am not well-versed in either detective or speculative fiction; a reason is that the tone of the first person narrators in these books usually puts me off by page one.
I'm thinking of Dan Simmons's Song of Kali. I remember that the author attempted to undo his protagonist's sexism through his wife's t-shirt, which read "A Woman's Place Is in the House...and in the Senate." Ooo, bumper-sticker humor, wittily original and redemptive. Anyway, that protagonist had that Tone. So did that of To Say Nothing of the Dog. The Left Hand of Darkness didn't, but I never finished it anyway. I can't think of another first-person-narrated skiffy book that I've read. There might be one.
The Tone is common enough in detective fiction as well to be spoofed in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and in "Calvin and Hobbes" through Tracer Bullet, and since this book is both vaguely speculative and vaguely detectivey, the presence of that Tone nearly put me off. Especially with a protagonist named Thursday Next. But not quite.
It was fun anyway, if not nearly as clever as it thought.
Yeah. The Tone. Maybe The Eyre Affair toned down the Tone enough for me to bear, maybe it's all in my imagination, maybe I wanted to like it because ÜberBoss liked it, maybe I wanted to like it because some Usual Suspects like it.
Maybe I just dealt because I'm gearing up for a big sf onslaught. I just put a slew of skiffy fiction on hold at the 'brary. Columbine found it amusing that I consider some books necessary to my cultural grounding; I just find it pathetic that I'm much more likely to succeed at slogging through Cryptomicon than Paradise Lost.
I was actually going to buy Ender's Game recently. It was there. It was cheap. It was trade not pulp size. Then I looked at the typeface--that was pulp not trade. I am hopeful that a library might have some of the books I want--Snow Crash in addition to the two above--in hardcover, though it's a detraction from the genre at all that so much of it is printed in paperback alone and not in cloth, and of that paperback, pulp not trade.
PLT sent me a Vernor Vinge book once. Pulp, hundreds of pages. Shyeah. Egg offered to lend me How Green Was My Valley, which I was listening to, so I could see how to spell some of the names. I finally got rid of copies of Crime and Punishment etc., that I bought at the annual library book sale when I only knew about obligations but not taste or translations, because if I ever do read any Dostoyevsky, it'll be in a readable format, not in pulp. I don't like pulp.
I also requested Hyperion, on PLT's recommendation. The author's name rang a bell--the Song of Kali fellow Dan Simmons. Bah. I should stick to discussing Barbara Kingsolver with STL instead.
I knew nothing about this except that it was on one of my lists, and then I read one of Jamaica Kincaid's short stories in The Secret Self. Lushly stark, if that's possible. I thought I would feel more connection with the protagonist given her name; I didn't, hence the "stark." Brief asides to Paul Gaugin (one of his paintings is on the cover) and, I'll have to check, I think The Second Sex.
I am listening to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not particularly closely. The first third--the download came in three sections--was mostly background noise. I listened to the second third this weekend but felt bad that Dandelion got all dirty in the garden with me. I might have set up external speakers on the porch but audio books really don't work well at such a cranked-up volume. It's in some primitive format, but it's narrated by George Guidall, which is all I needed to know.
When the librarian introduced "Stage Coach" at the 'brary earlier this month, she mentioned "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" as one the superb movies released that year. A child in the audience asked if the library were going to show that as well. "No," said the librarian, not adding, "and this version that I mentioned is not the Disney abortion you probably mean." I felt bad for the kid: I really don't think "Stagecoach" can be very fun for a seven-year-old. There's really not much adventure in it, just anxiety about the adventure.
I don't remember the movie of "Hunchback" much at all, just the basics--Charles Laughton begging for water and the creepy priest. I had forgotten the goat. As soon as someone mentioned trial for witchcraft, I twitched. There's going to be Goat Mortality, I just know it.
I am reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to RDC. I haven't read him a book since Christmas, with Bridge to Terabithia. As expected, the grounding in time and place that you get reading the book to yourself falters when my Yankee voice doesn't easily drop g's in dialogue, and the flavor of everyone's speech is diminished as I fumble to say "they" instead of "their."
But it's a great story. It was my first, and for years my only, exposure to what life was like for people for an entire century between the Civil War and Civil Rights. I really like May the Circle Be Unbroken as well, though it's a much less compelling story. I think Taylor tried to include too much and didn't integrate the pieces well. Of course it's hard to avoid seeing Wade Jamison as Atticus Finch during T.J.'s trial. But Stacey's job and Moe's cotton and Miss Annie Lee's voting and Cousin David's daughter and marbles-as-gambling too--those are a lot of themes to juggle, and they're not integrated very well.
