The first several books are out of alphabetical order because they are bookclub selections or books I'm currently reading.
I have heard unfavorable things about Kazuo Ishiguro's latest, Never Let Me Go, and I wish I hadn't so I could come to it fresh. I loved this novel completely. Ishiguro has a way of writing protagonists who live somehow superimposed upon rather than within their worlds, and who despite this are real and true and full of sympathy.
Okay. I finished Henderson the Rain King. For Stingo's sake must I read Dangling Man too? Because otherwise Saul Bellow joins Dreiser and James on the list of Modern Library 100 writers I don't need to read more of. Henderson--brash, clumsy, oversized, determined to mean well, but deluded and dangerous--is American to his core. None of his philosophizing with Dahfu enlightened me about Henderson's or Bellow's purpose. This books rates not even a "meh" but only "eh": it didn't involve me even enough to dislike it.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the story of six people who are killed when a bridge collapses; a friar wants to compile their stories. Luisa Rey is a character in the six-part novel Cloud Atlas. But I read that Luisa Rey (and Timothy Cavendish) appear one or both of Mitchell's previous books, and I wonder how he named her.
David Mitchell gleefully name-drops some of the texts he draws from: someone reads "20th-century optimists" named Orwell and Huxley; one part's character quotes "Soylent Green" and that movie's supposed twist features in another part. I have meant to read Delius: as I Knew Him since I first listened to Kate Bush's Never for Ever, and now I have a bit more reason to do so.
Neil Gaiman. Can you say "derivative" and "nearly plagiarism"? I knew you could! I mean, it was fun, but unlike with Cloud Atlas, which is also fun and relies heavily on previous texts, my noticing the man behind the curtain didn't add to my pleasure. This might be an anti-sff bias, but I don't think so: I liked his Coraline fine and my not getting into Sandman from its first volume probably has more to do with my not having read all the subsequent volumes than with any failing on its part.
For its reliance on archetype and myth, I was reminded again and again of Summerland. Michael Chabon managed to use Norse and First Nation and American myths of the Tree of Life and Raven and baseball, none of which he invented, in his own fresh way. When Gaiman used Raven and Remus, I thought not of what I was reading but what he read first.
Also, and this is the worst, stop smoking the Douglas Adams weed, Neil! Adams was Adams, and he was great, and he is dead, and you are not he. Gaiman aped Adams's style of humor to the point of directly copying two of his jokes--a meaning of the word "similar" previously unknown, and "smiling in the way striking cobras tend not to." The first is something Arthur says when Ford first brings him to the Vogon ship (with "safe"), and while I can't quite place the second, I know it occurs somewhere in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, early on, along the lines of something hanging in the air much in the way anvils don't. Perhaps the whale? It's not just the five Hitchhiker books, either: there's a lot of both Dirk Gently books too. And Spider is Zaphod Beeblebrox to an unfunny degree. Besides having to wave his hand at his featureless black sound system, he embodies Zaphod's mantra, "If there's anything more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now."
Whatever. Fast and mostly harmless [snork] and I possibly have more reason to read American Gods now, except I can find it only in pulp.
I have been keeping a book lifelist for about ten years now. What's online is only the read and unread; what is in what should be a database but is instead only Microsoft Excel has a lot more, not necessarily pointful, data. I have combed the internet for titles and synopses of long-forgotten books of my childhood, as if I needed more evidence that actually I read about a dozen books 20 times rather than, say, a lot of books.
Every time I think I have everything important, another title or several occur to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time. The Secret Language came up recently, and yeah, I read it and liked it well enough to recall it from a synopsis, but it wasn't ground-breaking. Then today, on my bike, out of the blue, came a title: Tread Softly. The author turned out to be Corinne Gerson, and the Library of Congress synopsis reads, "A young girl tries to cope with the loss of her parents by inventing an imaginary family"; those data are on Amazon. What flooded back to me on their own were older brother Buck and younger sister...Gabby? and the trip to Maine, and the other babysitter, and the weird painting, and the two friends, and the actual brother, the grandparents, and their aphorisms. My sister always wanted an older brother, which is as opposite to a younger sister as a sibling can be.
In the six years between its publication and my departing my library for college, I must have reread the book a dozen times. Or more. Yet it lay unrecollected, unthought of--except for flashes when I read Yeats--for 20 years. How does that happen?
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The Tattered Cover is closing its Cherry Creek location, removing to Colfax. The Fourth Story restaurant is closing, since the Colfax location in the renovated Lowenstein theatre doesn't have four storeys, and frankly I don't think the store as a whole is far behind. It might survive in LoDo and Highlands Ranch, for downtown and architecture and hordes of children, but how the store can survive without the Cherry Creek demographic, within that shopping district, without those numbers of passersby, I do not know.
I don't know of another independent, adult, new-book bookstore in Denver. Lots of used book bookstores--hooray for that stretch of Broadway--and there's the Bookies, independent sellers of children's books, and the Barnes & Noble downtown to threaten the LoDo store, and the Barnes & Noble on Colorado Boulevard that must have contributed to the decline of the Cherry Creek store, and the other B&Ns and Borders. But so much for independence in a metropolitan area of two million people.
While it survives, I will patronize the Colfax location enthusiastically, and if the relocation of the Tattered Cover and the rejuvenation of Colfax build on each other, well and good. But does the TC have the time to wait for the new housing (more traffic) and high-end housing (moneyed traffic) to be completed and lived in? Does the rest of the city believe, as I and many in my neighborhood do, that Colfax is grittily vibrant and full of possibility, rather than scary and suitable only to be avoided?
Successful and cheap plundering of Fahrenheit Books before "Capote" today. I hadn't been in for more than a year and the store has moved. It's not ten feet wide with "Howards End"-type tottering piles of books anymore. I scored hardcovers of Blindness and Pippi Longstocking and trade paperbacks of Tim Drum and Waterland. Happy happy.
Returning to the Mayan, I half-recognized a woman passing by. We each turned over a shoulder to glance at one another again. I spoke first: "Dot Org?" And so it was. She and her friend had just emerged from "Brokeback Mountain" and were headed to the Hornet for a drink. I think she might have been the one who started the defunct Dot Org book club and whom I offended by scorning Anne Lamott's Hard Laughter. Oops.
A Usual Suspects linked American Book Review's opinion of the 100 best first lines. Of course I couldn't read them just for the pleasure of it but had to copy the text, replace the em-dash separating line from origin with a tab, paste the result into Excel and hide the column showing the origin. Yes, in so doing I saw the first two, but, thanks so much, those I knew. Some were obvious; some were giveaways; some I have read but didn't recognize; and some I have read and should have recognized but didn't. For those I get a smack. Answers in white.
Oh ick! The first third of Pamela Aiden's faux Austen, Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view, really wasn't that bad. She used the exact dialogue from Pride and Prejudice, and her made up non-canonical interactions between Elizabeth and Darcy read okay though it's ridiculous to invent such. I wondered, when I read the books' description, why the second book doesn't end with, say, the first proposal, because cramming the proposal, Derbyshire, and denouement into the third didn't make sense.
And now I know why. It wasn't faux Austen, bad enough, but faux Regency Gothic mystery crap with nothing to do with Pride and Prejudice at all. Since I knew it wouldn't be set in Kent, I thought that there would be Darcy and Bingley, Darcy and Caroline, Darcy and Georgiana. He has to delude himself sometime, because he leaves An Assembly Such as This knowing Elizabeth doesn't like him, so how he is going to propose to her "without a doubt of [his] reception," believing [her] to be wishing, expecting [his] addresses"?
It is a trainwreck, and I cannot look away.
Besides actually doing the distances, the absolute minimum that's not happening, I learned the most from this book about nutrition and core strength, which are my weaker-than-weakest points.
Christina Gandolfi, editor.
Anansi Boys read as derivative, and so it is, but after reading American Gods I see that Neil Gaiman cannibalized himself as much as anyone else. I caught a bit of Delirium in one spot.
Make it stop! I have a tome of Eudora Welty stories, and I've been reading them and readily interrupting them with anything else, and having read the stories that comprised a titled collection, Curtain of Green, that's it, I give up. I can't distinguish between her and Flannery O'Connor--Southern, miserable, rural--and I am 38 years old and I don't have to read anything I don't want to. Damn it. So I stopped.
I read an abridged prose version of this in my Greek myth phase and excerpts in freshling year's Classic and Medieval Western lit. Bernard Knox's introduction was fascinating--how did (Homer) compose a preliterate work that existed best or only in performance? what is the evidence of literacy in its context or content (someone does send a message scratched in a folded tablet)? how can men and gods, free will and destiny, work together? How much can Thucydides and archaeology tell us about the actual Troy?
I know about the judgment of Paris, about how Odysseus pretended to be mad but not enough to plow up infant Telemachus (unless that's in The Odyssey) and how Odysseus arranged for Achilles to betray his identity also to be pressed into service, about Paris's cowardice and Hector's bravery. I wonder where all the fatted cows came from. But if The Iliad has as many begats as I dread and is more about Achilles's rage than anything else, I might be done.
Unfortunately, I think that's where I might stop. I read the first several hundred lines of the actual poem and, forgive me, had no idea who was speaking about what. It doesn't help that I was on a plane, with or without earplugs, but still. I might have slightly given up.
Instead I listened (through earplugs and earphones) to the Kiera Knightley "Pride and Prejudice" and attempted my first SuDoku puzzles in Hemispheres. Then I tried again. I'm not overly hopeful.
Voicemail informed me I had two items waiting for me at the library. I have to figure out how to get the system to send me email rather than voicemail. Or perhaps I have to stop thinking of voicemail as intrusive. Anyway, before I scampered thither at noon I checked online to see what treats awaited me: one was a book for the neighborhood bookclub on bellydancing, and another, for which I hadn't received a summons, was identified only as an interlibrary loan. The internal hold was on the regular shelf but I had actually to interact with a clerk to get the ILL. And, since I was at the desk anyway, I had him check out both books instead of using the self-scanner. Imagine, talking to a librarian in a library! What will they think of next!
The book turns out to be Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah from the Feminista list. I thought--I don't know why--that it was from earlier C20 but it's 1969. I started it at bedtime; good so far.
The bellydance book is Rosina-Fawzia B. Al-Rawi's Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing. The personal recollections at the front, about growing up in Baghdad within a vast household, I enjoyed very much, and the meditations on why the pelvis is a woman's center of energy. I admit to raising my eyebrows at a bit about how Arab-culture women take naturally to bellydance because of their awareness of and ease with their own sensuality compared to generic-European women. Bias rears its ugly head.
I'm looking forward to the book's discussion, of course. S studies bellydancing and her instructor is going to join us, dance for us, and give us a little lesson.
