Currently physically on my nightstand:
We'll just remove Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters now.
Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues and Jitterbug Perfume
I'm so ashamed.
Also I am being quite trendy and plan to read Angela's Ashes, Independence Day, and The Stone Diaries Real Soon Now. Also Publish and Perish and A Confederacy of Dunces.
HAO has allowed me not to like Anne Tyler, but she's told me that it would be difficult to forgive me if I don't like Angela's Ashes. I began it yesterday (29 September 1997) and two siblings have already died, from a five-year-old's point of view, and Francis has gotten mad twice already at people who dare tell other people's stories or sing other people's songs. I'm with him.
I have just (970916) begun this, which I borrowed from HAO, and list it now before I finish it because I see I have been lazy. I have reread quite a few books recently, September, for which there is no excuse, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for which there is a quite good reason which I might post later, and The Robber Bride, because HAO finally read it (and she's now reading The Handmaid's Tale and says I will be responsible if she flunks out of school, or maybe rewrites her master's thesis on Margaret Atwood instead of John Steinbeck?)
Cresswell, The Winter of the Birds
and Ordinary Jack
I am giving these another try because I didn't like them as a child and thus didn't finish them. I don't like them much more now. 9709
Alison Weir, The Children of Henry VIII
Can anyone tell me why a book classed as nonfiction, as history, should use presumably exact quotes from primary and secondary sources without footnotes? 970831
Go read this book now. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Scamper scarper or scurry to your local independent book purveyor right now and buy it. Be the first one into your local library when it opens tomorrow morning and borrow it. This is why people write novels: because people love to tell stories, and Tom Crick does; and because other people love to read them. Fens and historiography and eels and frank, barren truth. Barren, ha. NPI. 970823
Hills like white heffalumps indeed. With puns (?) like "over the liver and into the frieze" and "a lean unblighted face" and then the subtly overdone style. Good stuff.
I guess If She Hollers marked Voigt's departure from her Tillerman/Jackaroo style, and I confess I didn't like that one too much. Not because of its subject matter but because the narrative technique was flawed in sense of time. If the Tillermans come to rest with Dicey's marriage (very Jane Austen) and Oriel's heir is the savior of Jackaroo's kingdom, then I applaud Voigt's new explorations if she does stay with the power of Bad Girls. Boy. (Perhaps I should write "Girl"?) I like this book very much; it's strong (it's Voigt) and honest and biting and possible. She gives more emotional detail than has been usual: in the first pages of Bad Girls we are shown in third-person action how particular Margalo is and how slapdash Mikey, instead of sensing their personalities through their dialogue, as has been more typical. In fact the style reminded me strongly of E.L. Konigsburg (which is a compliment).
Robert Graves, Collected Short Stories
In the introduction he claims these stories are almost all autobiographical.
And I think he likely had the kind of anecdotal powers of observation that
he could glean stories like this in his everyday life.
14 August 1997
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs
Nin
I believe I started her diary once before, but not from the first volume, which is of course heretical to the Tigger Reading Pattern. She just makes me feel, as a journaler, so banal and inadequate. She is at least simultaneously inspiring, which is something. August 1997
Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other
Stories
Another HAO recommendation. From
WASPy little moi's perspective, I thought the perspectives Mukherjee took for
the different sexes, ethnicities, and stages of expatriatism (why is there no
word for being an ex-patriot? You can be an ex-patriate without being an ex-patriot,
and vice versa) were well rendered. Some stories were weaker than others, though,
primarily those told from the adult male perspective, except for "The Middleman,"
perhaps because it was first: "Fathering" and "Loose Ends."
Actually I have two more to go.
28 July 1997
Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Now I'm admitting my rereadings because the gaps in the dates. Perhaps I'd best just read more and more stuff I haven't read before.
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Just bought it in trade from Amazon. Now I want to dip into it, again, too.
Yep. Started to dip.
21 July 1997
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
Borrowed from HAO, and probably
the first of all of Coupland's titles I will read. As carefully full of
the right cultural references as Less Than Zero, only more so, and
without poundingly drawing attention to itself. Did he really coin this
phrase? Beat him up. I like Thirteenth Generation, because (counting
from 1776 in the U.S. at least) it's true, and the 13 implies a suspicion
that you can live above if you choose. Nobody has to be superstitious.
