The chosen directors of his prejudice

The one singular feature of the room was a small, glass-doored bookcase, full of volumes. They were all of Richard's purchasing; to survey them was to understand the man, at all events on his intellectual side. Without exception they belonged to that order of literature which, if studied exclusively and for its own sake, --as here it was, -- brands a man indelibly, declaring at once the incompleteness of his education and the deficiency of his instincts. Social, political, religious, --under these three heads the volumes classed themselves, and each class was represented by productions of the 'extreme' school. The books which a bright youth of fair opportunities reads as a matter of course, rejoices in for a year or two, then throws aside for ever, were here treasured to be the guides of a lifetime. Certain writers of the last century, long ago become only historically interesting, were for Richard an armoury whence he girded himself for the battles of the day; cheap reprints or translations of Malthus, of Robert Owen, of Volney's 'Ruins,' of Thomas Paine, of sundry works of Voltaire, ranked upon his shelves. Moreover, there was a large collection of pamphlets, titled wonderfully and of yet more remarkable contents, the authoritative utterances of contemporary gentlemen --and ladies-- who made it the end of their existence to prove: that there cannot by any possibility be such a person as Satan; that the story of creation contained in the Book of Genesis is on no account to be received; that the begetting of children is a most deplorable oversight; that to eat flesh is wholly unworthy of a civilised being; that if every man and woman performed their quota of the world's labour it would be necessary to work for one hour and thirty-seven minutes daily, no jot longer, and that the author, in each case, is the one person capable of restoring dignity to a down-trodden race and happiness to a blasted universe.

Alas, alas! On this food had Richard Mutimer pastured his soul since he grew to manhood, on this and this only. English literature was to him a sealed volume; poetry he scarcely knew by name; of history he was worse than ignorant, having looked at this period and that through distorting media, and congratulating himself on his clear vision because he saw men as trees walking; the bent of his mind would have led him to natural science, but opportunities of instruction were lacking, and the chosen directors of his prejudice taught him to regard every fact, every discovery, as for or against something.

--George Gissing, Demos (1892)


Reading Habits of Fictional Characters

Book package disdain

Every night when I come home from work I ask if anyone brought in the mail, which, if you know me, translates into: Were there any book packages for me?

Yes, they brought in the mail, and there was nothing interesting, just junk, just bills, they always tell me, which actually means: We take no interest in the stinkin' book packages of which there are too menny.

So I don't know when my latest package from the Book Depository actually arrived because they carelessly segregated it from the rest of the mail in the kitchen and I found it this morning in the shadows of the family room.

It contained Tana French's Faithful Place.

Two chapters in, I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

Oil Notes by Rick Bass

It is raining hard. The stereo is playing. I am alone. All the windows are shut, five o'clock in the evening. The rain is thundering, coming down hard. The stereo is up loud. I'm completely happy. It feels too easy: like walking in a dream. Surely I am missing something. It cannot be this easy. Happiness is supposed to be sought after, complex, to be found only with the greatest amount of cunning.

Water roars off the roof, and I am dry.

Later tonight I will fix coffee.

~~~~

They're not alike at all, really: writing and geology. There's a deceit in writing; you're trying to pull all the clever elements together and toss out the dull and round-edged ones. Basically, it's building a lie and then swinging the lie's massiveness into the path of the reader and hiding behind it. Curiously, however, in geology, when I pour a cup of coffee and sit down and begin to map, I'm not hiding behind anything; there's no pretense, no deceit, just an inquisitive hunger and innocence where I am neither superior nor inferior to the reader, but am the reader. There's truly an amount of trust. The earth lies there, still, and obeys certain rules. I have faith that I am not going to let myself believe something that is not true. It is perhaps the purest thing I've ever done. Perhaps that is why geologists become so fervent about a particular prospect. Not holy men, but still there is that aspect to it--as in athletics, and religions.

~~~
Go beyond that, under the greed and dollars of it and into the purity. How many traps of ancient reserves are left, and how long will it take us to use, at our known rate, our known requirements, this projectable quantity? You hit zero, every well in the world a dry hole, in about sixty-five years. Do not think it will be a pretty sight.