S recently gave me such a nice compliment, that she admires how gracefully and naturally I wear skirts, and yes, I can walk and run and garden and hike in them. Whatever grace they and I imbue each other with, however, is out the window when the time to dance comes. Further reports as bruising warrants.
Damn. A Common Reader, the best book catalog ever, whose company Akadine also reprinted deserving titles, has filed for bankruptcy.
Isabel Miller. A lovely book, and a good companion for "Summertime" because the women finding love and sexual freedom (and for Patience and Sarah, social freedom as well) are not punished for their wantonness. I didn't know it was inspired by historical figures until the afterword.
Today I attended my first No Kidding event in several years: it was within walking distance and involved a book. I walked over listening to White Noise, which I've finally almost finished. In a front yard I passed played two five-ish girls. One shouted to me, "Do you have any puppies or kittens?" On my person? That's what her question sounded like. I told her no, just a bird. "Oh, I love birds!" I asked if she had any pets; no. I asked, just your sister? "That's not my sister. That's my cousin." (How foolish of me.) There was more, about her going off to the store to buy snacks for the puppies and kittens, and asking where I was going, and what my friends' names were.
My answer to where I was going was to some friends' house to read a book together. This answer to an adult would have felt like a lie to me (and sounded like one: read a book together?) To an adult I could have said "book discussion" but the "friends" bit would have felt, instead of like reasonable shorthand, like a lie. I would have gone on and on in waaay more detail about No Kidding than a casual question warrants, or obviously stopped myself and then felt like lying for stopping, or awkward for stopping. I need to learn how to interact with adults as easily as I do with children.
This kid cracked me up, and the timing amused me more.
I reread Frankenstein in the morning, my second time through; the first time was for Revenge in Lit. This time I noticed conscience and responsibility much more than revenge. It made me think of Grendel and Forbidden Knowledge.
The people were nice, especially the hosts, though not readers except one, a current English major. Someone spoke of Brave New World's topicality, a society in a constant state of war. I couldn't help myself though I could control my tone in time (an improvement) as I blurted, "That's 1984." Someone suggested "Fahrenheit Four Five One" [sic ] as also topical. I didn't say "four fifty-one" because who knows, maybe you should say "four hundred fifty-one" and of course what he meant was clear (unlike with the Huxley-Orwell confusion). Someone else said that I must be from Canada or the U.K. and I said no, Connecticut, but with a slight speech oddity around my vowels. The hosts read primarily science fiction and fantasy and also wanted to read H.P. Lovecraft, because they had never had (that, to me, is like loving fantasy but never reading Tolkien).
Frankenstein creates his Monster and is so terrified of what he has wrought that he runs away. He has no interest in and no concern for Monster until Monster kills William, although if Frankenstein had showed Monster one whit of responsibility, Monster would have remained, I am sure, as kind as he awoke (and Shelley would have had no novel). The obvious English major pointed out that as a parenting statement, Frankenstein was an interesting choice for No Kidding. I was so glad of this particular attendee: she had had the novel in her comprehensive examination, she said (which included five whole books!), and so brought into the discussion several of the things that had occurred to me in my morning's reread, such that the group had the ideas out there without my having to be most pedantic one in the room (just the second-most). We talked of how good a mother Frankenstein mater is, taking in Elizabeth (as a bride for her infant son) and then Justine (because she's pretty), and in constrast how good a father Frankenstein pater might not be: Victor first says he had an idyllic childhood, and later represents his father as kind-hearted, but between those, when his focus is not his father but the inspiration for his work, the man appears dismissive and Victor to smart from it: "My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book and said, 'Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.' If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies." The English major read aloud this entire passage, saying "AG-grip-ah." The point of this entire paragraph, therefore, is not the conversation this book can spark but how deliberately I included the name in a subsequent remark so that people would know that hers was not only the pronunciation option. She also pronounced "chimerical" as "TCHIM-er-a-kal" but, as with the Bradbury title, maybe I don't know that the word has been Englished away from "ki-MERE-a-kal."
Our first attempt at No Kidding in the fall of 1999 taught me that the mere commonality of opting away from child-rearing is not sufficient basis for friendship. The second, drinks at a nearby tavern, was better only marginally for not happening in the corporate 'burbs. This event was better, with a focus for conversation; the hosts knew how to host; and these days I am certainly more comfortable among strangers, confident in being myself but also not punishing myself for holding back. Non-breeding is not sufficient basis for friendship; reading can be, but perhaps not here, because only one of the eight others was a reader and even she volunteered that she struggles with One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I stopped in Park Hill books on the way home. How I have missed its basement all these years? It was a treasure trove. I knew only of the staircase leading to the loft, but what I heard as I squatted at a bookcase was footsteps going up and getting nearer: from below.
Down I went. Franny and Zoey, The First Four Years, A Man for All Seasons, The Dogs of Babel, Incident at Hawk's Hill, Beating the Turtle Drum, Miss Hickory, and a book fated for the hidden shelf, there to join my one other Stephen King (Eyes of the Dragon), The Stand. Pulp and the miniseries cover. Shudder.
In the evening, the neighborhood bookgroup. In this case, reading wasn't the only basis for friendship. I really cannot believe my luck (or my willingness) that I like each and every one of these women very much, most of them very much indeed.
Kal called me just at 5:30 to say everyone was on the corner to make the arduous five-(short)-block journey together. I was a few minutes behind and said not to wait, but of course they did, though of course not just for me but for Scarf as well. I jogged up to everyone just before Monkey's stroller emerged from her house. It's a Norwegian brand called Stokke and struck me as kind of like a Segway and also like her parents have put her on a pedestal (and indeed why should they not?). When Scarf joined us and hugged me, she exclaimed, "You're wearing make-up!" So yeah, that's how shallow I am, that I wore cosmetics during the daytime, to meet strangers. I pulled my lapel over my face, embarrassed at my own superficiality, and she pushed it down again: "Let me see!"--and naturally everyone else had to inspect me too. She said it brought out my eyes--thank goodness, that being the intended effect--and I said eh, make-up on me is like gilding the sow's ear. Mixed metaphors are so handy sometimes.
This month's hostess's selection was Grandmother's Secrets, a book about bellydance, a little memoir, a little instruction. The hostess takes bellydance class and had invited her instructor came to gave us a bit of a lesson and a dance. Oh, and the hostess had a collection of things for us to play dress-up with, wheee! I wore my own full skirt but added a coin belt. The instructor had a belly on her, and I loved how sinuous she became not despite but because of it. I love how a dance requiring strength, stability, and stamina is best performed by a generously abundant body. She had a great smile, and of course she enjoys the dance and a smile is part of it but it didn't look a bit forced despite having a right to be, and how that smile and deep eye contact kindled explosions of sensuality in the room. In a contrast perhaps too obvious to remark upon, Samuel Johnson would have said of me bellydancing what he said of a woman preaching: "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
Admiring her belly made me think of what I said about barrel bellies the other day. I want to clarify that a belly dressed wisely is just fine (and in a bellydance outfit, can be delectable). A barrel (or any shape) painfully packed almost into clothing not sized or cut appropriately is what makes my eyes bleed.
Don DeLillo, except for Libra, deserves rereading. I think I first read this on my own, B.C. (Before rdC), and in fact that I was reading it on that day at Uncas that marked the beginning of our cursory courtship. At any rate, I hadn't read it since, and now I know a little more about DeLillo and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I got a bit more from it.
Was I on crack when I chose The Aeneid? A Blackstone production, read by Frederick Davidson who sounds like a male, British version of pretentious moi, such that his voice inspires self-loathing? Bleah.
But when I have rote tasks to tackle at work, happily I can listen to whatever with headphones, and I haven't read about old Aeneas, so whatever. It will serve.
And they didn't stop there. By Luong Ung, who has since devoted herself to the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World.
Carolyn Sherwin Bailey. One of the most delightful Newberys I have ever read, it's aimed at a younger audience than is average for a Newbery and much younger than my usual children's books. The illustrations are perfect and I found the little bit at the beginning about how everyone in the book is exactly the same now as when the book was written to be terrifically reassuring.
I've been looking for lists by people about my age about their favorite childhood books, hoping for any description that makes my throat catch in recognition. This title came up in the search after Tread Softly surfaced. I don't think I read it at the appropriate time--it was a horse book, it was told by the older of two sisters, it involved death, strike strike strike--but now, for Your Old Pal Al's sake, I read this other Constance Greene.
A Newbery Honor I picked up (with the two previous children's book) at Park Hill Books, by Allan W. Eckert and John Schoenherr. As does Miss Hickory, it has an epitaph asserting its truth (something along the lines of "an enhanced version of a factual occurrence"); unlike Miss Hickory, its apparent failure to be backed up by, say, a mention in a contemporary Winnipeg newspaper or any other source makes this epigram a lie.
Anita Loos, 1925. Hootingly funny:
So while I was thinking it all over there was a knock on the drawing room door, so I told him to come in and it was a gentleman who said he had seen me quite a lot in New York and he had always wanted to have an introduction to me, because we had quite a lot of friends who were common.
A while ago I decided I should push on with the Feminista list, because much of the remainder of the Modern Library list is Conrad, Dos Passos, Dreiser, James, and Lawrence and life is too short to read remaindered books.* I requested several from the library at once, figuring that that would be safe and they would come available gradually. I suppose I overlooked what negative demand these books have, because all seven (Djuna Barnes, Ana Castillo, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Patricia Highsmith, Anita Loos, and Grace Paley) came in at once, accompanied by a book I discovered while just noodling around, Louise Desalvo's Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge, or not noodling around but searching for Regina Barreca's Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. Barreca, a UConn English professor, has been toward the top of my memory recently because Frankenstein was one of the books we had in her course on revenge in lit.
Before the eight fell on my head at once, I had plucked two books I own from my to-read shelf, whose combination, RDC said, might make my head explode. Yesterday I told Überboss that he might get a kick out of my current choice of books and told him RDC's opinion, then I produced from my backpack Lucky Jim and Naked Lunch. He snorted and agreed. This morning I asked him if he had ever read Gentleman Prefer Blondes, the funniest thing I've read since Tobacco Road. He had, and it is one of the funniest books ever, all funniest-ever books always being second to the actual funniest book ever, and I spoke in unison with him because he's suggested it before, Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog.
* I am a little sick today and thought that was funny. However, I also thought were funny, and offer as possibly funny or at least laughable, the following responses:
Q: When is Good Friday this year?
L: On a Tuesday.
Q: And does he now live in shame?
L: No, in Alamosa.