Then there's The Land, which I was glad to read for more background on the Logan family but which just did not work as a story. I don't even remember The Road to Memphis. But I do love love love Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Is is okay that I bought this book directly before seeing "Stagecoach," a "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" western?
The stories and storytelling are remarkable. I wasn't sure of each narrator or what his relationship to everyone else might be but I felt strongly that that didn't matter. Years ago when I was having trouble getting in One Hundred Years of Solitude, someone told me not to try to keep track of the names but just absorb the beauty of the story. That's what I finally could do with this.
I really shouldn't've read Card's introduction first. I generally don't read an academic introduction first, because it's criticism and by an editor or critic, not the author. But this was an author and not academic, so I did. If I hadn't already known from his postings on the net and articles about him that he's a Mormon bigot and a poser, the introduction would have clued me. He's also an ostentatious jackass, attacking ad hominem those foolish enough not to like his book.
It's a good story, though Card surfaces not 20 pages in when Ender uses the boys' homophobia to manipulate his social standing in their little Lord of the Flies setup.
I interrupted my reading to open Moonshadow to say that the bits with Valentine and Peter as Demosthenes and Locke are pretty funny in the context of a conversation I had with Trish just the other night, as I chatted with her instead of starting the book, about Pinky and the Brain. "What we do every night, Pinky."
Charming and genuine, with real dialect. I think Krumgold reproduced well the rhythms of people fluent in both English and Spanish; it meshed well in my head with what little I know. A simple, if dated, bildungsroman with a really fine chapter as Miguel and his older brother makes sense of their theology. Plus sheep-shearing, for Farm Boy, and living in the Sangre de Cristo which is probably nothing like the territory around Animal Dreams but is enough for my eastern-living, urban-residing mind to make the connection.
When I reserved this, I asked the librarian if she had read it or then liked it. Her response was tepid. I offered that I had often not liked Avi in the past and wondered how much different (and better) this might be than his previous to win the Newbery (although his Nothing But the Truth is an Honor book). She supposed that if I hadn't liked him in the past, I wouldn't like this one: she hadn't either.
I started hopeful: it's set in England in 1377, points more in its favor than contemporary America (Truth) or even a ship (Charlotte Doyle) and I know I've read others by him obviously unmemorable. It's less clumsy than, say, Witch Child in illuminating for a 21st-century young reader certain points of daily life before electricity and running water without sounding like a lecture, and that's fine. But last summer while at Charenton I began a library book APB had just finished and recommended, called The Physician, also set in England in the middle ages, whose boy protagonist begins by being apprenticed to a juggler--well, a physician who attracts his patients with a juggling performance. That's as far as I got in The Physician, but it's enough to make me, already dubious about Avi, see this book's premise as derivative. Plus I read Lord Valentine's Castle, I'm sorry to say, I think on the recommendation of a man I was probably sleeping with at the time, I'm sorry to say, and where it wasn't tedious it was about juggling.
Eh. Newbery hasn't had a dud (that I've read) since...since...1962's Bronze Bow, though Elizabeth George Speare could certainly write herself a good Witch of Blackbird Pond (although what the ALA was thinking to award the medal to nonfiction light on the writing, like Lincoln: A Photobiography, I don't know. A good book, just not Newberyish). And this isn't a dud yet, on page 60. I doubt its target audience has read (or begun) The Physician or Lord Valentine's Castle so if I condemn it I'll do so on its own faults. Or merits. Whichever.
Edited to say: dud. An innocuous story, which is not what a Newbery ought to be. A bildungsroman (a term I probably apply far too broadly), as was Miguel, but with nothing for a reader to take away.
Someone or other who shouldn't have wrote some faux sequels for Jane Austen, The Third Sister about Margaret Dashwood and one for Georgianna Darcy whose name I forget. (Others have been okay, or, if not particularly Austeny, like Eliza's Daughter, at least an adequate story.) My problem with those two is that throughout the entire book you know Margaret and Georgianna are in love with Wrong-Seeming Men yet that they must marry by the end of the books. So you wait for the Wrong-Seeming Man to redeem himself, as Darcy did, or for the Right Man to show up. On both occasions, someone about whose personality and stake we know nothing swoops in at the end to claim his prize. Totally unsatisfying, even more than you ought to expect when you read faux Austen.
