Bendrix reminded me of the utterly selfish protagonist in The Sea, the Sea, and I might not have made such an unkind parallel if my library copy hadn't been a movie advertisement announcing Ralph Fiennes, whom I avoid.
I did like the religious questing and the touches of the mystic, except now I might confuse Graham Greene with that priest-author...Andrew Greeley? Maybe not: his titles at Amazon look too wholesome. The one I'm thinking of wrote thrillers.
Anyway, I think the Invisible Library is no longer being updated, so I shall list new contributions here:
Maurice Bendrix, The Ambitious Host, The Crowned Image, and The Grave on the Water-Front; also, in progress, a life of General Gordon.
A transparently genuine stream-of-consciousness narrative from a little boy's point of view. I don't know if there's a some sort of ruling against dialogue punctuation in bildungsroman of the blue-collar British Isles--this, Frank McCourt, Trainspotting, Vernon God Little if I may include blue-collar Usan writing by Brits, and Usan writing by Usans, too, like Cormac McCarthy--but Roddy Doyle follows it. Is it Joyce's influence? Is it just cool, like Faulkner? (José Saramago gets a pass, by the way. He can do no wrong.)
Is it okay that I confuse Doyle with T.C. Boyle, whom I haven't read, and that I want to call the book Paddy Doyle Ha Ha Ha?
Oh for goodness' sake.
For starters, the errors in the copy of this Bantam print. "Whose in the backseat?" and numerous random letter changes. It was the first pulp paperback I've read in ages--since last December's re-read of my high-school era Return of the King--and it had the same font as Judy Blume's Forever, which I haven't seen in decades but whose words I scoured off the page and which I can remember remember by appearance as well as by context.
The thing that's Rita Mae Brown's fault, not her publisher's, is just how perfect Molly is. Overcoming her dirt-poor childhood spent plucking potato bugs, excelling academically and intellectually despite her family's disdain and discouragement, physically gifted athletically and aesthetically, and queer. One of the criticisms I read of Lonesome Dove--I love the juxtapositions wrought by my eclectic reading plan--is reverse racism by making the black character Deets flawless instead of human. Mollly's a lot more interesting to listen to than someone dumb as a stump--and than Deets, who utters hardly a word--but how handy it is for Brown that a character who has to face the challenges society sets for the queer does so with such exceptional talents and personality, who is also flawless. What about the lesbian who is merely average? Also, Brown? Whether het or not, over adoption lines or not, incest is fucked up.
Anyway, a quick and dirty read, just like Brown's heterosexual fucking, but not as pointless. I hope it is a sign of social progress that it is not as audacious and revolutionary to me now as it needed to be 30 years ago upon publication.
Simple and hopeful and lacking the clear gussak=good anvil that Waterless Mountain had. Also it made me want a llama or several.
This seemed to me like a book written a few decades before its late '60s printing, and it felt as if written in Russian and translated. So I had its origin entirely wrong. The seeming might not have been due to anything more than its time and place, but the feeling was due to Bernard Malamud’s perfect prose. Then I thought maybe it was a response to Darkness at Noon, but I don’t find that it is. Wrongful imprisonment is hardly unique to the Russian empire or Russian soviet, and the Koestler parallel was only my groping.
It is based somewhat on fact, on the case of a Jewish man arrested at the same time and place for the same crime, but also, said Malamud, was inspired by Dreyfuss and Sacco & Vincetti. It took me reading Woman on the Edge of Time, and when was that, why was that? by 1990, I know, but why did I choose it? to learn about the latter pair.
When I read The Crying of Lot 49, RDC wondered if I would be frustrated by its lack of closure. The Fixer lacks plot closure in the same way, but the theme has been thoroughly explored, and it is complete.
What the hell is the point of this one? As I expected, Kim is better at being Indian--at being Hindu or Muslim, and so on--than any non-white, just because he is genetically white, and better at being European because he is English rather than French or Russian. Teshoo lama is the only likeable character in the book, but even he is not immune from Kipling's condescension.
This essay is entitled "Kipling's Burden." As Jofe Fiennes says, "Good title." "Shakespeare in Love" Oh, right, Kipling coined the phrase "white man's burden" anyway. I hope Kipling was grateful to die before that hideous occurrence, Indian independence.
"White man's burden" and the phrase I'm thinking of from Dune don't have quite the same cadence but "burden" is mostly "burd'n" and "right" is fairly long for one syllable so I am going to say I am not totally a loon for equating "white man's burden" as a response--what do you call the thing that Catholics say in response to the priest, when he's preaching and they say "Lord, hear our prayer"?--with "leader's right." I can just picture any discussion of Kim disintegrating into one person talking and the others agreeing, noddingly solemnly and intoning "white man's burden" all the time as a justification for taking another person's property--without the reason of owner being dead, as in Dune. Okay, this is officially the silliest train of thought ever.
I have almost twelve months to read something better in 2005, but it'd have to be some damn good to beat this.
Yesterday I brought all the cardboard and junk mail to recycling, making me feel so virtuous I rewarded myself with a shopPING expedition. Since nothing opened until 11, I finished Bel Canto in a Starbucks with a mug of tea. This left me, after the exertion of spending money, with nothing to read over lunch, and lunch I had to have if I was going to go to the gym.
RDC wanted to know why I would drive all the way to Flatirons Crossing when all the same stores are in Cherry Creek. I don't have a good answer to that, especially since the Tattered Cover is in Cherry Creek and all Flatirons offers is a Borders. I was carrying a purse instead of a wallet, and the reason I need to get a wallet-on-a-string is so the wallet-to-purse shuffle doesn't mean I sacrifice my lists of books. I stood in Borders unable to recall a single title.
V.S. Naipaul, Manuel Puig, Virginia Woolf, who are next on my list and whose titles I don't own, all didn't occur to me. I did think of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping; Borders had her new Gilead but not it. I didn't think of Michael Chabon's new title, which John Leonard reviewed in the same article as Gilead. Jared Diamond's new book wasn't available either but while I was in the science section, science fiction occurred to me. So I bought John Scalzi's Old Man's War.
I'm glad to have met and talked with Scalzi and to have had him join us when Weetabix and Chauffi dragged me onstage to sing "Dancing Queen." (Abba should, of course, be sung as a foursome.) I have read and enjoyed the Whatever for many years, and especially since he earned his first JournalCon Karaoke fame singing "I Melt with You" in Pittsburgh.
But I didn't like the novel overall. I liked up to Willie Wheelie, that is, up to when the serious army and alien stuff began. I don't much like much science fiction, and reportedly this book is very Heinleinesque, so perhaps it's a compliment to the book that it is so faithful to its genre. I had plotted several of the plot points because of foreshadowing (is it obligatory?) One character's angst didn't mesh with her earlier personality and its origins. There were nitpicking editing errors, a couple of glitches and one utter word omission that interrupted action. And there were less nitpicky things, such as someone pointing out that your Earth-done tattoo wouldn't follow you into the Colonial Defense Force, then a few pages later that same character showing his own Earth-done tattoo, without specifying, which would have been appropriate under the circumstances, whether he'd had it redone. (But the scene containing that flub is my favorite.) Furthermore, the jacket reads, "They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living" despite, first, that the recruits are trained to ignore the limitations of their humanity, both physical and emotional; and second, that other recruits are even better as soldiers because they didn't start out as 75-year-olds.
Jasper Fforde handled a mcguffin better than anyone else. A deus ex machina saves the day, someone asks what happened, and someone else replies that it, the deus, was [brand name] Plot Save-the-Day doohickey (tm). I forget exactly how he did it, but it was meta and acknowledged both his own resorting to such a device and the fact that I, the reader, would get more pleasure from laughing at his arrogance than a rigorously possible save. (Besides, in the world of Thursday Next, such a conceit is rigorously possible.) Scalzi had to let the exposition fairy slap the dialogue around less gracefully than that. Oh well.
Mostly it was the same stuff that annoys me in almost all the science fiction I have read. It didn't happen with Ender's Game, which I disliked for reasons all its own, because Ender defends Earth, where humans belong. I just don't like humans living elsewhere than on Earth. For all that we fuck it up daily, it's where we're meant to be, this planet that made us and gave us life. So the entire colonization thing had my teeth on edge from the start. That's not Scalzi's fault or the genre's but mine, but it doesn't help me like a book.
Also, right at the start, a bit of unexplainable technology is explained by assuming that Earthlings didn't invent the technology but cribbed it from an alien intelligence. So I expected the cribbing to come up later, and it did. The following wasn't the book Scalzi wanted to write, so I can't reasonably hold it against OMW, but wouldn't it have been great if the technology behind green-skinned, cat-eyed, SmartBlooded bodies, churning with BrainPals and nanobots, had also been cribbed?
My main gripe is how obvious the unfolding action was. How common is it for a newly transferred recruit to want his wedding ring, and why is wearing one allowed, since it's not necessary to survival? If you're allowed to keep some personal effects, why wouldn't the CDF make you keep your ring with them? That, following the unsubtle Ghost Brigades comment, made the course of the action obvious, and all the fiddling around with aliens just that much filler, and too glossy and glossed-over to be amusing filler.
That said, reading a man's books because I have a fleeting online acquaintance with him is a good enough reason for me (given that I enjoy the acquaintance). I look forward to Agent of the Stars, and I'm glad for his successes.
Having just been unthrilled by an sf book I was foolish to read another so soon. Generally I don't sort children's books into genre for the same reasons daemons don't settle before a certain age but this was certainly past that age. I picked up Nobody's Fool to wash out my brain. Sylvia Louise Engdahl earned a Newbery Honor for this the year Summer of the Swans won the Medal. Weak year.
I think Jasper Fforde ended the Thursday Next series with this, and I'm glad. This one was better than The Well of Lost Plots but there's a limit to how far a stunt can be stretched and Fforde reached it.
A boat keels over, right? It doesn't heel over, or heal over? In the book it was "healed over" and I think one copyediting error led to another. Or I don't know much more about boating than was covered in Arthur Ransome or said of The True Love in "The Philadelphia Story."
These stories have a few good lines but treat, not women of the West as its hype claims, but women who want men of the West. My neighbor is beginning a book club with this, which is why I read it. Good writing, except it was the same story a dozen times over, from different angles. An exception, "Blizzard under Blue Sky," was my favorite: a woman and her dogs instead of a woman and her man.
Pam Houston is going to be at the Tattered Cover tonight. This might be interesting, plus maybe I can get over my exasperation before the book club.
My fourth Don DeLillo; only The Names to go. He's not a favorite but he merits my reading.
"Mao regarded armed struggle as the final and greatest action of human consciousness." With his apparently usual prescience, DeLillo discusses terrorism and the novel, how terrorism speaks to the masses more than the novel. Someone lives in sight of the World Trade Center.