The first is because I heard the local news say that Mardi Gras (not Carnivale) would start on a Saturday, and I cannot back that usage. The second came about this way: The new intern (not, sadly, my beloved Intern, now in Argentina) is a college football fan and is obliged, for reasons I didn't follow, to dislike Big 10 12 [sorry, Haitch] schools, one of which is University of Oklahoma, and Überboss taught there for a spell. ÜberBoss, not a football fan and no longer affiliated with OU when it happened, remembers the Famous Tipping of the Sooner Chuckwagon Incident. (I know of it because the tipper is a friend of Haitch's.) The intern asked if the tipper lived in shame. Tragically, my Alamosa response could have been a falsehood as well as a straight line: I don't know if even Haitch knows where he's living anymore.
Really good! and a departure for me in that it was suspenseful and I avoid suspense in my fiction just as much as I do suspense and drama in my life. So tiring.
With apologies to Patricia Highsmith, I am somewhat tempted to see the recent cinematization. I was recently talking to someone about Philip Seymour Hoffman because of "Capote" and whoever it was said he was in that movie with Matt Damon, where he took over another man's life, and that was the first I learned that Hoffman was in it. If it weren't for Hoffman, maybe I'd be immune through having already seen Matt Damon in that role (in "Catch Me If You Can"). Edited to say, no I haven't seen Matt Damon in that role, since it was not he but Leonard DiCaprio in that one.
Anita Desai. The book is called Chekovian, and I can kind of see that.
Arthur Inch advised the production of "Gosford Park" for accurate detail about service and I looked forward to his book about the art of the table for lots of esoteric detail. This I did not get. I know not to double-dip and how to eat an artichoke and not to serve corn on the cob at a formal meal; and if he allows table linens to be other than the traditional white damask, why is stainless steel not acceptable at formal occasions? Poo.
The third part of Pamela Aidan's Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view. Darcy has a cousin named D'Arcy. Darcy's best friend is not Colonel Fitzwilliam, whose first name is Richard, or Charles Bingley, but someone else whom I would expect to see in other Aidan books if I were ever forced to read her further, because he and his other concerns are so damn random.
This book had to pack in everything from a month after the ball at Netherfield to the denouement since the second had fuck-all to do with our Jane's book. It was longer, about which I feel sort of like Groucho Marx's two restaurant patrons: "The food here is so bad!" "Yes, and in such small portions!" Aidan, for all her length, didn't treat everything she should have, nor treat as well as she should have what she did address.
The first book left Darcy in no doubt of Elizabeth's feeling for him, and I wondered how Aidan was going to manipulate him into believing her desiring and expecting his addresses. Answer: clumsily and insufficiently.
Col. Fitzwilliam might have been a flirt, but he did honestly like Elizabeth. His comment to her about younger sons not marrying where they might prefer is to warn himself as much as to explain to her. But Aidan reduced him to only being diverted by Elizabeth.
Aidan did not escape the anachronisms that plague this sort of thing. Don't make Darcy say "I'm going to be ill" just because that sounds more highfalutin to Usan ears. He would have said, if he were nauseated (not "nauseous"), "I'm going to be sick," just as contemporary Brits do. It's only in Usan English that "sick" has come to be a slangier synonym for "ill"; British has retained the vomiting connotation. She did try to place the book in its political context, but aside from Boney's rearing his little man's head and the war of 1812, I am too ignorant to know whether she did so successfully. That's nice. But there's no reason to write "o'erspread" instead of "overspread." It's prose, not poetry, and it's the 21st century, not the 19th.
And because it's the 21st century, I read Aidan's plural possessives [Gardiner's] as errors. Jane can write [her's]. No imitator may, and I don't think even Jane wrote constructions like [the Gardiner's carriage].
Aidan skimped on the elements I was most looking forward to--Darcy's confession to Bingley and Darcy asking Mr. Bennet for Elizabeth's hand--and completely omitted, thus demonstrating an inability that should perhaps clued her in to keep her mitts off my book, any interaction between Darcy and Mrs. Bennet after the successful proposal. Plus she made the last wedding a single instead of a double.
Mleah. I am well shut of them. I am giving the three to the friend of a friend who Friday discovered she is gravely ill (see, I said "ill" instead of "sick" because it sounds more formal, as befits her grim prognosis) and whose father died yesterday. Happy happy! The gift of diverting, tawdry books to feel superior to is better suited to a hospital stay than a bereavement and I could have given them to her on Tuesday, when the third arrived and before the death, if I hadn't had to read it myself first. No gift without some touch of selfishness.
So glad that's over with. Maybe one day I'll read it actually, but for now I have listened to it, metaphorically holding it away from myself dangling from my fingertips because ick, Frederick Davidson in a Blackstone production was just as bad throughout as I dreaded at the start. Now I am clearing my brain with Aimee Mann.
Nicole Krauss. It's mostly really good, and I love the premise, and for a woman in her 30s Krauss writes a really good old man. But certain things rattle me out of the book's world--when the clocks move forward and darkness falls before [he's] ready, when people refer to a Russian astronaut, shrimp at a bar mitzvah? I know the first is wrong; maybe there's a reason it's called that and not cosmonaut; and you don't have to be kosher to want a bar mitzvah but at a bar mitzvah wouldn't you make the least attempt to choose appropriate food? And "kosher cow's blood"? I asked Jessie about that, and she said no way no how; but it occurred to me later that maybe Krauss deliberately put such an error in a random person's mouth. In between the things I notice--some of which, in my ignorance, maybe aren't errors?--I love reading it.
Kal suggested it for bookclub and was to have hosted tomorrow night, but instead I am. I have to remember that contributions to the defunct Invisible Library are not a reason to like a book (The Remedy, How to Survive in the Wild, Words for Everything, Life as We Didn't Know It, and others). Instead I will suggest discussion of parallels between Leo's story and Alma's--e.g. Leo having words for everything while Alma's mother told her there's not a word for everything--and whether a kiss or laughter is a question to spend your whole life answering.
Good lines:
"If someone had told me then that Eve had eaten the apple just so that the Grodzenskis of the world could exist, I would have believed it" (83).
"His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom" (156).
"When spring arrived, he began to watch the bush obsessively, half expecting it to bloom with news of his secret" (187).
Unfortunately there were things like "you're" instead of a "your"--the reverse of the usual mistake; does that count for anything?--and "among the two," and these jarred me out of the story. Then there's "Through the window I saw her...planting flowers in what little light was left." Me, I plant flowers in dirt, but perhaps I lack sufficient imagination. Maybe I am being fussy, because there wasn't an article: "planting flowers in the little light" really would have been off.
And yet. I loved it.
Flirting indeed--casual adoring glances that, like Caroline Bingley's, show little understanding of their object's true nature. Unlike me, of course, who is Pride and Prejudice's ideal mate). Not all of them were that bad, but I guess I like my ruminating to be about Jane Austen rather than Colin Firth.
Grace Paley. Short, as short stories should be; often sad but at least drily humorous.
Ana Castillo. Reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver: Poisonwood Bible for the female relationships and Animal Dreams for the southwestern setting. Also not, because it's firmly Latina.
Bessie Head, from the Feminista list. I kept thinking of Henderson the Rain King and maybe I was supposed to. I liked it a lot, much more than the Saul Bellow (which I tolerated). There was also a white guy and there was also dynamite, but here their collaboration was not disastrous.
I know I'm thinking about the white guy's choice of cash crop, tobacco, through a 2006 perspective, but what about the idea of a cash crop at all? Why should people who struggle to grow enough food for themselves expend energy and rare water on a cash crop? And okay, Gilbert's an agricultural specialist (unlike Henderson), so why doesn't he know, in the '60s when this is set, that irrigation is not sustainable? How long until the land becomes salinized and mineralized into uselessness? And how superior of me to want Gilbert and the village of Golema Mmidi to prioritize the fate of the land in a thousand years over their daily survival.
I liked that Makhaya could know at least one righteous white person, and his pan-Africanism, and that the reader knows almost nothing specific about his past, and especially how the lack of specifics doesn't render him faceless and interchangeable.
I would like to know how Botswana got its name. The novel has Botswana people and Motswana people [aha, Motswana is the singular of Botswana] and someone reads a Tswana translation of the Bible.
Jane Smiley faced a dry spell after Horse Heaven and read 100 novels; this book is her ruminations on that process. I was interested to learn how differently A Thousand Acres, Moo, and Greenlanders, the only three of her novels I've read but all three of which I adored, evolved.
I came across this line and read it aloud: "The protagonist is the fulcrum of the author's relationship to the narrator, an the prose, or style, of the novel continuously presents the shifting balances among the three....The author, the narrator, and the protagonist are always in a state of conflict that is always being reconciled as the narrative moves forward." RDC criticized that that sounded very formalist, and the following led him to dismiss.
Nah, I'm going to have to buy this book to read it, because I want to write all over it, e.g. in protest of this:
It infuriates and intrigues me by turns, and I need to read it with a pen.
Mark Kurlansky. I tried to read his Basque History of the World but didn't get more than a page into it, but I don't remember for certain whether I blamed that on the book or on me. This was great and maybe I should try again about Basques and cod. In Salt, the third major element in that triangular relationship is expanded upon.
Also, I'm rereading Wide Sargasso Sea, and it's nearly a new read because I remember absolutely nothing from it--the narrator changes from Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Mason to her unnamed but Mr. Rochester-y husband less than half-way through? All I remembered was violence and Antoinette-Bertha. Anyway, when Antoinette taunts another child, one of her insults is that the other girl eats salt fish. Kurlansky writes of how dependent upon such provisions was the slave trade.
Kurlansky says that salt is the only rock we eat. Perhaps it's the only one we eat separately, not dissolved in other foods, because vegetables and meat contain minerals, which are rock, right? I think. I was glad to have more background on Gandhi and Indian freedom, and how interesting that the third-longest river in the world (the Yangtzee), 3700 miles long, had no bridge across it until after 1949, and he even made the genesis of Tabasco interesting.
He alleges that "sterling" derives from a word meaning "easterner"--I don't have the book with me, Dutch or German along the lines of "osterling"--by way of the Hanseatic League and that guild's assurance of quality. Wikipedia--which I am more and more inclined to take as gospel in a way I hope James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds), would approve--agrees, with reservations.
---
Bookclub two days later (Thursdays are the Other one, not the neighborhood one) had the least book-oriented conversation of my experience. At one point I tried to segue from someone's trip to Israel to the book by asking her if she swam in the Dead Sea (yes, and her experience made a good story), but it didn't work. Didn't anyone like the history? Or how China invented percussion drilling and techniques the West wouldn't credit itself with for a thousand years? Or how Kurlansky skillfully wrote the new, all-inclusive history, with, e.g., a contextual aside about Columbus and genocide that acknowledged the fact without being either flagellatory or apologetic?
I brought two different seaweed salads from Wild Oats, because of salt and because of Wide Sargasso Sea.
