Finally I have a hobby besides snorting cockatiel dust and tearing at my cuticles: proofing texts for Project Gutenberg. I started with a beginner's text, a brilliant piece of fiction circa 1912, melding the best of Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, by Margaret Burnham, entitled The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly. (Merriam-Webster dates "aviatrix" to 1910.)
(The title reminds me of a one-sentence movie summary that CLH called to tell me about, approximately, "An Amazon princess dances the lambada to combat evil forces." CLH said, "Now of course that I have to watch.")
I tore through one hundred pages of the book because the story propelled me along (planes, futuristic enough to be Tom Swiftian in 1912; yet a motor car--with a "tonneau"--that still needed to be cranked; lads and lasses with a chaperone and tonnes of unwritten yet throbbing sexual tension; barnstorming as in Illusions; dreadful storms; fires; gypsies; moonshining; adventures galore). Malheureusement the proofreading is set up for, of all things, proofreading, not reading cheesy books, so I can't find out how it ends until it's posted (you can sign up to be notified).
It's about time I gave something back, though. Besides those on-the-fly Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll quotes Gutenberg affords me, it's also allowed me to read The Blue Lagoon (surprisingly, just as bad as the movie) and Enchanted April (book and movie each good in their individual ways) and Ben-Hur (I'm only a quarter through; Lew Wallace writes like Charlton Heston acts: ponderously).
As far as Ellen Conford goes, it was no Me and the Terrible Two or And This Is Laura, but it went well with "Sea of Grass."
Eh. It's a Newbery Honor, but none of its interesting threads came together in any meaningful way.
When the protagonist says, "Next I know, I'll be calling myself the queen of Romania...," it's not so different from "Marie" that I can trust that the author wasn't purposefully paraphrasing Dorothy Parker.
Libba Bray's attempt to capture the era felt a lot like Tracey Chevalier's Falling Angels and plotwise it bore some resemblance to Down a Dark Hall and lots and lots and lots to The Secret History. Plus it owed a minor plot point to Ghosts I Have Been, not that the point originated with Richard Peck either, and another to The Cat Ate My Gymsuit although it was better handled in And Both Were Young.
The book's main action is set in 1895, but enough seeming anachronisms jolted me out of whatever suspension of disbelief I could manage when I wasn't thinking of Lois Duncan or Donna Tartt. Possibly they weren't anachronisms but only seemed so to someone who has only enough trivial knowledge to think she has more, but the seeming so was enough for me.
Men wear "tuxedos" (p. 229) and while the word for the suit maybe does date to 1886 in time to fit in the book, it was in Tuxedo Park in the United States that a man first wore one. Since even Usan Miss Manners thinks the term is slangy, I wonder if the Brits would have accepted it as quite the thing that fast, and quite enough of the thing to wear instead of white tie and tails, which is what should be paired with a woman's opera-length gloves.
Although the disease influenza dates to the twelfth century and before, I never think of its being widespread or well-known until the 1918-19 pandemic. So while an outbreak in 1890 could account for one detail, again it sounded odd.
On page 233, someone refers to an allegedly proper married woman Mrs HerFirstName MarriedLastName. When did the early twentieth-century etiquette that that form indicated a divorced woman (a married one being Mrs HisFirstName MarriedLastName) come into being?
Another datum in my wildly unreferenced trivia bank is that Dickens, while immediately popular, took some time to become respectable. So it seems unlikely that, as on page 265, the headmistress of an 1895 finishing school would read David Copperfield to her charges.
Overall I wish I liked it as much as I expected and wanted to. I'm getting nowhere with The Stone Raft, which lack of progress disgusts me; and I'm zero for three with the YA books I used to leapfrog back into this reading thing I've heard so much about. To be fair I should say zero for two, since I expected nothing from the Ellen Conford, but zero for two is still zero.
In translation from the German, Cornelia Funke is pretty good. The one fantastic element dropped into the unlikely but possible main plot was satisfying if a little deus ex machina.
I liked this one a lot more than Miss Wyoming, whose plot I can scarcely recall. Of course, this one's plot is a little too close to home to be either original or forgettable. But it's my favorite Douglas Coupland in a while.
Like The Lady and the Unicorn, this book is told in more than one first-person point-of-view; unlike that book, its four voices are distinct. Maybe because there are four voices and four sections (that makes it sound like Sound and the Fury--it's not) instead of the more frequent jumps Chevalier makes. There is no reason for me to link Coupland and Chevalier except that I read both of them in the past month.
And he finally set a book in Canada instead of his favorite target to the south. I appreciate that.
I am so glad this one is over. What the hell was the point? I still am going to try Portnoy's Complaint but I am done with Philip Roth.
Also I really didn't like Ron Silver's narration. I know how much narration affects my "reading" experience, so my bored indignation might not be fair. As if that's ever stopped me.
I know that the narrator's nasal whine did American Pastoral no favors, but that doesn't stop me from editorializing myself when I'm reading aloud to RDC.
Last year when I read him Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I muttered when the farm was referred to as "Mr. Fitzgibbon's" rather than as "the Fitzgibbons'." I also snorted when Justin told Mrs. Frisby to slide down a post like a fireman's pole, because of course she'd know exactly what that is.
Last night we finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This time my annotations were obvious: when Aslan paces up from the Fords of Beruna to the Hill of the Stone Table, I said "Gethsemane" a lot (the first time, RDC said, "Gesundheit" so I kicked him). When Lucy and Susan joined him, I said "Mary and Martha" instead of their names. During the Easter Sunday romp, among the joyous leaping and bounding and laughing, I added, "And Susan stuck her hand in his side." Naturally I had to make Susan the doubting Thomas, since she's the lipstick-wearing baddie who doesn't make it past Revelations.
It's not Evolution of Jane, and nothing could be, but it was quite good. It took me until about halfway through to appreciate was Schine was doing, and if it had been another author whom I have less invested in, I might have given up. The daughter, mother, and grandmother vibrated off the page, and the endings felt right, and I saw traces of Cathleen Schine's own story (through an essay she wrote for The New Yorker) toward the end. I loved that, and the bits about naming.
Someone says, "I need to bare my soul," and I thought of how true the homophone verb would work there. She needs to bare it because she otherwise could not bear it.
A stray dog needs a name. "When you got right down to it, what name wasn't a brand? She thought what a shame it was that language had devolved from being a means of expression to being little more than a flag....When everything in life was judged as an adornment rather than by its utility, when even a dog was seen as an accessory, when even its name was chosen as a mirror for one's own aspirations, then what name was free, what name was personal, what name was just a name?...'We'll name him after the first sign we see.'"
I like to think I would have loved it as a child, but despite its abundance of perfect elements I think it might have frightened or bored me--because it's old-seeming? because the slipperinesses in time would have offended my linear little self?
Marvelous.
"You mean...there's insanity in the family?"--Katharine Hepburn in "Bill of Divorcement."
A father is asked why he always calls his son worthless. "Because the little shit kept on landing in trouble--BB guns and rifles--neighbors showing up with half of their cats in each hand..."
"That was an accident, Dad."
This cracked me up from cover to cover. Nearly cover to cover. And continually, not continuously, but often and often. It was like The Corrections on nitros oxide. I liked Hey, Nostradamus! just fine, but that was regular Douglas Coupland. This was Coupland seeming to mind much less whether everyone noticed how clever he was, which allowed him to be a lot funnier than usual.
Also, someone is from New Lyme, Connecticut. Hey! Quit that!
When I first came across this title I thought it would be schmaltzy faux sentimality as I assume Tuesdays with Morrie to be. It might turn out to be so--I'm under halfway through--but mostly it cracks me up, especially when there are three connotations for "illuminated" in two pages.
"He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief....Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief. The unmarried women kissed the Dial's battered lips, although they were not faithful to their god, but to the kiss: they were kissing themselves" (p. 140).
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault quotes Jorge Luis Borges either translating or inventing a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into
Some of the language choices were delightful: a second-person pronoun is "casual," and it took me a moment to realize he meant "familiar."
Mostly I enjoyed how differently each character saw and told their story, particularly Alexandr and Jonathan Safran Foer. And I loved the multiple meanings of "illuminate."
This was really popular when I worked at Phoebe. The author blurb reminded me of Bastard out of Carolina, but the first pages made me think it would be less wretched. Nope! Just as wretched, though I was spared the misery of connecting emotionally with the protagonist. Which doesn't mean that Carolyn Chute failed where Dorothy Allison succeeded, just that their effects were different.
I liked how Chute showed how invisible the underclass is to the wealthier eye, and how money does not equal class, and how poverty does not kill decency.
A couple of hiccups: would someone say "geek" to mean "nerd" (post-1950, credit Dr. Seuss) or "dweeb" (what is its origin?) in 1912? and "neither of us (two discrete persons) were..."
I wish I could pinpoint why Beryl Bainbridge feels so much older than she is. I was sure The Bottle Factory Outing was written before 1950, but it was published in the early '70s. Every Man for Himself is set in 1912, and its writing style, except for the "geek" thing, if that's even an error and not just my assumption, feels no later than 1930. Is it only the setting?
I liked the character's story up until the boat hit the iceberg (most of the action happens on the Titanic), and after that I was so sad about the disaster that I wondered if the protagonist's action were not in character or if I only thought so because of Mrs. Strauss (who famously chose to die with her husband) and the stupid lowering of lifeboats only partly filled and Captain Smith's being so used to how smaller ships worked that he took the wrong evasive manoeuver after the iceberg finally was spotted on the utterly calm sea.
It occurred to me that, say, the Hindenburg doesn't make me as sad as the Titanic: hydrogen! What could you expect? Also death on a much smaller scale. But the Titanic represents the end of an era--from April 15, 1912, to August 1914 is no time whatsoever; and folly, not having enough lifeboats; and pride, calling the ship unsinkable; and those half-filled boats and everything else that consigned more of third class to their deaths than needed be.
Speaking of Hemingway's "The earth moved," when I saw a photography exhibit at the Denver Art Museum I tried to read the front page of a newspaper that quoted the newscaster's "Oh the humanity!" without decades of sarcastic hyperbole but with its original context. I was less successful than with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Gott in himmel. This evening I read the preface, Homer Contemplates Aristotle, and The Morning After in Richard Ellman's Ulysses on the Liffey, all of David Gifford's notes on the first episode, and the actual first episode of Ulysses.
(I, like scads of others, am determined to have read it by the centennial of Bloomsday.)
Also I put away the wash the same day as I brought it up from the laundry room instead of leaving it to chambre throughout the week. However, Joyce has so enfeebled my intellectual capacities that I left the socks in a heap, unable to pair them.
Because Eliza recently mentioned this book, I ordered it from the library, and today it showed up. I'm glad I read it, so that I can laugh at myself for so immediately failing to read from Ulysses every day. But I read and reread Into the Dream a million times before I was 10, and, heaven help me, Firestarter when I wasn't much older. So Willo Davis Roberts's happy ending for telekinetic kids rang entirely hollow.
Episode 2: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
The analysis in Ulysses on the Liffey is helpful and the notes are interesting for history and theme, but some of the phrases need translation too: the headmaster is always glad to break a lance with Stephen, i.e., joust or spar verbally. Or so I assume.
I am anxious to press on to episode 10 and beyond, because George Lucas has ruined the phrases "episode one," "episode two,"..."episode nine" for me.
My second Haruki Murakami and probably not my last: I'll probably read The Wind-up Bird Chronicles too. Norwegian Wood is supposed to be his most accessible, though. It was a lot less, as in not at all, as surreal as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World News. The final page threw me, but it does work...kind of.
Don DeLillo's prologue and epilogue are among the best writing I have ever come across, in any period. To place J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra in a box at the Dodgers-Giants 1951 pennant game encapsulates the entire mood of the country on a day of not only that miracle but also of the USSR exploding its first atomic bomb. Historically, I don't know if both events did occur on the same day; bookwise, the juxtaposition resonates.
I confess that I didn't entirely follow the plot of the bulk of the book: it is too long an audiobook for me right now, since I currently don't devote sufficient time frequently enough to listening. I believe, though, that this plot, and whose point of view, and that other plot, are secondary to what I did follow and appreciate: the vignettes and snippets of this American life, especially its seamy and seeming underside, in the second half of the 20th century. Pop art, the Cuban missile crisis, the New York blackouts, Yucca Mountain, the Zapruder film, Lenny Bruce, and the ruminations of someone standing in Freshkills landfill looking over his shoulder to where the World Trade Center is being built in the distance behind him.
That last made me gasp--Underworld was published in 1997--and the cover, in hindsight, is mournful too: the towers in the background, in fog, and in the foreground, sharper and darker, a church.