Okay, I got over my exasperation with the one woman kicking herself in the head with a cowboy boot theme of most of the stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness because now I have heard and met Pam Houston, heard her read from Sight Hound, which I'm reading despite its plot focus being canine mortality, and met her at a friend of a daughter of a friend of a friend's house. Or something. Kal belongs to a book group that her aunt has been part of since its inception, and the daughter of one of its members knows Pam Houston, having met her at a Tattered Cover workshop almost a decade ago.
After the reading at the bookstore, about which I kept forgetting to email Scarf, who is starting a neighborhood bookclub with Cowboys, a mass of people descended on the book group member's daughter's/friend of Pam Houston's house for a cocktail reception. Which factored into why I omitted to tell Scarf about it: I was going to be in two new situations myself, Kal's book group and the thrice-removed friend's house, and Scarf deserves a lot more credit for keeping her head afloat than my considering only that it was deep enough water on my own. And I even wasn't on my own.
Pam--can I call her Pam, having been introduced to her? Houston sounds so cold--read bits from Sight Hound, which has 12 voices, nine human, two canine, and one feline. It was on the strength of the feline chapter that I decided to read the novel, and I hope I hear it as I read in Pam's voice, because it was damn funny. Yes, the cat, and not the first dog (she read another, more canine-sounding, dog's part after I had the book in my own paw). The dog is a charming character, but he didn't sound very canine, whereas the cat's thorough cattiness cracked me up.
Pam said she spends a lot of time thinking about what her dogs might be thinking about, which pleases me. I said to Kal's aunt that the one voice the book is missing is the parrot's. There is no parrot, which is a common fault in literature. The aunt, who will also need an alias, and her husband, and more the husband, are owned by a greenwing macaw. (This made Kal very easy to break in, as far as the eccentricities of my own household go.) I spend a lot of time thinking about what Blake might be thinking about myself, and I wonder if I could tell a story from his point of view. I read a translation of a dog barking, approximately, "Oh wow, I'm a dog! Look at me, I'm still a dog! Yea, a dog! I'm a dog I'm a dog yippee." It must have been a golden retriever speaking.
Blake is extremely sweet and self-centered and likes things to be Just So, like Junket, and I severely doubt that any attempt I made to get into his head could be amusing to anyone but me, and to me only if I could stop nattering enough to let him be heard.
Speaking of Blake, as of course I was, we were reading and having our heads pet and preening when he dropped an ordinary gray contour feather, probably from his shoulder by the look of it. We watched it fall and he resumed preening. Then when he scratched his head, a crest feather fell out, not one of the tall ones but one of the wide ones that give it body, asymmetrically vaned with discrete barbs. That one he seemed to want, maybe because I pounced on it, maybe because it's funner to run your beak up and down an inch-long rachis with some spine (metaphorically speaking) to it than a round contour feather almost without structure. The rule is that once it's out of his body, it's not his anymore--this counts for poop too, and yes, we elect to interpret his not wanting to have his tail or feet touched or be otherwise disturbed as poop-possessiveness--so now I own it. Just a few minutes later a center tail feather nearly detached, and I gave it the slightest of tugs to disengage it. Blake is nine and I have never given his feathers away and I think I have fewer perfect tail feathers from him than I have from Percy, whose (much prettier) tail feathers I would often give away and who lived only to 2.5. Mine.
The dog dies, which is nothing you don't know about from the jacket. The cat's chapter, which Pam Houston read at the Tattered Cover, was not only the funniest but also the best and realest chapter, and the dogs' chapters were also exactly right. I expected to cry, but I didn't. I think that means she avoided tawdry sentiment and that's a good thing.
I do wonder how it would read for someone who doesn't live in Denver. Does the name "Chop House" convey enough about the restaurant so that you know what she doesn't show with more words? Do intersections mean anything to the non-resident, give the book a sense of realism, or they just scream Autobiographical?
Almost all of this was as compellingly readable as my first Jared Diamon, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He explained the outline of the book in an elephant inside a snake kind of way (he used sheep instead, which you can't tell me wasn't deliberate), so of course I liked it immediately. The majority was about past societies collapsing or succeeding, which was history and geography and fascinating, but I confess that when he started talking about now I had to push myself, because he was pulling my fingers out of my ears and writing more loudly than I could chant lalalalala, and then the chapter about oil extraction was all money and corporations and my eyes glazed over until the final chapter.
One of the two usual plots of my anxiety dreams is Forgetting I Have Registered for This Class All Semester so will certainly fail it. The classes I have omitted to remember are either French or anthropology, that is, the two subjects I should have pursued more. I like Diamond's cross section of geography and anthropology; plus, he's a bird-watcher.
Lovely. Surprisingly, the movie was as faithful to the book as it could be, as far as I remember from a decade back, and despite my Issues with William Hurt (that I loathe him, aside from "Kiss" and "Children of a Lesser God," neither of which I can watch again).
I don't know what to make of the extensive footnotes, that is, not so many but those few being extensive, going on for pages. They offer this person's and that's theory for the origin of homosexuality, which makes me wonder why Manuel Puig didn't offer similar rambling pedagogies on films and dreams (and dreams in films and films in dreams) and the prisoner's dilemma and other themes in the book.
But it was lovely.
Gorgeous, just gorgeous writing, involving a big lake and water water everywhere. I am not sure Robinson knew how to wrap up the relationships, so the ending seems forced and false, but sisters are sisters are sisters and that's that.
After I finished it I read the Suspects' discussion of it. I should get over my dislike of the ending because it cannot be meant to represent reality. I hope.
Loved it, until the end.
Not as bad as House of the Scorpion, no hope of touching A Girl Named Disaster. I had no idea of the point for about the first third, at which point it improved, but 33% is way too much of a book to be indifferent.
I really wanted to like this. Someone I owe an emotional debt to recommended it to me in August 1992, and he had already proved his literary trustworthiness by having read One Hundred Years of Solitude and bringing with him (on a Live Adventure weekend of camping) a volume of e.e. cummings. Also because it's the only book I can recall about Cuban Americans. Also because it won a Pulitzer. But I didn't.
It was okay; its prose was fine and even occasionally stirring; its plot existed; but it didn't grab me in any way. Sorry, Oscar Hijuelos.
I liked Howards End and A Room with a View but I wonder if that was out of loyalty to the movies. I am hopeful that I liked them because E.M. Forster was much more comfortable and natural in his native environment than in India. The book was okay for a while, merely adequate, but entirely fell apart in the last quarter.
It reminded me too much of Kim for me to be fair to it, and Dr. Godpole very much reminded me of the lama. Mostly, it was just tedious.
Two disappointing books in a row.
RDC2 was reading this. He asked me if I would join him for his daily half hour of reading, and he read this and I read Wuthering Heights. (I don't know why that occurred to me as a suitable beach reread.) After his 25 minutes had slowly ticked away, I picked up the book and read it that evening. It was your usual Spinelli: someone against society, someone against himself. (I do not expect RDC2, not quite 11, to read Dicey's Song or contribute another form of conflict to her eighth grade teacher's list.)
I asked RDC2 about Zinkoff and his comprehension seemed fine, which was reassuring. But if you asked the author to differentiate between Zinkoff and the kid in Crash, I don't think Jerry Spinelli could.
Did Audible omit final chapters that would have, say, finalized the book? It was good until then, although Felicity should have had a larger role.
I can't believe eight years have elapsed between my first Graham Swift and my next. Waterland is better, I think, but Last Orders is a pleasure to read, with authentic voices and characters and the baggage among any group of people who've known each other for forty years.
Reportedly Swift has been criticized for not acknowledging this book's debt to As I Lay Dying. I have to look that up, but, though not derivative, it absolutely has a lot more in common with the Faulkner than merely being the story of several people bringing the remains of another to a final resting place and told from several points of view.
I followed the action of this, which automatically makes it the best Faulkner yet. I remembered nothing from reading it over ten years ago, so I mention it as I don't with rereads.
This is iceberg writing I can accept. If Hemingway writes that two men are fishing and I am supposed to understand that the fish is a fine fish and a metaphor for the woman they both love but who loves neither of them and that hill over there looks like a white elephant, there is no way I am going to understand that. But if Faulkner writes "My mother is a fish" then I understand that a child is relating his mother to the kind of death he can understand, and how that makes him afraid for his mother because dead fish are gutted and eaten, and furthermore, she smells.
Take Denis Guedj's Parrot's Theorem, subtract all the hard-core mathematics, exchange the macaw for an African Grey, subtract the former's slightly stilted English in translation and multiply by Michael Chabon's beautiful native prose*, and what you have is a mystery about numbers (not math) with a soupçon of parrot abuse.
It should have been longer, and no one should be mean to a parrot.
* "The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips."
Louis Menand is a learned pleasure to listen to, like John Leonard; in the audiobook's favor is that the difficulty of rereading passages and taking notes means that I do not feel obliged to, unlike Leonard (whom I am reading on paper). Menand discusses The New Yorker, Hustler, Rolling Stone, Laurie Anderson, Oliver Wendell Homes, Richard Wright, and godfuckingdamnit, when I just checked the table of contents at Amazon, I discovered that, contrary to Audible.com's claim, their production is abridged, even though it's listed as not: I didn't get chapters on William James, Pauline Kael, or Christopher Lasch, not that I know who the latter two are but that's why I listen to and read books, to learn who they are. Also missing: T.S. Eliot, William Paley, Al Gore, and Maya Angelou.
I am really pissed at Audible.com right now, because earlier today I downloaded the first half of Nancy Mitford's biography The Sun King, available in the 2nd best format, and got an obviously lesser quality production of someone else's brief biography of Louis XIV. Its customer support sucks donkey balls too.
Which has nothing to do with Menand. The reason I like him and John Leonard is that they are cultural as well as literary critics, putting people and books into context (Arthur Koestler slept with Mary McCarthy? Laurie Anderson majored in sculpture?) and drawing (what would have seemed to me) unlikely but (now, in their hands) insightful parallels.
I think I had already read the best six, or listened to them. I like every glimpse into Eatonville I can manage, but a couple of the stories were too obviously recycled.
I liked this one more than Sons and Lovers or Women in Love. In fact, I liked it just fine, except for its one gratuitous, incongruous line of racism: black women like sex more than white women, but the lover's objection to them is that "we're white men and they're...muddy."
One contemporary review said that it was fine except where the gamekeeping was interrupted by romance. There was actually almost no gamekeeping; it was more like the romance interrupted speechifying on political economics, industrialism, and how machinery has killed the life in man. That's a better theme to discuss in the three books of his I've read than relationshipping and navel-gazing. This one had plenty of relationshipping but, thankfully, very little navel-gazing.