I suggested this for bookclub because it's short, deals with -isms, and is (kind of) a book told from a minor character's point of view. But I remember so little of Jean Rhys's psychological history of Mrs. Rochester that it was pretty much new to me. I read it in 1991 or 1992--it has so very much to do with medieval history--sitting in Fugly on Horse Barn Hill in the rain. I don't even remember when I first read Jane Eyre, but I remember that afternoon clearly.
Of course she was driven mad by confinement and lack of sun. John Sutherland asks, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? Because she's a freak of fiction, yes; for any other creature, no. Mr. Rochester is cruel.
Kal lent me Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which is so far an inoffensive story peppered with some Jane observations I had never considered before, such as the set-up of Sense and Sensibility as the opposite of a fairy-tale (a kind stepmother abused by her nasty stepdaugher-in-law).
Scarf, Kal, Harrison, and London (and I) were the only ones who liked Wide Sargasso Sea. At least everyone loved The Golden Compass last year, and I know my priorities. Someone new attended, someone whom Scarf collected on "the walk." I asked about her dog, but Scarf said it was the baby walk. Oh. The new person does not, in fact, have a dog because of an allergic husband. I refrained from blurting that allergies are for the weak, because I figure I should at least choose a book that more than half of us like before inflicting my perverse ideology on especially a new person.
In two weeks London has a piano recital that she invited us all to, and I am slightly torn--just a tiny rip--because at the Tattered Cover that night is a reading by both a DU professor we know and, uh, the UConn equivalent of its poet laureate during my tenure. Another UConn writer I knew spoke of him scathingly--"You mention his poetry and you can see the bulge in his pants rise"--and I am, still, crippled by nostalgia. I liked him, or at least one of his poems, well enough once to transcribe it into my poetry journal. But I'll probably go hear London instead.
Speaking of the Tattered Cover, the Lowenstein project got a third tenant, an independent cinema, with a café! Retail and entertainment: maybe this thing will survive.
I loved Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter and Longitude and I figured this would be equally engaging. It is. She writes the creation of the universe with awe, as it deserves, and quotes the first chapter of Genesis a lot with her reverence properly directed at the universe and the solar system, not at the Judeo-Christian god. After discussing the sun--I had never known it takes millions of years for light produced at the core to escape the star's gravity, but of course that makes sense--she starts the planets with Mercury and refers to Greek mythology just as much.
I started listening while walking to the post office. Now it's a mile away instead of a few blocks, but I saw a kestrel and what looked like a mutated magpie, with more white on it than should be. It looked so peculiar that when I first spotted it I thought it was a plastic bag caught in a tree, even though the shape and the tail-flipping were magpiesian. I paused, watching in wonder, until it flew off. Let's all be reverent together about this great planet we've got.
Then I got to this bit: "Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined. Compared to the Earth alone, Jupiter measures 318 times Earth's mass and 1000 times Earth's volume. The diameter of Jupiter, however, is only 11 times that of Earth, since the giant compacted itself as it accreted so its diameter expanded at a fraction of the rate at which its mass and volume increased." That sentence asserts that the volume of a sphere functions discretely from its diameter, twice its radius, but the volume of a sphere is calculated by 4(pi*radius3)/3.
Even Homer nods, of course (this saying was much more apropos at UConn, since the Homer Babbidge Library nodded its facade right off about two days after it was pasted on): Jean Craighead George writes in Julie of the Wolves about Miyax looking at the constellations of the southern hemisphere. I was reading it aloud to RDC, and I hadn't read it at all in years, and I do sometimes editorialize our reading (as Lucy and Susan walked Aslan up to the Stone Table, I called them Mary and Martha). George was the Rachel Carson of my childhood, and I was Sam Gribley under (if not in) my own hemlock and Miyax with my dogs and so my first wild, accommodating thought was that maybe the southern hemisphere stars are visible during sunless arctic days. But no. They're not. (Whoa, I just emailed Jean Craighead George. I thanked her for Frightful and Tornait.)
RDC says that Orion is in the sky over South Africa right now as winter begins. I accept that: Orion sets from the northern hemisphere for the summer. But he doesn't claim to see Polaris, and I want that geometry explained to me.
I'm not sure that RDC finished listening to this: he said she wrote with the adoration of a kindergartener and that was offputting to him. I noticed that tone too, but I'm a sap and enjoyed it, like Walter Cronkite saying "Oh boy!" as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.
Jorge Luis Borges. RDC heard about this on NPR and thought he could surprise me with it but it was already on my wishlist because I'd read about it in The Week. Since Yule, it's served well as a bedtime book because each being gets only a page or three. If I wanted to read my actual book, I did; if I was tired enough that I knew I wouldn't last, I read Borges. This and Invisible Cities and Dictionary of Imaginary Places need to be together in the library.
Nisou recommended this; it's by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I liked it as faux art history and for the chess, but as a story it fell apart. Spoilers follow. I accept that Europeans, Spaniards in this case, are big smokers, but would any restoration specialist chain-smoke around a painting? in 1990? especially after she removed the varnish, exposing 500-year-old pigment? Also, Julia's working on the painting in her own house instead of a sterile lab struck me as off before I saw how that unlikelihood was manipulated to fit the author's plot rather than the demands of realism.
As with The Da Vinci Code, the unveiling of the villain was no surprise because who else could it have been? I prefer to be amble along a garden path overgrown with ivy and tangled with weeping willow that obscure my sightline, not to be led down a straight path with clearly defined edges. And I wanted the villain and motive to have something, anything, to do with the painting, rather than with a simple homophobic bogey. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, at least no silhouettes glared.
The only sidepath alluded to but never glimpsed was the possibility of more chess and more mirrors: the game on the board, the placement of the figures in the painting on the chequered floor, and the reflection in the mirror. I kept hoping a clue to the game--and I hope the retrograde analysis was correct, because it was fascinating to this non-chessplayer--would be found in the mirror, which might reflect a different game, or different point in the game, than that depicted on the board.
Overall, disappointing, because the same characters and betrayal could have happened without mentioning either painting or chess. But Perez-Reverte uses enough epigrams from Gödel, Escher, Bach to inspire me to tackle that again.
This newish Ursula LeGuin caught my eye in the 'brary on Thursday. The setting's geography, called Uplands in contrast to away's Lowlands, plus the wearing of kilts, reminded me not as much of Scotland as perhaps it was meant to, as Cynthia Voigt's Kingdom. Also the protagonist's name, Orrec, reminded me of the unfortunate same in Voigt's Wings of a Falcon (Oriel). But LeGuin's conflict--and here I think of the English class in Dicey's Song when Dicey first becomes aware of Mina--is on a grander scale than Voigt's usual: a person's conflict with her society rather than mostly with herself.
The only thing that didn't wholly work was the first-person point-of-view: I assumed female and the text didn't clarify for a few pages nor did the character's own gender assert itself strongly. Which would have been fine without my assumption, in fact.
Jae suggested this by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for the neighborhood bookclub. Pleasant, the usual tropes but not used in as stale as way as a run-of-the-mill chick book might, reminiscent of Clear Light of Day (only because of the setting, because I don't read scads of books set in India) and even of "Bride and Prejudice" because of the dual marriages, one to stay in India and the other bound for America. Pleasant, and not a waste of my time, but I don't feel like I learned anything from it either.
The timing was a little off, too: published in 1999, it's set now-ish, recently enough that a computer programmer exists, recently enough for routine sex-identifying ultrasounds, which would make the the two protagonists' parents (who had their daughters probably in their early 20s) too young to remember, led alone be mature at the time of, the partition of India. I thought, since it's set in Kolkatta (Americanized to Calcutta), that perhaps the partition that beggared some characters was the eventual freedom of East Pakistan, but Wikipedia tells me that no, the Partition refers only to India's independence in 1947, not also to Bangladesh's separation.
But whatever, I love The Corrections despite the impossiblity of its timeline--Depression-era parents of a Gen-Xer?--and I'm a lot more certain of U.S. generations than of Indian history.
Daniel Mason's first novel, fit in alongside his work on malaria along the Burmese-Thai border. Hints of Heart of Darkness, unavoidable what with going upriver into a torpid territory not yet subjugated to treat with an insubordinate; airs of José Saramago that I could have done without, because running dialog altogether in one paragraph is annoying even if you are Saramago, and this author isn't; and Flanders Panel:chess::The Piano Tuner:piano tuning. A real gem of a first novel.
Susan is not the last to do this list, and there will probably be respondents after me as well. You are meant to bold the ones you've read, italicize those you haven't, and ? those books you've never heard of, but I dimmed those I've read, brightened those I haven't heard of, and bolded my intendeds. I have no idea whence this list comes: there are 93 titles, which doesn't make much sense, and neither does including Sue Monk Kidd alongside Eliot and Wollstonecraft.
I had Regina Barreca for a special topics class entitled "Revenge in Literature" in the fall of 1993; this book was published in 1994. Over a decade ago I read her They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted and Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales, and I enjoyed the hell outta her class, but there is no way I would have slogged through this current book in its entirety if RDC and I weren't in the acknowledgements (him by name, me only in the conglomerate sense of her students) and, primarily, if I were not crippled by nostalgia.
I was expecting more revenge in literature and less revenge in pop culture, some literature, and a passel of anecdotes. Even the typeface gave it away: I might not have read anything in that large a point size since I progressed beyond Syd Hoff. She writes for a popular audience, and I should have known better.
I remember the first third of The White Mountains so well--the Watch, the transformation of Jack, Capping and Vagrants, Beanpole--that I was sure I read not only the first book but all three books in John Christopher's trilogy. I finally reread them, quickly because they're children's books, but not with appetite, and now I doubt whether I even finished Mountains, let alone tried the other two: they were completely unfamiliar to me, and very sf-y, and especially the third, The Pool of Fire, was clumsy. A blurb from The Washington Post says that the third is worthy of the first two and "no higher praise is possible." That's an ambiguous remark if ever I've read one.
I've reread his Empty World a few times over the years and I still think it's fine. Also, familiar, and well-worn, whereas a new read as an adult, as these books were, shows a book's hackneyed construction and tropes under a harsh light.
Penelope Fitzgerald. I like how she drops hints through dialogue, but this book, despite being less than 150 pages, was not as readable as The Bookshop or Offshore.
Milan Kundera, in audio . I hadn't read this since the summer of 1989. Beautifully written, well-translated, but possibly not well-translated, because I don't recall hating Tomas the first time around.
Le Ly Hayslip, for Other bookclub. Similar enough to First They Killed My Father--young girl caught up in a war in southeast Asia and finds her way to the United States--that I know I am going to confuse details.
Milan Kundera, in audio. I hadn't read this since the summer of 1989. Beautifully written, well-translated, but possibly not well-read, because I don't recall hating Tomas the first time around.