--Rick Bass, Oil Notes (1989)

New books!

This photo makes me look much worse than I've actually been. Practically half the books pictured were freebies from the new staff book exchange at work. I've done my best not to be greedy there, waiting several days for others to take first dibs, but after awhile I started carrying them out, one per day.

From the top left:

Too Many Magpies by Elizabeth Baines. Mainly because the cover reminds me of the birds I saw last December.

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant. Another for my NYRB shelf.

The City and the City by China Mieville. Because I need more mind-blowing books and everyone says this qualifies.

Kraken by China Mieville. Because I find it impossible to resist an inky and tenacled Magnificent Octopus.

Savage Lands by Clare Clark. From the Book Exchange.

Reality Hunger by David Shields. A former writing instructor has a quote in here. Book Exchange.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine. Book Exchange.

The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee. Book Exchange.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. Book Exchange.

Dracula's Guest. "A connoisseur's collection of Victorian vampire stories" edited by Michael Sims. Purchased because of this article from the editor.

The Radleys by Matt Haig. When I first heard the title and saw the white picket fence on the cover, I was convinced it was about Boo Radley's family and I was squeefully excited. Instead it's about non-practicing vampires. That could work. . .

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I'm not reading Stephenson this summer with the Girl Detective and Mental Multivitamin, alas, but they've inspired me to buy a copy to have on hand for when the time is right.

To the End of the Land by David Grossman. This is an ARC of an Israeli novel due out in September. According to the editor, it's "about the toll of war on one particular family and the impulse toward peace that persists even in a society constantly taking up arms." I have very high expectations for this one.

The Passage by Justin Cronin.

Eight White Nights by Andre Aciman. I'd read about this one somewhere just a day or so before spotting it on the Book Exchange shelves.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I know Dorothy set it aside awhile back, so if I don't get along with it any better than she, I'll simply return it to the Book Exchange shelves.

I'm also stockpiling titles on the Kindle, which is a bad, bad practice. I have Allegra Goodman's latest, The Cookbook Collector, and Shappi Khorsandi's A Beginner's Guide to Acting English and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen and Pinckney Benedict's Miracle Boy and Other Stories. I really need to get the immediate gratification thing under control. We've a new roof and gutters to pay for!

Why wasn't it enough

Ah, what a second-rater he was! How he always thought of everything in terms of what somebody else had said! In earlier days when he was a boy and still thought he might perhaps amount to something this had been an affliction to him, a secret shame. But now he did not grieve over it. Since he had died and come back to this other life, he took everything and himself, too, more simply, with little concern for the presentability of the role he was to play. If, honestly, that was the sort of nature he had, why rebel against it? The only people who got anywhere by rebelling were rebels to begin with. And he was not. Why wasn't it enough, anyhow, to love the beauties other men had created?

--Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Home-maker

Reading update

I'm obviously back to my nefarious bad-blogger ways.* I think about blogging, but do I actually type words in the provided box so that said words then show up on my blog? No way. Props to myself, though, for not blogging about the changes at work since I would hate to find myself dooced. At least the changes are now complete, and it's just the adjusting to them still ahead.

Soooo, June was a particularly wonderful month for reading. I stuck to my summer reading plans until late in the month, when I snuck in Muriel Spark's Memento Mori instead of moving on to any of the books I'd mentally assigned to July or August. I completed Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y, Justin Cronin's The Passage, Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-maker, Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream, and Wallace Stegner's bildungsroman The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

My favorite of the bunch was the Lessing, which explains why I now have Martha Quest and Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta on my desk at the library. I intend to have a Lessing-intense fall--if I can hold out that long. I read The Passage in a weekend right after we returned from a family vacation to New York, and it was a most enjoyable way to decompress. There were only a couple scenes where I wanted to mentally check out for pop corn and not come back until they were over, and I didn't appreciate how jerked around I felt near the end, but I'll be reading the next in the series whenever it may be published.

And since we're now (more than) half-way though the year, I should provide you with a reading update based on the plans from the first of the year. Only 16 of the books I've read so far have been from the library, so I'm doing well in the read-from-my-own-shelves department. And Ulysses is back in progress after a six-week hiatus. I've two chapters remaining, "Ithaca" and "Penelope," both of which I'm most eager to read, but I need to coordinate my  schedule with W.'s, so we finish at the same time. Have I mentioned that everyone else dropped out? (I wasn't a bit surprised.)