Same thing with Avi. Several potential plotlines to develop and he finishes one, an important one, with little but dialog exchanged to gauge the credibility the action.
You know, it could be his whole Sting-Prince-Cher-Madonna thing that I just don't cotton to.
Hookay, it happened again. Whenever I read Witch Child and The Watcher, one after the other, I noticed that both authors used the device of a coin broken in halves as mementos for people who're separating. Yesterday in ...And Now, Miguel, Miguel has a lucky stone with a hole through it. I am just starting Coraline and the protagonist is given a stone with a hole through it as a charm for luck or safety.
Edited to add: pleasantly ghoulish. I immediately thereafter started Sandman (again), where someone is being read Through the Looking Glass. I didn't need to read that that to know that Lewis Carroll must haunt Gaiman's dreams.
It is not just that they both have the same Vermeer on their covers that makes them similar to one another. There's also that I read them within months of each other and that Voigt's city of Trastad is (deliberately) very Dutch.
I just reread both of them over the past two days. Elske is satisfying for tying up all the Kingdom threads and for being better than Wings of a Falcon. Girl is just great, though rereading revealed a flaw: on page 46, she tells her family that her employers have a daughter her sister's age but on page 53 her sister sees her at the market with that girl and Griet says she had not mentioned the similarity in ages, that her sister should not feel displaced.
I love that book.
I have a few subliterary weaknesses. I speak freely of my pubescent and adolescent predilections for V.C. Andrews and Stephen King, respectively, and I write truthfully if with shame of my continuing addiction to Jean Auel, so you can imagine (or maybe you can't, if you really didn't try, so maybe you shouldn't, OMFB) how much lower my real cheesy subliterary guilty pleasure is.
I would like to state for the record that I seldom indulge in it. In fact, I haven't for years.
There is one title that was always my favorite, except I didn't know the title. Or the author. Only the series name and general plot. (Yes, it was a series.) The book might have resurfaced in my brain when my own personal Gracious Wings realized what a poor joke the male lead's name was. Eventually, a google search turned up a title, Amazon turned up a seller, and now, three months after I bought it--three months during which the vendor, or the vendor's pimp, alleged it had been sent out two days after I placed the order--it showed up in my mailbox (with a note from the vendor apologizing for her tardiness, which was due to illness).
I have to go now. I have to reacquaint myself with trash I knew was trash late in high school--when Stephen King didn't survive tenth grade.
I am so glad I borrowed this from the Cherry Creek library yesterday: the Audible.com version ended about seven minutes or one chapter too early. I thought that the goat's name was Jolie, because it was pretty, but it was Djali. Also Quasimodo was named for the Sunday on which he was found, and it happened to suit his person as well. There's a half-man holiday, like Whitsunday and Assumption? Okay.
I finished it on the porchswing.
Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" appeared in The Secret Self collection of short stories I read during the blizzard. These were mostly really good, with one, "Raymond's Run," particularly striking for its lovingness. I confess that I read most of this yesterday in the sun and today in Vito the Reading Chair, indulging in whatever nappitude happened by. So if I didn't follow "The Survivor," that's probably not Bambara's fault. "Maggie of the Green Bottles" and "The Johnson Girls" were also memorable.
By the end of this collection, I had got the point. The point, I must say, had eluded me through the first few installments. Neil Gaiman himself said in his afterword that he didn't find his voice until later on. As the characters, or single character of Dream, developed, I found the narrative more compelling.
I still don't think much of the artwork except for the covers, and for me the difference between a novel and a graphic novel is the, uh, graphics, so if they suck, I'm perfectly comfortable calling the whole shebang a comic book.
I might read more volumes of it.
I finished reading this to RDC last night. I am gratified that he liked it so much.
Next up I think might be Jackaroo, though Melissa found it so poorly done that I wonder if it will hold up to RDC's ear. Maybe The Giver, although that doesn't hold up for me. He does need some Voigt (that is, I want him to know some Voigt), but I am dubious how he will feel about the Tillerman saga, when it is so saga-ish. He would like Dicey (read, he had better like Dicey) but Homecoming might be too young or repetitive, although he grew up along their trek route just as I did. (No, he grew up west of New Haven, whereas I can remember when the Old Lyme A&P had the outdoor conveyor belt the Tillermans encountered, and I laughed when they entered Sound View and "everything looked very clean," because Sound View was as scary to me as any inner city when I was a child. Can you say "sheltered"? I knew you could!) Maybe The Runner? Maybe Island of the Blue Dolphins or Julie of the Wolves or My Side of the Mountain for Independent Wilderness Living, despite the Canine Mortality. Which is a factor in The Runner as well.