Stephen Crane, and if it was assigned in high school, I managed to skip it. I can see why it was revolutionary for its time for the psychological portrait of a youth in battle, but to this reader a hundred years on, it wasn't as impressive. Fine, but not awe-inspiring.
Afterward I took a multiple-choice quiz Sparknotes, which deliberately? mistakenly? has incorrect results. The red badge of courage is, no spoiler but obvious, a wound; it's a squirrel not a dog and a blue demonstration not a useless crew; and, unless I blindly misread my symbols, question 18 is way off. Reading on-screen, my eyes do tend to volley after my attention has lapsed, but I have more faith in my reading comprehension than that, and so the question scares me because maybe I shouldn't.
Colorado resident Temple Grandin got a fair bit of press a couple of years ago for Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, so I picked it up. I've read about 50 pages and that's enough. I feel bad because maybe her writing style is a function of her autism, and therefore to dislike the style is to be mean to her autism. I'm content just to feel stupid about feeling bad because I know that I am, in fact, not being mean.
She tells the reader that cows don't like yellow. Okay. She doesn't need to say that another three times in those first 50 pages, does she? Not only the same fact (or observation) repeated over a few score of pages but in the same paragraph as well:
(An interesting idea, but anecdotal; also, animals perhaps don't have developmental disabilities because humans are (sometimes) humane and don't let the imperfect die, as animals must do.)
Furthermore, it's irritatingly memoir-esque and chatty and I don't need every last item spelled out in words of one syllable.
This title caught my eye in my search for Temple Grandin's book. I couldn't remember Grandin's name except that maybe her first was Summer, and the library catalog produced this with the keyword autism. Elizabeth Moon does a good job illustrating the perspective of her autistic characters, but her straw antagonists are stereotypes and she makes her protagonist act contrary to his previous motivations for a quick resolution, Flowers for Algernon having already been written. She perhaps should have camouflaged, better or at all, that she wrote it in the early 21st century but set the action several decades later: all the discoveries and technological innovations are dated to the '90s, the early aughts (though I credit her using that phrase), or the turn of the millennium.
This is the outstanding contribution to children's literature for 2005? It wasn't terrible, but either I am too old or this has been done already. It is my fault for not noticing that, horrors, this is the second book featuring these characters but I haven't read the first one yet.
Lynne Rae Perkins's book made for a pleasant couple of hours diversion in a camp chair under a tree in the backyard for a while, after cloud cover let the temperature drop from the low 90s to comfortable.
UConn's library, Homer, didn't fall over into the swamp, but its face did fall off. Precipitation leaked behind the brick facade, froze, and popped bricks right off. From 1987 to 1995 the building was swathed in plastic to protect passersby before eventual correction. Snopes says no architect ever did forget to account for books in the weight of a structure--though it does say that Homer's floors are sagging. As are Formigny's.
RDC observed, or at least suspects, that the house continues to settle: has the dining room floor sunk, or was there always that much space between the oak planking and the floor molding? does the porch roof continue to pull away from the house? Are those two bookcases with 42 feet of shelving altogether compressing the flooring? The answer to the last is yes. So this weekend I emptied them and brought the books downstairs, where they can weigh on the cement foundation as heavily as they like.
In August, I bought a larger bookcase for the nonfiction. The 36x36x12 bookcase that that displaced has been in a corner behind the closet door and held only Ann Lauterbach and D.H. Lawrence so far. One of the upstairs bookcases could fit there, 84x36x12, the only spot in the basement with high enough ceilings--my study is sunken but still has walled-in ducts in some bits. I removed one of the shelves from the standard-and-bracket ones we installed on the wall to the right of my desk and from beneath them removed the little chest of drawers and the little bookcase, so the shorter bookcase now fit in their spot; and I added its last shelf to another case (a step I avoided because it results in two short shelves).
Neither of us has used the NordicTrack or Total Gym in ages. The latter has been collapsed and away at least half of those ages, and the skier merely collects dust. RDC says he can't imagine our not belonging to a gym, and so they're both going to go live on the farm. The skier's absence frees the west back wall for two pieces of furniture from the sunroom, where RDC has begun to build the breakfast nook--the gateleg table and the cookbookcase.
The table in the den has been pieces of board left over from building the drawers in my closet (under the hanging shirts) supported on two crates. I removed one crate and one board and put the little chest of drawers in its place with the little bookcase on top.
So much for arrangement of furniture: now to arrange the books. Forty-two feet of shelving, but once all the books were downstairs, only about 35' of books, into 30 additional feet of cases.
The standard-and-bracket shelves by my desk had had a shelf each for writing books, favorite authors, favorites, and kids' books in pulp, and the little bookcase had had my reference books. I purged some reference books--I don't need the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of law and etymology at my fingertips--and some writing books--Annie Dillard and Sue Hubbell could join general fiction--and the favorite authors--Atwood and Byatt, except for Possession, also could join general fiction. Reference and writing merged, favorites (including Possession) remained, and bracket height dictated that pulp books remain as well.
Some of RDC's particularly favorite fiction--DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tim O'Brien, Pynchon, Gary Snyder--had been upstairs but the bulk was cultural, literary, and information theory. Fiction would be easier to categorize than nonfiction, as well as beginning at the far left of the available shelf space. It all had to come down, case by case, beginning with A for Atwood. I emptied the first case, Edwin Abbott to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and filled it again, Abbott to Don DeLillo. I emptied the second, Penelope Fitzgerald to Wally Lamb, and filled it again, Dickens to Ken Kesey. From there to the end of the alphabet was faster because I didn't have to empty before filling. Fiction now ends on the second shelf of the second case, with the fixed third shelf of impractical height holding a Riverside Chaucer and one Riverside Shakespeare and one Pelican, and Shakespearean and Chaucerian criticism. The third case is all fixed shelves, but only the top one is a silly height, at slightly less than trade. It had held my Penguin medieval and Renaissance collection, but now the pulp-sized Penguin is on the pulp-sized shelf and the trade-size is at the end of general fiction (I'll work the latter into general fiction but I forgot during the main project) but now it holds whatever nonfiction is short enough to fit. I dislike arranging books by height, but so it goes. Other than first three feet of short books to hand, I kept some groupings--women's studies, history, cultural studies--but otherwise arranged the non-facetious non-fiction alphabetically by author or editor. Not by LOC, because RDC prefers to go by author and because I am not going so far as to label the books. Yet. Facetious non-fiction--Cynthia Heimel, Uppity Women of Medieval Times, Al Franken--and a slew of Norton anthologies end the hoard.
Cullings: Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi in pulp, since we have them in a Twain collection, vast but more readable than pulp. A duplicate collected Yates. One Riverside Chaucer. Ellen Tebbits, even though it was a gift, because it is not a Beverly Clearly I grew up with. James Howe's The Watcher. Yellowed pulp versions of texts that are readily available online, like Malthus and Veblen. Pulp Dreiser, since neither of us will ever read him again for pleasure and Sister Carrie, though not An American Tragedy, is available through Project Gutenberg. Learn Downhill Skiing in a Weekend.
Next, the cookbookcase will leave its temporary quarters in the bedroom for the den. Because we digitized the music collection, the CDs don't need to be easily accessible. Cramming rather than shelving them will free up space for how-to books in the television shrine, and eventually the sunroom will take back the cookbooks--another whole new bookcase! And then I will have to go on methadone. Or we'll have to decide that we don't need two different editions of the two-volume Norton collection of American literature, or perhaps not the one-volume version at all.
Elizabeth Lewis's early Newbery Medal winner does not date as badly as Lawson's Honor book of 25 years later, but it shares the same faith in western ideas of progress. It presages the predominant themes of so many later Newberys--consequences and growing up--but still has the earlier ones--courage (The Dark Frigate, Call It Courage, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years) and responsibility and gung-ho western progress (Waterless Mountain, Invinicle Louisa, Caddie Woodlawn, Matchlock Gun).
Robert Lawson made me insane with the animals' worship of St. Francis in Rabbit Hill, as if animals had been unable to get along by themselves until about 800 years ago. This didn't annoy me quite as much, but it's certainly Horatio Alger-ish. A quick read, another Newbery Honor.
Mark Helprin, and my new favorite book. When I looked up reviews on Amazon, only then did I recognize it, by its different cover, as something I saw frequently in college. A paean to New York City, New York, and winter; infused with gorgeous, meaty turns of phrase; illuminated by magical realism. A pleasure from end to end.
Because I seldom sleep well the night before travel, especially an early flight. Louis Sachar follows characters from Holes but barely mentions Camp Green Lake, which is good--Armpit has a job as a landscaper and his boss says he's a good digger, no surprise.
Nine hours in the air, plus a layover. I finished José Saramago's The Double in a day and worried that I had not brought enough books with me. It is my least favorite Saramago and I'm glad it wasn't my first, but it was the book I had with me on the plane, where I could give it my full attention. I love his ramblings and his authorial intrusions, but in this book the dog didn't have enough of a role.
Last year I found Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire fascinating, and this, particularly after Fast Food Nation and "Supersize Me" and with my being such a Whole Foods whore, fascinated me. I knew corn was pernicious, and now I know it better; I knew Whole Foods was a delusion, and now I know by how much; I have wondered if any farming is sustainable over the long term (look at the Fertile Crescent after only a few millennia of irrigation and agriculture), and maybe it can be; and I'm glad I don't have to gut my own meat.
Readable, unpoliticized, honest, and unself-righteous. I had hoped Eric Schlosser could be our next Rachel Carson. Maybe Michael Pollan can be.
Charles Palliser. I don't remember when or why I picked it up, but I've had it for years. I do remember SPM saying that his Quincunx is one of the best things he's ever read. I liked this just fine. I felt as enmeshed in an English cathedral town in the late Victorian period as I did in New York of the Belle Epoch in Winter's Tale, and I might have even shivered in the smothering fog if I had not been, you know, on a beach in the tropics.
Eric Blehm, about the disappearance of a backcountry ranger, veteran of 28 summers patrolling the Sierra Nevada. A friend of RDC's recommended it to him before we left, and this was one of his vacation books. I started it on the last day at the beach when I decided that I am still not ready to devote myself properly to José Saramago's Journey to Portugal. Contrary to the westward flight, the homeward one was overnight: mask, no reading.
Someone likened it to Into the Wild. I would not: I had no sympathy for Christopher McCandless's unplanned, untaught jaunt. This ranger was flawed, but none of his faults was an ignorance of or respect for his chosen territory. Also to Into Thin Air, for the pacing and placing of backstory. That I can see, somewhat, but Blehm is no Krakauer.
Perhaps because I identify more with the theme of losing your best friend more than with the generalized angst of growing up, I preferred this to Lynne Rae Perkins's Newbery-winning Criss Cross. The drifting apart, the not understanding, yeah. Ow.