Now that I'm reading Ulysses and have just finished listening to Underworld and started War and Peace (unfortunately, the Constance Garnet translation, but I'd never read it otherwise so I'll deal, and didn't I just say that Underworld was too long? this is over twice as long), José Saramago seems a lot easier going. I opened The Stone Raft, sad and neglected for weeks, again, and read this:
"Deux Chevaux [Two Horses, either the name or the model of a car] crosses the bridge slowly, at the lowest speed permitted, to give the Spaniard time to admire the beauty of the views of land and sea, and also the impressive feat of engineering that links the two banks of the river, this construction, we are referring to the sentence, is periphrastic, and is used here to avoid repeating the word bridge, which would result in a solecism, of the pleonastic or redundant kind. In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all."
Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It's a good television book. Then I got to this bit:
"'And how did this despatch reach you?' inquired the king. The minister bowed his head, and while a deep color overspread his cheeks, he stammered out, --
'By the telegraph, sire.' -- Louis XVIII advanced a step, and folded his arms over his chest as Napoleon would have done."
Wha? This book begins in 1814. Though Dumas wrote it after Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1842, it was only three years afterward, which was only one year after the first complete line was laid between Baltimore and D.C.
12 March: Aha--thanks to Beth, the explanation I should have looked for. Dumas wasn't being prescient but describing Chappe's telegraph, which appears to have been a mechanical semaphore. Or I should say, the semaphore is a descendant of Chappe's telegraph, which surprises me. I would have guessed that the semaphore had been invented earlier, to complement or assist Europe's naval supremacy. But then, the longitude clock wasn't invented until well into the eighteenth century, and the semaphore is much less critical than that.
A Project Gutenberg text to while away slow periods. Um. Heavy-handed. The animosity between Messalah and Judah has less founding here than in the movie and latter's involvement in Jesus' mission is much more promiment.
With Mel Gibson's "Passion" in theatres, I was particularly interested in how Lew Wallace would treat Christ's last day. He might have sought to place the blame for the execution on the entire race of humanity by making the ridiculous number of three million witnesses Jews from everywhere, Libya, the Rhine, Egypt, still those who thronged to see him suffer and be debased were only Jewish. Eww, and maybe that three million was not supposed to represent the vastness of the human population but to be a census of all the Jews then living. Even Rome at its peak had only a million inhabitants. He does say that Pilate was inclined to be merciful but that Jesus wouldn't defend himself, which should allow the reader not to blame the Jews or Romans but know Jesus chose his fate.
When I saw the ballet "Romeo and Juliet," I thought it odd that Mercutio, however much more likeable in the play than either lead, took much longer to die than Romeo, Juliet, and Paris added together. There's something about dramatic tension, I suppose, but I am naughtily inclined and compared the word counts of the chariot race vs. the passion. And, okay, from "About three o'clock, speaking in modern style, the program was concluded except the chariot-race." to "And the race was won!" inclusive is 5,558 words, while from "There are certain chapters in the First Book of this story which were written to give the reader an idea of the composition of the Jewish nationality as it was in the time of Christ. They were also written in anticipation of this hour and scene; so that he who has read them with attention can now see all Ben-Hur saw of the going to the crucifixion--a rare and wonderful sight!" to "A tremor shook the tortured body; there was a scream of fiercest anguish, and the mission and the earthly life were over at once. The heart, with all its love, was broken; for of that, O reader, the man died!" is 7,306 words. So Wallace didn't pull a Prokofiev. Good for him.
I can't wait to get back to The Count of Monte Cristo.
Once again, all books are one book (not really). Those bits of Underworld I liked least were those that reminded me of American Pastoral. In The Count of Monte Cristo, someone has had two attacks of some kind and knows he will not survive a third, because no one has. In War and Peace, vulturous relatives are waiting for someone to die. His German doctor says "Dere has neffer been a gase...dat one liffs after de sird sdroke."
I read a child's comment about the Harry Potter books, that he loves them so much because there is more fun per page than in any other book. Tangentially, that's not true of the fourth and fifth, where pointless dialogue stalls action and defies logic even more than in the first three; primarily what I came here to say is that clearly that kid had never read The Count of Monte Cristo. Swashes are buckled in every sentence. It's great fun, and I love the language, formal and on its way to being archaic--unlike Harry Potter, malheureusement, whose influence is so vast that, as with Stephen King, I weep at the simplicity and stiltedness of its prose.
I have just got to a bit where the Count says someone has two strings to his bow, just as Leopold Bloom says of a woman he sees in the street. Because all books are one book.
Later...all books are one book: a chemist by the name of Flamel is mentioned, who I surmise is the alchemist Nicholas Flamel from Philosopher's Stone.
I regret reading the first 60 pages in dribs and interrupted drabs earlier this year. When I gave it better attention, it turned out to be as good as any thing else José Saramago has written. Of course. As with the others of his books that I've read, this concerns ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen, things they don't understand but through which they try to get along and survive. In this, the Iberian peninsula splits from Europe down the Pyrenees--minus the Rock of Gibralta, which belonging to the U.K. remains in place--and floats, a stone raft, through the ocean.
There is also a dog, which marks his best books--the Dog of Tears in Blindness and Found in The Cave and here, Constant--if there was a dog in Balthazar and Blimunda or The Gospel According to Jesus Christ I don't remember it, and All the Names was good even without a dog.
I started reading The Egypt Game to RDC last night. It is one of my earliest favorite books, maybe the first after Dr. Dolittle, who wasn't just a book but my favorite fictional character. And I think I learned about him from Mrs. Plimpton, my beloved second-grade teacher. She read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle aloud to us, I know, and, memorably, once an old-fashioned tale that had the word "bosom" in it.
After hearing Zilpha Keatley Snyder's name, RDC asked if the entire book was written in iambic trimeter.
RDC2 turned ten while he was here, and the night before his arrival we pillaged the Tattered Cover. I had titles in mind--Holes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Tom Sawyer--good stories, compelling writing, accessible. Considering RDC2's reading level and randomly opening Tom Sawyer, I reluctantly decided against that. It's easier thematically and stylistically than Huck Finn but not yet easy enough. I don't know much about books for the 6- to 9-year-old set, which is realistically RDC2's ability and willingness, so a salesclerk recommended other titles: Enclopedia Brown, The Dragons of Blueland, Lost Treasure of the Emerald Eye, and--this was the biggest hit--The Day My Butt Went Psycho.
I broke out Encyclopedia in the car on the way up, and RDC2 did listen, which pleased me. I doubt I figured out many of the puzzles myself when I was eight, nine, and ten (but I liked rereading them and seeing what I missed). When we finished that book (the first), I tried Roald Dahl, who was somehow less immediately compelling. Also Holes has 50 whole chapters, but after seeing the movie even JHT wants to read it. I hope RDC2 reads at least Butt on his own.
From Word-A-Day:
petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun
The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
[From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is
supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by
researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.]
"Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils
given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and
released into the air after a first rain."
Matthew Bettelheim; Nature's Laboratory; Shasta Parent (Mt Shasta,
California); Jan 2002.
---
That's a good word. It rained slightly Friday night last week and as the five of us stirred and got outside, the whole world smelled wonderful--perhaps especially because the rain released any leftover scent from two seasons of dried catmint blossoms on the ground.
RDC2, I am sorry to say, opined that it stank. He wouldn't use the toilet in the basement because it smelled, he said; it might, though of basement not of sewage I hope. The other four of us mocked his finding the after-rain smell offensive.
Except that it was an hour too short, the weekend was relaxing and productive and quiet.
How old I sound. There's an old "Peanuts" strip--from the ‘50s, I would say, because--if memory serves--Snoopy still looks like he does here in the first two rather than the in later strips--in which someone is trying to get Snoopy to play fetch and Charlie Brown says that because he is older now, he's more interested in quiet pastimes, like 20 Questions. At the mention of that game, Snoopy's head snaps around.
Anyway. I tried to talk myself out of going to Margaret Atwood but I had promised CGK that I would go and fetch a lower number than she herself could get arriving later (coddling a parent, I confess). When I got there I found Spenser (really, why did I alias her so? I haven't the foggiest) and gave her the number to give to CGK, planning to leave, but true to form Spenser cracked me up so I had to stay. We came up with a new band, Alexander Pope and the Beats. Because "The Rape of the Lock" really could be a rock and roll song, couldn't it? Then I suggested "Absalom and Achitophel," because yes I confuse together everything I had in Restoration and 18th Century Lit.
I did not wish to have a book signed so hadn't even brought my Oryx and Crake. I had in my bag only What's Bred in the Bone, which cracked me up. Not even Canadian women, only Canadian men for me.
When Atwood arrived, I was pleased to see she seemed friendlier. On her last tour--did I see her for Blind Assassin?--she was out and out mean. Perhaps by now she's stopped being resentful of being asked about writing science fiction. She allows as how Oryx and Crake is "speculative, like 1984," not science fiction. Even though it's all based on science and she made nothing up. Oh, sure you didn't, honey, because there actually are green-skinned, blue-genitaled, purring, ruminant modified human beings. You didn't make that up. Pat pat pat.
Spenser asked a good question, I thought. She said Steven Spielberg has said that if he'd made "Schindler's List" first, he wouldn't've made all the dinosaur movies (I hope that wouldn't mean "Jaws" and Indy'd be struck too). Does O&C's Cassandra complex (I paraphrase) make another Robber Bride or Cat's Eye seem to mean less? Atwood said no.
I scarpered immediately afterward, grocery-shopped, and made like a hermit for the rest of the weekend. I meant to return Blake's aquarium to the vet Saturday, but the range hood doesn't come until Tuesday and the vet can wait such that I don't have to make two trips to McMansionville.
I watched the final four episodes of "24" while painting fiddly slatted pantry shelves and doors. I scrubbed the entire kitchen, carefully not to drip on the new cabinets. I primed the east, short wall of the kitchen (it has no cupboards touching it) and the bit of wall around the door on the south side (also no cupboards). Not the ceiling, because eek, the cupboards--also because I found a bit of bubbled paint I had to scrape off and patch with wallboard compound--and not the rest of the walls, because eek, the cupboards, and of the trim, only that associated with bits I did (four doors and some floor moulding).
I uncovered, raked, weeded, hoed, and otherwise pummeled the original vegetable bed and planted beans, carrots, and spinach along marked lines (to distinguish between baby plants and weeds, I hope). I raked and weeded the south bed and planted some flax seeds. Should I cut down the sage? I suppose so. I noticed that the raspberries are still spreading, which made me happy; and that of course so is the cherry tree, which did not. I spent some little time laboriously pulling out and snipping baby cherry trees. Sorry, tree. Blake is so happy to be back outside in the fresh air and sun. He's still no help with the actual gardening.
Another of my hausfrauisms was to fill the liquid soap dispenser with the last from the big gallon jug. I filled the jug with warm water and used that diluted soap to scrub the patio furniture. I should have done that under the cherry tree, to water it, instead of on what's left of the grassesque, which doesn't need any moisture for weeds to thrive. Oh well. I like "grassesque." It reads like maybe I planted blue fescue. But I didn't.
I caught up with where I'm supposed to be for the TUS Ulysses seminar. I can't claim to catch more than a smattering of Joyce's cultural references but I do like piecing the action together on the minimal interior-dialogue cues. And I loved the Hamlet debate. This week's reading (episode? chapter? 10) is longer than previous weeks' readings, and I think begins to be even screwier.
Speaking of screwier, what was I just reading that made me think of Turn of the Screw? I try not to think of The Turn of the Screw at all. It must have been one of David Gifford's annotations and come from a source earlier than James. Shakespeare again, probably. Also, twice now in The Annotated Ulysses has been mention of the poem or song "If a body meet a body comin' through the rye." Yes, I like Ulysses, even though it breaks my brain.
Last night I was reading in Vito the Reading Chair with Blake playing in his box at my feet (on the recliner). Ulysses tires me, I admit, and a couple of times I nodded off, snapping awake when my head fell over. At some point Blake took himself out of his box and sat on my knee, waiting for me to notice him. I picked him up and put him on my intercostal clavicle for headpetting, but I continued occasionally to doze off, waking now not because my head fell over but because Blake would, quite understandably, snap at my hand when it dropped on him. Poor buddy.
The one grocery I forgot was butter, despite having obtained a dozen thirsty sesame bagels. This was a tragedy. I scampered out to the nearby 7-11 and thought of recent conversations about how to eat cheaply and healthily. At Whole Foods on Friday I overheard what was surely a visiting parent comment to his Denver resident child that he couldn't believe the selection. I repeated that compliment to the produce guy, who is always pleasant and eager to slice samples. Mr. Produce said the parent was probably from some one-grocery-store town on the plains. Maybe, but you could live in the middle of Denver, lack easy mobility and funds, and come across no more fresh produce in a week than an occasional overripe banana at the local 7-11. It didn't have butter either, and cream cheese is just Wrong, so I tried the grimy little grocery a couple of blocks away. I checked the butter's expiry, but if I die I'll know it's because of scary butter. Or excess of perfectly good butter, of course.