Me, I'm listening to Across Five Aprils. I should have listened to a sample first, though anyone following George Guidall would compare badly so maybe I should show the narrator some mercy.
Wow. I began this, desultorily and the first two pages, a few days ago; since then I've pussyfooted around it knowing I wanted to give it a reasonable chunk of time. Today I gave it my lunch period, 30 whole minutes, wheeee, but still, that's plenty of time to be dazzled.
If I didn't get as far into it as I ought to have, I blame that on looking up ataraxic and balanic and battenberg and, I admit, probity and catamite too, just to make sure.
I was about to write, I wonder who got the Booker that year, because this is just great. Then I looked at its publication date: 1989. Possession won the 1990 Booker and Remains of the Day the 1989. Well okay then.
I took the 2 bus to downtown from Cherry Creek Friday instead of the usual 83. That was interesting, prettier because it went north on Downing instead of Lincoln, hairier because of much narrower streets. Point being that I exited the bus at Grant and went to Capitol Hill books again. I saw Oscar and Lucinda (1988 Booker) with the Vintage mark and got all happy, but it had the movie cover anyway. Bleah.
RDC's timing was perfect: he pulled up just as I finished the last paragraph of The Book of Evidence. I read it yesterday and today, once I finally started. Frederick Montgomery reminds me of a Nabokovian protagonist in his inability to perceive and treat other humans as humans, and specifically of Pale Fire's because of his unreliability.
Unlike most books (in their small numbers) told in a single first-person monologue, this one worked. The monologue suits a megalomaniac well. The narration paused as, I the reader sensed, he gathered his thoughts or put down his pen and took it up again the next day. He used asides and addressed his probable readers--his solicitor, the judge--personally.
Really good. Plus it kept me, at least at the start, skedaddling for a dictionary.
I finished this somewhere over the Atlantic. I can see how someone who was used to Animal Dreams and this would be dismayed by the abrupt shift in tone in Poisonwood Bible. I do like her characters.
I wonder how much Sharon Creech likes Barbara Kingsolver.
I guess I am glad I read and enjoyed Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer before her earlier three. The difference in tone is striking, but all of them are good.
This is one of those books I can Appreciate but do not Love. I hadn't read it for ten years, and now I read it in Paris, and it's RDC's favorite, but except for some really lovely paragraphs about fishing and swimming and even bull-fighting, where some emotion shows, I wasn't in love.
When Mike responds to someone's question how he went bankrupt, he says, "Two ways. Gradually then suddenly." I laughed and told RDC that sounded like something Cary Grant would say. He sighed at my ignorance, telling me how much the book informed script-writing (and everything else). He quoted "Philadelphia Story," though not a Cary Grant line: "Belts will be worn tighter this year."
UberBoss lent me this just before I left, like the Friday, but between planting and flooding and guests two nights, I left for France with 30 pages left. I finished it today.
It's fun, though I'm not prepared to admit I might like detective or speculative fiction. At least the author is honest: when an outlandish scheme is proposed to solve a problem and someone asks what is that, another character admits it's a literary technobabble device. That cracked me up.
Much better than The Sun Also Rises. His writing life in Paris and elsewhere, not so much with the racist slurs, and a little kid called Mr. Bumby. Gertrude Stein, and how he fell out of love with her (hearing her plead with her nameless companion); Ezra Pound, and how disappointed he was that Pound had never read the Russians; Tolstoy (who appears only through his books), whom Hemingway loved even though he wrote so badly (according to Hemingway, who maybe didn't see more than one way to write well); Ford Madox Ford, "as he called himself then" and what a twit he was; skiing in Austria and having the legs for it because lifts didn't exist and you couldn't ski what you couldn't climb.
Eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, from transcribed oral histories and discovered secret writings buried and sealed for years, from people who are known to have died during the war, people who're known to have survived the war, and people whose fates will be forever unknown.