I knew nothing of this novel going in, except that it was banned and scandalous because the love relationship crossed social lines and was explicit. I had expected more explicit scenes, but besides a couple of quite mild scenes the only mention of smut was in the word's original meaning, relating to the coal heaps of Lancashire.
In a forum I adulterate my Usual Suspects with, a journaler I keep half an eye on enthused about this book, which is by Steven Gould. Eh. It reminded a lot of Replay, another science fiction book, in that the dictates of the phenomenon bled the author of any ability to imbue his protagonist with humanity.
Even William Sleator in Singularity wrote a more believable reader than this jumper. The latter reads for information, and the library is his refuge, but he is never portrayed reading or being interested in books other than as physical possessions, and the only books whose contents he refers to by name are the two Gould drew from most heavily--an sf novel about teleportation whose title I didn't note, and Stephen King's Firestarter, for government interest in these talents.
Oh, and the other Replay thing: Jumper's aseptic dialogue and personalities had reminded me of it even before the Middle East element hurled itself anvil-like into play.
Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Monday I had RDC pick me up from the library instead of at work. I borrowed the Coatsworth and Mukerji because they are Newbery Medalists (and also for that reason the as-yet unread Invincible Louisa), the Snyder for author-loyalty, and this Choldenko because it's about a dog (though a puny one) plus an unread other, a Newbery Honor. Yesterday I went to Park Hill Books, a used and new cooperative bookstore, and bought an armload of books: Amos Fortune, Free Man; Miracles on Maple Hill; and Tales from Silver Lands, all Newbery Medals that I haven't read and that I will be good about sending on their Way if I don't like them, Martin Amis's The Information, Robertson Davies's Salterton Trilogy and The Cunning Man, a present for Haitch and another for CLH, and, because I paid with cash and it was used, a pulp copy of Shelters of Stone, for completeness's sake only, to stash with its siblings in the cache.
This morning I brought my first copy of that last in all its hardcover enormity (I do love English's portmanteaux) and left it on the bookswap shelf in the breakroom. It was gone in less than two hours.
In order of my reading them, then:
I liked this recent Snyder more than most of her later books. I always will read her for love of The Egypt Game and grateful adoration of The Changeling, but that's my weird loyalty thing. I began to read her again, to pay attention to latter titles, after I noticed The Gypsy Game in the downtown branch. That book didn't work in the slightest, and not just because it involved Egypt's characters. This was a little better.
Coatsworth: her author photograph makes her look like Nisou's mother, which is a fine thing, and if I had looked at the photograph before I read it I might have, for that reason, liked it more. It was about a cat, so eh, who had no tail for reasons never explained (and it wasn't a Manx), double eh; the sepia pen-and-ink drawings of various animals were sweet, but then it had cat mortality. I don't need that.
Mukerji: Dull. About a pigeon, of all tedious animals, which I knew going in, but I like raptors, and pigeons' only purpose is to feed raptors. Which reminds me, are the red-tailed hawks back at MIT this spring? I'm counting it even though I only skimmed two thirds of it, because I am a cheat.
Cleary: Dear Beverly Cleary. I began to read Otis Spofford once but stopped when I realized it came after Ellen Tebbits. Ellen and Otis both fell out of my head until recently. I proselytized at Kal about Cleary's teen non-romances, The Luckiest Girl, Jeannie and Johnny, and Fifteen, and she at me about Ellen and Otis. Then on her inaugural visit to Park Hill Books, she bought this for me (and remembered it today). I went to that story yesterday specifically because she thought the Snyder book she saw there might have been Until the Celebration, which I would like to have (it was The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case).
Choldenko: The dog was a six-pounder whom only the protagonist, and not the other four humans of her family, liked (unlike in my family, in which the dogs were the only ones everyone else always liked); and the situation wasn't as harsh as in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" but the ballerina sisters reminded me of it; and instead of Jesse's music teacher in Bridge to Terabithia, Ant's is an art teacher; and instead of Claudia's Duffy, Ant has a Harrison: and I loved it. Blame it on my listening to David Gray's White Ladder this morning and getting all delicately emotey, but I cried.
It's guilt-inducing, because if I would just let go of resenting my mother, this sort of book wouldn't affect me so strongly. I--this is progress--recently made a conscious decision to stop feeling guilty for being happy: being happy now is not disloyalty to my past selves. Similarly, I often have resolved to stop resenting my mother, and though I've improved yet I haven't stopped. And I don't resent her: my emotions toward her are not so clear cut and unyielding as adolescent resentment. But if I were all the way well, this book wouldn't've hurt. Maybe ached, for the past, but not hurt.
Interesting, but not as riveting as it might have been if I had adored Little Women from a young age. The one thing I didn't know already was that, like Caroline Ingalls, Abba Alcott lost a son between her third and fourth daughters. Perhaps, by that logic, Charlotte, not Henrietta, should have been the tomboy of the all-of-a-kind family. Except eventually they had a brother.
Where did I recently read an article about Bronson Alcott? I do not recall that it mentioned March at all, but that novel must have inspired this article, which I read fairly recently. Aha, thank you Haitch and SFP, despite Kal and RDC not remembering anything from the New Yorker and my therefore doubting my own memory, it was indeed thence.
I think I have heard the expression "Capone does my shorts." The author, Gennifer Choldenko, points it out as something servicemen wrote in their letters in wartime to indicate they were stationed in San Francisco (even though Al Capone left Alcatraz in 1939).
This was quick and fun. I will keep an eye out for the author in the future. She mentions Temple Grandin ("America's Most Famous Autistic!") as a resource. I want to read her Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.
This won a Newbery Medal? It's not a bad book, but it's not momentous either, and Strawberry Girl had the same girl-goes-to-the-country thing. If Four-Story Mistake didn't win, did this one because it featured a father with combat fatigue?
Idyllic country life, living on government pension (because the father was a POW), lots of sugaring on Maple Hill, which is near Pittsburgh. Cynical, I wanted to shout through the pages to these people about incipient acid rain.
I appreciate how difficult it must have been to write an historically accurate novel for children about someone few of whose records involve his life before age 60, but Elizabeth Yates did a lot better with the history than with keeping racist assumptions and tropes from her book. Perhaps she wanted to dwell on the known, his circumstances and career, rather than on the unknown, like how he contented he seemed to be while enslaved. But that gives her too much benefit of the doubt: she portrays him as proud all his life and exultant in his eventual freedom, so his acceptance of his lot before manumission rings hollow.
Whatever: I am closing in on the goal of reading every Newbery Medal winner. I think I'm at 69 (of 81).
Folktales from South America by, or collected by, Charles Finger. Llamas and magic and witches, oh my! Sadly insufficient parrots.
More biographical and less political history than I would have preferred, but still interesting. French names given in proper French were difficult for my wooden ear to distinguish among.
Another concept besides political maps over time that could be rendered in Flash is the genealogical histories of European (and other) royalty. Because the 17th is my least favorite century of the modern period, I know nothing of the War of the Spanish Succession. I haven't encountered it much because--I think?--England, the only country I pay attention to, was too busy with its tedious later Stuarts and Roundheads and hiding in oak trees to be much involved. But I should pay more attention. I have a couple of books about the Hapsburgs (am I supposed to spell it with a b instead of a p? meh) and possibly I should read those.
I cannot recommend this audio production. It didn't suck, as Flo Gibson sucks, as the Blackstone production of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee sucks, but the beginning and end of each chapter had music, which was annoying. The narrator was a man, despite Nancy Mitford probably being female, and not so much of the tale was told from Louis XIV's personal point of view to justify it either.
As I knew but hoped against, History of the Siege of Lisbon is not a travel book. If all that travel time were actually a single stretch, I could read a challenging book, but it's not and I can't, not when jet noises distract and the only time I read on vacation is before sleep: that doesn't work for Saramago. On the way home, then, in Memphis, I bought the one trade paperback available that vaguely interested me: Christopher Paolini's Eragon.
Eragon to Aragorn is too small a jump. The true names of things and being unable to lie in that language and dragon is straight out of Earthsea, and if Ursula LeGuin took it from somewhere else, I didn't realize it when I first read her in...1992, and it hasn't seemed derivative since either. His languages--three, for pity's sake--have even more random punctuation than '80s glam-metal bands.
People saying "She don't" or "I seen" or writing "I should of done" doesn't bother me nearly as much as their slavishly following a rule they don't understand. Much worse than "between you and I" is the misuse of "whom"; in Eragon I stopped actively counting at five. Sometimes Paolini used it correctly (e.g., "You saw whom?"), but it seemed to my reflexively and by this point excessively critical eye that he got it wrong more often than right.
In the sentence "You must deliver this sword to whoever can best wield it," the object of the preposition "to" is the entire dependent clause "whoever can best wield it"; the clause, comprising a subject and predicate, takes a subject, not an object, pronoun: who, not whom. Paolini used "whom[ever]" in like constructions.
The author was homeschooled in beautiful but relatively remote Montana, right? His Alagaësia reminds me very much of the homeschooled Yorkish Brontës' Angria and Gondal.
Only a vague interest, it only vaguely paid off. I wish I were better about putting a book down a fifth of the way through.
I liked Jane Yolen's retelling quite a bit. The tone that must be de rigeuer in her other, fantasy books intruded only a couple of times, and it was an inventive retelling though a lot more obvious through the reader's one hearing than it seemed to be through the characters' multiple rehearings.
Bill Bryson is American yet this book's narrator is British. The cosmological stuff twisted my head, the anthropological stuff particularly intrigued me, and the last chapter, entitled "Good-bye" and about all the species we've managed to destroy--even, until tragically recently, by naturalists who wanted to study them--saddened me.
There. Four whole lines. I finished the book on the 11th yet I write this on the 13th. If I cease to use this space even as a log (not a log of the web, but a log of my reading and exercise), then that's that.
Kal had had me read the introduction and tulip chapter of Michael Pollan's book before going to Amsterdam, and on their strength I was certainly looking forward to the other parts.
I knew that apples don't grow true to their parents from seeds, but hadn't made the connection that Johnny Appleseed's trees were therefore not yummy eating apples but for cider. Pollan makes a good argument for John Chapman's therefore being America's Dionysus. Another connection I hadn't made was that since apples are all so closely related, being grafted specimens, they have not evolved as have their bacteria and insects, so apple growers apply a lot of poisons to combat these vermin. Excellent. Apples came from Kazakhstan (and still do): it is their center of genetic diversity and might save American trees (all of which come from a wee narrow slice of the apple's possible genetic diversity).
The tulip: the streaking of color that cultivators tried to replicate came from a virus. Cannabis: it's become so potent over the past few decades as a direct result of the drug war (just as Prohibition turned the U.S. from a cider- and beer-drinking country to a gin-swilling one). That much I knew from Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness.
