Currently physically on my bedtable:
Now I personally have my doubts about which of these I'll manage to finish, especially since I've been reading little besides The Nation, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books, but not actual books, and avoiding DeLillo. Except some Lois Duncan last weekend.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
I missed a lot last time, which I suppose is why I got discouraged last time. Now, the somnolent, ethereal elements strike me more and I am enthralled.
RDC gave me hardcover Watership
Down for Christmas; the paperback I bought on a class trip to Boston
in ninth grade has yellowed severely. The pagination is different as well
as the color of the pages and I noticed things I have overlooked
for several rereadings. Like how very very British the bunnies are, calling
each other "old chap" and keeping extremely stiff upper lips.
This would, naturally, be the old Britain, before Diana Spencer Windsor
died and everyone suddenly began to emote.
So here I am with a paperback I have a lot of sentimental attachment to. I could
keep it; we still have two of Catcher in the Rye, One Hundred Years
of Solitude, Bell Jar, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Sense
and Sensibility. We also each have a Riverside Chaucer, as is my Shakespeare,
but his is Pelican. But I should do something worthwhile with it. When I found
a hardcover Temple of My Familiar, I put my tattered pulp in the Dot
Org trading bookshelf without a backward glance. But I can't do that with this
Watership Down. Last summer I shrank--this after the yellow floral dress
incident--a favorite navy blue dress
with an ivory William Morris-type pattern. I couldn't button it around me, but
HAO is a third my size and she loves
it. I am glad for it to go to a good home. She will also be the repositor of
my Watership Down.
I reread this when at DMB's--her copy. Spank me. It's the only King I can stand, and The Unconsoled requires too much focus for me to read it in that house. RDC gave me a hardcover Watership Down for Christmas and that is the closest I have ever had these two books in conjunction. King mentions Watership Down as one of the few books that ever enthralled one of his many nonreading characters (another case of his characters reflecting his readership); the character had thought of rabbits as "pathetic" and "cowardly," I believe. Anyway, for the first time I wondered if King had Watership Down in mind when he decided to use epigrams for sections of The Stand. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Adams used Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Orwell for his epigrams, and King selects passages equally apropos to his subject matter but his sources belie the relative level of his book: Bruce Springsteen and Blue Oyster Cult.
My father finally sent this back after over a year. He said he enjoyed it a lot, as did his girlfriend, which I'm glad of. I reread it because I wanted to make sure it is worthy of how much I had missed it. It is.
E.L. Konigsburg, Up from Jericho Tel
and T-backs, T-tops, COAT and Suits
The View from Saturday and borrowing the several last winter from HAO reminded me how much I like Konigsburg. Tallulah Bankhead is in Up from Jericho Tel, which exploits a foolish, if inobtrusive, plot device as a vehicle for Konigsburg's exploration of character. That exploration was rather like A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. And how often are children's books written that are set only ten years before? Or written in the '80s but set in the '70s, anyway? T-backs etc. (the third element in which title I might have mangled) is more how I remember Konigsburg being.
Christine Pevitt, Philippe, Duc D'Orléans:
Regent of France
What I said when it was on my nightstand:
Non-fiction! Lisa, are you ill? History, natch; and although it's about a specific person, it's 944 not 920: history, not biography. So there. I expect I have a harder time than most adjusting to Library of Congress cataloguing. I estimate that I shelved about eight feet of books over 500 times throughout high school. Then college and the big transition. The only LOC I know is that literature and criticism is P.
And it has a family tree! I love family trees. They make me think of Anne Frank, who had quite detailed family trees along with her photographs of movie stars. Well. I liked them before that. I drew one of Greek mythology once. I wish I still had it, ridiculous as it is to say definitively just whose Aphrodite's parent(s) were.
What I said when it was on my nightstand: "I'm a sucker for an enticing
cover." Ha!
As usual, I am unable to describe a book that I like articulately and in denotative
terms. Hegland uses a literary technique I like, of starting the book later
chronologically than when the story involved actually begins. She brings the
reader back in well-constructed remembrances of things past, gradually revealing
the causes and events of the relative present. The narrator, Nell, and her sister,
Eva, have always lived detached from most of the world, forest-dwellers, the
home-schooled daughters of ex-ballerina weaver and an elementary school principal.