Speaking of scary butter, while RDC2 was here I chased him around the house with a scary banana, one that had gone quite brown and soft while we were away. I mentioned that to my mother under the category of Amusing Anecdotes with Nephew and she didn't understand the point. RDC2 is 10, and a scary banana is icky...does this need explanation?
This weekend I also slept a lot. When RDC is gone I sleep with all my animals on his side of the bed, all of them minus either Hamlet or Pantalaimon, who sleeps on my side with me. When we went to the zoo RDC found me an okapi in the gift shop. I say "Wapiti wapiti" like someone trying to start a stubborn, early model car--and I can never say "wapiti" just once--and RDC and I both say "O Kapi My Kapi," like Walt Whitman (well, like Robin Williams). Unfortunately, the stress in "okapi" falls on the first syllable. Sigh. Also this is a standing okapi, and how do you put a standing animal to sleep? I don't know. Also it cannot fit comfortably with the main five, so it will have to live downstairs with Tigger and Opus and Madeline and Josephine the penguin puppy. And it's not an it. Her name is Ophelia.
(Besides my animals, I also sleep with Moonshadow. This weekend I fell asleep to "Pride and Prejudice" Friday, "Sense and Sensibility" Saturday, and "Persuasion" Sunday. This is why I'm not allowed to have a television in my bedroom.)
Oo, and I reorganized the nonfiction. It's not all the nonfiction: most of it is critical or literary theory and in RDC's study, and about two shelf-feet's worth is in the living room bookcase, and the reference books on camping and birding and cooking are in the living room and sunroom. (One day I will get book cataloging software and be very happily geeky.) The nonfiction I reorganized is mostly mine: history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism.
I ought to organize by proper LOC numbers. Or not. I have a biography of Rachel Carson next to Silent Spring; and Boswell's Life of Johnson next to Boswell's Dictionary; but I have several memoirs and biographies without a counterpart. Jon Krakauer is still in fiction by author, but Touching the Void is not. Does The Tao of Pooh belong with the Tao de Ching or withWinnie Ille Pu, or does the latter with the Latin grammars and dictionaries and not with The Pooh Perplex?
Partly I am a librarian because I like information management. Mostly because I like books. Some because I like reading to kids. Plus there's a large wedge of fiddly organizing that I geek out on.
After thinking little to nothing of Murther and Walking Spirits several years ago--I was sure because Robertson Davies was Beyond me, not because this particular book wasn't a good starting point--I read Rebel Angels in December and loved it, and this morning I finished What's Bred in the Bone, which is even better. I want that painting.
It had bits that I love, that I think more learned fiction readers scoff at but which I eat up, like those in A Prayer for Owen Meany, where all these threads and themes neatly tie together.
There was fictional and actual art history, both of which I enjoy. I love figuring out the iconography of a painting and remember delighting in learning, in ninth grade, how the dog in The Arnolfini Marriage symbolized fidelity. Davies writes faux art history as well. Several years ago at an academic conference on creative vs. academic approaches to English lit, I listened to a presentation of creative art history, a detailed examination of daguerreotypes that existed only in the writer's mind.
I have The Well of Lost Plots and The Lyre of Orpheus--which I bought 13 years ago--waiting for me, but I have my week's Ulysses reading to do.
My reading list, which I've kept since 1990, I managed to fuck up. (I just came across "fark," and while I dislike fuck substitutes on principle, "fark" is the first that I like for its sound's sake.) I think it's not a big screw-up: only the authors' first names are wrong. But they are scrambled--it's in an Excel spreadsheet--in a way I can't figure out. Kingsley Updike wrote Rabbit is Rich. Douglas Dickens wrote Little Dorrit. At first I hoped they were all only a few cells off, but no.
The web version seems to be okay, so I can use that to fix the original, but I have no idea what I did. Except to use MS Office products on a Macintosh.
The best of the faux Jane Austen sequels or retellings, which isn't much of a compliment, except this was okay. Unrealistically (because no one recounts word-for-word conversations in letters) but appropriately epistolary; wisely refraining from any interference with Emma's main characters while satisfyingly gossiping about them; plus the marriages so vital to an Austeny plot. The author clearly has no good opinion of Frank Churchill, which pleases me: I've never understood what Jane Fairfax sees in him.
Another fun romp, but as with J.K. Rowling, Jasper Fforde concerns himself more with the romp than with integrity or sense. (I eagerly await the end of Harry Potter so Rowling can prove me wrong.) Anyway, I like this, but only for the page-to-page fun, because the internal inconsistencies drove me batty. Following are spoilers for Great Expectations and Of Mice and Men. For instance, although both Miss Havisham and Lenny die in their books, Miss Havisham is gone forever while Lenny can spend his free time on Watership Down. The mcguffins and self-aware plot device grenades are fun.
Why was I allowed to read this when I was so unworthy, getting over Stephen King just in time to fall for Ayn Rand? Books like this shouldn't be wasted on the unappreciative. I remembered the story well enough from 11-grade English, but apparently I missed the gorgeosity of the prose. Descriptive prose wasn't entirely lost on me--I did like John Steinbeck--but I am now ashamed that I remembered eyeglasses and ash heaps and all these beautiful shirts but not Fitzgerald's turns of phrase.
Not as good as Kate Dicamillo's earlier Newbery Honor book Because of Winn-Dixie, but a hell of lot better than last year's Medal, Avi's Cross of Lead. I guess Despereaux had lessons about courage and loyalty in addition to being a ripping tale, and that might have been its Newberyness.
Family loyalty is all well and good but I prefer to believe, however naïvely, that truant and social service officers would not be so behindhand in dealing with such problems, and I also believe, however cynically, that the chances of the story's conflict being so resolved are some less than diddly over squat.
After Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse's Stowaway really disappointed me, being a thinly disguised child's version of Cook's log. This was somewhat better.
I am exactly halfway through Ulysses, 500 lines into the Oxen of the Sun episode. I would have no idea what is going on without the criticism and annotations, and I don't have much even with it. The criticism tells me this episode happens in a lying-in hospital, and I doubt I would know that by the text alone. There is finally mention of Leopold's son--that I got. The criticism says that Stephen is being borne of English, and that explains the Middle English touches throughout the first 500 lines. I'm grateful to remember as much of Chaucer as I do.
The sentences bear only slight resemblance to English syntax, so I read this section aloud until my mouth went mealy (that's why only 500 lines). That forces me to read slower, of course, and the words do sort themselves into clauses more aloud than they do on the page. But not so much more.
....As as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness....
Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops....
This was the coolest read in a long time. Full of intra- and interbook references. It nearly opens with Catcher in the Rye's first line; not much later it plays with The Great Gatsby's, that book's first of a zillion appearances. There's Tender Is the Night, Moby-Dick, Tale of Two Cities, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Lord of the Flies; and Brigadoon and Bluebeard. JFK and the Rat Pack are only the most prominent of the dozens of 20th century personalities who feature or cameo.
I didn't get some few of the references--a dog wonders why the bone it found in the surf disappears in its mouth? and I haven't read Magic Mountain and while the book is probably perfectly comprehensible to someone who knows only the theme song, I think a reader's enjoyment would increase with her familiarity with the referenced books, Alger Hiss, Ed Wood....I haven't looked up a few of the names yet, and I will be amused to find out how many have no cultural referent but are just red herrings Tom Carson planted to make his readers think they'd missed something.
Did I mention The Ground Beneath Her Feet yet? One of the things I loved about it was in its world, some of our fictional authors, such as Nathan Zuckerman, are actual. Gilligan's Wake had the same feel, and I adored it.
I am rereading something I have not read for 18 years if not 20. I remembered it well enough to want to reread it, to search for it through Loganberry Books. (Contributors there seem able to access Library of Congress summaries. I haven't found that on Thomas yet, but I haven't tried for a while. Nope, I still don't see it.) Now that I've started it, I can't isolate why I liked it. I remember thinking the being abandoned and found again and the overly refined technology society vs. the hand-powered, bound to the planet one. I remembered a couple of lines: "She was a medic, and medics did not allow themselves to become filthy"; and "they [chickens] never see a human" -- "How sad"; and the pity and bewilderment at deliberately not reproducing.
Now I want more about how the culture, not just the knowledge, decayed over 500 years. I see the gaps from things left unexplained or untreated. Apparently H.M. Hoover wrote a lot of speculative fiction for young adults, but this didn't leave me curious to read more by her.
I recently submitted three queries to Loganberry Books. All of them were solved within a month, which makes me think I wasn't reading obscure enough books as a child.
I can't find my query for what turned out to be Adam's Key, a beginning chapter book by someone Lattimore. All I wanted was the title, so I can rest easy there. I could give a range for this author's surname because of where I know it was shelved, the farther alcove. I could have narrowed the range if I could remember when the new cases were added, tall narrow four- or five-shelved cases constructed to either side of the children's room exterior door, which lay between the two alcoves. Those cases pulled Ls through Os closer to the nearer alcove and Narnia and Mrs. Frisby were now in the main room instead of hiding in the further, my favorite, alcove. The early alphabet never moved, so when I wondered about The Ghosts, I knew the author began with B (Nina Barber) because of where the book was.
Another query was "A girl is part of a behavioralist school environment. Adults are absent? as if the children were babies left in a Skinner box. They submit homework into mailslots and it is returned marked in brown marker (not red). Everything is regulated and hands-off, their laundry and cooking and sleeping. The title is something like The [Secret] [Project/Experiment] with maybe an alphanumeric. The ending smacked of the author’s not knowing how else to wrap it up: the girl (and others?) escapes, she runs home and tells her parents, they are mad because “that’s what you’ve been doing after school/late to supper for so long,” whereas the girl remembers being held away from her family for some considerable time. It was probably from the ‘80s, though it could be the ‘70s. I remember the cover was brown (or dark) with an a piece of notepaper on it, jagged on the top edge from being torn out of a spiral notebook."
This turned out to be Bernice Grohskopf, Notes on the Hauter experiment : a journey through the inner world of Evelyn B. Chestnut, which I might not have found in PGN at all since I don't remember where it was. Or, if I did, it unsurprisingly it turned out to be G--F through K and maybe early L, like Lattimore for Adam's Key, were in that further alcove.
"A teenage girl is a medic on an alien planet, descendants of a long-ago, forgotten Earth colony. A ship lands, perhaps accidentally or because of malfunction, with people from Earth, who are surprised at the divide between these people and themselves. The colonists are taller than terrestrials and cannot reproduce as well, whereas the terrestrials are flip about children and shocked at the colonists' lack of technology (the colonists use splints instead of automatic bone-healers, and they don't have orthodontia). The colonists might keep a kind of large, intelligent blue insect as pets. I remember the cover being mostly white, with the girl in brown in the foreground and muted, watercolory figures behind her."
This turned out to be H.M. Hoover's Another Heaven, Another Earth. I was wrong about Madam Pomfrey's Bone Re-Grow, which doesn't figure in it. From what other book do I remember someone's horror at the idea of a splint or a cast instead of an immediate healing? Also I was wrong about the cover. The girl was in brown in the foreground but the figures behind her are in bright, though still watercolory, hues. The pet was an intelligent reptile that ate the large bugs.
I couldn't give an author range for this one because PGN's YA section was so small, A to Z in ten feet on two shelves, an afterthought under a counter in the reference section, that I have no spatial recall about those books at all.
I do miss PGN, a foolish nostalgia since its physical structure is so changed and none of the staff I remember remain. At least the reading room remains largely untouched, with Phoebe gazing benevolently out from her portrait over the fireplace.
My favorite of the Cornish trilogy, though I enjoyed all of them. As What's Bred in the Bone ruminated on painting, Lyre of Orpheus ruminated on music. All three ruminate as well on theology and philosophy. I love Simon Darcourt.
One of the criticisms I have read about Lyre is that Robertson Davies tells rather than shows. I noticed the Exposition Fairy smacking the characters around a lot, but as with Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, which is criticized for the same fault, I liked what the author had to tell me, so it didn't bother me.
The best Gregory Maguire since Wicked. A retelling of Snow White, the bits with the dwarves, how and what they are and of course though not particularly how they are named, are super. Plus Lucrezia Borgia--how to go wrong?
I have never read a novel by an Afghan before; I've read mighty few by anyone in an Islamic culture. This was an excellent place to start.
Khaled Hosseini's first novel, it's about two boys growing up in Afghanistan. One is Pashtun and Sunni Muslim; the other is Hazara and Shi'a. Both factors determine their socioeconomic status, but they are still milk-brothers and friends. A lot of gut-level recognition that people are the same all over, and then a few punches in the gut to remind me that theirs is a different world.
It reads like there are only a dozen people in Afghanistan, but the narrator excuses his coincidences by admitting that happenstances would be incredible to anyone who's not an Afghan. There's a middle section that reads like a memoir, a time-filling device, but the bulk of it is well-constructed novel. All the threads come together, but not to be tied in a perfect little bow, quite realistic.