The last chapter, on potatoes, interested me second only to apples (maybe because I am American first and Irish second). Pollan planted Monsanto's patented, genetically modified NewLeaf potatoes and contemplates the Inca's surviving on a host of different types of potato to suit their array of microclimates versus Ireland's population boom reliant on, and doomed by, exactly one, also cloned, variety.
Tulipomania is interesting but not vital, and cannabis took the author to flights of historical fancy (and fact): the apple and the potato gave me the most food for thought. They were good follow-ups to Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, whose last chapters dealt with Earth's genetic diversity and balance.
Blending theories of historiography with alternative history with an historical novel, José Saramago continues to astonish and allure me.
I love how John Leonard's mixes not just metaphors but established words, like bewilderness.
Also I am wildly envious of the circles his mind has earned him a place in, and how he helps me love Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie and Barbara Kingsolver more, and how mercilessly he thrashes Bowling Alone and a not-much-of-a-biography of Eugene Debs.
Complex and subtle. Can there be a crime beyond the bounds of God's love? Can morality exist without God? How can a just God allow the innocent to suffer? (That ties in with The Razor's Edge.) How much does suffering affect your goodness?
Thank goodness for Sparknotes and a Dartmouth page about reading it. Without those questions to structure my reading, which was mostly listening, I would have been even more befuddled. Sparknotes alleges that Katya suffers to draw attention to the wrongs of others who make her suffer. I inferred self-sacrifice and even martyrdom, but not that motivation. Agrafena is unloveable, but so is Dmitri, so maybe they do belong together. But I don't understand about Lise and Alexei.
While I have a shadow of a hope of reading a regular European language and do not feel guilty in the slightest for not reading any Asian one, Russian occupies the middle ground of my never being able to read it even though I once made an attempt. So as most often happens with Russian translations, how the rendering into English happened intrigued me most.
How should one choose among the following translations?
Pevear and Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics
There's just one thing: how can I make a compact with the earth evermore? I don't kiss the earth, I don't tear open her bosom; what should I do, become a peasant or a shepherd? I keep going, and I don't know: have I gotten into stench and shame, or into light and joy? That's the whole trouble, because everything on earth is a riddle. And whenever I happened to sink into the deepest, the very deepest shame of depravity (and that's all I ever happened to do), I always read that poem about Ceres and man. Did it set me right? Never! Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.
Constance Garnett
But the difficulty is how am I to cling forever to Mother Earth. I don't kiss her. I don't cleave to her bosom. Am I to become a peasant or a shepherd? I go on and I don't know whether I'm going to shame or to light and joy. That's the trouble, for everything in the world is a riddle! And whenever I've happened to sink into the vilest degradation (and it's always been happening) I always read that poem about Ceres and man. Has it reformed me? Never! For I'm a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed. Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand.
Andrew H. MacAndrew, Bantam Classic
But what makes it hard for me is that I don't know how I could possibly enter that eternal alliance with Mother Earth. I don't kiss Mother Earth, I don't plow her soil... Should I, then, become a peasant, a shepherd, or what? I go on and on, and I don't know where I'll find myself next - in stench and disgrace or in light and joy. And that's where the main trouble likes: everything in this world is a puzzle. Whenever I've sunk into the deepest shame and depravity - and that has happened to me more often than anything else - I've always recited that poem about the goddess Ceres and man's fate. But has it reformed me? No - because I'm a Karamazov, because if I must plunge into the abyss, I'll go head first, feet in air. I'll even find a certain pleasure in falling in such a humiliating way. I'll even think that it's a beautiful exit for a man like me. And so, in the very midst of degradation, I am low and despicable. I must still be allowed to kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded; and even if I may be following in the devil's footsteps, I am still Your son, O Lord, and I love You, and fell the joy without which the world cannot be.
David McDuff, Penguin
But the only thing is, how am I join eternal union with the earth? I don't kiss the earth, I don't churn up her breast: What am I to do, become a muzhik or a shepherd? I go and know not whether I have landed in foulness and ignominy or in light and joy. I mean, that's where the trouble lies, for all the world is an enigma! And whenever I've had occasion to wallow in the very deep ignominy of lus (and that's all I've had occasion to do), I've always read that poem about Ceres and man. Has it set me on the right road again? Never! Because I'm a Karamazov. Because if I throw myself into the abyss I do it straight, head first and heels last, and am even glad that I've fallen in such a degrading posture and consider it flattering to myself. And it's there, in that very ignominy, that I suddenly begin the hymn. I may be cursed, I may be base and vile, but I too shall kiss the hem of the robe in which my God enwraps Himself; Even though at the very same time I may still be following the Devil, I am Your son, O Lord, and I love You, and sense the joy without which the world cannot stand and be.
Unless I misremember the experience of reading Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham should have written this and then stopped.
"Good title."
The investigative reporting, the deductions, the willingness of some to speak but not others, the squirmy lack of commenting by more, made this fascinating reading. The thing is, it was published in February 1974, and closes with an address to the nation by Nixon in which he says he'll never leave his responsibilities. Wasn't it August of 1974 when he resigned before being impeached?
Politics are dirty, sure, but I was grown before I knew that Nixon had been Eisenhower's vice president and thought that the outcome of the 1960 presidential election was false but didn't want to put the country through what it would go through 40 years later. So I didn't know how very much he wanted the presidency in 1968 and to keep it in 1972. Am I wishy-washy for simultaneously thinking "crook" and feeling a little sorry for him?
Haitch gave me this book for my birthday years ago--2000, 2001? Every birthday I think I ought to read it. Knowing who Deep Throat was made it a little less mysterious, but not less intriguing.
If Richard Bach had written The Little Prince.
Nah, I can't leave it at that. I know that Illusions is supposed to be cheesy now, and even on the peak of my Jonathan Livingston Seagull love I couldn't swallow the first pages of Bridge Across Forever, but Paolo Coelho is not as treacly as Bach. The young person questing for the meaning of life in the desert, though, and meeting different sorts of people, and sheep. If there had been baobab trees and I were de Saint-Exupéry (and not dead), I'd sue.
Before the book club meets on Wednesday, I will try to think of something more charitable to contribute.
The pacing was much better this time than in any of the previous books. I didn't feel at all that action was stretched to fill a schoolyear, which has bothered me about every one of the previous books. I welcomed that Harry started confiding in people finally--Mr. Weasley and Prof. McGonagall about his suspicions about Draco, and Dumbledore about a lot of stuff, but that made his not asking Dumbledore about the half-blood prince the worse.
Why would Slughorn have needed (or merely appreciated) Dumbledore's help cleaning up his house? And Harry asked why Merope couldn't have magicked herself food and shelter--if that were possible, without money, wouldn't the Weasleys not wear hand-me-down robes? These are the type of inconsistencies about Rowling's world (in addition to waxing Procrustean with the timeline) that makes me itch.
My goodness, JKR has been reading her fantasy books, hasn't she? Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone, both setting and cup; the entrance to the Mines of Moria in Fellowship of the Ring; Arthur's white tomb; His Dark Materials. And the Chosen One, jeebus, in addition to Harry's being now without parental figures just like Buffy.
Plot points and questions of a spoilery nature: Was Dumbledore a Parseltongue? He understood the Gaunts' casual everyday use of it. Is it realistic that Draco would have bragged about joining Voldemort even to his pack? Being in Slytherin doesn't require being evil.
"Neither can live while the other survives," but they've both been alive for two years now. Unless the prophecy is off, and Dumbledore did say not to put too much stock into it, but if it didn't deserve stock, why'd he hire Trelawney?
Why, as Potions teacher for five years plus however long before Harry showed up, wouldn't Snape have taught students the better ways to do Potions that he knew? How did he learn these improvements?
Overall: R.A.B. and horcruxes are totally new. There is no way anyone reading the first five books, even obsessively, would know about them. If a reader cannot guess the overall story by deduction of given hints, then Rowling is just leading readers down the garden path instead of supplying an orchestrated lead-up to total denouement. I hope to have to eat my words when #7 comes out.
Yea! Dumbledore ends his speech with "Pip, pip!" when the wizarding world doesn't use telephones. Now, that's okay, because while inconsistent, it's minor, and it's funny. Plus I wonder if even British kids wouldn't get it these days; do Brit phones still say that? I only know it from Arthur Ransome and Rosamund Pilcher's WWII books and maybe Tintin.
I picked this up last Sunday after finishing HP6 at midnight of the day I received it (at 4:00), and began to read it this Monday when I realized oops, bookclub Thursday. I finished it on the plane, with One Hundred Years of Solitude-type anticipation, listening to Peter Gabriel's Long Walk Home over the Wasatch Plateau in Utah. I don't care if I loved it because it was a good vacation book; I loved it because I loved it and that's fine for me.
It had some Replay, and a bit of Sunshine and other Robin McKinley (I nearly automatically crush on long red hair, McKinley heroines and Polyhymnia O'Keefe alike). As Jeffrey Eugenides says in Middlesex, the gun on the wall in the first act must be used by the final curtain, and that happened, but I'm not averse to Standard Literary Techniques. The character of Kimy reminded me of Ruth Gordon. Also, House of the Spirits: Clara and Alba, though not Blanca.
At book club we discussed Clara as Penelope and Henry as Odysseus. Hmm.
As Mrs. Bennet settled Elizabeth's marriage while stirring the fire, I finished this while watering the garden. That occurred to me because I maybe kind of bought an annotated Pride and Prejudice the other day.
I was thinking that the plural of anecdote is not data, but Kal found Malcolm Gladwell's response to that, which is that he's not trying to prove but give food for thought. Not a belief but a pretty good idea. I like that.
Kal's cat made himself all lovey for bookclub, and we, the South City Park book group, crossed Colfax to go to her house, and she made wonderful food for a hot night, and the power went out, and it was stories all around.
When I began this book, I thought it was going to read like a self-published book: too personal, with an axe to grind (somehow bitterness against the publishing business always leeches out), riddled with errors. In the first chapters especially are noticeable typos--lie for lay, e.g.--and it was overtly and perhaps excessively personal, intimately personal, early on. But this, I realized, was because Mark Bittner needed to set up why he was able to arrange his life around the parrots--no steady job, few commitments, a high tolerance for filth.
Lou saw that I was reading it and asked whether I liked it--she'd also seen the trailer--and I said I liked it a lot, but then I'm a parrot person (which she is not, definitively). Even as a parrot person, if I had not seen some of the flock moments before buying the book in City Lights, I might not have liked it as much.
Reading it alongside Blink was interesting: Bittner practices the intuition Gladwell promotes. Bittner ties his ability to connect with the parrots (and his responsibility, if any, to them to return, like the Little Prince's fox) to Taoism but also to intuition and the oneness of the world, a concept I cannot describe justly or aptly but which rang true to me.
All books continued to be one book because in Blink, Gladwell mentions the ecotone, the area in which two distinct ecologies overlap; (and it was the title of that Sunday's episode of "Six Feet Under";) also Bittner just by paying attention found how much more overlap there is between "the natural world" and San Francisco, and how to move between them.