The family live as apart from the world as they can, geographically and mentally;
and on a foray into an activity as banal as a Saturday evening with her agemates,
Nell realizes that although "they were friendly with me,...with each other
they shared an entire universe of jokes and memories and a knowledge of TV shows,
algebra teachers, and school lunches I couldn't hope to replicate." When
that outside world falls apart, so does the family, but slower. Not quite halfway
through, I am waiting to find out if the meanings of the young women's names
will be alluded to: Nell is short for Penelope and Eva is not so far from Eve.
Whom does Penelope await, and what kind of world will Eve renew?
Both of those questions have been answered. This is one of the best pieces of ecofeminist fiction I have ever read. If not the best. Certainly it shames the mega-faulty Women on the Edge of Time further into the ground. Furthermore, the relationship between the sisters is so much CLH and me that I hope she likes the book as much as I do (I'm getting it for her for Christmas):
Eva handed me the bottle, and I drank. Finally she said, 'Hmm.'
'What?' I asked eagerly, pouncing on any possibility of talk.
'I was just thinking--what would Father say?'
'About what?'
'Drinking the Grand Marnier.'
'Pass the bottle,' I said.
'You've got it,' she answered.
'What?'
'The bottle.'
'No, that's what he'd say.'
'What?'
'Pass the bottle. '
We started giggling, and the giggling felt so good. It felt so easy to giggle--so impossible, somehow, to stop--that our laughter grew, took on its own life and momentum until we were laughing in great spasms, until our bellies hurt and our eyes were flooded with tears.
'You've...got...it,' Eva blurted between bursts of hysteria.
'What?' I gasped.
'The bottle,' she answered, and we laughed until the muscles at the tops of our cheeks ached.
'I'm going to pee my pants,' Eva moaned, and that was the funniest thing yet.
'Remember,' I spurted, when I could again breathe enough to speak, 'when we got the giggles like this when Dad's superintendent came all the way out here for dinner?'
Eva was rolling on the floor, roaring and clutching her stomach.
'And you,' I blurted, 'you squirted milk out your nose--'
'All over the salad,' she shrieked.
....
Finally we laughed our way to silence.
Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books, 1996. 111.
What does anyone do who hasn't a sister?
971125
Jacquelin Gorman, The Seeing Glass
What I said when it was on my nightstand: this was recommended by The
Nation, which seems unlikely, or The New York Review of Books,
at least briefly. Or, scarily enough, the Denver Post.
In the library, the title intrigued me, and as I began to read the flyleaf,
I recognized the storyline, from The Nation or The New York Review
of Books or somewhere. References to sight and light left and right...sorry.
I couldn't tell what import the author's relation to Ogden Nash was, except
that it further establishes her as From Family. And okay, Nash's childhood
eye problems and his mother's reading to him establish her Family as a Reading
Family too. Although I did not follow why her loss of sight was only temporary,
I liked the idea of her brother leading her through the blind period, despite
his never having had snowdays. And the how the first memory she tells is
related to her regaining her full sight.
971122
When I think that sf of today considers Wells a founding father, and therefore probably consider that he wrote well....Oof. Groundbreaking, new topics, new ideas, whatever. Victorian excess, I say.
Lois Duncan, They Never Came Home, Twisted
Window, and Ransom
These puppies never had to wait on my nightstand. I have no discipline,
and increasingly no discrimination. Is it that my tastes are now supposedly
more refined or is it really that authors get stale? These aren't nearly
as good as my favorites when I was a teenager, Daughters of Eve,
Killing Mr. Griffin, Stranger with My Face, Down a Dark Hall.
Of course, I never liked I Know What You Did Last Summer, and that's
a classic.
971115
When I tried this before, a couple of years ago, DeLillo's deliberately
assumed style of a detective novel turned me off. Part of it was
style and part of it was that I attempted a pulp book. Now I have it in
trade and with all the hubbub about Underworld, I am trying harder.
Not enjoying DeLillo, much as I consciously know to admire him, makes
me feel like a rube.
Finally I finished the damn thing. RDC
told me it's the one I'm least likely to like
971129
Okay, so it's a textbook; I have to offer some excuse for my not reading many books. Also Partial Justice and Women and the Criminal Justice System.
Periodicals
More excuse making. Does the fact that both Harper's and The New York Review of Books have recently reviewed Underworld absolve me at all from not actually reading Underworld?
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