E.L. Konigsburg has still got it. Unlike Madeliene L'Engle, who should have stopped some time before Many Waters, Konigsburg is still writing Newbery-level books with 30-year gaps. This isn't as good as View from Saturday, but it's good. I would like to know why it's a companion to Silent to the Bone, as its blurb says. It takes place in Epiphany, NY, as Saturday does, but I've read Silent only once and don't recall any characters in common, or themes particularly.
The good thing is that it will be a pleasure to reread Silent to the Bone looking for the companionability. I wouldn't reread Troubling a Star unless forced.
The Schuyler bit makes me happy in a Nobody's Fool kind of way, and James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere also concerns Sarasota Springs and the same kind of urban blight issues Outcasts does. I am fond of Konigsburg's overly but believably bright yet still engaging characters, her pacing, the carefully crafted structure and points of view.
RDC and I have had big lulls reading The Egypt Game, which thankfully can handle interruptions. He says I have not read him From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a major omission on my part. That's next in line.
A quick read in verse in a running cadence. I don't understand how this and Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust count as poetry, but they do count as good. I have another Sharon Creech to read this weekend, and I'm looking forward to that.
Much better than several of Katherine Paterson's post Jacob books, though not nearly touching even Master Puppeteer. Set in Vermont in 1899, its narrator was named Robbie, for Robert Burns, but he also felt a lot like Robert Newton Peck's Rob, both of Soup and A Day No Pigs Would Die--possibly because I can't tell fin-de-siècle from the Depression.
Sweet and simple, despite having with two Creech plot crutches, the baby-in-danger and the first-love-confusion. The fact that despite her use of these elements in almost every book, every book remains fresh and original, is testament to her skill.
Katherine Paterson's Christianity is more prominent in these her later books--this and Preacher's Boy--than in her earlier ones, but it's still not preachy. The main issue of children of people in the penal system wasn't compromised, and the only weak point was that "everyone" else in school had new clothes and expensive notebooks, even in rural Vermont. Not an artificially happy and tied-up ending either, which is realistic.
There.
The question-and-answer episode let me understand the Odysseus and Telemachus parallel more than anything preceding, and the weird thing is that I had read it before, at least a little bit, because I knew about the flyspot.
I had also read bits of the last episode, Molly's soliloquy, before, because of Kate Bush's sensual world. I had sympathized with that character up to then, up to reading the entire episode. I read it aloud, or nearly aloud, mouthing more than I have since One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, to feel the words physically (Blake is also a fan of this method).
I do not make any claim to full comprehension. The brothel scene left me burbling and I decided it was a tribute to Lewis Carroll. The only chapter I felt like I understood was the exhibitionism and masturbation on the beach.
But I read it.
He said I was a flower of the mountain yes but now I've power o'er a woman's body mmm yes
I might say de Cervantes and Faulkner and James but right now I'm reading Watership Down for the first time in at least four years.
It certainly was not free of certain stereotypical Oprahisms, but it was fine fluff. The three sisters were Chekov (I don't remember that story at all, but the title works); were Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Whatsit; were any three sisters--weird, fatal, gorgon, harpy--from myth and legend and no worse for that. It reminded me of Sue Hubbell's A Country Year (also about bee-keeping), Carson McCullers, and even E.L. Konigsburg because of a French Provincial bedroom set (just like in The Outcasts of Schuyler Place.
Now comes the decision: which of the real books should I start?
Now comes the decision: which of the real books should I start?
From the library I have José Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon. Otherwise, on the top shelf of the living room bookcase, reserved for stuff high in the queue, are Isabel Allende's Infinite Plan (I've had that for years), Sherman Alexie's Toughest Indian in the World, Don Quijote, Tracey Chevalier's The Virgin Blue (I started it and it seems like she doesn't do the annoying swap-the-narrator thing, so it might be okay), Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, Moll Flanders, David James Duncan's The Brothers K, Zora Neale Hurston short stories, Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters (about which I knew nothing when I bought it for RDC except its great title), an annotated Lolita, Charles Palliser's Quincunx that SPM said is one of the best books ever, Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost, Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Geoff Ryman's Was. Also War and Peace, for reference.
The harder or longer of those have sat there since we bought the bookcase over a year ago. I need a good thick book to sink my teeth into, like Palliser or Pears. But I've also got to get started on Absalom, Absalom!, though I should reread The Sound and the Fury first. Maybe I'll take Faulkner as my Project reading and punctuate it with Hurston, though if Ulysses is any pattern I did a lot of lite reading just to avoid him, 'cause I'm such a brainiac.
I am not sure whether this is Tracey Chevalier's first or second book, but I know that this and Girl with a Pearl Earring are her earliest. And that she should have stopped there.
Earlier stories made us shout with laughter as we drove through the mountains to Aspen; later ones were more serious. But the final few nearly made me pee again. An excellent driving book, read by author David Sedaris.
Me and Harry Potter is like me and Woman on the Edge of Time or me and The Fountainhead or me and The Giver. They're way easy targets and that's why I like them, because I can feel superior to them. But I'm only showing my own stupidity by not picking on something my own size. I have long maintained that Harry Potter is fun but not worth such devotion and analysis--so why do I reread and analyze? Pomposity, OMFB.
Seeing "Prisoner of Azkaban" got me rereading Prisoner of Azkaban and then Goblet of Fire and then today starting Order of the Phoenix. I got a couple hundred pages in and then stopped myself, because god knows I'll reread them when #6 comes out and they don't bear rereadings that often.
My new grievance tickled the back of my mind at the end of Prisoner: how did Sirius get a wand after getting out of Azkaban? He couldn't go to Diagon Alley or show his face anywhere in the wizarding world. It crystallized at the end of Goblet: when an animagus transmogrifies, how does it keep its wand? I'll allow clothes to reappear on rehumanizing because that's so assumed in fiction as to be quibbling even for me. But a wand is not so much an extension of the body as all that: viz Harry dropping his at the Quidditch World Cup.
The biggest problem is this: when Voldemort lost his corporeal self after his curse rebounded off Harry, he could not have kept his wand. He could not hold it. Who restored that very same wand (we know it is the exact same wand) to him when he got re-embodied at the climax of Goblet? Did Wormtail accompany him to the Potters' that night and pick up the wand? We are given to understand Voldemort was alone.
Which reminds me--and this, unlike the previous, is easily my own not remembering and not a fault of Rowling's--but if Sirius was suspected immediately upon the Potters' deaths, why would Hagrid have borrowed his motorcycle? Neither can I omit commenting again on Voldemort's stupidity as a villain: it doesn't fit with his character so is an intrusive, shoddy crutch on Rowling's part that Voldemort explains himself to Harry, and that this explanation happens at the end of every. single. book.
Plus Goblet's fleeting look of triumph in Dumbledore's eyes when he learns that Voldemort now has, through Harry's blood, the protection Harry's mother's love and sacrifice laid in his skin bothers the hell out of me.
A special topics class on evil in literature was one of the best classes I had at UConn, professor and books and discussion and everything. The Book of Job, Macbeth, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass (evil in history rather than in literature), Things Fall Apart, Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing.
I'd have to look at the syllabus to remember what else there was, but right now I'm wondering why we didn't read The Sound and the Fury. I can't think of any literary character less chockful of pure cussedness than Jason Compson.
Non-humans can't compare, so Woundwort and Saruman are out. Mr. Gradgrind is too flat. Teacher isn't flat but he is limited. Anyone insane, even criminally, like Whatsisname from Handful of Dust is out. Raskolnikov is sympathetic, maybe a tad touched, capable of love. Danvers and Heathcliff are sympathetic because they love someone. Even the Wicked Witch of the West is just drawn that way. Aha--after thinking of book after book I see the light: Jason Compson is the only one who tells his story in the first person, so you can see how deep, how causeless, how impenetrable and pervasive, his evil is.
I love Benjy. I love Dilsey. I love this book.
I read the first part of this amused by a fellow elitist stickler. Then at lunch yesterday I talked to Überboss about it and he said that after reading the New Yorker review he only wanted to look through it. I read that review when I got home and the remainder of the book fell apart and Lynne Truss seemed unnecessarily snobbish. That's how malleable I am.
The review was good. In the first third, Louis Menand dissects Lynne Truss's grammatical mistakes in perhaps a fussily nitpicky way, but in writing a book subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, she has to have expected that. And why isn't it "zero-tolerance"? Surely it needs a hyphen? Menard uses the book('s faults) mostly as a springboard into a broader, compelling discussion of voice in writing, and that discussion, more than his nitpicking, was the brilliant bit.
Überboss's understated snark (that having acknowledgments, foreword, publisher's note, preface, and introduction is a sure sign of a new writer pulling out all the stops*) and the review made me much more critical the second part of the book, but she didn't entirely lose my respect until page 158:
* This isn't a quite fair snark. Only the American printing has Frank McCourt's foreword, and if a stop was pulled out it was the publisher soliciting McCourt for his sure-fire appeal to Usans; and the publisher's note explains how we Usans are getting the exact same book the Brits got even though the two countries punctuate differently; and what ÜberBoss mistook for an introduction is really a first chapter. But it does look like excess and perhaps could have been disguised.
Also, the panda joke is just not funny. The argument over the serial comma is a valid one--"I'd like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God" is an excellent, if apocryphal, argument for it--but a comma between predicate and direct object is a mistake, not a stylistic nuance. And it's a British joke: in the States you'd have a serial comma that would certainly clarify that the sentence has a three-part predicate and should be modified.
Moon Tiger appeared on my to-be-read list because it was on the Feminista century's-best list. I'm not sure when I connected the author with my childhood favorite The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, but Moon Tiger got bumped up when I cross-referenced all those lists with the Booker and Pulitzer lists.
It is again raining and I cannot convey how strange this is. The chief occupation of this flobbery day was reading Moon Tiger, and it was time well spent. I knew immediately I would like the book--Thomas Kempe's author writing about an historian--and it lived up to my expectations. I liked the protagonist initially because of Antonia Fremont, a stupid reason, since Claudia Hampton and the Margaret Atwood character have only being historians in common, and because of "Wit," a better reason, each with a woman on her deathbed contemplating her life. Also she reminded me of Penelope Keeling, and I don't care that Shell-Seekers is banal fluff because war-time love is a particularly romantic sort.
I particularly liked how she and her friend or lover would recall the exact same scene, both remembering the truth but each knowing different words and gestures and ramifications.
I think this means I have to go back to Portrait of a Lady. That I don't mind giving half an eye to, but I won't deny myself full attention for The History of the Siege of Lisbon. That looks promising for the same reason Mooon Tiger did: "Raimundo Silva...has chosent he safe occupation of proofreader at a distinguished publishing house. One day he inexplicably takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a history text. His alteration leads him into an affair of the heart that changes the course of European history....Saramago has constructed one of his most ambitious, sweeping novels to date: a broad, multifaceted tableau involving meditations on historiography, the uses and abuses of language, and life under authoritarian rule. This rollicking love story is a delight for readers of Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez."
Between "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Tobacco Road, I'm pretty sure I never want to be in the pine woods of Georgia.
"Babylon Revisited" makes me hope that Tender Is the Night was a fluke and F. Scott Fitzgerald is usually eminently readable.
I love Many Moons and James Thurber's little illustrated story called something like "The Last Flower." "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is more like O. Henry and why I can always confuse the name of Hemingway's character with the short happy life.
I wouldn't leave my bike unlocked outside the gym for an hour's swim, but I'd leave it in the vestibule of the library while I stocked up for the weekend. The Portrait of a Lady is going well but this is a holiday: Lois Lowry's Messenger, which includes characters from The Giver and Gathering Blue, and I wonder if I remember the latter enough; William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner; and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. And yes, Haitch, one day I will read All the President's Men too.
No, I didn't remember the Gathering Blue characters particularly or well enough to fit them into the theme of this book. I got to know Jonas's fate, but not that of another key Giver character.
But of Messenger, eh: can you say Christ figure?
Also, can you say sequel?
Nineteenth century novel: everyone dies or gets married. Also there's a war. Peace is mighty thin on the ground.
I am so extremely glad to be done with this that I have declared this No More Tolstoy Day. Coincidentally enough, having packed away both this and Anna Karenina, there's no damn more Tolstoy to read (short stories? I can't heeearr you!). And I am glad.
Haven't I already said all this? I thought I had but maybe not. It's too long a book in audio for me right now: I only cranked through the last eighth because I gave up and listened at work until work got loud or busy. Its narrator should be slapped; the recording was made in 1982 before audiobooks were stolen by people who could still use their eyes. And possibly the Garnet translation doesn't convey Tolstoy's linguistic genius, if such genius can come through in translation at all. It's not the translation's fault that Tolstoy gives a child's age and then within 15 or 10 minutes gives it again. Damn.