I will always be grateful to Barbara Wallace for Claudia, which is why I recently picked this up at Park Hill Books (a co-operative used book store). This, eh, it was okay. Well, good. Well, I shouldn't expect everything she wrote to be Claudia. But I think expecting things not to be just a rehash is fair too. Also, was the Scholastic imprint the '70s book equivalent of today's straight-to-video toddlers' movies?
Jorge Luis Borges. Alexandria. One Hundred Years of Solitude again. I am not equal to describing this book's effect on me. I want more Umberto Eco.
Well, I wanted to read it. Silly me for thinking I would learn something new about the book from it. Glossing the same words--mind, connections, relation--at each use seems unnecessary to me, but maybe that's the nature of the annotated beast and not something I might hold against David Shapard. What I may* hold against him are the apostrophes in his decades ("1790's"), his plurals ("the Philips's party"), the size of the print, and, much worse, one unfounded assumption about Darcy's motivation and, less harmful but stupider, at least one utter blindness to the given text.
Just after Col. Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth about Darcy's interference in Bingley's suit of Jane, Elizabeth decides that Darcy "had been partly governed by this worst kind of pride, and partly by the wish of retaining Mr. Bingley for his sister." Shapard asserts that "Elizabeth's final point is correct, though Darcy himself will never admit it, even after he reforms" (p. 343). And later, on p. 471, contemplating reasons for Darcy not to have brought Georgiana with him to Netherfield, Shapard says maybe Darcy didn't because such a visit would have interrupted her education, but "one could argue that this is one of the rare occasions when Jane Austen sacrifices...plausibility of behavior to the needs of the plot": Darcy had more reason to bring her with him, Shapard asserts, because he would want after Ramsgate to keep her with him and to promote a Bingley-Georgiana marriage.
Up on my hind feet now, I say no way. Wickham at 15 through elopement would have been a terrible situation, but anyone else at age 16 through procurement would not be much better. I am sure Darcy still considers her too young to form a permanent attachment. Furthermore, I believe he told the full truth in his letter to Elizabeth, that he discouraged Bingley because of the Bennets' situation and because Jane's heart was, he believed, not easily touched. The only textual evidence is Caroline Bingley writing to Jane of her and Louisa's hope that Georgiana might one day be their sister, and I don't call that evidence of Darcy's similar hope but of the Bingley females trying to separate their brother from Jane.
The utter blindness to the text occurs with Mr. Collins's last letter to Mr. Bennet, warning Elizabeth away from Darcy. After relating the chief ("the greater part," as Shapard believes his readers need be told repeatedly) of it, Mr. Bennet continues, "The rest of his letter is only about his dear Charlotte's situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch." Shapard notes the biblical source "olive-branch" to mean offspring (Psalm 128:3) and that "such an allusion, one both pedantic and biblical, is appropriate for Mr. Collins."
That's one of the funniest things Mr. Bennet says but Shapard doesn't even notice. I aver that Mr. Collins didn't write "olive branch" at all, but instead that Mr. Bennet summarizes the letter thus because it mocks both Mr. Collins in his first letter (his "offered olive branch" of accord and peace between himself and the Bennets) and Mary's tedious observation ("the idea of the olive branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I think it is well expressed").
* "permit myself to," not "possibly," speaking of glossing.
I remember in Maus Vladek Spiegelmann's describing the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians Jews being brought to Auschwitz and murdered immediately. This is one family's story. I knew nothing about Hungary before and during WWII or its preceding war with Ukraine. Yes, Aranka Siegal's book is for (older) children and is fiction, but it's also her own experience and shows the Holocaust from a perspective I didn't have before.
I didn't know if I would like Katharine Graham's memoir. I thought first it was autobiography, and then the first chapters set up her family background and psychology, which I thought intrusive and overly intimate, even though well-written.
I started really liking it after she got out of her family's hearts and minds and into her own. Obvious talent, ambition, and sociability. She and her broadening circle knew everyone and everything, which was interesting; and she presented her wealthy frankly, and I liked that she didn't apologize any more than she condescended.
The book made an excellent follow-up to All the President's Men, even at a remove of a few months and from a distance.
At some point in here one of the neighbors lent me the book for the next discussion, The Dogs of Babel. I don't know why I didn't note it at the time and I thought I said something about its making me glad I didn't read Lives of the Monster Dogs.
Oh, I know when it was. The Saturday RDC and I got back, a half dozen of us congregated chez Scarf, where it took us in a brigade all of nine minutes to move 500 bricks from the garage around the corner to a better spot. At the progressive dinner the next night, I hurled myself on someone and demanded to know whether it would be okay, much as I hurled myself at Jessie five years ago demanding to know whether The Amber Spyglass would be okay. You just don't do that to dogs, and please don't be that stupid about your dog.
What reminded me that Dogs of Babel had been missing from SC until today, 9 September, was that over lunch I began William Trevor's Death in Summer, the other bookgroup's August selection, which I didn't read because I wouldn't be back from vacation in time. Kal just lent it to me, and wheee, it starts with someone's wife dying and leaving him with her dog. And Dogs reminded me somewhat of Time-Traveler's Wife. All books are one book.
I love Robertson Davies. By heaven, an engaging, readable story, and though not sacrificing a bit of being a great story, also lovely, witty, erudite writing.
Also contributions for the Invisible Library: Dunstable Ramsay, A Hundred Saints for Travellers, Forgotten Saints of the Tyrol, and Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe.
Fiction has probably proliferated most, but though the nonfiction expanded more slowly, it had less space, just 12 feet of shelving. So along with gifts for Increase I bought a bookcase. It's only four inches wider than the one it displaced but has five shelves instead of three. The three-shelfer went into a corner of my study, behind the closet door, for fiction to swell into (and perhaps by the time that's full, we'll have a breakfast nook and its shelves; after that, I dunno).
I listened to "Jaws" and put together yet another piece of particle board. I had been able to hoist the piece from shelf to cart in the store, and from cart to hatchback, but I opened the box in the street and brought four armloads of pieces downstairs. Emptying the old bookcase and moving it, and emptying another bookcase so I could scoot it four inches to the right (now the rocking chair is out from the corner, at an angle), inserting "cam locks," screwing in brackets, nailing on the back, and reorganzing the books (including the 18" stack that had accumulated elsewhere) took me from "Come on in, the water's great!" to "I always hated the water"--"I can't imagine why."
Then I picked up RDC from the airport.
Reading the Usual Suspects' "Serenity" thread later this week reminded me I finished listening to this book. There I read that Michael Shaara's Pulitzer-winning novel inspired Joss Whedon to write "Firefly," down to Jubal Early being a character's name. Heroism, romance, and mythology fuel the battle narrative, and also make this an excellent companion piece for the Deptford trilogy, in whose characters these themes seethe.
The narrator does a splendid job with Maine and Virginia accents. I wouldn't say I came away from the novel with a perfect understanding of the tactics and decisions of Gettysburg, but I do understand the personalities of the major players.
Also, I learned that the phrase "the bubble reputation," which is the title of a novel by Kathie Pelletier (an author of little prominence but whom I met at a booksigning), is from Shakespeare. If Pelletier gives the quote from "The Seven Ages of Man" in an epigram, I didn't notice. So when Longstreet contemplates it, I had a pleasant shiver.
Sgt. Malcolm Reynolds says, in the "Firefly" pilot, that they can't die because they are so very pretty. It hadn't occurred to me to link the two texts (can a complete television series be a text? I'll say yes), and now linking them is probably irreverently heretical, but that's Robert E. Lee, a mythologized, romantic hero to both sides, and the idea that valor can hold its own against any opponent.
Better than The Manticore because I didn't dislike the narrator, and because Magnus Eisengrim's story is more important to the question of the Deptford trilogy--who killed Boy Staunton?--than David Staunton's. Also better because while Magnus was the main speaker, as I expected, Dunstan Ramsay set up the framing narrative, and I adored him.
I envy, as well as doubt, Davies's characters' ability to spin an unrehearsed yarn without backtracking because, having reached one point, he realizes he omitted a vital other point earlier.
Three deaths, actually, which is nothing you don't know from the back cover. I am tired after a 3-mile swim but it takes 45' on an elliptical or today's run to make me weary. I was glad to spend the afternoon on the couch reading with a sleepy buddy. A short book, thank you William Trevor, that at first reminded me of Dogs of Babel (widowerhood with a dog) but soon much more of Last Orders and House of Splendid Isolation--death, only the edges of a story told, a few different perspectives.
What a pleasure. I often read Stump the Bookseller, but not frequently enough to have submitted a solution to a stumper such as
or
or
or
or
or
...but of course I wanted to, because it was through Loganberry Books that I found Steps Out of Time and Another Heaven, Another Earth and The Elephant and the Bad Baby and The Loner and Toby Lived Here and others. Others had identified the above, and thank goodness, because I don't want anyone to be without obscurities like Beloved Benjamin is Waiting or The Ghost in the Swing or classics like The Ghosts and The Shades or favorites like Step on a Crack and Mandy. But to date, I haven't been the first to solve one, one that I am sure is so obscure that I might be one of three people in the English-speaking world who know both the book and the site.
This is the stumper:
It is, of course, Tonke Dragt's The Towers of February. It was one of my absolute favorites when I was reading Madeleine L'Engle and The Cat in the Mirror and The Shadow Guests (two other books people have sought through Loganberry Books), books about time travel (as is The Ghosts). HPV and I were convinced that the story was real (the book had newspaper clippings! That proved it!) and that we could figure out the way to journey to this parallel universe as well. I asked the children's librarian to save it for me, because it barely circulated and I knew it would be discarded eventually. Indeed, aside from the rash of date-stamps in 1980 and 1981 when HPV and I read it to tatters, it was checked out maybe seven times in 20 years. I have it, that very copy, but I haven't read it in 900 years. Until last night, when I started it again.
And wow, the different message that I got this time. Parallel universes and the dog-girl Téja and the rug and Thomas Alva and the cockade flower and the no-electricity, sure; but much more the hostility of one world for another. It was like rereading My Side of the Mountain as an adult and only then noticing how everyone who isn't Sam thinks he's preparing himself for duck-and-cover days.
CLH said she'd borrowed non-Tudor Philippa Gregorys from the library but they didn't look as good as the Tudor ones. She began reading The Virgin's Lover, which I brought to her, and I leafed through Wideacre. Then, blarg, I read the whole thing, and then its sequel, Favored Child. If V.C. Andrews had written Wuthering Heights during George II, it might have been like this. I am going to read the third one, I know, and then I am going to slice my own head off so I don't have to know that I did so or remember anything about them.