I mentioned starting a new Reading Habits of Fictional Characters project back in January, and it's there that I've been an abject failure. Oh, I've dutifully dogearred pages when characters mention the books they've read, but I have not kept track of this reading on the blog, let alone started a wiki page so that others could join in. I blame it on Buddy and Seymour Glass: I read Salinger's "Hapworth 16, 1924" as a tribute back in February, and the reading list included in the story was so extensive that I've not yet recovered from copying it all out on notecards.**

Perhaps I shall in the months to come.

And if there is a downside to having completed 51 books Jan.-June, other than that many bloggers have read twice that much or more, it is that I will now feel like a failure if I don't manage to reach 100 books for the year. I hadn't intended to pay any attention to numbers,*** and now I'm sure to worry about them constantly. The quality of the books I've been reading has been too high for such distracting silliness; maybe I ought to deliberately trip myself up by taking a month off from reading. It might make an interesting experiment to see how I'd use my time if I couldn't read.




*have I ever left them?
**which I have since misplaced
***except for short stories, where I'm clearly lagging behind my great expectations

Your mind is nowhere else

When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, “your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there’s this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing.”

--"David Mitchell, the Experimentalist," Wyatt Mason interview with David Mitchell

A sign of maturity?

Crossing campus this morning I heard the sound of some creature scrounging about in the bottom of a trash can. Raccoon? Feral cat? 'Possum? Large rat? While I did stop for a few moments to consider the possibilities, I did. not. kick. the. can.

And so the mystery remains.

Now or then?

Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there’s a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)

Last year, 55 percent of my reading was of books published within the last year; it was 53 percent in 2008. I'm a little less than 50 percent so far this year, thanks in large part to the 15 Books/15 Days project when I was drawn to the skinniest, not necessarily the newest and shinest, books on my shelves.

Even before blogging, which definitely brings out my competitive (Must. Read. This. First) side, I'd have to say I had an established tendency of reaching for the new hardback instead of the used paperback on its nth printing. This is in large part to support the writers who may not get a chance to publish again if no one buys their books now, and, of course, because I happen to enjoy these books.

But I also enjoy older books and definitely don't believe that because something is new it is automatically a better read or more worthy than what's come before; reading at whim merely leaves me more susceptible to being diverted away from books of merit (or longevity on my shelves) because of buzz.

And I am becoming more and more anti-buzz and marketing--at least inside my head; I'll have to see how well it plays out in my actual reading in the months ahead. No offense, but I don't want my literary DNA to be just like yours! I would like to read more classics, more books from the first half of the 20th century. I would like to buy fewer books as well: my shelves are overloaded.

Whether I can do this and still hang out with book bloggers remains to be seen.

Booking Through Thursday

Brand free

And not so interested in marketing either.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

--Graham Greene

God vs. the multiverse

"What if you reject this quantum physics?" asks Adam.

"Then I guess your CD player and credit cards stop working."

"I don't have a CD player or a credit card."

I grin at him. "Yes, but you know what I mean. Real technology is built on quantum physics. Engineers have to learn it. I mean, it is nuts, but it works out there in the real world."

"God or the multiverse," says Heather. "Which one would you choose?"

"I'm not happy with either of them," I say. "But probably God--whatever that actually means. Call it the Thomas Hardy interpretation: I'd rather have something out there that means something than feel like I exist in a vast ocean of pure meaninglessness."

"What about you, Adam?"

"God," he says. "Even though I thought I'd given up all that." He smiles without showing his teeth, as if doing more with his mouth would break his face. "No, it does make sense: the idea of an external consciousness. I prefer that anyway, given this choice."

"Oh well, I'm on my own then with the multiverse," says Heather.

"You're never alone in the multiverse," I say.

"Ha, ha," she says. "Seriously, I can't believe that God made life, not with the research I'm doing. I mean the evidence just isn't there. And I get so many threatening letters from creationists that I just can't align myself to them in any way."