My paper copy, which is the Maud translation, is at home, where I have to confirm this quote. I kept rewinding to see if I really have to hate the book after devoting two and half days plus, 64 hours, to it: "Once admit that human can can be guided by reason, and all possibility of life is annihilated."
Begun in early March. Oy.
This is possibly my favorite collection of A.S. Byatt short stories, maybe second to The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. All the stories have a touch of the gothic or the grotesque, in a slight but satisfying way. The last one, "Pink Ribbon," made me cry, because it is clearly derived from Iris Murdoch's decline: it was therefore a fitting follow up to "Raw Material," in which a writing teacher tells his students to write what they know.
A while ago I added a bit to my list of movies with canine mortality for teddy bear abuse. The list of novels and stories with canine mortality and teddy bear abuse, including "Pink Ribbon," is too distressingly long to contemplate.
A quick and delightful read. I picked it up only because it's a Newbery Honor. I would have loved this in first or second grade--lots of illustrations, lots of animals, talking animals, a child outwitting by charming and harmless ways these animals.
The People of Sparks follows Jeanne Duprau's The City of Ember in plot and, sadly but expectedly in a sequel, in quality. Emberites have lived a sheltered life but even those of Sparks seem to know but little more of their common past. I realize Duprau wanted to explore tension and conflict resolution between the two communities and not their background, but I guess I am engaged enough in the story that I want to know more.
Actually, the theme of recovering post-apocalyptic community was done a little better than in Lois Lowry's recent Messenger. I do not understand how a world that contained the societies of Gathering Blue and Messenger could also contain that of The Giver, but it's the personalities Lowry wanted to combine in Messenger, not the societies. The macguffin could have worked if it had a source instead of being so starkly a deus ex machina.
"Our heroine's biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek" (163)
He doesn't know why? Why make the reader question the author's own creation? And why purposefully organize sentences so uncomfortably as this: "Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded [a letter] away she saw Lord Warburton standing before her" (154).
Also, I'm sick of these perfect-looking and uniformly charming heroines: Natalya Rostov, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer. Get a fault. Elizabeth Bennet is not "uniformly charming," as Mr. Collins stammers: she is hasty and her decision outspeeds her judgment. She's real. Anna Karenina's perfectly formed, ivory arm; Natasha's every action being described as supple (maybe I can blame that on the translation); Isabel's charm and composure and appearance. They're the 19th-century equivalent of Jessica Wakefield.
I was hating Isabel for a while because damn, how could she be so stupid, but chapter 42 is one of the most skillful treatments of an invisible but tricky situation that I have ever read. After that I liked it better, and if I can’t adore a book based on only its last quarter, I can like it a lot. Nonetheless it’s probably the only James I’ll ever read.
Begun 28 June 2004.
Very sweet. A doll moves in and out of children's lives but without so much sentiment that the reader gets morose. Glimpses of 19th century American life. Rachel Field won the Newbery for this book, and she deserved it.
This reprint contains a rumor in its back matter that Rosemary Wells might write her next 100 years. Blech.
Again, why do I do this to myself? Any book with such a title should trust its audience not to need the clarification of its subtitle, "The Sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." First, not "the," since there are several; most importantly, Jane Austen's rather than whose else?
Among its dreadfulnesses is this gem: Someone--well, fine, Wickham--says, "Before coming into Derbyshire today I ventured first to Rosings Park." Possibly the author meant that Wickham journeyed to Kent during recent days before today's arrival at Pemberley, but that wording implies that Wickham has one hell of a fast horse. How Wickham could think to be received at Rosings, lowlife that he is, is a mystery to me equalled only by Mrs. Bennet's also making a casual visit thither, there and back in a day, some weeks before.
Darcy would not honor Wickham with an audience. As Elizabeth restrained herself from asking Lydia about Darcy's presence at Lydia's wedding but then pumped her aunt for details, so Darcy would restrain himself ever from conversing with Wickham again, let alone allowing him such a power over himself as disclosing secrets against his family--and he would thus restrain himself even if he didn't have someone to fill him in later.
Other plot wrongnesss and character betrayals: No mention of Mrs. Collins's young olive branch. Lady Catherine dismissing Mr. Collins for his being related to the Bennets but accepting Mary Bennet as intermediary and then as companion to Anne. Mr. Darcy's agreeing to mediate in a business transaction for a perfect stranger. Colonel Fitzwilliam matched with Mariah Lucas, who lacks the personal charms that made him regret Elizabeth's similar poverty. Caroline Bingley at Pemberley after the Darcys' marriage. Caroline Bingley sympathizing with Lady Catherine over Darcy's not marrying Anne. Georgiana Darcy matched with someone who is not Col. Fitzwilliam and corresponding with him before they are engaged. Mary married before Kitty. Mr. Bennet caving to and then Darcy agreeing, even for a moment, to Mrs. Bennet's stupid plans. Wickham reformed, at all and when no other more deserving character improves a jot. Naming a son Fitzwilliam--not Bennet, nor for his father or hers? A ball at Netherfield "a year ago [this November] and Elizabeth's first seeing Pemberley "the previous August," even though she has borne a child between the August and November. Darcy about five years older than he ought to be. Any conspiring between Lady Catherine and Wickham, and the idea of her hiring Wickham to ruin Lydia in order to distance Darcy from Elizabeth, when Lady Catherine didn't suspect their attachment until months after Lydia's fall. The idea that Darcy would have told his aunt about his love for Elizabeth before being accepted.
Among the stylistic faults: botched "former" and "latter" parallelisms. "Effect" for "affect." Hundreds of comma splices but a lack, OMFB, of setting-off commas, such as these that I illustrate in this sentence. Quotation marks curling next to the dialog tag rather than next to the dialog. "Collins's" as a plural possessive. "De Bourgh's" as a plural. "You have achieved perfection to some degree."
Affecting obsolete spellings in an Austen way, but considering eleven o'clock as "afternoon," even though the Austen "morning" stretched to our late afternoon, is pathe. No contemporary house would allow "chuse" and "shew" (I doubt), but this book didn't come from a house. It emerged from VirtualBookworm.com, an on-demand vanity press. And it looks it: though the cover doesn't look shoddy, the interior print looks like primitive inkjet, in a reasonable font but without anti-aliasing. Widows and orphans abound.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all sequels suck. But must they suck this hard?
The only thing stupider than this book is me for reading it.
One of the best-crafted books I have ever read. The extended metaphors Warren creates become vignettes of theme and character and Americana; his pacing is exquisite; overall finely honed prose.
It's one of those books whose craft I admire and enjoy but that don't resonate with me on a character or story level. From what I have not been able to forget about Bonfire of the Vanities, I can see its influence on Tom Wolfe, and the foreword claims that Primary Colors borrowed heavily from its style and pacing and voice as well as from its plot.
Carl Hiaasen's first attempt at a children's book reads a lot like I imagine his adult books to be: crazy characters' bizarre dialogue, a definite and proud Florida setting, Florida and more Florida.
I have never been too curious about his other books, but this is a Newbery Honor book, so I read it. As an ecological not-really-mystery Hoot reminded me of Jean Craighead George's Who Killed Cock Robin? Good messages for kids of how to deal with bullies and to achieve real change, good change.
I expected this to be more tidbits like those in Daniel Pool's first, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. It wasn't, but instead a social history of mainstream Victorian novel publishing, interesting in its own right.
The author's name, Molly Gloss, reminds me of Molly Zero and her webblog Polygloss, and Jessie recommended it, so it was a very journaly book. Its setting evoked Annie Dillard's The Living and its protagonist reminded me...well, not of me, though she did Jessie of me, which I took as a tremendous compliment...of someone I wanted to be. Good hair, of course. Also of Peter Høeg's Woman and the Ape, but only because of the unknown simian angle. While again the journal format is not credible for the storytelling style or pace, whatever, I should learn to overlook that.
This book with its sasquatches finds itself in the genre debate. Is it magical realism? Speculative fiction? I don't have the vocabulary for this debate.
I tried to read this a couple of times, including an attempt on audio in 1995 that didn't work enough that I was back to listening to music on my Walkman, and when it was time to move I just returned it instead of finding out how I could mail it back to the Hartford library. This time, although it felt like a fairly significant departure from Ulysses, War and Peace, and The Portrait of a Lady, I could still claim it as Significant in a Genre Whose Basics I Want to Know and By a Woman. Furthermore, after getting through the first hundred pages or so, I liked it. I thought there would be more exploration of the sociological implications of a unisex human race, and was disappointed by that absence, but I did very much like the exploration of friendship.
I brought Unlocking the Air with me as well, but when I started the first story I realized, or was pretty sure, that I had read it already.
Posted to the Usual Suspects:
We just listened to Pat Barker's Another World, ~7.5 hours, during vacation driving. The reader was really good, to my American ears, doing different gradations of Scottish accents, thicker for the less educated and moderated for the younger or more educated. It has two threads of narrative that Barker might have woven together more, but each thread was compelling on its own. It's set in the late 20th century so a WWI veteran can still be alive, and WWI is throughout the book, though not its only focus as in Barker's Regeneration trilogy. It's a good bridge for me to non-Regeneration (non-WWI) Barker books.
This is not on my main lists (his Sophie's Choice is) but William Styron did win a Pulitzer for it (so it's on another list). This is a kind of novel I particularly like, extrapolating a story and characters from slight little bits of known history. The first other example that comes to mind is Girl with a Pearl Earring.
What is known about Nat Turner is that he fomented the only sustained revolt in the history (the written record) of U.S. slavery. I thought Styron did an excellent job of getting into a possible Turner's head and showing his character and the development of his divine plan. Therefore I am glad to have Styron's afterword, written for this 1992 volume, about reactions to the novel: he presumed to write from a black man's perspective; he is racist to have written about slavery and how captivity and ignorance can warp spirit and potential; the book is so not worth reading that reactions against it, but not it, appear on college syllabi.
From email to my sister, who had also just finished it:
I don't read detective novels much (the last one I can remember is Don DeLillo's Libra about JFK's assassination (chock full of conspiracy theory for you) and before that the odd Agatha Christy or Where Are the Children?) so the pacing interfered with my reading in a way I am not accustomed to: Here's something happening! Quick, change the scene to leave your reader tensed and stressful!
In the opening paragraphs, a silhouette stares. That doesn't work for me.
Plus I saw [a spoiler] from miles off and I don't think Brown wrote the [mask the spoiler] scene nearly well enough to have pulled off that conceit. Also I think Brown watched "Eyes Wide Shut" too many times (i.e., once all the way through) and also followed "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" too closely. Also "Dogma." I did like how he took little bits of this literature and that history and wove them all together in a plausible way.
Except that some bits weren't plausible: claiming that Tom Cruise witnessed a goddess celebration instead of an orgy in "EWS" means that Brown is delusional, and putting in the bit about the dust spelling out "sex" over Simba's head--which is factual--to bolster a hypothesis about Walt Disney who had been dead for 30 years when "The Lion King" came out turned me off hard. Spoilers: A daughter carrying on two familial lines of a patrilineal society? Assuming Jesus was married because all right and proper Jewish men of his time were married might make sense; but he did tell his disciples (in canonical gospel) that they had to leave their families to follow him; hence it doesn't make me suspicious that his own spouse wouldn't be mentioned. Also if he was a right and proper Jewish dude and married, why ever would his wife be pregnant with their first child when he was at the advanced age of 33? So the implausible detracted from the credible.
The da Vinci stuff, the solving of the puzzles and all, the weaving of known and possible, that was all good too. Except I thought it was cheesy and manipulative of Brown first to give all four lines of a puzzle verse but then with later verses offer them to his readers only one line at a time.
(Someone told me an art historian of her acquaintance gets angry at the title, since da Vinci was known as Leonardo in his own lifetime. The plot doesn't support that particular title, but the market does; and the plot doesn't claim that he was so known, unless I missed that?)
After all that I had to read Was, of course. I can see how it ruined "The Wizard of Oz" for my mother-in-law, although I hope that was only temporary. In his acknowledgments, which come at the end as they ought when they give away as much about a book as today's do, Geoff Ryman showed a bit of the man behind the curtain: not himself but his source material, searches, eliding over the unknown or inconvenient, how the unknown fell from the known (buried under Los Angeles freeway foundations, the last extant copy stolen).
Like my recent Confessions of Nat Turner, Ryman builds on the history that remains, though feels no need (nor ought to) to be faithful to it. I read the last chapter of Was as I did the last pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, that is, breathless in the current the author unleashes and sustains; this is not as high a compliment as the comparee (I made that up) would indicate because the whole book is not as fine as that. The whole book was good, but the last chapter, like the first and last of Underworld, was sublime.
Somewhere along here I finished listening to The Odyssey. It was a lot less exciting this time than it was 22 years ago. I look forward to The Iliad, though.
The narrative is hard to follow because of jumps in time and perspective and the necessity of not knowing more names than is good for the struggle. The prose was beautiful, and I appreciated getting more inside the heads of those involved in the Troubles than newspapers and history books had yet put me.
