Currently physically on my bedtable:
Laura Ingalls Wilder (Set
of Eight)
I might have written a blanket excuse about not listing rereadings back when I began these pages, but oh, these books should be sung from the rooftops (insert politically correct disclaimer). Sigh. This past Thanksgiving, as I stood at the sink washing waves of dishes and HAO, KKJ, and Christy kept me company, somehow Laura Ingalls Wilder came up. HAO knows better than to spar children's book trivia with me, and I think Christy hadn't read them (or prefers not to spar with me at all), but KKJ and I challenged each other back and forth and never has dishwashing been so fun. And since I was dishwashing for so many, naturally the church social in which Ida Brown, grateful adoptee, washed dishes and served attendees all day came up. Anyway, this Sunday in Boulder's used book stores with PSA, I found a complete set (The First Four Years doesn't count). If you loved Laura and her family, I recommend Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Ingalls Wilder,
ed., Dear
Laura : Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder
Any devoted reader always wanted to know what happened next. When a child would write to Ms. Wilder and ask, she would tell them, until her arthritis made that too painful and she came up with a stock letter answering the basic questions. The one line I remember comes at the end of a paragraph telling the fates of family and friends: "They have all been dead for many years now." She outlived every one of the family we grew up with, including her younger sisters.
Roald Dahl, Going
Solo
When I was growing up, Danny, Champion of the World was more a favorite
than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And The Great Glass Elevator
was just weird. Finally I read James and the Giant Peach, and Tales
of the Unexpected while in a dull summer cottage. I like Dahl and I like
those bits of him others find intolerable. Discussing censorship in class, my
publishing professor said she didn't like James and the Giant Peach
because two little old ladies get creamed in the first chapter (and that despite
this, she would never censor it). Censored or not, I had to come to the book's
rescue: "But they were mean little old ladies [which my professor
certainly was not] and James had two very nice parents too who just happened
to get eaten by a rhinoceros."
Anyway. Consider the above why I'm fond of Dahl. Boy and Going
Solo are two collections of autobiographical anecdotes; Going Solo flows
more continuously as a novel. The nifty thing about Boy is that therein
lie the seeds of many of his children's books. Going Solo is a good war
story, conveying some gore, horror, and stupidity on a level children can understand
without being emotionally scarred.
980422
Tim O'Brien, The
Things They Carried
RDC and I began to read these stories to each other on a long car trip, but
it's taken me this long to finish them. Stories and ways of telling stories,
honesty and honor. I would like to know more about the evolution of his stories,
to see the organic process of the stories' development through versions and
audiences and over time.
980419
Dorothy Allison, Skin
Bastard out of Carolina was one of the most powerful novels I've read
in years, and the first essay in Skin, "A Question of Class,"
made me feel guilty about it in a way I hadn't before. I had felt survivor guilt
for not having had to endure much of anything Bone did, grinding poverty, stepfather,
or incest (social if not biological). I hadn't felt guilty for the sharp distinction
I perceived between Bone's and my own social class, until the essay, which sparked
an awareness of my own class-ism. Good essays.
980418
Hanif Kureshishi, The
Buddha of Suburbia
Ehh. Almost as soon as I began the style seemed like Neal Stephenson's The
Big U. RDC said it reminded him of Tom
Robbins, whom HAO loves
and whose Jitterbug Perfume got AFK
eating beets (I think that's the one), but whom I have yet to endure a complete
novel of (early PSA conditioning).
Perhaps if I had more of a personal connection to the action, being either a
suburban Londonite or cognizant in the early '70s, I would have found it more
amusing. If I hadn't been in college when I found The Big U, same thing.
980420
Manlio Argueta, One
Day of Life
The next book for the colloquium (such an odd-looking word, isn't it?). This
was translated better than Mishima--maybe it's easier when both languages are
in the same family? Or since it is American (but not Western, because
third-world: imperialism again), perhaps it feels more familiar? Or perhaps
it's the influence of Bill Ner/ric/cio* that I think all of my reactions must
be imperialist merely because I am USAn.
A teeter-totter of ideology. And I wrote "teeter-totter" for the sound;
my own regionalism is "see-saw." Is "see-saw" derived from
French at all, "comme ci, comme ça"? Leapin' lizards, look
at her go. A few thoughts back, to wind up: Billy, whose last name had some
variant number of r's and c's, arrived at UConn the youngest professor by far,
under 30 although this wasn't even his first position. He shared an office with
an Episcopalian priest. At least Felix and Oscar wound up friends. Billy taught
third-world literature (one of his texts was "Friendly Dictator Trading
Cards") and held office hours in a bar. Because he was pals with RJH
(and roomies with the priest!) he knew the medievalists; he taught one class
just before Chaucer (which I had) and one day scrawled a taunt on the chalkboard
to the Chaucer professor about all medievalists being closet deconstructionists
or something. He lasted, in that geriatric English department (which had
had its share of spouse-swapping, to be sure, but twenty years before),
two academic years and then scarpered for the less provincial air of San Diego.
980413
Don DeLillo, White
Noise
RDC quotes this book so frequently that
I had to reread it. He doesn't remember things this way, but I do: the first
day we played together (when he returned the favor and proposed back to me,
seven months after I had to him), he was reading The Names and--hey,
I don't remember what I was reading; something appropriate to demonstrate my
intellectual prowess, I'm sure--and I knew DeLillo because I'd already read
White Noise. Certainly he knows it better now than I do, but I did enjoy
the rereading. Toyota Celica.