My first Sue Stauffacher was good enough that I want to read others by her. The "joint jive" was forced at times--it made me cringe in remembrance of a creative writing assignment in I hope no later than seventh grade that consisted of as much CB-radio jargon as I could manage, from a little book I probably found at a tag sale. Possibly I can blame this on...Alvin's Swap Shop? Isn't that the one where a Caribbean boy somehow got to the States and then to Alvin's town by way of a trucker? There was a stamp and a shell, I think. One of the Alvin books, anyway, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway. Still extremely handy that a child with a spine out of alignment from a dislocated shoulder and with obviously poor nutrition is strong enough to climb a rope. Also handy that, despite her considerable responsibilities, she reads enough to nickname someone Homer Price. Also handy that all the crumb snatchers haven't been warped. Despite such conveniences, a fine book.
I am in book heaven, or was until I finished this. To have this--Charles Palliser's first book--and Winter's Tale both in less than a month means that, once again, I fear that I will never be able to read again lest I read something lesser.
It is Bleak House (and other major Dickens) and Mysteries of Udolpho (not that I've read that, Jane Austen fan or not) and Instance of the Fingerpost (for several contrary points of view) and in every way the best book ever. As Winter's Tale is a paean to New York City, so this is to Dickensian London. Palliser obviously loves Dickens, but he didn't write another David Copperfield in 1990. No, it's 1990s in outlook and style and uncertainty and unreliability and Dickens in its setting and convolutions and relativity.
I was so pleased to find this conversation about it. (It's rife with spoilers.) It gave me much to think about and of course made me want to reread it.
The group selected both books one woman nominated, and I offered to host one of the two--since it was The Golden Compass. I was looking forward to it--the garden is lovely in June, and those of the neighborhood group who wanted to discuss it again were going to come--but the woman has new digs she wanted everyone to see and recently said she'd like to do it herself.
Talking about children's fantasy meant that Harry Potter came up. One member does not distinguish among fantasy books at all and asked the difference between Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. Rowling writes a story with action and not much theme, and not very skillfully; Pullman has plot and theme and character development and skill and imagination. Also, Rowling's world is full of inconsistencies--if food and shelter you magick forth can sustain you, why are the Weasleys poor?--but Pullman's is not.
I was pleased that several woman had immediately read the rest of the trilogy. No one took me up on my offer of a three-sentence summary for those who didn't want to finish it. I brought Pan and no one mocked me. Plus someone pointed out how evil Mrs. Coulter is and how prescient that makes Pullman seem--was Ann Coulter anywhere in 1997? No one could come up with a theory why her daemon doesn't have a name or speak better than that the absence of these basic characteristics makes him seem even meaner.
I can see why this was so shockingly funny when it first came out. It was still funny in bits, and perhaps Douglas Adams owes Kingsley Amis a turn of phrase.
The third in Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember series, and I hope she stops with a trilogy. The first book was vaguely interesting, but flawed; the second really problematic; and this one was just heavy-handed and banal. But not as stupid as I was for reading it anyway.
The title story brought the 1918 epidemic to life for me more than the entirety of The Great Influenza. Somehow I preferred "Old Mortality," though, and while "Noon Wine" isn't in the big collection of short stories that sustained me through the blizzard, somewhere Ive read it before.
I am pretty sure I've read somewhere that Scott Berg's biography of Katharine Hepburn wasn't tawdry for a celebrity biography. A couple of things I didn't know--Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable were the first choice for Kate and Spencer Tracy's roles in "State of the Union"? Spencer Tracy was to have been Penny Baxter in the first attempt to film The Yearling?--were interesting to contemplate and didn't make me feel dirty, but reading about her acquaintance with Michael Jackson and her frail, prideful (and well-founded) reluctance to appear in a Warren Beatty (ugh) remake of "An Affair to Remember" (double ugh) did.
But I liked reading about Fenwick and knowing that she swam every day of the year. In high school when I mastered crossing the Baldwin Bridge over the Connecticut River (several hundred feet up, and where "mastered" means "did it several times without being blown over the side by an 18-wheeler or otherwise dying, even when I had a cast on my arm"), I rode all over Old Saybrook, sometimes to sell advertisements for the yearbook and sometimes just because. Also I went to Fenwick because it was pretty and as close to the Lynde and Breakwater lighthouses as you can get by land--and I didn't consider what I did to be trespassing. Soon after I passed a "No Trespassing" sign (whether it said "please go away" I can't be certain of), walking my bike innocent as a lamb, a woman in a gardening hat asked me who I was and told me to scarper. If that was Phyllis, it is probably as close as I got to Kate in life.
Except now that I look for it, Kate's house was several away from Lynde Point, by itself near a salt pond. Well, someone told me to bugger off, anyway.
Historical, very fictional novel about Katherine Swynford, mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt, by Anya Seton. It has an article in Wikipedia claiming it as one of the first historical novels--I guess it does try more for verisimilitude than Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs--and maybe it is. It certainly has that genre's faults, despite being published in 1954: comma splices, unnecessary fragments, even a "he might of had" error. But it was medieval geekery, and helped me straighten out Edward III's children. Katherine de Roet Swynford Lancaster-Gaunt's son John's son John's daughter Margaret's son was Henry VII, who married her daughter Joan Beaufort's daughter Cecily Neville's son Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York. I still don't care about the Stuarts or Hanoverian kings, but the Plantagenets from Henry II through both branches to the Tudors are my thing.
Thomas More to Thomas Cromwell: You have your desire of me. What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts.
Between Robert Bolt's Thomas More and Atticus Finch, my conscience has all the role models it needs.
There's a line in To Kill a Mockingbird that I have never quite got. At a white women's tea after the trial, when white Mrs. Meriwether complains of her black employee's attitude, Miss Maudie asks, "His food doesn't stick going down, does it?" I mean, I get what she's criticizing, of course--but the antecdent of "his"? why food--because Sophy is a cook?
When I brought that up, three other women said yes, that line has always troubled them too. Kal said her used copy is unmarked except a star next to that line, so someone else didn't get it either. So she investigated. She found a site that suggests it means that Mr. Meriwether can still bring himself to eat Sophy's cooking, but the site's author cited a suggestion she'd received that the line is not about Mr. Meriwether and Sophy but about Mrs. Meriwether's ability to eat Atticus's food in Atticus's house while denigrating Atticus's purpose and effort. That seems to make the most sense.
What I didn't bring up was grammar. Third paragraph: "Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to us...."
In this book, unlike in most of Alison Weir's previous, she employs endnotes, but feh, I cannot agree with her conclusions. She overlooked and elided earlier points that she made when she wanted to draw a different one.
I can believe at least two things: that Isabella was not an accessory to Edward II's murder, and that Edward II, though murdered, was not murdered with a red-hot iron shoved up his bowel. I can stretch to recognize the remote possibility that he escaped and lived out his life quietly elsewhere (though she says once that he left Ireland for fear of being recognized and returned to England, where, you know, no one would recognize him).
I cannot quite embrace the idea that he escaped to the Continent and had audiences with the French king and the pope and died a hermit and no one in either court ever mentioned a word of this in their own records. And the suggestion that he ventured from seclusion to visit England once as "William de Galey" (William of Wales) and see his son is entirely over the top, as is the fancy that his monastery shipped his embalmed corpse to Albion when his natural death occurred.
An example of Weir's seeing only one possibility: When Edward II possibly escaped, he possibly killed a porter, whose body conspirators possibly dressed as his. Weir alleges that since Isabella would not have wanted to be lie alongside a porter, her willed intent to be buried in his tomb indicates she knew it wasn't the commoner's body but that of her husband, finally parcel-posted from Italy. Much nearer-fetched is the likelihood that it was Edward's body all along, or that if it wasn't, she didn't know it; or if she did know it, she also knew she should keep up appearances even in death.
What intrigues me is that, according to the evidence Weir has compiled, no one in any court in England, Paris, Hainault, or Avignon (where a version of the pope was in the 14th century) wrote anything about Isabella's sexual relationship with Mortimer, even in the veiled terms they weaseled about Edward II's homosexuality. And for a woman fertile enough to bear four healthy children to a man who preferred men not to bear, to a man who preferred her, even a pregnancy that lasted long enough to show, is odd. Weir excuses this with her being 30 and more, but Henry II thought Eleanor of Aquitaine at 27 was still a good enough dynastic bet to shatter the commandments on the spot "The Lion in Winter"for.
No we don't.
At the beginning I liked how Lionel Shriver (a woman, originally named Margaret Ann) portrayed the narrator, Eva, as a reluctant parent. I was grateful for Eva's honesty about her disquiet and regret about her child (the titular Kevin). So far I could sympathize with her. But when she snapped and unleashed her frustration over him upon him in violence, I was as disgusted with her as I was with Kevin and his father.
Most important, since she knew her son was a malevolent sociopath, I thought it was a crime for her to have a second child; and when he did, in fact, maim the daughter, I held Eva culpable for not removing her child to safety. It reminded me of Lisa Steinberg, whom I had not thought of for years. Joel Steinberg had abused poor Hedda Nussbaum for years, and while even in my 18-year-old's omniscience I didn't feel justified getting into her head about why she didn't leave, I did judge her for not safeguarding the child. All I am now is less certain.
At first I remembered the case but not the name Steinberg, and I strongly associated it with 12th grade into freshling year. Lisa Steinberg died in November 1987, fall of sophomore year.
This might be Philippa Gregory's first non-V.C. Andrews book. She spared me Flowers in the Attic and I thought she did an okay job of creating a character whom both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor would speak frankly to, but goddamn, the comma splices.
Lovely brain candy while cuddled on the couch in fleece, once I was home showered and warm, with a pot of Earl Gray Lavender tea beside me and a cockatiel nearby.
Ruth White's 1987 Newbery Honor book. It was fine, especially read on the couch in the sun with magpies quarreling just outside. I knew the big reveals ahead of time, but then, I'm not a child.
I have to get more Mary Renault, stat. This was wonderful. The writing is absorbing, the love Bagoas bears for Alexander is beautiful to read, and an insider's perspective on Alexander's conquest of the known world is a joy to read.
I liked American Pastoral fine. I liked The Human Stain quite a bit. I plan to like The Plot Against America next month.
I didn't like this. The first third was okay and the rest wasn't.
An excellent recovery book to cleanse my mind after Portnoy's Complaint, which I had had from the library for three months and umpteen renewals.
I've been thinking of words I associate with my mother. Umpteen is one. What is that from? Also, "jot" instead of "write" and "yea" as a modifier ("about yea high").
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
And "iddy" served the same for "dot."
