Currently physically on my bedtable:
I don't remember where I heard earlier about the intermittent office cry of "Gap Check!" but that, with L.L. Bean and CLH hand-me-downs, would effectively sum up my wardrobe. The protagonist, Dan, and gf Karla discuss "the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a paper napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell Soup flavors:
You have to have had piles of J.Crew catalogs delivered to your college cafe
to appreciate the humor of Pond and Lagoon. Perhaps as a bird
owner, or perhaps as an unhipster, I don't get Beak. But I'd try Creamy
Dolphin and Crack. Coupland likes lists. I saw him at the Tattered
Cover last night (980326) and he read from his new Girlfriend in a Coma
("Yes, it's from the Smiths song," he answered the unasked question),
in which he encapsulates the characters with their yearbook minutiae, just as
he précis'd the Microserfs with their seven ideal Jeopardy categories.
And he told me (in the book-signing line with HAO)
something I should have known: he didn't coin the term "Generation
X"; Paul Fussell did in Class. He was surprised I'd heard
of and read Class, which I had because of an acquaintance of mine/friend
of RJH's at UConn.
He also denied association with the term "Generation X" and with the
position of "spokesperson." The latter denial I respect but the former
I question: his signature includes a circled X: 
This is the book I heard Byatt read from nearly two years ago when she also
told me (well, the whole audience) about Pat Barker.
Although I guess each novel is independent, I am glad I stuck to my lisa-clivity
and read the first two first. She does the most extraordinary things with language.
The dedication of the first, The Virgin in the Garden, is to her son,
who has two dates, just over eleven years apart. Leo is his age. I fear for
him, but I do long for the fourth book. The first three came out in 1978, 1985,
and 1996. I can't hold my breath. In the meantime I'll read Margaret Drabble.
Ha!
980322
Karin Goodwin, Sleeping with Random Beasts
I had checked out my pile of books and was headed for the door ("I had to find the passage back to the place I was before") when this book's title, as well as its neon orange with yellow text cover, grabbed my eye (ow!). Another trip to the desk. I began it Saturday morning, reading in bed and ripping up a bedside hygiene product's insert for bookmarks; I finished it Sunday morning. The author stopped polishing and the protagonist stopped reading after about the first third, but it's all amusing; the first 40 pages amused me so much I called CLH and told her I was going to buy it for her (I haven't yet, oops). The parental relationships, the gay male best friend, the living in Boston. Maybe she's not as tight with her sister as I am with mine, but they are equally able to read each other's minds and to finish each other's sentences.
98016
After a slug fest early winter, my reading life started to pick up in March.
Did I really need to reread The Shell Seekers? Well maybe I did.
A.S. Byatt, what can I say. She's wonderful. RDC
says she's probably been criticized for using vocabulary the average well-educated
reader isn't familiar with (nugatory: of little or no consequence: trifling,
inconsequential; having no force: inoperative) but I say hey, I need the mental
exercise. Plus all the conversations about novels and sex and philosophy and
current events and what makes a play work embedded realistically (given the
characters) into the novel.
The thing now about Byatt is that rumor has it she doesn't like her sister.
I had just started Still Life and was reading it as I walked back into
work. In the first few pages I'd learned more about Van Gogh than I ever knew.
As I passed the receptionist's desk, Donna (the receptionist, keep up with me
here) asked if wasn't Byatt Margaret Drabble's sister.* I didn't know. Donna
has read two or three Drabbles and Still Life and Babel Tower
would be my last Byatts. Donna told me she'd heard or read somewhere that they
didn't get along. I considered this. "In The Game,a man comes between
two sisters when they are young women, and they are nearly estranged for the
rest of their lives. In The Virgin in the Garden, two young women are
both in love with the same man, but they get over it and are friendly if not
close. There's nothing suspect in Possession, Sugar and Other Stories, The
Matisse Stories, or Shadow of a Sun." The idea of sisters not
getting along is so alien and uncomfortable to me that now I fret that I might
like such a person, at least as an author, quite a bit. That's when I decided
I had to read Drabble. I found out through various Yahoo
links that Byatt is Drabble's elder (by three years) half sister. The jacket
synopsis of Drabble's first novel, The Summer Bird-Cage (1963), is a
younger sister's coming home from Oxford for her older sister's wedding and
realizing that her sister is a callow superficial stoat-hearted wench who's
marrying for money. Who cast the first stone here? That's why I have a stack
of Margaret Drabble on my bedside table.
*May I just say again that I love my job? How many receptionists read ergodic
fiction?