I tried to listen to Across Five Aprils while weight-lifting, but for a clumsily narrated audio book it's really affecting. Okay, it is about the Civil War, from a civilian point of view, based on the author's grandfather's boyhood, but it's not as if I don't know what happens. So in the gym I listened to stuff like "Express Yourself"--maybe that's why I could lift so much--and in the yard I listened to Irene Hunt, where I could cry when the names in the family Bible were read out, those with one date, and those with two.
Clumsily narrated, but a good story, skillfully interweaving the nation's political and military battles into a civilian family's life. Hunt mentioned the family's homestead's "dooryard" all through the book, and I should have realized the allusion she was building up to before Appomattox, when she first mentioned the shrubs that grew there.
I was doing a mailing at work, and it was a pretty empty day, so I could listen to speakers instead of headphones. And tear up on my own and the family's behalf, after the 14th of April, 1865.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
I enjoyed, I pondered, I was inspired by, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge, so when I saw this on Jessamyn's reading list I found it in the library.
Smithsonian magazine has the trick of taking a subject, however arcane, and making it interesting to the common reader. Shattuck does this with the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who emerged from a forest in southwest France in 1800. I read it expecting more about the nature of feral children and their ability to learn and use language--Victor spent his first several years of civilization in an institute for the deaf--than I found but it was interesting enough and a fast read.
Pictures! Pictures of Colin Firth! Pictures of all the rest of them, including David Bamber, who played Mr. Collins, looking--quite startlingly--kind of attractive, in a Wes Bentley circa "American Beauty" kind of way.
Also some words. I was particularly interested in the research process. The Complete Servant, published in 1825. Digging through sketchily cataloged stores of wigs and hats. How to light a scene so it can be filmed without forgetting that in 1813 there was neither a constantly full moon nor the convenient 20th-century fallback of damping black asphalt for better reflectivity.
As someone said recently of Can You Forgive Her? too much fun to get Serious Litterachur points for. Soap opera and all that Dickens interconnectedness. Way too much fun, even with the brickmakers' plight and Jo.
That I can't remember the source of this recommendation makes me itch, but recommended or discussed it was, so I requested it of the library. Someone whose taste I generally respect later said it was good, better than 1984.
Whatever.
Its descendents are 1984 and Brave New World, or so says the back of the translation. They're also dystopias, but otherwise but I see more of it in Anthem and This Perfect Day than in the former pair. Really it's all through This Perfect Day, to the point that Ira Levin should acknowledge Zamyatin (maybe he does).
The second recommender liked its mathyness and I did like how no revolution can be the last one because no number can be the last one, and how frightening the concept of the square root of negative one must be in an exactly rational society.
Mostly I thought it dull, like "Logan's Run" and The Giver. (Okay, The Giver isn't dull but frustratingly undeveloped).
I don't remember when I developed a taste for dystopias. I had 1984 in tenth grade and either Brave New World as well or I read it independently.
I also liked post-apocalyptic fare, or maybe only liked The Stand so much--one book when I was 14--that I drew a fallacy of generalization. Earth Abides disappointed mostly for its premise that Earth needs human husbandry but partly because I have an expectation I will like post-apocalyptic fiction--why I have that expectation, since it was only the The Stand, and that during my mercifully short Stephen King period, I don't know. Oh yeah, also Empty World by the Tripods trilogy's John Christopher, and I must have read several post-Armageddon books as a teenager as well, that being during the early '80s when we all expected to be toasting marshmallows over each other by next week. On the Beach was okay. I would have liked it better if I hadn't hated Shute's Town Like Alice.
Anyway, dystopias.
I must have read Ira Levin's This Perfect Day during high or maybe middle school as I branched out from Stephen King (I read and reread Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives, Boys from Brazil, and even his first one about people who take over the night. Boys and Day were my favorites, by far.) In my Ayn Rand stage, I adored Anthem. I read Utopia freshling year of college, and Erewhon sometime during college, though not for a class.
I should not be drawing a blank here. Oh of course! Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, but of course that was, according to her intention, a utopia. Is The Dispossessed a u- and dystopia? This is how to get along on a subsitence-level planet and this is how excessive a luxurious planet can be? "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" shows up on a discussion of dystopian texts, speaking of LeGuin, but I wouldn't call that a dystopia anymore than, say, The Handmaid's Tale. Because their settings but not their primary themes are dystopian? I'm not sure I have a reason other than that.