"Jot" is from "iota" and "yea" is an Americanism of only a few decades' standing. She's also fond of "a little dab'll do ya," which I thought for many years was her own thing, but it turns out Brylcreem's slogan is just a good fit for her frugality. Oh! My sister likes Anne Taintor and must have given our mother a magnet I saw last week on the latter's fridge: "Frugal is such an ugly word." She kept it! keeps it out in the open! Is this the germ of a glint of a possibility of her having a sense of humor about herself?
/tangent
This was a great quick read. I got over the thing on the first page and zipped right along. The Speed of Dark unsurprisingly lost more ground in comparison, because for all that book's protagonist Lou's work being pattern recognition, Mark Haddon actually showed Christopher's ability in maths and pattern recognition. And when Christopher said he wanted to be an astronaut, I recoiled, not wanting him to have anything in common with Lou, but in fact I liked Moon's character if not her book overall.
I was pleased that I immediately understood the Monty Hall problem but disappointed that I approved Siobhan's suggestion that the geometry proof be in an appendix and that I kind of glazed right over it.
Mm, maybe because a movie is only two hours of my life and a 300-page book takes longer, but I thought the movie did a much better job with the author's concept than the author (Jennifer Weiner) did. Also I could write the same sort of thing about UConn that she did about Princeton, and it would read the same: like someone whose college reminiscences don't make for fine literature.
A satisfying library excursion. Kal needed to pick up some books she'd reserved and I went along for the walk. I borrowed a few books I knew about--two Philip Roths, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America for next month's bookclub; Julian Barnes's Arthur and George; Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby but not J-Pod--and one whose title suddenly surfaced in my head after not even being on my lifelist, Michael Frayn's Headlong, and two I hadn't heard of, Peter Ackroyd's The Clerkenwell Tales (I'll read anything by him and if it's faux Chaucer, all the better) and Margaret George's Helen of Troy (I loved the last's Autobiography of Henry VIII and another Tudor gossip novel about Mary, Queen of Scots). Helen of Troy fits in well with my Iliad guilt and Mary Renault love.
All these great books have a return date, though, so despite the Mary Renault love, I must interrupt paperback The Friendly Young Ladies, which I began yesterday. In case I forget later, it reminds me I Capture the Castle for its dank, frigid setting, and Death of the Heart, for foiled love in late adolescence.
And tonight I plan to go to the Tattered Cover to hear an old DU pal read from a newly published book of poetry, and while there I almost certainly will pick up Lemony Snicket's Beatrice Letters, and so we see that library books do not always precede owned books in the bedside stack.
I only happened across it as I began browsing the fiction section. I've liked Peter Ackroyd before and I'm a sucker for many faux Chaucerian things. What I liked most about it was the tiny glimpses of 1399 London, whether they still exist or are currently in a suburb. I'm not sure I understood the line, if there was one, between fact and fiction.
This was one of the most enjoyable books I've read for a while. Longer than Curious Dog, meatier than Clerkenwell Tales, quicker than Persian Boy, not guiltily lowbrow like Queen's Fool or inexplicably highbrow like Portnoy's Complaint. Art history and iconography reminiscent of The Cornish Trilogy and Possession set in a lighthearted English country farce. I think a DU friend recommended this Michael Frayn years ago, and hey! it has legs on the cover but they're not female ones in stiletto pumps.
Also I began and discarded after just a few pages Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby. I still mean to read J-Pod but this morning I was not in the mood for a miserable female 30something protagonist browbeaten by her mother. So I just stopped. That's big for me. I started Arther and George. I liked The Final Solution with very little Sherlock Holmes under my belt but even primed by Curious Incident I am not sure it will grab me. But it feels worth more pages of effort than the Coupland did.
Julian Barnes. Although this is a form I usually like--the fictionalization of known persons, and in the hands of a skilled raconteur--the book ultimately left me a bit unsatisfied. Perhaps because I only found out, through the author's note at the end, that the events as well as the main characters were based in fact? Or because, since it was based on fact, I'd like to know how the one last fact was known, because it's an important thing to invent.
8 November: The book taught me two words: minatory, having an ominous or threatening appearance, and fleam, a veterinary instrument for letting blood. At least, I think the words came from this book. I wrote them on a post-it note (my bookmark of choice despite their being the bane of preservationists) that I just discovered in a crevice of my backpack.
Mark Haddon has another success. It's not as poignant or as much of a literary reach as Curious Incident, but it's pretty damn good. I particularly liked how different people, such as father and son, would think separately of the same thing--ferries, for instance--and in their individual responses you could see how the people were both similar and different. I might not have liked the book, which at its basic plot is only a family drama, as much if I had not decided just partway through that it is the next book for my mother-in-law. She loved All Families Are Psychotic and has asked for similar books since. A tragicomedy about small group of closely but bitterly related people over a short span of time and an absurd chain of events? I came up with nothing, until this.
Bob Harris is not as funny as he thinks he is. But I still might try Ken Jennings's Brainiac, because that gets more into trivia as a sport, as Word Freak, than this did. Harris didn't make me care enough about him for the memoir stuff to work.
I can forgive myself a fast stupid read better than I can a long stupid read. I picked this up at the library after work and read it through the news and partway through "The Smartest Guys in the Room" (until I decided the documentary needed more attention and worked on AKT's stocking instead) and finished it before I fell asleep. Is Ann Brashares going to milk the series until all the girls are paired off? Skim milk, that.
So this was a fast stupid read. Margaret George's Helen of Troy is not quite stupid, but for heaven's sake if I can't get through The Iliad I don't deserve 800 pages of faux-Homer nigh-romance novel. At least I should hold off until I finish next week's club book.
It is remarkable to me how different a book can be in print and in audio. I loved Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winner in print, and I loved it again in audio, maybe more for the audio this time.
A note to myself about books to query Loganberry Books about:
Solved: Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost." I came across this title while searching likely terms but dismissed the possibility as not a children's book and not the right period. But Jessie suggested it and at that point I bothered to search within its text for "paint." That's the one, and now I wonder how and when I came across it. A short story is not at all what I remember, and a genre I eschewed as a child. I guess I am content having false or unreliable memories as long as, when they're proven wrong, I realize it. But the faint visual memory of a (cover?) illustration and the stronger recollection of its being a book-length tale aren't resolving into Oscar Wilde. Plus it means "The Importance of Being Earnest" is not the first Wilde I read. Wild.
I am glad I at least remembered the ghost as being dryly witty: the vital Wilde characteristic.
I began Operation Shylock immediately after Portnoy's Complaint and closed it after maybe three paragraphs. I liked The Human Stain and American Pastoral (though less, and I confuse it with E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, because both were audio and one followed the other hard on its little digital heels) and I had to read The Plot Against America for bookclub and I only wanted to write run-on sentences, not to consume so much Roth in such a short period, as my mother-in-law did on lobster, as to become allergic. Perhaps I am too old, and born too late, to have liked Portnoy. Perhaps I prefer Portnoy to be a woodchuck.
This novel's protagonist parallels Roth in a few major ways, as much can happen in whose world Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940 can be--named Philip Roth, born in Newark in 1933, a second child--and also Portnoy, also a second child in Newark whose father is the sole Jewish insurance agent in a gentile office. I don't mind Nathan Zuckerman as an alter ego, but Alexander Portnoy made hair grow on my palms--instead of my usual teeth itching--and Plot's boy Philip Roth resembles Alexander Portnoy more than I would have preferred.
Other than that, I liked most of the book okay. Everything about how Lindberg was elected, the neighborhood and family's reactions to his election, Alvin going off to fight with Canada (pulling a Hemingway, though perhaps I shouldn't use the verb "pull" this close to Portnoy's name) when Lindbergh kept the U.S.A. out of WWII, and Walter Winchell, all of that worked. But I think Roth chickened out of staying in his alternate history, so the last bit of the book fell apart. Spoiler: When someone ceases to be president, her vice-president becomes president and stays that way even if he sucks, until he's impeached, because there's this thing called the Constitution. You can't shove FDR back on the throne just because the people want him, as Roth did, because if the veep is impeached, there's still the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Cabinet and probably the last postal employee before a private citizen can be propped up there.
That said, the novel certainly works as a response to the current zeitgeist.
Lemony Snicket's last Unfortunate Event. I was two weeks late getting to it and the excuse-making is part of the story. Cassidy had to go to the shop, which is near the Tattered Cover, the Monday before the book was released. I was going to get book and car on the same day, but it wasn't ready Friday or Monday and on Tuesday it was snowing, which I didn't expect and wasn't dressed for, so I wasn't in the mood to walk any distance in sandals and short sleeves, even for the book. Then I spent a weekend in dive class instead of reading, and then this read I read The Plot Against America, so yesterday, two whole weeks later, was the day.
And all that unnecessary detail is just the kind of tangential stuff I wanted Lemony Snicket to eschew this time, in order to have space to tie everything up in neat little bows. What I wanted and what I knew to expect, however, were two different things, and thank goodness.
The only Newbery Medal-winning books that I haven't yet read are either very old or about dogs. Today, walking home from a children's Hallowe'en party, I visited the Park Hill branch of the library and borrowed Rifles for Watie and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. I was pretty sure the eponymous dog doesn't die, unlike that of Old Yeller, and since Dear Mr. Henshaw didn't traumatize me, maybe Shiloh wouldn't either. Shiloh doesn't die and an 11-year-old learns about shades of gray in himself and others.
Between the party house and the library, I enjoyed the beautiful day, 70-degree sun melting Thursday's more-than-piddling snowfall. I met an old dog named Buster and a young one named Marley and admired a front yard snowfort. Between the library and home I walked and read.
Of course I couldn't resist. As soon as I read the pirated list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and learned that Peter Ackroyd edited it, I had to add it to my lifelist. Although I didn't make the comparisons I did five years ago when I assigned myself the first three lists of 100 (Modern Library, Feminista, Radcliffe), I did see that every list I now track (fourteen*) has non-trivial overlap with it.
Database software intimidates me enough that I'm content with an Excel worksheet full of formulas and filtering. When I read a book off one of the lists, I change an initial in as many columns as applicable from a letter to 1. This is how I know I've read 272 of the 1,001, and that 647 titles don't appear on any other list. It is not how I know I'm pathetic, but it would be a leading indicator if I didn't.
*Feminista, Radcliffe, Triangle Publishing, and Modern Library, with 100 titles each, plus the BBC's and Time magazine's opinions; Man Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, and PEN-Faulkner winners, with fewer than 100 each; more than 100 Nobel authors but no title count; more than 100 title that the Library Journal considers the most influential; the book 500 Great Books by Women; and now this one. The 500 Great Books' initial is D, and so, logically (since it weighs as much as a duck), this list's letters are MI.
Frank Rich is not immune to the same spin that he faults the current administration for--sometimes labeling the press lapdogs for following the party line too closely and sometimes lauding it for sniffing out the real story--but since I agree with him, I liked this book, his investigation and analysis, very much.