Fastidiously hip, this book; and I resent it only for the Voice of My Generation
Pose. Less self-conscious than Less Than Zero, though with more carefully
considered name-dropping. I wouldn't pair the two out of hand, but in Generation
X it was obvious Coupland knew his Ellis.
19-21 July 1997
Richard Peck, Ghosts I Have Been
I went to the library in a humpf, needing some time out with my journal
and a comforting book. Besides the lurking lecher in the library, this was
a great read: during lunch, on the bus, in the evening during dinner and
the news: finis. I'd forgotten how much I like it. Blossom's a sarcastic
chit of a gal.
21 July 1997
I had read before this but I must not have paid very close attention. Naughty Tigger. Now I understand at what price Pecola bought her blue eyes: not her father's rape (which happened before Soaphead, in that uncertain time Morrison uses) but how she lived afterward.
The point of view goes back and forth between a first-person schoolmate of Pecola's and an omniscient third-person narrator. I don't know what Morrison was trying to achieve here, because I don't read analytically enough, but the different perspectives hint nuances of interpretation.
I haven't read Jazz and I didn't like Sula and Tar Baby
as much as Beloved, which I thick I have a fairly good understanding
of, but what I really need to reread is Song of Solomon, which I
remember about as well after one read as I did One Hundred Years of Solitude
after its first going-over.
21 July 1997
Have I read this multiplous times before? Yes. So spank me. I needed
a dose of Voigt.
20 July 1997
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
The second in what now has become a long line of reread books. Sustenance.
And Atticus would be there when Jem woke in the morning.
20-21 July 1997
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
My first purchase inspired by The New York Review of Books. An intriguing review, a hint of A.S. Byatt. It entertained and interested me, but I don't know enough about German Romanticism to get as much out of it as I could have or to have understood all the allusions. 15-18 July 1997
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred
Years of Solitude
I reread this to assure myself that Earth Abides was only a minor
lapse. Garcia Marquez waltzes you-as-reader about his unfamiliar landscape,
with frequent dips and forays into the unbelievable that are presented so
matter-of-factly that they are credible. Although I usually don't
put my rereads on this list, I do for this novel because I would have to
give it about seven very close readings before I called myself familiar
with it. Although, contrariwise, no matter how much one forgets between
readings, there always can be only one first reading of anything.
5-12 July, 1997
I have come across this on many people's favorites lists, and it often
comes up in discussion in rec.arts.books. People describe it as amazingly
hopeful, as beautifully written, as this, as that. So I had it on a list
and plucked it from a shelf; I read it in less than 24 hours. This does
not mean it was a compelling read; this means it was a fast read. The third-person
narrative of events is sporadically interrupted with essay about how and
why and theory; I didn't find those sections any more poetic or stirring
than the stream of Objectivist (so it seemed to me), mildly racist, detective-genre
narrative they punctuated. Frankly I found Stephen King's The Stand
a more realistic depiction of human near-extinction. King only covers a
year or so and doesn't discuss the denouement of humankind scores of years
ahead, which is Stewart's point; King, of course, details the horror of
the mass deaths, which Stewart neatly avoids by isolating his protagonist
until the outbreak is well over. I think the ideas in the novel would have
been better served as essay or non-fiction; that the protagonist's being
a graduate student in geography and thus an observer rather than a participant
is too convenient; and that overall the book doesn't work as the type of
novel he attempted. Stewart's point was to chart the changes on an
Earth (in the San Francisco Bay area) profoundly changed by human hand now
without that hand's guidance and husbandry; his protagonist, observing these
changes, cannot have natural human relationships. Also Stewart strongly
implies that Earth is worse off without humans, which is hogwash.
Anyway. On to Hopeful Monsters, in which I shall be properly over
my head and about which I shall write a short paragraph, not being equal
to a longer discussion.
4 July 1997
top
Go to the previous or next season, Reading Index, Books, Words, or the Lisa Index.
Last modified 20 November 1997
Speak your mind: lisawherepenguindustdashcom
Copyright © 1997 LJH