"I don't think this means aligning yourself with creationists," I say. "Surely some external being could have sparked the very beginning of the universe and then everything else just evolved as scientists think it did."

Although as I say this I think: via Newtonian cause and effect, and I realize that this is at odds with the idea of a quantum universe, and I suddenly don't know what to say.

--Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

The Mountain Lion

There had been a big snowfall on Thursday and there had been no thaw. The sun was warm on the slopes and mesas and brilliant in the branches of the evergreens, but the air was cold and the wind was raw in the unprotected clearings. Uncle Claude said it might drop to twenty below that night. They had got the ladybugs --Uncle Claude scraped them up with his hunting knife to Molly's exasperation for she used a spatula which seemed more humane and also more scientific -- and had started down. Uncle Claude was the first to get to the opposite bank of the gulch and just as Ralph and Molly began the ascent, he turned around and motioned them to come quietly. It was an easy climb and the path was deep in snow so that they made no sound. Once Molly broke off an ice-covered twig on a chokecherry bush but the noise was slight. Their uncle stood absolutely still, watching something. He had moved into the cover of a small deformed scrub oak laden with snow and he beckoned them to join him. They stepped carefully in his boot-prints, not seeing yet what he did. Then, when they were beside him, he pointed to the east side of the mesa and there they saw the mountain lion standing still with her head up, facing them, her long tail twitching. She was honey-colored all over save for her face which was darker, a sort of yellow-brown. They had a perfect view of her, for the mesa there was bare of anything and the sun illuminated her so clearly that it was as if they saw her close up. She allowed them to look at her for only a few seconds and then she bounded across the place where the columbines grew in summer and disappeared among the trees. Her flight was lovely: her wasteless grace and her speed did not make Molly think immediately of her fear but of her power. When you saw a running deer, you were conscious only of its instinct to flee danger. The lion had sensed peril and yet they, the watchers, sensed peril in her, under her tawny hide, in the way her tail had moved against the glint of the snow, in the way she streaked across the flat land. Molly shivered to think she might now have climbed a tree like a tame cat and might be sitting there observing them with large green eyes.

--Jean Stafford, The Mountain Lion

Proposed Summer Reading and A Random Question

As best I can tell I skipped posting a summer reading list last year--I just talked about inactivating all the books on hold for me at the public library (and some of those holds are still inactivated: the guilt I deal with on a daily basis) so that I could read some of the ones I already owned. Above's the bulk of the books I hope to get through this summer. I of course want to read the new Justin Cronin, the new biography of E.M. Forster, and whatever will turn out to be the next selection for the Slaves and the newly-formed book club at work, but I don't have any of those on hand for the photo op.

The official Books of Summer 2010 are:

George Gissing's Demos. My Victorian lit for the summer.

Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y. I love some quantum physics in my fiction. Just started it last night.

J.C. Hallman's In Utopia. Advanced proofs; it's being published in August.

Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion. NYRB is republishing this over the summer; I'm making do with an older University of New Mexico edition rescued from Compact Shelving.

Dorothy Canfield's The Home-Maker and Leonard Woolf's The Wise Virgins. Still more rescues from Compact Shelving instead of those nice Persephone editions everyone else has been reading.

J.G. Farrell's Troubles. I'm a little worried it'll get recalled before I get it read, but maybe no one else at the university is interested in the Lost Booker.

James Joyce's Ulysses. W. and I intend to have this finished by Labor Day. (I'm currently in the Circe chapter.)

Rebecca West's This Real Night. For my too-long-neglected Rebecca West project.

Wallace Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

J.D. Hallman's The Hospital for Bad Poets.

Mary Lee Settle's Know Nothing.

Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream.

Doris Betts' The Scarlet Thread.

Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand that First Held Mine. Review copy.

Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists.

Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge. My most recent purchase.

Justin Cronin's The Passage.

Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster.

And my random question: Are there any extroverts who prefer character over plot in their reading? I know some introverts who prefer plot over character, but I can't come up with any extroverted acquaintances who prefer riding a character's thought waves over watching the character pick up the surfboard and head to the beach.