Plus I like Grover Gardner as a narrator. First among my many complaints about audible.com is not enough George Guidall. Apparently double-G initials indicate quality narration.
Ken Jennings is less annoying than Bob Harris was in Prisoner of Trebekistan. His favorite verb is "pore" (though my mock-a-Mormon reflex wants to say "tithe." Also he uses the Gilbert and Sullivanism "very model of a modern major" what-have-you twice, and a limit of once per book that's not about "The Mikado" should be regulation.
I'm sure Harold Keith was a nice man to everyone he knew. I'm just as sure everyone he knew was white. Yes, Hugh Lofting won the Newbery with a book peppered with racist stereotyping, in 1922; hadn't sensibilities changed at all by 1949? "Half-blood" Cherokees--who survived or were the first generation after the Trail of Tears--to look down on full-bloods because they want to live according to their own lights instead of their tormentors'? I have no problem with his uneducated characters speaking in dialect, but I do with his adult characters speaking like children. Lack of formal education doesn't make you think like a child.
Furthermore, almost every character got slapped by the exposition fairy when Keith thought the reader needed a history lesson. Which I did: I didn't know about various native American tribes siding with the Confederacy in hopes it would respect treaties more than the Union had. But an author should make a history lesson a tad more seamless than this one did.
My Bill Bryson so far: English and How It Got That Way, which was interesting (to me) and in print and, as I recall, fairly free of Bryson. In the summer of 2000 I read A Walk in the Woods, and while I loved his cultural and ecological background on the Appalachian Trail, I got really pissed at him for blowing his ride: an opportunity to hike a seven-month trail, squandered by being unfit and unprepared. But then A Short History of Nearly Everything made me happy: it was funny and informative and an excellent narrative of, yup, nearly everything.
In a Sunburned Country combines his interesting, humorous delving into language, Appalachia, and everything with his unappealing wimpiness, insincere self-deprecation, and complaints. It doesn't make a good audio book because in print I could have skipped all the bits about him and read the geographical and zoological and other worthwhile bits.
The other reason it doesn't make a good audio is that he's the narrator. He doesn't speak clearly. He swallows the insides of many words, dulls some consonants and unexpectedly sharpens others. Hepronounces "unsettling" as "un-seh-dling." Living in Europe didn't sharpen his t's at all, and whatever, we Usans, and he's one, say "twenny" and "mih-ten" and apparently all British women named Katie are quite sick of Usans calling them "K.D." But a narrator of audio books is obliged to enunciate a sight more than Bryson does. "Peer-yud" instead of "period," "quayre-lous" instead of "querulous," "sig-nif-gant" instead of "significant." Plus he sounds like he has a stuffy nose or, harkening even farther back in my college career, a deviated septum.
Davids McCullough and Sedaris read their own work just fine, but Bill Bryson should leave his to others.
I am glad George Guidall narrated this. It's not that he employed what I consider his habitual sardonic tone for Elie Wiesel's story: of course he and the production company wouldn't be that disrespectful. It's that I associate his voice and that tone with more pleasant topics, and that association made the story easier to hear. On the way home I fell asleep so often during Dawn that RDC put on Hemingway short stories instead (assuming correctly I wouldn't mind missing what I wasn't already familiar with).
I loved The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything. I hoped Mary Anne's just criticism that in the former, Simon Winchester sometimes sounded like the madman Victorian colonial he was describing--in being patronizing and racist, if not psychotic--was not a constant element of his writing.
This book is an erudite, wide-ranging work whose exploding world, centered on a volcano, is developed through topics ranging from geology to colonialism to meteorology. With flaws. Fascinating: Krakatoa was the first global catastrophe to happen after the telegraph had connected the world, and news of it reached London only three hours after the eruption (by contrast, news of Lincoln's assassination 18 years before had taken 12 days to reach England). Frustrating: lizards and snakes are not amphibians.* Fascinating: in the early 1800s, a biologist traced a line through southeast Asia, east and west of which lay distinctly different flora and fauna; that line correlates to how landmasses have drifted over time, anticipating the theory of plate tectonics of 1965. Frustrating: Winchester footnotes that the New York World newspaper, which after the eruption noted more vivid sunsets, is the paper of "World Series" fame (as if the championship took its name from the paper's sponsorship, 288), but other, apparently more trustworthy (though online) sources deny this, and the paper's own archives show no connection.
Offhand, careless mistakes like those, and larger ones like his persistently (in Madman and in this, more than once) referring to Sri Lanka by its pre-1952 name, Ceylon**, make me wonder if I should not have enjoyed the book overall, if any of what I thought I learned (about continental drift, subduction zones, the repopulation of Krakatoa's relics) is trustworthy and accurate.
* "And as the forest thickened, some amphibians that had somehow found their ways across the sea begin to slink in and make their nests--monitor lizards, paradise tree snakes" (364).
** While Sri Lanka was Ceylon, Taiwan was Formosa. Why then in the same note (33), would he refer to "Dutch outposts" in Ceylon, Formosa, and Thailand, not Siam? Why call Sri Lanka "Ceylon" several times despite seeming to be aware of (not only) a name change ("what was then Ceylon," 262)? This despite acknowledging an assiduous editor and fact-checker.
I was almost 12 when Mount St. Helens erupted. I think I knew about Krakatoa earlier than that, that a story about it appeared in a Reader's Digest collection for children that I read to tatters. But it fit well with what I think is a typical pubescent fascination with the weird, scary, unknown, or extreme. I could not read much this week with three houseguests, but I tried to engage RDC's 12-year-old nephew's interest with Krakatoa. That it was so loud it could be heard 3000 miles away, as if you yelled in New York City and could be heard in San Francisco. That sunsets were prettier all over the world because an entire pulverized mountain was suspended in the upper atmosphere. That it caused tsunamis taller than the one of two years ago, whose effects registered on tidal markers in France. That the barometric shock wave reverberated around the globe 15 times. Sadly, none of this stirred him at all.
Vocabulary: chicane, threnody.
Hooray! Another non-Boggart book by Susan Cooper. I thought King of Shadows was great and so was mightily disappointed by the Boggart titles. Maybe they were just younger than my usual. Anyway, this was great, another now-and-then book like King but without the blatant time travel, and with a small nod to King as well, with a boy from North Carolina, i.e. Nat, playing Ariel at the current Globe. A fun quick read with Horatio Nelson and Mystic Seaport and the usefulness of reading old books. Good stuff.
Possibly Mary Renault should stick with ancient and mythological Greece. I adored both The King Must Die and The Persian Boy, and then this (along with Boy) was on the Triangle list too.
Renault said (according to the book's preface) that she always wrote what she wanted, without concern for censorship, but this book takes some disjointed turns that seem forced by publishing mores rather than by the characters' various motivations. Furthermore, it has one of the most moving heterosexual love scenes I've ever read, and no homosexual ones: Renault knew what was publishable.
The introduction alleges she wrote it in response to The Well of Loneliness, which I haven't read, and The Children's Hour, of which I've seen a non-Bowdlerized cinematization, and that she meant to get across the message that homosexuality doesn't have to be miserable or end miserably. I don't think she succeeded, and I'm a bit surprised at the book's inclusion on the Triangle list, because she as much as says she doesn't agree, or care that, Silence = Death.
Well-constructed; lovely writing; a little more of people's being able to read whole personas and deduce complex motivations from a glimpse of an expression than sits well with me; not as much of a collapse of credibility as production codes demanded of "Suspicion" and "Rebecca" but certainly wobbly.*
* Mr. Rochester isn't the most desirable of partners either. Hollywood did not give Joan Fontaine the nicest husbands.
The book's own blurb alleges that James wrote this book for adults and just happened to be pleased by how well children received it. I don't believe it: one, its writing is geared toward young readers, but more, two, when the year's crop of foals is rounded up, author Will James describes only branding ("there was no pain," snork) but Smoky leaves the corral a gelding. It's like that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle propaganda about the kid whose room is so untidy that eventually he cannot reach the door. I'm like Ramona with Mike Mulligan here: we, or at least I, don't need details about gelding or peeing, but I'd appreciate your being honest enough to allude to the situation.
I admit I expected it, in a 1927 book about mustangs and cowboys, but damn. "All of him [clothes and face] pointed out...the man being a half breed of Mexican and other blood that's darker, and [bad behavior] showed that he was a halfbreed from the bad side...." "Halfbreed" as an adjective (or noun) is as bad as I expected the pejoratives to go, but then James used "breed" too, because, I guess the reader should gather, it's not just miscegenation but the bloods themselves that are bad. And the horse goes from avoiding all humans, in a mustang kind of way, to particularly hating all dark-skinned humans. That's nice.
That happened when the horse was bright and strong. For the rest of the book, he wasn't. And that's why I don't read animal books.
This was be my last Newbery of the year. Five more to go, and then I'll be caught up and only need keep up with each subsequent year's winner.
May Sarton (whose first name I always think of as "Mary").
I would like to suggest this for bookclub, one or both, because it's short and, as far as I'm concerned, brilliant. But I reacted to it way too personally: is it really brilliant, or did it just speak to me so intimately that it must be perfect? I could deal with its not being chosen, but if it were chosen and disliked, I wouldn't want to attend the discussion, let alone host it (as each book's selector does). I might even have to explain why it is now a favorite book when I am not 70, a poet, or noticeably bisexual, and I don't know if I can do that.
One thing I can say is that I like how unafraid Sarton is to use symbolism plainly. Mrs. Stevens is an interview subject; her two interviewers drive past quarries to reach the woman they consider their quarry. One interviewer is named Hare, and both actual and metaphorical pebbles are thrown into the deep still cold quarry waters. When an interviewer asks if something were a watershed moment, all three submerge again into the conversation.
After I finished May Sarton, I picked up Nightwood. I made a great library haul at my beloved main branch of the Arapahoe County library system two weeks ago after my pretty birdful walk. I've been wrapping and writing cards and finishing stockings and not setting aside a lot of time to read, and even watching "Battlestar Galactica" before sleep instead of reading. What that means is that I don't like Nightwood much, or rather that its first dozen pages have failed to engage me.
Today is a hanging-around-in-our-jammies day, and I will give Djuna Barnes another push or give up for the next book in the stack. Which I should have done several days ago.
Its full name is American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, and the sections on religion and oil were interesting (devastating, disheartening) but the bit on money went on forever. Also, narrator Scott Brick was less emotive than in Influenz but Richard Simmons is less emotive than that: still not un-emotive enough. I doubt I'll listen to any more of Brick's narrations but I'll read more Kevin Philips.
And do I have good timing or what? The next book I started was Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, because I am all about the cheerful.