My library turns up books I had forgotten or never knew we owned. We own Les Liaisons Dangereuses, French title, English text, Penguin volume. I haven't read it and it doesn't strike me as RDC's usual. But there it is. I have combed the shelves a few times for titles for the upstairs stretch of unread fiction, and one of those books was Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life, which is on the Feminista list, though whether the title novella or three-novella volume as a whole I don't know. Last night I opened it for the first time.
The title page is inscribed: "For Lisa. Mary Gordon."
I have no memory whatsoever of attending a booksigning for Mary Gordon. Her face on the back cover doesn't look familiar (which means nothing). I always peel off the bar codes, so whether I bought this book, published in 1993, from the UConn Co-op or the Tattered Cover I couldn't say. But probably the UConn Co-op. At the Co-op I remember Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Louis de Brunhoff's son, Bobbie Ann Mason, Douglas Adams, Anne Lauterbach, and Allen Ginsberg. Mary Gordon I do not remember.
I try to tell myself that remembering every event ever isn't necessary. My father just visited Connecticut and one of my sister's plans with him was to go to Block Island, just as he and I did in 1987. He had no memory of that visit. That's another story, but that's the kind of thing I remember. That I want to remember. That I ought to remember. Booksignings, I don't require. But still.
Throughout college my journal was a series of 120-page Joredco notebooks that eventually they stopped making, driving me to merely serviceable or occasional really cool spiralbound books. The last sheet or two of more than one notebook listed Reasons I'm Glad I'm Alive, events that I maybe didn't have time to chart in detail but didn't want to forget, or the date and the event so I could find its detail easily rather than pore through pages of not-as-happy-making filler. It's occurred to me recently that those pages could stand review (recently because I am almost finished with my current paper volume and it'll be time to dig the box out and either quickly cram it in or torment myself by skimming previous volumes). I wonder how many of those events I would remember.
A struggle for me has been how much to cling to my previous tastes and preferences out of loyalty to my former selves or devotion to the idea that I don't have former selves but am an integrated being. If I have forgotten a gathering in SEM's room sophomore year, does that mean it didn't mean anything? It's another thing for me to feel guilty about, that I am trying to learn not to feel guilty about.
On the strength of a luxurious visit to the Park Hill branch (which shouldn't feel so luxurious, since it's the one closest to my house) instead of the overcrowded with people and non-book media one near work) and her Peaceable Stories, I borrowed Francine Prose's After yesterday. She uses a high school shooting as the catalyst for post-September 11th invasions of civil liberties. Kind of like The Wave. And not without some "Red Dawn." It was mediocre, and not just because lately my diet has been of High Literature.
I confess that after the Barnes & Noble opened on the Sixteenth Street Mall, I browsed there as in a library. It was closer than the library or the Tattered Cover. I didn't buy from there (much). But it facilitated cheesy browsing. I read Life in the Fat Lane there. And The Face on the Milk Carton and Whatever Happened to Janie?. So yesterday when I spotted another Caroline B. Cooney Jane book, I bought it.
It was a Twinkie, a soap opera. I read it after After last night and in the jacuzzi this afternoon. Woe is me.
Last night's reading was four stories read by four actors not their authors, which worked well. The authors were local, though I don't know how well known the three who aren't Connie Willis are supposed to be. Connie Willis lives in Colorado? JJM and I mostly enjoyed them but also were waiting for each to be over.
Margaret Coel's "Lizzie Come Home" had such the tropes of, as a DU colleague said looking at earnest cheese in Santa Fe, "Honest Injun crap" that it was difficult to discern any merits of story within the Women Who Run with the Wolves names and the descriptions of hair and skirt and particular beauty. Still, its theme was compelling and I liked it fine even with its plot hole and unlikeliness. How does the sister justify spending however much time with Lizzie if she's not the woman she seeks? How could a woman orphaned at the age of 10 make a good enough marriage that now as a widow she had no financial worries ["You can have whatever you want"]. Also, the Sand Creek massacre happened after Gettysburg, which is too easy, if not too significant to the plot, an error to mess up. (Yes, I had to confirm it, but my hunch was right!)
James Van Pelt's "Home" was funny and funnily read. Then after the second occurrence of the phrase "Pack your things," his use of elements of "Solsbury Hill" gelled for me and at least the author admitted his debt to "a Peter Gabriel song." So I knew approximately what would happen in the last third of the story and its last line.
Connie Willis's "A Letter from the Clearys" typifies what I dislike not necessarily in science fiction but in clumsy fiction. There are clues to The Big Mystery all along, and then you figure it out long before the author is done with her smokescreens--which makes the remaining smokescreens before the Unveiling more annoying--and then has to hammer home the Message of the Mystery. This happened in The Da Vinci Code and, Climbing Tree help me, I noticed it in Absalom, Absalom! too: Quentin's pacing of his storytelling to Shreve suits Faulkner's purpose more than Quentin's character. But her name did remind me to find The Domesday Book, which is the most recommended of her titles besides To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I think was fine Twinkie-ish writing that Jasper Fforde has obviously overread.
The writing in the first three was fine, as much as I can harsh on their other elements. The last, Chris Ransick's "When the River Runs Red," went on far too fucking long. And what was the deal with the wasps beyond the beginning short-story writer's technique of Honoring the Catalyst? Bah. The narrator's rich voice nearly but not quite made up for it.
Except for the one weeny little instance where I thought one weeny little bit of story-unfolding suited Faulkner's narrative goal rather than Quentin's character and got some water in my lungs, this entire novel swept me away. The story, the characters, the history, the themes. I will need nine rereadings, but I loved it.
I trekked to my favorite non-Denver non-PGN library with a list of children's books. Indiscriminately--totally being one of those parents at whom, as a page, I rolled my eyes, because they selected books for their children based on exactly the same list--I plucked Newbery books into a stack in my left hand.
And then I went off and read them. I don't know what I thought I wanted to find at Nordstrom, but I read Everything on a Waffle over a sandwich from Paradise Bakery. That was charming and fun and safe, like Because of Winn-Dixie.
(What did I miss about Desperaux? It was okay, but it fit into a pattern, in which the work that follows the best work is rewarded, out of guilt for previously neglecting the best, that I had previously noticed more with Oscars. And, as regards Philip Roth and Richard Russo, the Pulitzer.)
Home again I read On My Honor, which was A Taste of Wild Blackberries Meets the ABC After School Special; yesterday I read The Wish Giver--I'd say Stephen King lifted Needful Things straight from it if it weren't such an old premise--and The Matchlock Gun, which had a strong anti-Indian slant (even for 1942? when Laura Ingalls Wilder was publishing Newbery Honor Indian-hating books?) and brought up interesting bits of history only to let them fall scattered and neglected.
Today I'm reading One-Eyed Cat, and I'm surprised it took four books to prove that all books are one book. In Everything on a Waffle is a recipe for perfectly boiled potatoes. In One-Eyed Cat, someone describes the succulence of the perfectly boiled potato.
I also borrowed one of the three Medalists I feel guilty about, Up a Road Slowly--about which I feel the guiltiest since it was mentioned in Look Out My Window and I even read a book about a doll (Impunity Jane*) for its sake and and painted my teenaged bedroom yellow with white trim. The others are M.C. Higgins the Great and A Gathering of Days. Those are the only three since 1959--unless it be about a dog (Sounder and Shiloh**)--that I have missed, and 1959 to 1986, Witch of Blackbird Pond to Sarah, Plain and Tall, is the Golden Age of U.S. children's books.
* Impunity Jane was fine. So was Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. I am not impugning (disappointingly, those words' sources are dissimilar) dolls.
** I did survive Ginger Pye and King of the Wind and Julie of the Wolves. I could try Sounder and Shiloh. And maybe Rascal. I am not going to read Where the Red Fern Grows, though. That I refuse.
It occurred to me to take before and after pictures of the house today. This is just to remind that I intended to do that. A before picture of the microwave would be too gross, and an after picture would tragically fail to include the microwave cart currently out of stock at the closest Target unless I did something insane like go to the two other nearby Targets.* A before picture of the dining table as an example of the mess would probably suffice, but an after picture would similarly fail to include new white tapers for the candelabra and therefore be inadequate.
Also, do you see what I am doing? I am not cleaning. I am typing.
I have houseguests on Monday, one Ukrainian whom I've never met and the other whom I've seen once at a wedding in the past nine years and who is more RDC's friend than mine and also someone else's ex-husband. I don't know anything about the Ukraine. At least previously if not currently extremely fertile soil. Kiev. Chernobyl. Odessa. The Endless Steppe. The Dnieper and the Dniester, because of Russian History to 1905. The Crimean War, because of a biography (for children) of Florence Nightingale. I'm not sure if it's Little or White Russia, though I know Belarus, which I cannot spell off the top of my head--no, I can, but not so confidently as not to check--is the other. Everything Is Illuminated.
I'm still typing. Meanwhile, Blake has been preening on my lap. He has finished dropping feathers and is now growing them in. I'm wearing RDC's navy terrycloth robe instead of my periwinkle fleece one, and I don't know how I can still be surprised at what he can produce, but there are strips of feather casings as long as my little fingernail. He's only little.
Oo, a list. Then I'll stop typing and do the list.
What I did instead of clean:
* 30 September 2004: Most of the cleaning strike-outs date from last night; since the potential houseguests got stuck in Flagstaff I stayed slothful for longer. I did attempt the other two Targets but one was illusory and the other was also out of stock.
My history is off, or Laura Adams Armer whitewashed--pun deliberate--it in Waterless Mountain. I didn't know Big Man was white, since he was given a Navajo name, until he drove a car. And I'm not sure when it was set: there are cars and planes, but no missionaries and no reservations.It was a lovely story about a boy growing up and becoming a medicine man, but "medicine man," even in a 1932 book for children, rankles my 21st-century sensibilities. Big Man took the Younger Brother and his family by train to the California coast, where Mother wove at a museum without quite becoming Ishi, and legends were related hinting that the Navajo are descendants of Karana's people. Or not, since they all died as soon as they were brought to shore, but from a Channel Island people.
Up a Road Slowly is my favorite Irene Hunt. I read and reread No Promises in the Wind possibly for years without associating it with the two books Kate's parents give her when they won't let her have Inky, and I liked Across Five Aprils just fine, but Up a Road Slowly is by far the best. Yet I'm glad I didn't read it until now. It's so solemn and detached that I think I would not have liked it as a teenager; now I can recognize its voice as just right.
Did I not read this as a child because it was about a boy? I wish I had: lots of Boston, lots of Revolutionary War build-up, and a fine bildungsroman embedded in that backdrop (instead of nonsensically marionetted before it).
Is this too hard for fifth grade? I still remember the illustrations in the history book showing the steps and time necessary to fire one musket shot. Johnny is 15, but is that too old a protagonist for a 10-year-old?
Esther Forbes doesn't omit that the Sons of Liberty owned slaves, and while a man is orating about freedom from tyranny, from the Spanish and French slavery to the south and north, an enslaved woman is serving punch.
I don't know what I expected this to be about. Two Years Before the Mast mixed with All Quiet on the Western Front, maybe. Instead it was a short happy version of Island of the Blue Dolphins with the added benefit of no canine mortality. A fine adventure story in paradise.
Except that somehow I doubt cannibalistic tribes were darker of skin than any other: should Armstrong Sperry in 1941 be allowed that aspersion or should I consider that "those dark people" was a metaphor?
An idyllic story about 1890s New York. The girl reminded me of Phoebe Caulfield because of her class and not being a snob (but not because of roller skates, because the rollerskating girl in Catcher is anonymous). An idyllic story, that is, for someone of that class: it would be decades before there were books about the Italian immigrant boy who tends a fruit stand, instead of just about the wealthy little girl who befriends the boy.
Why haven't I known about E.L. Doctorow before, besides Ragtime? I really enjoyed this story, in spite of the narrator, whose manner I hated. There is some line I feel like I want to draw between this and American Pastoral and Underworld, but I think it's not there to be drawn. I guess I thought, because of his best-known title, that Doctorow was from much earlier in the century than he is.
It wasn't Slippery Slope, but it was fine. I do hope the twelfth, which might be Lousy Lane, starts wrapping up threads so the thirteenth isn't overwhelming with raveling and knotted care. Grotto does end with a chance in that direction. Sunny didn't bust out with anything as priceless as "Buscheney!" but she did use a few words I want to look up.
This book didn't grab me, maybe for no good reason. Mary Gordon's prose was lovely and even her take on three different love relationships, fresh and interesting, failed to grip me as I wish it had. Well, really it was the first novella, "The Immaculate Man," that took me an age. The other two, the eponymous one and "Living at Home," were better.
The most noteworthy thing about this book is that it is signed on the title page, inscribed to me, signed by the author, and I have no memory of seeing her. However, I do remember telling this story before.