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood

A friend called me a few weeks back to talk about a memoir that she was reading. She liked it, but was having some issues with it at the same time. No one could recall memories from when they were five years old in such detail, she complained. And all that direct dialogue! Surely no one could remember the exact words spoken from that stage of their life. Had I believed all this when I read it?

And all I could muster was an Eh, it's all just a marketing decision now, whether a book is classified as fiction or a memoir. You just have to accept it as a story, appreciate the writing if you can, rather than getting yourself worked up over whether everything in the book actually happened. There's a lot of seepage these days.

Well, now that I've read Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, the 2001 Whitbread Prize-winning memoir, I get to eat my words. This is a clear-cut memoir, free of the fictiony trappings I've grown so accustomed to in the genre over the years.

Literary critic, author, and professor Lorna Sage, who did not allow a teenage pregnancy and early marriage to keep her from obtaining an education and embarking on a career as the norms of the times would have had it, traces her own "bad blood" to that of her maternal grandfather. A Welsh vicar with well-documented vices (he kept a diary of his affairs with which his wife periodically blackmailed him), he taught Lorna to read at the age of four and took her on his round of bars: "I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children." She saw herself as being on her grandfather's side so she never told on him.

Because the grandmother! Many women of her generation found themselves married to philandering men taken to drink. "What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot," Sage writes. "She stayed furious all the days of her life -- so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife. Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar's helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her. When he took to booze and other women (which he might well have done anyway, although she provided him with a kind of excuse by making the vicarage hearth so hostile) her loathing for him was perfected. He was the one who had conned her into leaving her real home, her girlhood, the shop where you never had to pay for anything, the endless tea party. It was as though he'd invented sex and pain and want and exposure. She turned patriarchal attitudes inside out: he was God to her. That is, he was making it up as he went along, to spite her and with no higher Authority to back him up."

Needless to say, being raised by such a brawling pair worked a number on Sage's mother. Used as a household drudge during the War years when she and the young Lorna lived with them in the filthy vicarage, she never managed to throw off her early influences: she couldn't cook, keep her modern council-house clean, "she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science." Her husband willingly takes on the role of realist protector to her inept dreamer when he returns at the war's end and Sage observes: "in truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had one story between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it. I regularly cast myself in the part of the clever, unwanted child who's sent out to lose herself in the forest, but manages nonetheless to find her own way, being secretive, untruthful, disobedient, and so on and on, as they never ceased to complain. The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too -- all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side."

But the memoirs of those raised in happier marriages are often hamstrung as well. The most interesting characters in Bad Blood are certainly the grandparents, whose stories are told at the beginning. As the dysfunction dissipates in Sage's family, despite Sage's claims of virtuelessness, the lives of the characters become less compelling to read about. The story becomes more one of growing up at that particular time, in that particular environment. Sage and her husband may have broken the rules and gotten away with it, and their daughter may well have been the future, but the bad blood they're predisposed to seems to have been less influential than that of the changing environment. That's a loss for non-fictionalized memoir writing, but heartening news for reality.

Please feel free to join in the discussion of Bad Blood at Slaves of Golconda.

The latest stack

Although I'm not making a lot of progress reading-wise this month, I'm still acquiring books at a steady clip.

Three books influenced by the recent Persephone week and my first ever Persephone catalog: Mathilde Wolff-Munckberg's On the Other Side (in a cheapo used mass paperback edition); Penelope Mortimer's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting; and Susan Glaspell's Fidelity.

Just out in paperback, Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze.

Dezso Kosztolanyk's Skylark.

The Essential Rebecca West. Uncollected prose: seven essays, fifteen book reviews. I think a volume of all of West's uncollected book reviews much more essential than this skimpy offering, but obviously, I'm going to snatch up whatever's out there.

Forrest Gander's A Faithful Existence. Essays.

Jonathan Dee's The Privileges. From the new book exchange in the staff lounge.

Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. I do believe the buzz, I do, I do.

Jane Smiley's Private Life. I've already read this and I liked it very much.

Michael Crummey's Galore. It's autographed! And I think it won an award, too, but I bought it because it's been highly touted at Book Balloon.

I have decided to vent my spleen by embarking on a series of books that, I hope, will be of no interest whatsoever to the readership of this magazine.