"Tip" is not an acronym! Apologies to E.L. Konigsberg, who made that mistake, and with "posh" too, in A View from Saturday. No apologies to Melvyn Bragg, because he is the one writing a history of English.
I had my hands full of a package for Increase and did not rewind at the time I heard the following, and afterward I said whatever the fuck and continued not to rewind and relisten, this being the problem with audio books, but I think Bragg alleges that Richard II put down the Peasant Revolt in 1381. If he had been that talented as a prince, he probably wouldn't've been deposed as a king. Edward the Black Prince squashed Wat Tyler. Sheesh.
The tip myth came up during cookie-making, with iBook open to the proper recipe, easy enough to jot a complaint. I should have noted all its weaknesses, but then I couldn't justify how otherwise I enjoyed the book.
A nonfiction audio book is wonderful to listen to at an airport gate. I sat in a chair with my legs up on my wheelie, head back in my horseshoe neck pillow, noise-blocking headphones in my ears, and if I missed a bit about Australian English or backtracked to repeat the chapter on Caribbean English, well, that's okay. The consistent, if not monotone, voice made for a better lullaby than my crooning playlist.
Um, wow. The Name of the Rose, certainly, for historical mystery, and more, John Fowles's A Maggot, for the period and the gradual uncovering of what might have happened.
Also, all books are one book: in The Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg mentioned a (the one?) linguistic legacy of Oliver Cromwell, the phrase "warts and all" (for how he wanted his portrait painted). Iain Pears managed to mention it in his book.
Scarf suggested graphic novels for bookclub. "The Incredibles" stole from this a bit. It's not Maus and it's not Arkham Asylym. It's better than what I remember of the first volume of Sandman.
This? This? This is what the fuss is all about? This is the worst book I have ever read. It is, so far as I have made out, also the inspiration for "polyamory," which is, in my experience, most common among sf readers. I don't put down the philosophy but I do mock this book as an inspiration and I further mock anyone averring this book as an affirmation. Not because its ideas are bad but because they are so badly written.
This week's Tuesday was the longest day in the history of the world. Far from wishing Dot Org had built a roll-back roof into the new office (which roof I, on the top floor, have wanted quite a few times), Tuesday was a couch and bathrobe day. When finally the clock rolled around to closing time, I was so apathetic that even vamoosing seemed like too much effort. I knew I wasn't going to go for a swim (cold and cloudy, hence not a sunroof day) and stopped at the library. I borrowed the Robert Heinlein and a book from the Modern Library list.
Is this book even available in a durable format? If a book is printed in pulp only, then its publisher shows a lack of faith in its viability as a text as much as the book demonstrably lacks durability as printed bound material.
Impressions: Objectivists must have just about died and gone to heaven with this arriving just four years after Atlas Shrugged. (Aha, googling shows how much objectivism and Heinleinism fawn over one another.) Dialogue in The Sparrow came straight from this, plagiarizing in mood and style if not in word. And damn, Heinlein himself plagiarized the framing story in The Illustrated Man. Also, I know it's unfair to judge a text by my context instead of within its own but that's why I'm me, so I can be unfair when I want to be: the patronizing and the homophobia did not suit a book set supposedly in the future--contextually, probably the 1990s--when Heinlein tried to futurize so much else.
I read Douglas Adams and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger as a teenager. I'm glad I did; as Valentine Michael Smith would say, fullness would not have been achieved by waiting. Maybe this is another book that works best only if you come to it at that age. And it's not the worst book ever: I read the later V.C. Andrews Dollanganger books, and I just read The Favored Child, so I know that as far as plotting and structure and language go, there are worse books. But I can't think of a worse cult favorite.
Finally, all books are one book: Jubal Harshaw (which, because of my recent reading of Killer Angels and viewing of "Firefly," I kept reading as "Jubal Early") knew he didn't want to be any older than 100, and Mr. Swales in Dracula thought 100 was a fine old age and didn't need to be any older.
John O'Hara's book reminded me more of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Babbitt than it did of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom I had seen him compared. Better, because shorter, than Main Street. I'm glad I knew the micro-short-story (here's a version by W. Somerset Maugham), though the version I knew emphasized that the distance fled was nearly impossible to cover in one day.
Damn. I remember starting this in middle school, sometime between all the ghost and UFO books and the Stephen King phase. I remember getting to the three weird sisters and being bored. It does drag in a 19th century way, though all the use of the archaic conditional tickled me, and I am glad the diary device has mostly lapsed.
I'm waiting, at this point, to find out how Jonathan Harker effected his escape, why Dracula killed off the crew that he needed to get him to England, why he wanted to go to England at all, why he needed 50 boxes of earth instead of just his one coffin, and why he youth-ified himself. Part of it is just obsolete storytelling, like whether Friday was a Dufflepud or how else he left a sole footprint on a wide beach, and part of it is vampire lore I've forgotten (like hairy palms--does masturbation make you undead?). And most of all how he can change his form to that of a dog--a bat, I can accept. I even can accept that as a bat he could not fly from the Carpathian Mountains across Europe and over the Channel to England. But I want to know why Bram Stoker so demonized dogs.
Mostly, I am at at this point cracking up at my bad self--Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, John Seward, Quincy Morris, and Lord Godalming all follow Abraham van Helsing in a manner not unlike Stranger in a Strange Land's Jubal Harshaw's minions flocked after him, and they all lurv each other so much that I expect a one big happy Nest too. And ha! As Anne is a Fair Witness, cf Mina:
Dracula travels as a human during daylight hours? He can attack only a willing victim, so why Mina? I remember while still in my Stephen King phase reading criticism of 'Salem's Lot, about how the boy is here described as small for his age and pages later as tall, and another continuity error now mercifully fallen out of my head. Maybe if Stoker's purpose was Suspense Is Good and Sex Is Bad, then the behavior of his monster isn't as important. Otherwise, if this is a seminal horror text, then maybe I should be more lenient to his legacy, including King. Nah.
All books are one book. Except that Stoker's doubting a woman's abilities is more forgiveable than Heinlein's.
Oo, even more books are one: van Helsing must "trepine" Renfield, and trepanning is Julian English's father's favorite surgery in Appointment in Samarra. Now there's been mention of both "elemental dust" and trepanning, but no, Dracula is not One Book with His Dark Materials, damn it.
Like My Side of the Mountain, except about the Okeefenokee instead of the Catskills, and not as good, but not a violation of Jean Craighead George's Newbery books as her sequels were, and, considering she's 40 years older, not betraying a decline either.
Too much football (discussion of point spreads began 40' in), and just as I began to read it RDC found a new, lush, Jeremy Irons narration of Lolita on Audible so pretty much I got through it as quickly as possible. An interesting companion to Blink, also suffering from the plural of anecdote not being data problem, and more inherently contradictory than I could wish.
Why Time put out a list of 100 books from 1923 to now instead of waiting until its centennial I don't know. But I am helpless, and I looked at the list. I've read 60, and of the remainder, 29 were already on my list and I added the other 11.
"Best English-language novels"? Not most influential, or most innovative, or most ground-breaking, but best? Coincidentally I did just read Watchmen, a graphic novel, and while it's interesting in an alternative history kind of way, and maybe deserves to be on some list somewhere for Different or Redefining Literature, the graphic novel format does not allow for "best language." Or "best in language."
Similarly, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret was shockingly honest and new and revolutionary, and it redefined or shepherded in the pubescent novel (as Catcher in the Rye did the adolescent), but "best language" it is not.
Blind Assassin is not Margaret Atwood's best. Even Oryx and Crake was better. Not to quibble with the Booker committee, but this and not Cat's Eye or Robber Bride for best novel or best language?
Sandra Cisneros. It put me in mind of Gorilla, My Love. Vignettes manage to sketch a full picture of Esperanza's life. Short, not sweet.
Today I learned a new word: cloture. It means closure, the closing or limitation of debate in a legislative body especially by calling for a vote, and the t is a ch-y t.
Recently I learned that jalopy is stressed on the second syllable instead of the first, jaLOPy.
I am slightly better at remembering when "gi-" starting a word is hard or soft. Gin is soft but gimlet is hard but giblet is soft though an alternate hard pronunciation is encroaching. Gibraltar, gibberish, and gibbet are soft (I thought gibbet was hard). Gibbon and gist are hard (I thought gist was soft). The gill of a fish is hard but the gill as a unit of measure is soft, according to Merriam-Webster--who knew? Gimcrack is soft but gimmick is hard. And oh no, a gibbous moon is soft. How am I supposed to remember that?
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For the first time since I named it six years ago I am tempted to change the name of my journal. From a recent Word-a-Day email:
1. Gardening marked by an affected and elaborate style.
2. Affected use of archaic language.
[From the line "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!" in a poem by Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897).]
Now here is a word with a dual personality. Poet T.E. Brown unwittingly helped coin it when he wrote a poem describing his garden filled with all that came to his mind: grotto, pool, ferns, roses, fish, and more.
And when he needed a word to rhyme with the line "Rose plot," he came up with "God wot!" He used "wot", an archaic term that's a variant of wit (to know), to mean "God knows!" and it stood out among other contemporary words in the poem.
If you wish to create your own godwottery, we recommend: sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams, and wrought-iron furniture. A pair of pink flamingos will round it out nicely.
While listening to Lolita I am reading Alfred Appel's Annotated Lolita. I have come up with my second dissertation in English literature: the annotated Pale Fire.
By Rebecca West, with vagues shades of Atonement in class and war, and of Hemingway in deft prose, and of perhaps no one but herself in perfect, haunting, yet succinct characterization. Ninety pages, yet I finished the book feeling like I knew more about its characters than those in many a longer novel, and this despite icebergs of unrevealed emotion. Splendid and fine.
Cynthia Kadohata's Newbery winner wasn't quite as much of a pity vote as Desperaux--which was a fine book, but I am sure given the medal through guilt that the Newbery committee didn't give it to Because of Winn-Dixie even though Kate DiCamillo's book gave A Year Down Yonder stiff competition. And it wasn't completely unjustified, like the trite, boring, and unplotted Crispin: Cross of Lead.
It did feature the usual Newbery elements: absent parents, death, prejudice, and protagonist mature beyond her years who has made a Terrible Mistake. Sometimes that basic formula works wonderfully--Walk Two Moons--and sometimes it seems plagiarized--Out of the Dust had nearly the same plot as Walk Two Moons but not quite, and its language, in prose that happened to be cut into odd line lengths so as to appear to be poetry, excuses much--and sometimes an excellent book has none of the four--such as View from Saturday.
Lois Lowry didn't win the Newbery for A Summer to Die, also two sisters and the same story line, but with Kira-kira I kinda feel like she did.