The only unfamiliar title searches of dystopian novels turn up is It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. When I remember to read that, let me remember why.
Someone recently compared this with The Lovely Bones while implying that the greater success of the latter was due to its being marketed as straight fiction instead of being ghettoized into fantasy. So I picked this up to see; the ongoing issue of What Is Genre Fiction interests me.
One reason The Lovely Bones sold better is that it's an adult book, or more easily an adult book, than this, which is straight YA (another layer of ghetto). Another is that Bones is about the death but more so about the relationships, and less the reason for the death--it's thematically more complex.
House aside--Flying in Place is from Tor, so I mentally waved at the Nielsen Haydens whom I know by two removes through online journaling and three in the real world--I wouldn't call either a fantasy. Fantastical elements do not make a fantasy in my world, any more than the horses and the southwest made All the Pretty Horses a western. To me the only thing that makes a genre book genre rather than mainstream is being formulaic.
We reminded me of dystopias, obviously, and I searched for a used This Perfect Day online. It arrived yesterday. It and We and Anthem all have in common that the protagonist can't handle the idea of his woman touched by another. I wonder if Asher's name is in The Giver is because of Ashi here. Probably not, but it's such an uncommon name I've wondered how Lowry thought of it. I didn't like We, and this is Ira Levin cheesy and derivative of We, but it was a lot more fun to read. Maybe because it had a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment, when Papa Jan shows Chip the factory.
Years ago, somehow, my mother-in-law and I discovered that we are the only other people we've ever known to have read the book. I called her yesterday when it arrove and she was excited. She has never read Boys from Brazil either, another book I excacvated from my mother's attic in January, so I have to get to the post office to ship them both off in time for her vacation.
I bought this not as long ago as I had assumed, since it was published in English in 1993. But it's an intriguing title and the cover is pretty, and it's about Greek mythology, and really what more do you need? I put it, somewhat guiltily, into my to-be-read shelf a few months ago, and then Teresa Nielsen Hayden mentioned it and so did Lucy, so I picked it up again or for the first time.
It's been a long time since I've read philosophical fiction, or whatever you would call this. Milan Kundera and Robert Calasso have probably nothing in common besides their ability to intimidate me. I do know my d'Aulaire and Hamilton and Homer and Ovid inside and out, which has to help, but not noticeably.
The prose, even in translation, is rich and melodic.
"For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims" (p. 95).
Spoilers abound, following in white text: Nothing that happens in the first 800 pages has anything to do with the series as a whole. This reminded me uncomfortably of Shelters of Stone, in which nothing that has anything to do with the series happens until the very end, when Ayla and Whinney both hatch and Ayla decides to become a shaman. Rowling does the same thing with Sirius that George Lucas does with Obi-Wan Kenobi, in stripping the protagonist of his last remaining parental figure, but as the exact parallel to Obi-Wan is not Sirius but Dumbledore, to lose Sirius instead of Dumbledore wasn't as bad as could be. Also, we barely know Sirius, since he hardly figured in Goblet of Fire and scarcely appeared in this either to any personal degree. Despite that Sirius's Animagus form was a big black dog named Padfoot, I remain fonder of Lupin. And of Mad-Eye Moody. In the final pages of exposition--Rowling also does the Bad Guy Gives Away Evil Plan thing--Dumbledore admits to making a mistake, failing in his protection of Harry by thinking as himself, as an old man, instead of as a young nearly-man, as Harry. He also describes Sirius as the one person Harry would go to any length to rescue--which makes me wonder why it was Ron, not Sirius, at the bottom of the lake in the final test of the Triwizard Tournament. My answer: because the reader knows Ron, and the reader knows Ron because Ron'd been there all along. He didn't trot into and then out of the story as Sirius did.
Dumbledore told Harry a lot but he still hasn't let on why Snapes can't have the job he wants so badly. And if he had a reason not to realize that that wasn't really Mad-Eye Moody last time, I've forgotten it.
My Usan edition seems to have been incompletely Usanized. Harry eats "sausages and mash" instead of "bangers and mash" but nor does he eat "sausages and mashed potatoes." There's a reference to the Sorcerer's Stone. But Fred and George sell candies that make you sick so you can "skive" off classes, and they "take the mickey out of" Ron for being made a prefect; a character called Mundungus is a fence and uses a slang word for "steal" that slips my mind--"scrog," maybe. Most obviously, Harry also puts on his trainers. That's not Rowling's fault of course but the publishing house's for Usanizing the text at all and then fast and sloppy to boot.