--Nick (He's back!) Hornby, The Believer

Be so glad, constant readers, that I have not been blogging these last many days. I have been in a pissy little mood and I have spared you all the ill effects of that. There have been changes afoot at work--Superdesk-size me!-- and my six-word memoir has not been out of my mind in weeks; let's leave it at that.

So the passive-aggressiveness of reading books no one else would be interested in and blogging about them appeals to me enormously.

If only the people who deserve such treatment read my blog--I'd know just how to handle them.

Charlotte, NC

George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee

It is times like these that I wish you all had e-book readers so that I could implore you to download a freebie copy of George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee and commence staying up all night to read it. I would love discussion buddies for Jubilee, particularly for the ending, when the natural, organic conclusion we've been traveling toward for our appealing female character (would Gissing's contemporaries have been appalled by an ending we expect as a matter of course?) is replaced (quite abruptly) by Gissing's own misogynistic late-Victorian views. Submit to the patriarchy, ye educated yet still lowly wenches! Biology and the Bible will unite to beat you over the head until you embrace your inescapable inferiority! This, from the author of The Odd Women?

It's as if Gissing undercuts his own artistic creation in order to advance the conventional ideology of his day. Part of what makes In the Year of Jubilee such a fascinating, albeit at times infuriating, read is that current of tension pulsing through its pages. We empathize with the female lead, we see her worth, only to be told, basically, at the end that it's all been a cosmic joke at her (and any woman's) expense--and she'd better acquiesce cheerfully to that fact of life.

"It comes to this. Nature doesn't intend a married woman to be anything but a married woman. In the natural state of things, she must either be the slave of husband and children, or defy her duty. She can have no time to herself, no thoughts for herself. It's a hard saying, but who can doubt that it is Nature's law? I should like to revolt against it, yet I feel revolt to be silly. Once might as well revolt against being born a woman instead of a man."

. . . . "After all, one can put up with a great deal, if you feel you're obeying a law of Nature. Now, I have brains, and I should like to use them; but Nature says that's not so important as bringing up the little child to whom I have given life. One thought that troubles me is, that every generation of women is sacrificed to the generation that follows; and of course that's why women are so inferior to men. But then again, Nature says that women are born only to be sacrificed. I always come round to that. I don't like it, but I am bound to believe it."

Nancy Lord and her brother Horace have been educated beyond the level expected of their lower middle class London suburb; yet their stubborn piano dealer father refuses to move the family to a more refined neighborhood. Horace demonstrates no aptitude for a profession and falls for a vulgar young gold-digger; Nancy expresses social discontent and a mind for independent thought. When he realizes he's dying, Stephen Lord changes his will-- if either marry before the age of 26, they won't inherit a dime.

Unfortunately, Nancy is on holiday with a friend and her friend's mother while the will is being changed. She allows herself to be seduced there by a man of higher social status, a man she's been interested in for some time. To his credit, Lionel Tarrant is technically enough of a gentleman to marry her immediately afterwards, but he's all for keeping the marriage secret and treating Nancy as his mistress--even before they learn the conditions of Nancy's father's will, or that Tarrant's own expected inheritence has vanished, leaving him with nothing. Or that Nancy is pregnant.

Nancy determines to keep both her pregnancy and her marriage secret in order not to lose the money she's sure her father wanted her to have--Horace was the one he expected to marry badly, not her. Lionel ships off to the Bahamas, then to America, more to escape the day-to-day responsibility of caring for a wife and child than to find a financial means of providing for them. Nancy must fend with suitors and her jealous frenemies' threats to expose her fraudulent endeavors; she must find the means of providing for herself and child when her husband proves unreliable. And then Gissing botches the ending with a lecturing love song to inherent masculine superiority. Boo! Hiss!

But until then, what a fascinating look at life at the end of the 19th century--the rise of the middle class, the Queen's 50th Jubilee, lending libraries, educational theory, mass culture, advertising. . . What's the point of reading only material you're going to agree with wholeheartedly, right?

Recommended.