980312
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
So I'd never read it before. Spank me. I borrowed this and Women in Love from the 'brary, not considering that we might have both (and Sons and Lovers, Kangaroo, and Apocalypse) at home. So I tried it and realized why I haven't read anything since Sons and Lovers, which I slogged through freshling year when I decided to give myself a crash course in English literature (in high school we read a lot of Dickens, little poetry, and one Shakespeare a year. I had a lot of catching up to do). I read indiscriminately and thought that if a book resided in someone's canon it must be good and therefore I must like it. I was wrong
Antonia S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden
Byatt continues to dazzle me with her phenomenal ability to name-drop without being pretentious. Even her authorial intrusions flow into the narrative without interrupting. Discussing a teacher's possibility with a young woman just graduating from his school, Byatt concludes, "...and Lolita not yet written." Lolita is just the book Alexander, the teacher, would read; he is just the sort of character to relate his outer life to life to his inner by ways of books. A reluctantly virginal character, Francesca, plays Elizabeth I of England in a garden play; hence the title. And hence lots of contextual references to Elizabethan plays. Also, given the sexually charged characters and plots in a repressed Northern England setting, naturally a lot of D.H. Lawrence. 980219
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
I brought HAO to the Decker library Saturday. I perused Beverly Cleary, looking for the Ramona book in which she draws herself a coloring book. (I really just reread Ramona the Pest . What a great book!) HAO reread Tuck Everlasting, one of her favorites, and I took it with me. I don't remember what other Natalie Babbitt I've read. I liked this, but I haven't talked to her about what makes this a favorite. 980124
This is wholly RJH's fault. He gave me The Jane Austen Quiz and Puzzle Book for Christmas and I can't let it go until I am master of every quiz.
Jean Craighead George, My Side of the
Mountain
I haven't read this in probably fifteen years. I had forgotten how much I love it. Her hints of how to do this on your own are appealing without being overpowering, but I didn't notice in earlier readings how very much in the '50s this novel is set. George (through Sam) refers to the atomic (or hydrogen?) threat three discrete times. And the ending is very '50s, with parents properly back in control. The reread served its purpose though. Sam and Frightful belong together as O'Brien and Harley do not.
Dan O'Brien, Equinox: Life, Love, and
Birds of Prey
I found this super book in the library Monday. It caught my eye because of the falcon on the cover, I expect, and then the title: Equinox. What about the equinox? The subtitle intrigued me even while I thought it might mislead: Life, love, and birds of prey. Yes, living with a cockatiel has influenced me to become a casual birder and exacerbated my lifelong love of eagles and hawks; and so I can't say now whether I like this book just on its own or because of Percy and Blake, but I do. Another book has influenced my liking: My Side of the Mountain. Sam Gribley climbs a cliff to a nest her mother fiercely defends, but Sam perseveres and steals Frightful, a female peregrine falcon chick, who becomes his greatest companion.
(The sequel, written 30 years after the original, opens with an EPA agent confiscating Frightful as an endangered species. While I know the author, Jean Craighead George, is a naturalist and that "rescuing" Frightful might be the right and proper thing to do in the early 1990s, I didn't want to imagine Sam without Frightful. Furthermore, Sam ran away from home in the late '50s or early '60s. I hate authors playing with time like that. Dunno why George wrote her sequels; did a plethora of her readers run away from home as Sam and Miyax of Julie of the Wolves did? While Sam without Frightful might be ecologically correct, certainly Miyax buddying up to her traitor father's gringo wife isn't.)
Anyway. I like Equinox. I feel no desire to hunt or fish, although I see the appeal of falconry. O'Brien conveys well his passion for hunting with birds and dogs but as of yet hasn't explained it or told of its source.
Jean Little, The Belonging Place
I love From Anna and Look through my Window and so when I saw a new book by Jean Little in the Children's Room, I seized it. It's okay. With her as with Jean Craighead George, though not with E.L. Konigsburg yet, authors lose their touch. As a book about adoption, it's okay; as a book about an historical time, mood, and place, it's mediocre. And the framing story renders the writing unbelievable; this is not believable writing or narrating for a fifteen-year-old without formal schooling.
Mary McGarry Morris, Songs in Ordinary
Time
DMB gave me this for Christmas. Reading it reminds me of how I so easily allow myself the habit of a soap opera. Atkinson, Vermont, is a real town populated with three-dimensional characters who aren't merely wallpaper, and everyone and everything that happens could happen in any smallish New England town, but what gives it away as a soap opera is that there are so very many people, all interconnected and involving, and that all of the events happen in so short a time frame. Morris didn't use any of the soap opera staples, though: identical twins (or cousins), preferably separated at birth; amnesia; SORAS (Soap Opera Related Age Syndrome); plastic geography. An academic writer RDC just began to read on Sunday invented (I think) the term ergodic as a (for now) non-elitist term to discuss levels of literature. The author works to produce his books; the level of work the reader must apply to enjoy, understand, or benefit from the book determines whether it is ergodic: requiring work. This isn't a strictly fair term, because readers vary in experience and ability. Little Women might be ergodic for an eight-year-old but not for someone at an adult reading level. Anyway, it's a useful term for the purpose: Songs in Ordinary Time is an enjoyable read but not ergodic. I'm going to send it to DEW, though; it's a good read and I hope she enjoys it.
Kazuo Ishiguro,
The Unconsoled
I missed a lot before, which I suppose is why I got discouraged. Now, the somnolent, etherial elements strike me more and I am enthralled.
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