980409
980419 I introduced PSA
to White Noise in a bookstore in Boulder. He sounded about ready to read
it right then, but it'd make a big change from noh drama.
Yukio Mishima, The
Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
I am sitting in on a colloquium on non-Western lit at DU. Mostly non-Western.
Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje are neither U.S. nor European, but Western
they is. Anyway. I think this text suffered by its translation. It must
read much more poetically in Japanese. How does a USAn
read a non-Western text and refrain from assigning Western tenets to it? Is
it imperialist or only realistic (or both) to assume that a well-educated Japanese
author in the 1960s would have known about Freud?
The Japanese title translates as Tugboat Action in the Afternoon. Sing
ho for idiom.
980405
Tennessee Williams, Suddenly,
Last Summer
Because I recently watched the Kate-n-Liz cinematization on TCM. A word of advice: don't take your co-dependent, non-reading, close-minded mother to Tennessee Williams plays. CLH and I individually and without malice aforethought brought our mother to "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," respectively. Overall I think my choice was worse, but perhaps only because I don't know the former. Perhaps when CLH and I both live in the Bay Area and BJWL visits us (in passing on the way to her in-laws in charming Fresno) we can take her to "The Glass Menagerie."
Margaret Atwood, Alias
Grace
I first read this in January of 1997, when it was published; this time I read
it for the above colloquium. I enjoyed more of its angles
and depths this time, even as it made me aware what lazy reader I am.
980504
Cynthia Voigt, Bad,
Badder, Baddest
This is weaker than Bad Girls, which isn't surprising since Bad Girls,
as far as I'm concerned, is one of the finest crafted contemporary children's
books I have read. However. Characters contradict themselves and their past
behavior, which is a sort of inconsistency I can't bear and consider nearly
a betrayal. After a bad day in Bad Girls,
Mikey wants to go home and watch "101 Dalmatians" for the eleventy-first
time; in Bad, Badder, Baddest, she claims to despise now and to have
always despised all Disney flicks.
Overall, I think what might have happened here is what happened for Voigt in
Sons from Afar. Well, no, that doesn't work. In Sons from Afar,
neither James nor Sammy were strong, nay, credible, without Dicey or Gram in
the foreground. I always found them three-dimensional in those books where Dicey
starred, but on their own, they didn't work. So the analogy doesn't work for
Bad, Badder, Baddest, because Mikey and Margalo were just fine on their
own in Bad Girls. Perhaps because the tantalizing hints from Bad Girls
of their worlds outside school are now fleshed out but cartoon-like.
In sum, Voigt is going to have to do a lot worse than this before she loses
me as a fervent reader, but nor would I have become the fan I am if this was
her usual.
980505
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World
Fairly bizarre, this. Another colloquium book, this one fitting the requirements.
Unnamed characters keep the reader at a distance. Translation mars the idiom,
again and of course. I want to read more Murakami; I don't want to read any
more Mishima. If that tells you anything.
980519
J.M. Coetzee, Foe
What if a woman had shipwrecked on an island with a suppposedly civilized white-skinned man named Crusoe and another, supposedly savage brown-skinned man named Friday, and Crusoe was a heel, and then all three of them were rescued, and afterward she told her story to an author named Foe, and he rewrote her story to make it more interesting, leaving her out of it completely?
Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Judy Blume, Summer
Sisters
This is the first of her adult novels I have read. Seeing her in person, reading
her website, and reading one of her books
for the first time as an adult, all make me realize what a weak writer she is.
That does not, mind you, detract one whit from the good her books did
me as a child. To wit: I arrived at the Tattered Cover and sat in the third
row next to a woman who looked friendly, but mostly I just wanted to sit fairly
close. But being the tigger I am, I turned to this stranger and asked, "So
which one is your favorite?" By the end of the night, Marietta and I were
pals. We had shared the Judy Blume experience, natch. I didn't know
that "period" could mean anything other than punctuation when I began
to read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I had no idea what Joel
was underlining in those books of his in Then Again Maybe I Won't. Judy
Blume helped me through all that. And that's the kind of thing Marietta and
I talked about. Except it all started when she ended a comment with "…it's
endless" and I added "it's a total drag" and she recognized
the line as from "The Breakfast Club." So when we stood in line to
have our books signed, we told Judy Blume that common love of her had
made us friends in the course of the evening (we didn't mention John
Hughes's and the Brat Pack's help). And that, more than any current
book, is what Ms. Blume means to me.
980528
Cormac McCarthy, The
Crossing
"Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked
new born out of the hand of some improvident god who'd perhaps not even puzzled
out a use for them."
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 31
980530
John Leonard, Smoke
and Mirrors
Published by a small, independent press, lacking any hint of index or thesis,
full of vintage Leonard turns of speech and literary allusion, poorly copyedited,
this rambling discussion of television and its culture is an excellent read.
980605
Katherine Dunn, Geek
Love
Except for the denouement of the framing story, this is a great novel. A more bizarre set of characters I challenge any novelist to produce. I shall never again misuse the word "geek" to mean "academically skilled but socially challenged person." Unless the person geeks on the side, of course.
'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. 'Spread your lips, Sweet Lil,' they'd cluck, 'and show us your choppers!'"
p. 3Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond, "Good morning." She is not interested in my identity. She doesn't notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix--a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary pic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.
p. 30
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