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