I never read Robert Louis Stevenson's novels so the closest children's piracy novel for me is Peter Duck. Charles Hawes is somewhat more serious than Arthur Ransome, and the first half or so is of the finest swashbuckliness I could want. Hawes didn't expect to die ony two years after this won the Newbery, because it's set up for a sequel--even in 1924--in a way that The Story of Dr. Dolittle, in 1922, is not (Dr. Dolittle's adventures are each independent of the others). The protagonist--not nearly Will Turner, though the latter surely owes a debt to Phil--does the right thing more easily than Johnny Tremain does, but the eve of revolution shtick and the proximity of my readings made them similar.
I wasn't making any progress with Ivanhoe. No wonder it was so despised in Up the Down Staircase. What the hell is the point? If it's supposed to be an adventure novel, it needs to have more buckles swashed than its first several score pages had. Project Gutenberg had Women in Love, though, and after only a litte bit I was bowled over.
Conversations like these characters' never do happen, but they read well. Except that the Project Gutenberg text rendered all the italics as ALL CAPS and that made characters shrill and melodramatic. I turned all the stupid British "inverse commas" into quotation marks as is right and proper and then easily could find and replace quotations in contractions and possessives, but if strings of capitals can even be sought in Word, I don't know how.
And no wonder it's on the Triangle list. It seems, three chapters in, that I maybe won't hate the characters as much as I did those in Sons and Lovers, and reading it lets me understand A.S. Byatt (who did her thesis on D.H. Lawrence) better, even just her care with sensual details of physical surroundings.
Although I know Lawrence is 20th century--1920s, pretty much?--I associate him with Thomas Hardy for their rural settings (Lancashire, Wessex, it's all one), and I began this while also reading The Portrait of a Lady, so electricity and automobiles startle me more than they ought.
What struck me while reading:
All books are one book: in Messenger, one of the meals Seer and Matty cook is rabbit. One of the purposes of coal-mining, someone disdains in in Women in Love, is to cook a rabbit.
Chapter VIII reads like a parody of itself. This Gutenberg text renders all italicized text into capitals, which makes Lawrence read like J.K. Rowling (one character is named Hermione, and a chapter is entitled Moony) or like Jean Auel fan fic, which I certainly have never ever read.
Chapter XVIII: "Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference."
Before chapter XXVI, I hated the characters' unreality and was left only cold by the their running hot and cold with each other. So chapter XXVI, about a chair, was a nice break. I could sit back and think platonic thoughts for a while.
Isn't this a which splice or something similar? "Every woman he comes across he wants to make her in love with him." The sentence would be correct without the accusative pronoun. I mean "her," but this book throws in so much French and German that I want to retaliate with Latin.
With the exceptions of the scenes or chapters above, I mostly hated it, because the characters were so unreal. The end slightly redeemed what had gone before but did not justify it.
A delightful listen, read with a believable, to my ear, set of Down Easter accents. RDC had this Sarah Orne Jewett book for a UConn grad class in what subject I forget. Otherwise I don't know how I might have heard of it.
My fifth Penelope Fitzgerald. I love how she uses a small detail to illustrate an entire facet of someone's personality, and how quietly she'll sneak in something equally quietly but inescapably funny.
All books are one book:
In Vernon God Little, Ella Bouchard; in Main Street, Ella Stowbody (not that the name Ella is that uncommon or that the characters are similar. In the former, the family name Gurie; in the latter, Gurrey; plus, in Nightbirds on Nantucket, gurry is the slimy residue left over from rendering whale oil.
Reading Main Street, set in Minnesota in the 1920s, makes me think about Betsy's Wedding, whose time I know only because of Betsy and the Great World. I really don't want Betsy to turn into Carol, but then Joe isn't Will Kennicott or even a doctor. But Whatsisname the Laurie character* from Anne of Green Gables is, isn't he?
*Gilbert. Sorry.
I have to look up why DBC Pierre earned the Booker for this. I thought that prize went only to British commonwealth authors. The publisher has offices in Edinburgh and New York, so maybe that's it. Aha! Although the author blurb says merely that he split his first 25 years mostly between Mexico and Texas (only in Texas is that a parallel pair), he was born in Australia and now lives in Ireland. But I still need to find out why a pen-and-ink drawing of a capybara appears in the front matter, when the book is the lesser for its lack of capybaras (as so many are) and the animal doesn't seem to be the publisher's device.
Pierre's figures of speech are hysterical and original and his mother and her "friends" remind me of the mother in The Corrections. I loved his voice and style.
This book is the third I've read in less than 10 months drawing from the assault at Columbine High School (the others were Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! and Francine Prose's After). The Coupland was okay, and I thought this was great, but they're my last Ripped From Today's Headlines (at least that one) novels for a while.
I began this last fall in audio, but the Audible file suddenly changed to an Arthurian myth narrated by Derek Jacobi. Which isn't a bad thing at all, but it's not Thornton Wilder.
I love how the enterwined characters make the four novellas one novel. I thought the Pulitzer prize was to be given for portrayal of U.S. life, but if it went (inexplicably) to The Stone Diaries and The Shipping News, I guess it's for American stories.
I am going to devour Mary Renault's opus. Greek myths expanded into novels: what could go wrong--in the hands of a sympathetic master of prose? Nothing. This was a great read.
My ten-year-old nephew RDC2 recently read this and reported that he really identified with the main character and understood him. He has only just begun to read read, to read for pleasure, with fluency and comprehension, and this delights me, as Dicey was reassured when Maybeth, at eight or nine, read Green Eggs and Ham, late, but giggling and appreciating the silliness. The Collier brothers' book won a Newbery Honor (the afterward-like epilogue makes the deliberation behind its 1974 release obvious) for it, and Christopher Collier taught U.S. history at UConn while I was there, and the book is set in Connecticut, so RDC2's enjoying it was an excellent reason for me to skootch it up the queue.
I just recently read Johnny Tremain, Newbery Medalist, good story, good history, but Tim Meeker is more credible in his way because he doesn't just happen to fall in with the major players, as Tremain does, but lives his own life. Like Across Five Aprils, My Brother is a war story from an average child's point of view instead of from a soldier's.
Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt failed to blow my skirt up; and then, associating Lewis with Upton Sinclair because of their names and period when Lewis wasn't as obvious a reactionary as Sinclair, I decided the former was boring. Main Street changed my mind. Aside from an incredible because manipulative episode fairly late in the novel, the characters, events, and plot formed a riveting microcosm of American life.
A question: Why would someone give a pregnant woman Ben-Hur "as a preventive of future infant immorality"? Because it's "a tale of the Christ" or because, for this time (late 1910s), it would have been a diverting read during confinement?
First I thought that Carol was merely a female Babbitt, and she does have her babbitty strains but Lewis is not that lazy. Then, by period and discontent, the next obvious parallels for me to draw were to Dorothy Canfield's The Homemaker. Familial and economic differences again let Carol be her own self, but not the townsfolk. If they were not drawn by the same pencil, at least their authors used the same sharpener.
Preliminary googling turns up Lewis working as a janitor in Upton Sinclair's socialist commune and also knowing Jack London. I have confused Upton Sinclair Lewis since high school, but now at least I will remember that both of them were interesting.
Annie Proulx cranked out her thesaurus but not her Strunk & White for this. Partly because of that article in The Atlantic but also on my own I rolled my eyes at the unnecessary sentence fragments. And the choppy sentences. Full of gerunding. Because it enhanced nothing. The author was wrong. And didn't care.
Both Lou and Minne, seeing the book on my desk, asked if I was rereading it. Is ten years old so old for a book? Both said they needed several score pages to get into it. Lou said unprompted that the style annoyed her. My sister said she gave up after a dozen pages or so. I preferred Far Afield for remote northern Atlantic outcast of Western civilization.
It reminded me of Anne Tyler, and a book does that to its peril. Hopeless, unlikeable characters living lives of quiet desperation. I say that on the (not) strength of Searching for Caleb and Breathing Lessons. My sister and Haitch love her, so I haven't written her off (as I have, say, Theodore Dreiser), but I'm not enthusiastic about anything more by her.
I should read Iris Murdoch or Eudora Welty but I'm reading Robin McKinley as a reward. Mleah.
I loved this. Also it makes me more hopeful about the Rabbit books than I had been previously. Also Ürboss said that it, rather than Hamlet, would be sufficient preparation for Something Rotten.
Absolutely engrossing. A few, surprising grammatical lapses dropped me out of her world, but only briefly, because engrossing. Although its market probably exists because of Buffy, I was glad to find the story independent of the Slayer world. I read it not for Buffy but for Harry and Aerin and Robin McKinley. A wonderful, absorbing story. I'm a big enough fan of Spike that I wanted more and more Constantine, and more Constantine and Sunshine, but even the tantalizing incompleteness was satisfying.
All books are one book: there was a jeweled goblet in Gertrude and Claudius too.
This had been a noticeable hole in my Newbery Medal reading. I loved the characters and their family ties and the setting, but I don't quite think its various plot threads came together as Virginia Hamilton intended.
Sometime in November I finished listening to Edward P. Jones's The Known World, about what happens to a plantation after the death of its owner--its black owner, who owned not just land but people as well. I see now, wanting to link to it because of something in I Am Charlotte Simmons, that I never wrote its own entry.
Really good. It read as if carefully founded on Census data and 19th-century newspapers and pamphlets, which impressed me all the more after I listened to the interview with the author following the performance because while his fiction read like creative nonfiction, it wasn't. Not quite like my next listen, True History of the Kelly Gang it was nearly historic invention, and only nearly because Jones's characters never existed as individuals, only as statistics.
Pop history indeed. I didn't quite throw it across the room, as I did with William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire--a stupid title for a book about the medieval Europe, since the entire world, not just Europe, was lit only by fire, up until Edison--except, you know, also by sunlight. I only skimmed the last few chapters. Unfortunately I bought two books by Norman Kantor. The other is a survey of antiquity, a period I'm not quite as attached to, so its unsupported conclusions, red herrings, and convenient glosses (meaing both elisions and definitions) might not piss me off as badly.
I had never read any Nancy Farmer before and picked her up only because she's won Newbery honors. I started with this because the other I borrowed, A Girl Named Disaster, looked more appealing (it starts out better than House starts, continues, or ends). House wasn't awful, but in the way of The Giver, I am too old. It might be a fine jumping-off point for kids to debate certain ideas, but it lacks cohesiveness for the adult reader.
I went along with opium and coca being grown in unsuitable climates; but it lost me when drug lords ruling a thin strip of country between post-Mexico and the U.S., farming narcotics and blocking illegal emigration, were granted their sovereignty in return for promising not to sell their crops to either country but only abroad.
Miles better than my previous Nancy Farmer. A blurb says that Nhamo is peer to Miyax Julie Edward Kapugen and Karana of the Island of the Blue Dolpins, and she absolutely is. (There was a little Life of Pi in there too, for me, because of the island.) A great story, of freedom and independence and self-reliance (except the bit about the brassiere and shoes).
I expected not to like it; and while I liked the writing, nope I didn't like the story. Quelle surprise.
The way Buck turned into a better wolf than the wolves were reminded me of how, in the beginning of "How the West Was Won" (the beginning of it was all I could stomach), Jimmy Stewart is described as being "more Indians than the Indians." Because, of course, as a white man he could better any red man's accomplishment. Blargh.
I first tried this some years ago and closed it after the first several pages. Or paragraphs. This time I persevered and it appealed to me more. Being me, I had to assume similarities between John Kennedy Toole and his mother and Ignatius J. Reilly and his mother.
Because of the Swift quote and for Ignatius's refusal to respond to any reality other than his own imagining, I expected a Don Quijote, but Toole's protagonist (and all the characters) are more original than that. I also tried to find some great Symbolism in the Scenicruiser and his inability to leave New Orleans until I recalled that he had gone to college.
For ten years. With graduate work in Medieval Studies. Ah-ha-ha.
And finally, a protagonist more thoroughly repellent than McTeague.
My previous Peter Carey was Oscar and Lucinda, which I read on the Poudre. I'll have photographic evidence of what I did while listening to this, eventually and maybe soon. I don't know how anyone can do anything craftie (distinct from crafty) without a book to listen to.
A Recorded Books interview with the author followed the book. The interviewer said that the New York Times reviewer called this fiction "historical invention." I do like this sort of fiction. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one sort, utter invention from the wispy known facts about Vermeer--his city, his religion, his painting. In Cold Blood is another, adopting the basics of an actual case but independent of it, written with the tone of a newspaper article though with a novel's perspective. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a pure novel, in tone and perspective, though it is anchored to historical incident. And The Known World is, surprisingly, entirely fictional; from explicit hints in the narrative I was sure its author had based his characters on actual people polled in the Census, and on archival pamphlets culled from the Library of Congress.