Last night we discussed Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. As soon as I got home from work I started preparing sweet potato crack, which I referred to once there as "roasted yams and sweet potatoes," and once it was in the oven went to take a shower. Finally I had a couple of minutes to spend with Blake, but I was already wearing what I guess are obviously going out clothes and he opened his beak at me and stayed on RDC's shoulder. I should have reread the Suspects' discussion before the club met, and at least skimmed the book. We talked a lot about bonding and detachment and water and I think throwing out the quest motif would have borne the conversation along more.
When we were leaving, I said hello to two humans pushing two strollers along the sidewalk in merely a friendly passerby way then veered back when I saw what was bringing up the rear: an English mastiff. Kal laughed at me when I recalled meeting the dog as a Lab-sized two-month-old puppy, especially in the context of the bookgroup, of which several members's names I regularly need supplied to me. When I remembered meeting the dog before, I was thinking it was earlier this year; looking up whether I mentioned it here, I see it was last year. So yeah, I remember a dog I met 15 months ago but not the name of a person I see once a month: not exactly polite. Not to the humans, anyway.
Flannery O'Connor. I had read several of the stories in this collection already but not all of them, not "The Displaced Person," which was my favorite, nor "The River," which is more along the lines I expect from Flannery O'Connor. Recently the Suspects were naming their favorite short stories, and someone opined that Usans have the short story market. These stories support that point of view.
Kate Seredy's 1938 book is more worthy of a Caldecott than a Newbery. A lot more of the earlier winners, before the Baby Boom gave children's lit wings, are meant to be educational than my favorites of the '70s and '80s, and perhaps that's why I can't quite agree with its medalling.
An epic-ish (-ish because short, but epic- because spanning generations and featuring heroes and legends) history of Hungary winning the Newbery medal in 1938 indicate that political correctness might be an older mode of thought than I would have reckoned. If WWII hadn't broken out yet, Hungary--this book suggests it was the Huns, not the Magyars--already had begun to smack down Jews and the Ukraine, as Upon the Head of a Goat suggests.
But the illustrations are fabulous.
Elizabeth Jane Grey. What a good little capitalist, don't-rock-the-boat this is. Also, reminiscent of A Door in the Wall. An enjoyable story, but Adam, though resourceful and talented, is not as independent as all that.
Adam is motherless: I really must go through the list of Newbery medalists to see how many protagonists this is true of.
Listening to Jeremy Irons read Vladimir Nabokov's prose was, how shall I say, uplifting. If I were male that adjective would work better. Lolita became more amazing because I heard all Nabokov's language (whereas in print I have to make a conscious effort to hear the words), and Jeremy Irons's voice and the feeling but not dramatization he brings to the text enhanced it even further. I thought my favorite audio book was Their Eyes Were Watching God or Catch-22 or A River Runs Through It or Rob Inglis reading Tolkien but it is Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov. I was as enchanted as a hunter throughout.
Alfred Appel Jr., editor. Extremely helpful, and he admits that Nabokov chastised him for seeing symbolism in words like rose and carmine where, Nabokov said, if he'd wanted to describe something "red" and mean something by it, he'd've done so, and even more useful for the Latin and French and pidgined Latin-and-French I would otherwise miss in an audio version, like the "Repersonne" pun.
I searched Project Gutenberg for books on the lists with the earliest publication dates, and that's how I came to read Knut Hamsun sooner rather than later. And am I ever glad. It made a good companion piece to listening to Lolita because of the all-consuming insanity of the protagonists. Where Humbert Humbert has the selfish absorption of the pedophile, the unnamed narrator here has starved himself into Vision Quest. It's amazing.
Philippa Gregory. The best of the trilogy (which isn't saying much) because there wasn't any gratuitous incest.
Oh my. Leah Stewart has written a book reminiscent to me of The Dogs of Babel (in tone and forensic storytelling) and The Evolution of Jane (in the rediscovery of self that happens upon the rediscovery of a friend), and Angle of Repose (for family history and an old historian and younger assistant, though the points of view are reversed) and I think of The Archivist too, even though I barely remember it and perhaps only through its title. I love it, even though no one wearing contacts opens her eyes underwater, but whether because its plot and theme are my touchstones or because it's actually good I cannot tell.
Also I'm listening to No Country for Old Men, which I love as I guess I've determined to love all Cormac McCarthy, and Chigurh's search for people who tell him things or not reminds me of Cameron's search for Sonia, and of the trusting people who I hope exist in more than just the pages of fiction.
Cormac McCarthy published this book recently but I'd like to know when he wrote it. I accept that people were saying "fedex" by 1980, when it's set, but I'm glad no one used that abbreviation as a verb. Someone offers to go to an ATM, and while ATMs existed in 1973, it doesn't seem likely that west Texas was awash in them seven years later. An Amazon reviewer points out that Texas didn't have a gas chamber, and that's a bad mistake, one that McCarthy as a Texan shouldn't've made. Merely as an Usan adult from before 1980 to now, he has no excuse that I can think of to put a mobile phone in a regular Joe's shirt pocket.
I'm glad I listened to this: It wasn't good enough a book to navigate without punctuation or dialog markers but it was an enjoyable listen, well-performed, and "dont" and "I knowed it" don't hurt my brain as much to hear as to read.
RDC asked if I thought it was a reactionary book, and that's an interesting question because I'm not sure how much to separate Sheriff Bell and Cormac McCarthy. The book has to be set in 1980 and not much later because Bell has to have served in WWII with enough time to have passed for him to be old but not yet decrepit. From Moss's being a Vietnam vet, in contrast, we are to know that while Bell is Good, Moss is Flawed.
Oh, that's another mistake. Moss ascribes to himself only one brother's worth of family, but Bell eventually speaks to what seemed like Moss's parents.
Yeah, the book's reactionary, or McCarthy is: if Bell had his ideas--that society went to hell when people stopped saying "sir"--in the third person narration of the bulk of the novel, I'd say that McCarthy wrote Bell. But Bell'sfirst-person interludes look to me a lot like Lightly Disguised Author.
I thoroughly enjoyed Ragtime and Billy Bathgate and RDC liked those plus Sweet Land Stories and this, so I had high hopes. I do like it, and as an audio book it's a good companion to The Killer Angels and The Known World, combining the former's military and the latter's civilian life as it does (though World is antebellum).
Unfortunately a couple of things jarred me out of the story. In dialogue, Doctorow writes realistic speech faithfully, with "mens" and "he don't" and General Sherman saying "darkie" when better educated or less prejudiced whites say "Negro," etc. In internal dialogue, he uses such markers only occasionally in otherwise standard English, out of context. Maybe this works better in print than in audio, and maybe some of it is the performer's fault: he speaks dialogue differently than narration, but internal dialogue as narration. Another thing was anachronistic vocabulary. Although "guerrilla" originated in the early 19th century (to mean the sort of warfare the Spanish could conduct against the invading French under Napoleon; the tactics of course predated their name) and it's possible that Sherman would have used that word, it does not seem to me likely that an illiterate fieldhand like Coalhouse would know it. "Bivouac," too, I thought was an anachronism, of WWI coinage, but Etymology Online says it came into English also after the Napoleonic wars.
The March was an excellent complement to The Killer Angels and The Known World. Before reading the former, what I knew of Gettysburg was its date, that the North won and thank goodness because we desperately needed a victory for morale and public support, that the South lost because Lee made a major error, and that Lincoln made a brilliant speech. Having read it, I know more of the key players' names, and what the mistake was, and that the cherries were ripe in southern Pennsylvania. But I guess I don't need to know the exact specifics of who moved where when. The time was I could you the troop movements in Tours, Crécy, Verdun, and Normandy; that time has passed and I doubt I will ever reread The Longest Day or The Song of Roland. The Known World is antebellum and from several African-American perspectives, and wholly invented (not just fictional). The March was good in that it showed several characters' perspectives over time, free and freed, civilian and military, white and black--and how the gray are those concepts of supposed opposites.
Halldór Laxness. Jane Smiley's Greenlanders for desperate geography. Frank Norris's McTeague for stubbornly stupid protagonist, though more loveable if even more irascible and lethal. The subtle cues and obvious illustrations of the wretched life in a land only just this side of sustainable.
I borrowed this because it had won the Nobel for literature ("Where do you find these things?" Kal asked) and knew nothing about it. This is the best book I have read this year from the lists and not also recommended by an actual person. It's heartbreaking and brutal and wise; it is hopeless and hopeful.
I love the web. At one point in the book, someone sees the Southern Cross, from Vietnam. There must be some crossover, because you don't see an entirely different set of stars at 1 degree north latitude than at 1 degree south; but I had thought of the Southern Cross as severely southern, as southern as Polaris is northern. I googled: how far north is the Southern Cross visible? Answer: 30 degrees. Vietnam must lie south of that latitude, I was sure, and sure enough, it ranges from 21 to 9 degrees north.
Vocabulary: Pataphysics is the physics beyond metaphysics.
Thank you, David James Duncan, for a terrific book. Critics fuss at the character-narrator's narrating scenes at which he was not present, but I say it works. It works because the siblings are so interwoven, however different they all are.
I expected parallels to The Brothers Karamazov to be more obvious. . And I was glad they weren't. Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei, and the illegitimate one whose name is not Karamazov, to Everett, Peter, Irwin, and Kincaid, plus Bet and Freddy: not exactly. Politics and philosophy and religion and the love of good women appear in both, but mostly Duncan likes the pun. Besides, their last name doesn't begin with K.
I shouldn't've shied from this for so long. If its language isn't as lovely as that of Mrs. Dalloway, it is infinitely easier to make sense of, and I can follow its narrative, unlike that of To the Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf is probably incapable of writing ungainly prose, even if it's less studied than Mrs. Dalloway: "He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong."
Also, what a large debt Margaret Atwood owes Woolf.
Flannery O'Connor managed to create something as sad as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, though without the love, and as wretched as Tobacco Road, but without the what I hope was supposed to be humor. Plus a tetch of A Handful of Dust. Quite cheery.
Damn. Wise Blood was about as depressing as Live Girls or Jude the Obscure, so the arrival today of a package from Powell's was especially welcome. I haven't read it for years, and goodness me, the things I didn't notice before. Measles still endemic in 1973, but already discussion of the Channel Tunnel.
What a repellent book. Dostoyevsky wrote three times as much about the insides of people's heads as Ford Madox Ford but I didn't want to slit my throat even once during Crime and Punishment. If this hadn't been a library book, I would have flung it with great force. Instead I am contemplating the fact that I agree with Ernest Hemingway about something.
I am going to confuse this Graham Greene book with Graham Swift's Last Orders, even though I don't remember for certain whether the Swift destination was Brighton rather than any other seaside resort within reach of London, because it's a seaside resort and because of their names.
I don't say that a good book can't tell every last damn detail, just that The Good Soldier did and did so badly. But it seems like I am saying that, because here're several characters sketched with a detail or two and lots of backstory only hinted at, yet overall a much more fulfilling story.