I'm certainly not fond of Rowling's excessive use of capitals when more expressive writing would better indicate emphasis. And she still uses more showing than telling.
Overall, another fun book that I continue not to believe deserves the analysis or accolades some give it.
"And all at once she understood what myth is, understood that myth is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining. She need not fear the uncertain life opening up before her. Whichever way her wandering husband went, the encircling sash of myth would wrap around the young Harmony. For every step, the footprint was already there."
This is really good, much better than Blind Assassin, whose snaring of the Booker Prize I don't understand. Blind Assassin was really incoherent, for me. It shared with Oryx and Crake a protagonist not quite in tune with its surroundings, which is interesting, and there are shades of her other books as well. Probably unavoidably with Handmaid's Tale, since it's a futuristic dystopia, and with one specific tidbit about the main character's mother (Offred sees her mother, now and Unwoman, in her training at the Red Center; Jimmy sees his mother in footage of a protest long after her disappearance). Offred's Scrabble words, which all had to do with beds and procreation as well as using the high-score letters, also echo in Snowman's occasional flashes of vocabulary: I would have to look it up to confirm but I am pretty sure Offred uses "valance," as this character does as well. Atwood uses Tony Fremont's knowledge of war from Robber Bride to inform Jimmy and Glenn's game of Blood and Roses, which is a nice touch. Oryx sounds sometimes like Xenia and sometimes like Roz ("Oh honey, you need a new table!") and the vegetarianism reminds me of Edible Woman.
I am really glad I attended CGK's class presentation on Alias Grace, because it hadn't made much sense before then, not even with seeing Margaret Atwood herself in between my initial reading and that class. Blind Assassin I just didn't like. This sounds much more like Atwood to me and I am well pleased.
Oh, and one of the baby shower diversions was to wear a photo sticker of whichever parent you thought the baby would resemble. If it looked like the father, its hobby would be fantasy baseball, if it looked like the mother, it would have to read all of Atwood's books by the age of 11. I did not hazard a guess there. I did mark a square in the baby pool: the weight was hard to guess because she looks huge but I wanted to be merciful, but the date was easy because she wants it born early and one of the early dates was 29 July, a favorite date of mine with, for once, no real-life significance. PSA's and my anniversary, though I assigned that occasion to that date, out of the week we spent together, because I was already fond of it rather than its being on that date that any first thing happened.
Later, fin.
Margaret Atwood and her names, Margaret Atwood and her vocabulary and vocabularies. Her most brilliant coinage here is foetility. I looked up mephitic and mastitis. Queynt is not in my Tenth, but it is in my Chaucer. Again, a high-scoring Scrabble word with sexual overtones. Leman is not high-scoring but it does mean mistress. I had to look up fungible, which I shouldn't've'd to do but did and it didn't mean anything like what I thought. Pullulate is another completely unfamiliar but thematically perfect word, as is pistic. And so she strings together words: fungible, pullulate, pistic, cerements, trull. Succulent, morphology, purblind, quarto, frass.
Best book in months.
I bought this yesterday between swim and seeing Trish and Jared. Making sure I had time for the Tattered Cover might have been why I shortened my swim. I haven't been a regular reader of Pamie's for a while, I think since she moved to L.A., but I knew most of the entries she used in this, either because they occurred while I read or because they garnered enough attention through links that I sought them out.
I can't distinguish between my pleasure that one of us--indubitably suitably Pamie, and I don't really consider her and myself an "us," I'm not that delusional--really got published because of her journal, and the delicious pleasure of lite reading fare, which is exactly what I wanted yesterday.
One eensy copyediting error: the medium of web journaling clearly places this book post-1996. But someone gives a Hartford--an unlikely place to have a nice house with a backyard and a swingset but I'll let that pass--phone number with a 203 area code. Connecticut, minus the New York suburb of Fairfield County and New Haven County, has been 860 since 1995. (Hartford is in Hartford County. It's an imaginative state, wot? Guess what the county seat of New London County is. G'won, guess! Next try Windham County! and Litchfield County! But Fairfield County's is Stamford, I think. And there is no town of Middlesex for Middlesex County. Pity, that. Really though I doubt Connecticut has seats as such.) Anyway, should've been 860.