True History of the Kelly Gang shows yet another way to imagine historical fiction. Before I read it, I thought, from whatever I'd heard about the novel, that the Kelly Gang were historically factual. Reading it (listening to it), with the narrative distributed into parcels, written on bank stationery or brown wrapping paper, in pencil or black ink or whatever came to hand, I was sure it was entirely made up, like The Known World, and that Carey used the parcelling for verisimilitude. The Kelly Gang were real, like the Usan Jesse James gang, and Ned Kelly did write a letter, though not the several parcels; and I don't know how much of what he actually wrote found its way into Carey's novel. I do know (because Carey said so in the interview) that one Australian reviewer slammed the book for not being inventive enough, which means that the reviewer must have found that the characters, plot, and Kelly's voice in the novel accorded so well to the Kelly legend in popular culture that he didn't realize it was all pure invention.
A wonderful book.
"Never heard of it."
I read Erewhon sometime during college, maybe after reading Utopia. Somehow I had heard of it before its mention in my Evil in Lit class. Maybe only seeing "A Room with a View" was reason enough for me to look up Samuel Butler.
Anyway, including this book on the Modern Library list is cheating a little: it was written well before 1901, and Butler belongs as thoroughly to the 19th century as do Dickens and Eliot. The list is the list and I assigned it to myself knowing it was stupid and chauvinist and omitted To Kill a Mockingbird, but of the 100 books, the only two not set in the 20th century are nonetheless clearly of the 20th, I, Claudius and Wide Sargasso Sea. I might disagree with the presence or placement of certain books but this is the only one that feels like it violates the list's own rules, not just mine. But this is not the book's fault.
About a third of the way through, a resemblance to Of Human Bondage occurred to me. Because of their coming from about the same era? I just googled Somerset Maugham, not daring to google "Of Human Bondage," because I didn't know its date: 1915. Way of All Flesh was begun in 1874. There is my tendency to conflate the late 19th century into the early 20th, and vice versa, e.g. trains in D.H. Lawrence startling me and never keeping straight in my head that Isabel Archer was born during the Civil War instead of, say, between Cleveland's administrations. Mostly it is the hostile parentage, Ernest Pontifex's own parents and Phillip Carey's uncle, and the self-serving and hypocritical Christianity these people profess. And the two heroes' foolish first romantic connections.
I learned the word laches: negligence in the observance of duty or opportunity; specifically: undue delay in asserting a legal right or privilege.
My fourth Iris Murdoch.
The prose, the descriptions of the physical setting, primarily seascape, is extraordinary. The protagonist frightened me severely, and some of the plot patterns hang unfinished, not clumsily but deliberately to unsettle. I didn't get all the symbolism the book is supposedly packed with, and certain events were unbelievable. Yet I loved it. Murdoch's expression of personality and interplay and history propelled me along.
I could tell its writing was better but I didn't like it as well as The Green Knight, whose characters resonated with me. Then A Severed Head, then this, and far, far below, Under the Net.
All books are one book: Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe’s heroine, thinks that the El Dorado she had come to DuPont University to find was now the entire known world.
A dramatic reader gave the flat characters more personality than Wolfe did. The egregious stereotyping and trite, minimalistic plot wore on and on. I hope I wouldn't have read it, but it was an okay listen, an easy and entertaining story. I know this was a better listen than read: reviewers at Amazon complained of things like ":::::STATIC:::::" that the performer, not I, had to deal with. I did have to deal with lots of thrice-repeated words, rut rut rut or caress caress caress, which might work once or twice in context, but not continually, and not of a truck churning uphill ("struggle struggle struggle"), or multiplous times in one paragraph of a heart beating, pound pound pound pound (because sometimes the word would be quadrupled).
Among the several unbelievable things is Charlotte's first experience in high heels. Any female with any sartorial concern at all, and we know Charlotte has some, would put on dress and shoes and try them out, especially heels, before wearing them at an event.
This book is amazing. I know I have consistently enjoyed almost all my recent books, but that is a pleasant effect of reading good books. This one--I was only on page 74 when I began this entry--is better. Sophie doesn't come on stage until page 40, and around page 60 we see the number on her arm, and now on page 74 Bobby Weed is mentioned. So I asked my friend Google who Bobby Weed was. On a page about Sophie's Choice, a non-spoiling paragraph said, "In December 1845...a Jewish merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, was arrested for selling a pair of gloves on Sunday.... The Charleston Sunday Times editorialized in favor of the court's decision: An ordinance for the better observance of Sunday...does not say to the Hebrew, You shall not keep holy the seventh day,' but merely declares that you shall not disturb the Christian by business or labor on his Sabbath."
I am going to feel guilty by transference by reading this book. Within the same site is mentioned Philip Roth's Ghost Writer, of which I hadn't heard, which imagines that Anne Frank survived Bergen-Belsen and became a creative writing student in the United States. I also haven't heard of Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews, which is about a Jewish tyrant within the ghetto system. And the page itself, which I didn't read closely for fear of spoilage, posits that Sophie's Choice is not about the Holocaust but about its "ideological representation."
The physical and psychological stereotypes about "race" make me itch: "wore in lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race." It's set in the late '40s, but the narrator implies a few decades of hindsight.
In Maus, Spiegelmann speaks of his father's having survivor's guilt; I have the egotistical guilt of the latter born. I love Styron's writing, and I love his forthright, examining what interests him and dealing with lambasting, and most especially his not shirking that intellectual obligation just for fear of the lambasting.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker for this. I like the parallels between the two courses of action 50 years apart, and what it had to say about the British in India 25 years before and after its independence, but I confess I know so little about India--Midnight's Children, two Rumer Goddens, and Just So Stories are about my limit--that I must miss oodles of meaning.
I linked this and Heat and Dust for several insubstantial reasons: I had them both from the library at the same time, neither is over 200 pages, and both won the Booker prize.
Both books are about women coming to terms with unexpected relationships, but despite that similarity I doubt Ruth Prawer Jhabvala will stay with me. Anita Brookner, on the other hand, will. I don't think it's just because England and Switzerland are more familiar settings than India. And I should think about Brookner on her own and not in comparison to someone else, not even Penelope Fitzgerald, a compliment.
In one of the most surprising instances of All Books Are One Book, Joan W. Blos's protagonist Catherine hears about Nat Turner's 1831 uprising. Otherwise, despite her being from New Hampshire at exactly the time Sturbridge Village is set, this book barely touched me and I don't see how it won the Newbery.
Reasons: it won a Pulitzer; also the Western is the one genre I have never read.
I liked the first section with Call and Gus at Hat Creek, as long as the men were alone. There was one woman, the hooker with a heart of gold, and a scattering of unwomen, like desiccated widows and shrewish wives.
Then we meet Elmira, another shrew, who never hears anything her husband of four months says because he never says anything new. Except that immediately preceding Larry McMurtry's telling us this is her being annoyed at his habitually asking his stepson at every dinner whether he wants any buttermilk, which the stepson doesn't like.
I only recently learned the term "cover" for "to mate": I was looking up the origin of a horse breed and came across mention of a gene pool so small but so desirable that horse-breeders had sires "cover" their own offspring. I would have understood "he covered her" without that, but I would have missed the lovely, and so appropriate for the genre, bestial taint.
I admit that I expected to sneer at The Da Vinci Code and I read the first chapters pen in hand to mark logical fallacies (instead of, say, not reading them at all), but I don't think it was solely my predisposition that made my eyes bleed in the third paragraph, when a silhouette glared. As a metaphor, it just didn't work for me. I thought of that when, in contrast, I really liked once in Lonesome Dove when sun groped through clearing rain. Without a "the," I can read that as "sunlight," where the article would have made it Sol and too close for comfort.
Flat stereotypes in I Am Charlotte Simmons annoyed me, but the same thing--the John Wayne silent type, the hooker with a heart of gold (most of them), the bloodthirsty Comanche, the instinctually superior cowboy, the wise but unheard Mexican--didn't as much: I expected them in a western. I didn't expect the Dickensian coincidence of everyone happening across everyone else's path: in the four points between Texas and Montana, Arkansas and Colorado, there seem to have been only a score of people.
A great story. Except that the very ending was an afterthought.
Eight nonfiction
Literary Analysis, History, Cultural Studies:
Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague
Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods
Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey
David Gifford, Annotated Ulysses
Daniel Pool, Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novels
Grammar Geekery:
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Well-Tempered Sentence
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Memoir:
David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Sixty novels, including nine audio and six onscreen
Joan Austen-Leigh, A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself
Pat Barker, Another World (audio)
Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (PG)
Antonia S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (audio)
Tom Carson, Gilligan's Wake
Tracey Chevalier, The Virgin Blue
Carolyn Chute, Beans of Egypt, Maine
Douglas Coupland, All Families Are Psychotic
Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!
Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone
Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
Don DeLillo, Underworld (audio)
E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (audio)
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (PG)
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Jasper Fforde, Well of Lost Plots
Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Molly Gloss, Wild Life: A Novel
Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs (audio)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (audio)
James Joyce, Ulysses
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (PG)
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (PG)
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
Jack London, The Call of the Wild (PG)
Gregory Maguire, Mirror, Mirror
Robin McKinley, Sunshine
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (audio)
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little
E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (audio)
Geoff Ryman, Was
José Saramago, The Stone Raft
Cathleen Schine, She Is Me
Juliette Shapiro, Excessively Diverted
William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron, Sophie's Choice
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (audio)
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius
Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (PG)
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of the San Luis Rey
Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons (audio)
Other:
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1953-1954
Forty-one children's books
Joan Aiken, Nightbirds on Nantucket
Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
Marion Dane Bauer, On My Honor
Joan W. Blos, A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32
L.M. Boston, Children of Green Knowe
Bill Brittain, The Wish Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree
Ellen Conford, A Royal Pain
Caroline B. Cooney, What Janie Found
Sharon Creech, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup
Sharon Creech, Heartbeat
Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes
Kate Dicamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
Olivier Dunrea, Peedie
Jeanne DuPrau, People of Sparks
Walter Edmonds, The Matchlock Gun
Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster
Nancy Farmer, House of The Scorpion
Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain
Paula Fox, One-Eyed Cat
Jackie French, Diary of a Wombat
Jean Fritz, Homesick: My Own Story
Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Cornelia Funke, Thief Lord
Ruth S. Gannet, My Father’s Dragon
Virginia C. Hamilton, M.C. Higgins The Great
Charles Hawes, Dark Frigate
Karen Hesse, Just Juice
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot
Polly Horvath, Everything On A Waffle
Irene Hunt, Up A Road Slowly
E.L. Konigsburg, The Outcasts of Schuyler Place
Lois Lowry, Messenger
Katherine Paterson, Preacher's Boy
Katherine Paterson, The Same Stuff as Stars
Francine Prose, After
Willo Davis Roberts, Girl With the Silver Eyes
Ruth Sawyer, Roller Skates
Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto
Armstrong Sperry, Call It Courage
Lawrence Yep, Dragonwings
Of the 25 adult novels that I read not by reason of award or list, and not because their medium (audio or Project Gutenberg, which both allow me to fill otherwise bookless time) constrains my choice, what were my reasons?
Five were by favorite authors or authors of favorites--Byatt and Saramago the former, Chevalier, McKinley, and Schine the latter; another two were for Davies becoming a favorite author. Coupland and Maguire were more for completion than for favoritism. Two were Austen complements; Fforde was purely escapist; and Kidd was to ease my brain after Ulysses but also sent me haring back to better fare. Four were direct recommendations, Bray from Melissa, Gloss from Jessie, Hosseini from the UConn Co-op, Updike from ÜberBoss. Carson and Foer were Suspect mentions, and because of Suspect love I read my second Murakami. Of course, without the Suspects I wouldn’t’ve read Ulysses either, or got as much out of Faulkner as I did. Bainbridge was a combination: I began it at some friends' house while catsitting, napping with a cat in the sun, and when Beth read it I thought to borrow it to finish while napping with my own pet. The Chute I had meant to read since a Phoebe book club discussed it during my tenure, and the LeGuin because it is a seminal sf title. And Brown I read for hype.
Twenty-one of the 41 children's books won Newbery Medals or Honors. Of the others, only the Conford wasted my time, though the Cooney is also trashy. Roberts I read because of Eliza; the Dunrea because it is adorable, ditto the French; Dahl was there, but of course also worth reading; for Hesse’s Newbery I have read two but will not read additional others. Aiken, Creech, Konigsburg, Lowry, Paterson, and Snicket are favorite authors of favorites. Boston and Funke could be new favorites. DuPrau milks the sequel beast, which I should resist, and the Prose could have been decent but wasn't. I might continue to think that because I have read all the best of the Golden Age for my favorite age range (1960 to 1985, for 10- to 12-year-olds, except that 1959 gave me Witch of Blackbird Pond and 1986 Sarah, Plain and Tall (which is perfect despite being younger)) that children's books are all used up for me, but then Creech and Curtis and Sachar give me hope.