Why yes, yes I do. I do think that, and I do know her work. Well, five of the six completed novels. Northanger Abbey and the juvenalia I admit to being weaker on.
I've enjoyed John Sutherland's literary quiz books (Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Is Heathcliff a Murderer?) and I have Deirdre Le Faye's edition of Austen's letters.
(Damn it, I can't call her Austen. I like calling her Jane.)
I will come back to this book again and again. Some of their questions and analyses I like a lot--e.g., what godparents are identified in Mansfield Park, and what kind of farmer is Mr. Knightley--and others I think are obvious to the point of unnecessary--is Mrs. Weston Emma's accomplice or even confidante about her marriage project for Harriet Smith--and others I disagree with. To wit: when Darcy refers to the impropriety displayed even by Mr. Bennet, what is he referring to? Le Faye avers it is Mr. Bennet's partiality for Wickham. Er, no, it's Mr. Bennet's unkind manner of preserving the Netherfield Ball from any more of Mary's exhibition.
One of the fun things about this--an exceedingly casual look at literature through a lens of evolutionary biology--was reading it while overhearing RDC's current audiobook, The Inner Ape. I did not read the following line exactly when his book used it, because that might have caused the space-time continuum to collapse, but both texts did a) quote "The African Queen" at all and b) one of my best lines: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put on earth to rise above."
The father-daughter pair of authors, David and Nanell Barash, obviously like their movies as well as their books, the former perhaps a bit too much. Perhaps specifically Humphrey Bogart movies: they use "shocked, shocked" from "Casablanca" at least twice and maybe thrice (but never credit it).
And a dog! Why isn't the dog in the title?
Jeanne Birdsall. Obviously E. Nesbitt-y and Edgar Eager-y and Elizabeth Enright-y and even Eleanor Estes-y and all those good E things. Not March-y except in their number, though there is a single parent and a boy in a mansion next door. Good in all kinds of kid-book ways except why ever would Mrs. Tifton be a landlady if she's so damn concerned about Keeping Up Appearances? Renting, even a vacation cottage, would be, in her opinion, Not My Kind, Dear.
Okay, I've had enough. Some time ago I plucked from the swap-a-book shelf a bodice-ripper entitled Something about Emmaline because the title was almost perfect. I was going to send it to Nisou as a gag present. Sometime in here I dreamt of a character called Sedgwick the Rodent, and that cracked me up. Her box ended up being really full, so I left the book out and considered sending it to CLH. Wrapping and packing, I skimmed its first page again and saw that I had not made up the dream-name, because there it was. Poop. I decided I wouldn't insult my sister with such a thing and decided it could be the booby prize for whoever won the pool for Scarf's baby: at the Yule party people could initial a date and guess B or G. o
On Christmas Day what did I find in my stocking but a Regency bodice ripper: CLH also gave me So You Think You Know Jane Austen? and figured I could use more Regency books since I've drained the Austen well dry. That present screams for re-gifting almost as much as the prize of the stocking, the Glade "room freshener" candle set into votive glass with a Thomas Kinkade scene. (Haitch, I have just given away your next birthday present! Please don't be heartbroken.) The reason I have had enough is that today at work I came across the name Sedgwick again, and damn it, I liked thinking that I had made up that name. "You pick up the paper, you read a name, you go out it turns up again and again." Yes, Kate.*
Perhaps I should take solace in knowing that--despite the knowledge being worthless, since I can't do anything with it--my idea for swing voters doing swing dance is still all mine.
And that my Ratty and Moley::Huck and Jim dissertation is still viable, especially considering Tom's unnecessarily complicating things compared with Toad's distressingly human traits.
My all-books-are-one-book thing isn't helping either. My last haul from the library included Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Both have to do with Africa! And the Penguin edition of Bellow has a nice lion on the cover, and I just saw "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" on Monday! (Which was fine except that I wish Aslan's voice had been another unknown, like all the Pevensie children especially the charming Lucy, instead of--spoiler, Haitch?--Liam Neeson.) But I am 80 pages into Henderson and hating him (where the antecedent for "him" could be either Henderson or Bellow, who cares). Henderson is more hateful than Ignatius Reilly, and there's all this Heart of Darkness shit going on, and I asked ÜberBoss today if he's read Saul Bellow and he resolutely said no and again gave me permission not to finish a book. Eighty pages is less than a quarter through, and damn it, he's right, this is not a situation about which Bill could say, "There ought to be a law."
*Speaking of Kate, SMW gave me her new Aerial. I've been waiting only since 1993, Kate! No worries! SMW also gave me, proving herself the best notstepmother ever, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. My library is now complete.
I am drawn to retellings of classic stories, of fairy tales, Arthurian legend, Christian myth. Penelope has waited long enough to speak, and Margaret Atwood did her proud. She employs her usual detached, dry tone with an overlay of waspishness for Penelope.
Officially, the count for the year is 44 fiction and 11 nonfiction books, plus 13 audio, five on-screen, and 32 children's books, three short stories, four trash, and six other.
Seventeen nonfiction, including six audio
Daniel Barash and Nanelle Barash, Madame Bovary's Ovaries
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men
Mark Bittner, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Melvyn Bragg, The Adventures of English (audio)
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (audio)
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Katharine Graham, Personal History
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (audio)
John Leonard, Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures
Louis Menand, American Studies (audio)
Nancy Mitford, The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles (audio)
Thomas Pakenham, Remarkable Trees of the World
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (audio)
John Sutherland and Deirdre Le Faye, So You Think You Know Jane Austen
Fifty-six novels, including seven audio and five onscreen
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Robertson Davies, The Manticore
Robertson Davies, World of Wonders
Don DeLillo, Mao II (audio)
E.L. Doctorow, The March (audio)
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (audio)
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
David James Duncan, The Brothers K
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (audio)
Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster, A Passage To India
Julia Glass, Three Junes (audio)
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Philippa Gregory, The Virgin's Lover
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (PG)
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness
Pam Houston, Sight Hound
Zora Neale Hurston, Collected Stories
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (PG)
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (PG)
Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (audio)
Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra
Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
John Scalzi, Old Man's War
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (PG)
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (audio)
Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me
Bram Stoker, Dracula (PG)
Graham Swift, Last Orders
William Trevor, Death in Summer
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Thirty-two children's books
Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks: A Summar Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Ann Nolan Clark, Secret of the Andes
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Tomie de Paola, 26 Fairmont Avenue
Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Enchantress From the Stars
Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm
Charles Finger, Tales from Silver Lands
Jean Craighead George, Tree Castle Island
Alison Leslie Gold, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend
Steven Gould, Jumper
Elizabeth Janet Gray, Adam of the Road
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Do, Dear?: Proper Conduct for All Occasions
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Say, Dear?
Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira
Holly Keller, What a Hat!
Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Laurie Joffe Numeroff, If You Take a Mouse to the Movies
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Kate Seredy, The White Stag
Todd Aaron Smith, Cow in the Dark
Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Virginia Sorenson, Miracles on Maple Hill
Jerry Spinelli, Loser
Barbara Foster Wallace, The Summer of L.E.B.
Elizabeth Yates, Amos Fortune, Free Man
Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Four trash:
Pamela Aidan, An Assembly Such as This (Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman: Book 1)
Philippa Gregory, Meridon
Philippa Gregory, The Favored Child
Philippa Gregory, Wideacre
Three short stories
E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Doris Lessing, "The Summer Before the Dark"
Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"
Six graphic novels or other
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Audrey Niffenegger, Three Incestuous Sisters
Robert Sabuda, Winter's Tale
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1957-1958
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers
Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1985-1995
Of the lists of 100 best that I began tackling in 2001, this year I read six from Feminista (55 total), five from Radcliffe (82 total), four from Modern Library (65 total), and five from Triangle (22 total). Of Newbery medal winners, ten (leaving nine outstanding); of honor, four (leaving 186). I read two Man Booker and four Pulitzer prize winners and four books by Nobel laureates.
I read the first Philippa Gregory because it was faux Tudor gossip and not bad of its sort. The faux Austen was fun and didn't make me feel unclean, as did the three non-Tudor Gregorys (two of which I sped through chez my sister, leaving me to request the third through the Denver library). Shudder. Two other books I regret reading are The Alchemist and Stranger in a Strange Land. The former was for bookclub and took me a couple of hours, whatever; the Heinlein disappointed me on multiple levels.
Without the two bookclubs, I wouldn't've read Cowboys Are My Weakness, Sight Hound, The Razor's Edge, The Time-Traveler's Wife, The Dogs of Babel, or Death in Summer. I am glad to think better of Maugham than I did after Of Human Bondage and Houston was fun to discuss and to meet (and I loved the cat's chapter). I unapologetically love Time-Traveler's Wife and I guess I forgive the CM rating of The Dogs of Babel because for Yule I gave each member of that bookclub a device to cube-ify a boiled egg.
For favorite authors I read The History of the Siege of Lisbon; The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; the Deptford trilogy; Hurston's collected stories, and No Country for Old Men. I'm glad I only listened to the McCarthy, but I'm not done with him yet.
Usual Suspect or online journal hype led me to The Brothers K, Bel Canto, and Old Man's War. The two former are among my favorites for the year and I'll probably read Ghost Brigades even if OMW didn't rock my world. Other hype led me to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and The Myth of You and Me, all three of which I loved.
Project Gutenberg gave me Ivanhoe and Dracula and these reaffirmed my stance that except for Jane Austen I prefer 20th-century fiction to 19th. Ditto for The Brothers Karamazov. The lists I've harnessed myself to led me to Graham Greene, whom I enjoy, and Wise Blood, which I...finished, and The March. Medieval geekery, language trickery, and Iain Pears set me up for The Name of the Rose, which I enjoyed reading and got more from than I expected of myself. Three Junes had tantalizingly too little parrot in it (as did The Final Solution).
Of the children's books I read, 15 were Newbery medal or honor books; the five picture books were read aloud to children, Paolini was for hype and Rowling and Snicket because I like the series the hype has led to. I'll read any early Cleary (Otis Spofford is still unread) and Jean Craighead George was pretty good for 40 years later (also the book wasn't an unworthy sequel). The Wallace I read for Claudia's sake and it was fine but didn't motivate me to find other books with Claudia in them. I have author-loyalty for Snyder, the Spinelli was to see if I suddenly like him (eh), and the Yolen was for fairy-tale retellings.
By count of texts, 70% of my reading was geared for adults. Page-wise, I'm sure that percentage is higher, but I refuse to do page counts, partly because that would be yet another quantification for me to obsess over and partly because I am just as glad, and gladder, to have read The Return of the Soldier at 112 pages as I am to have read (listened to) The Brothers Karamazov at 900+. And mostly because Al Capone Does My Shirts is not less valid than Rubyfruit Jungle.