A most important misunderstanding

In 1516, [Sir Thomas] More produced the short novel Utopia, a portrait of a happy island nation whose benevolent ruler advocates communal property, religious freedom, and marital separation. Utopia spawned an entire genre of literature, and apart from the Bible it’s hard to imagine a book that has proven to be so influential. Utopia borrows heavily from both Lucian and In Praise of Folly, which makes our current moment the quincentennial of the gestation period (1509-1516) of what is perhaps the most important novel in the history of mankind.

Oddly, the book succeeded only because most people misunderstood it.

--J.C. Hallman, Drifted toward Dragons: Utopia Today

E.M. Forster's Arctic Summer

'. . . my new era is to have no dawn. It is to be a kind of Arctic Summer, in which there will be time to get something really great done.' (Venetia murmured, 'Arctic Summer.') 'Dawn implies twilight, and we have decided to abolish them both. . . '

~~~

And they chattered on in the strain that pleased all three, maintaining their opinions with sincerity and yet without inconvenience, brandishing as it were the little knives that had been given to each man to defend his soul, but never proving their metal. An outsider would have thought that they were quarrelling, an intelligent foreigner that they were making conversation. Both would have been wrong.

~~~~

. . . and though he doubted a purpose behind the Universe, he never ceased to act as if there was a purpose. Of course he had his difficulties and temptations; for instance he nearly became a bad citizen. When beauty flowered, the wonder of life so dazzled him that he saw nothing else, and the world appeared as a gymnasium in which fine fellows develop their muscles and swing about from rope to rope. But he had an Englishman's capacity for correcting his faults, and a Quaker's capacity for perceiving them, and he took himself sternly in hand.

~~~

For that was the wonder of the picture--that he was here to see it. He might have been at the Basle hospital--or nowhere; he might have been clicked out of life. But he was here: a fellow creature had saved him.

~~~

Beauty may sink into the decorative too--she moves between two abysses--and this Italian tour gave him the sense of stage scenery which borrows all its value from the events that take place in front of it. No events did take place--here was the defect. The jar inside him was spiritual as well as aesthetic: he was rushing day after day through a world that did not belong to him.

~~~

He had never felt the rough winds that still blow about the world. He imagined them abolished--as if by some international agreement! Well, the least breath from them, the merest puff, had touched him this evening, and he had run away.

--E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer

Book 13 in the Girl Detective's 15/15/15 project was Forster's segment of an unfinished novel, which I enjoyed despite its lack of anithesis.

Two more to go!

Books 9-12

I'm feeling a time-crunch since next week is the primary--I really ought to reacquaint myself with the election manual-- and because I start three-months-worth of extra hours at the library--which were only okayed late last week-- on Sunday. I told my husband over the weekend that I thought I would drop out of the 15/15/15 project to free up some more time between now and then, but he, he of the you-read-too-much/own-too-many-books opinions, told me I'd come too far not to finish.

So what have I read since I last checked in?

Ninth book was E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley. Everyone already knows about Homer and Langley, right? It was a pleasant enough read and it firmed up a notion I'd already had for awhile to reread Ragtime--it's been at least 30 years, so I think it's due.


Tenth book was Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, which I loved so much that it moved directly onto my best of the year list. A Berkeley grad student goes home to the family ranch intent on using all her considerable powers of personality to bring her identical twin's wedding to a halt. Cassandra has not felt whole since Judith abandoned her for New York several months earlier; she feels her life impossible if her twin cannot be convinced that their bond is too vital ("Just us. Nobody else ever.") for separation.

If not:

The bridge looked good again, she tells us on the second page. The sun was on it, and it took on something of the appeal of a bright exit sign in an auditorium that is crowded and airless and where you are listening to a lecture, as I so often do, that is in no way brilliant. But lectures can't all be brilliant, of course; they can be sat through and listened to for what there is in them, and if the exit sign is dazzling it can still be ignored. Besides, my guide assures me that I am not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing. I'm given to conjecture only, and to restlessness, and I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now or forever holding it. . .

Confession: I chose the eleventh book, Forrest Gander's As a Friend, from the browsing collection at the university library solely because of its size: a mere 106 pages with lots of white on its pages ("I listen to what I can leave out," we're told in those pages). I may have been looking for something to careen through in an hour (the book I'd started earlier in the day turned out not to want me reading it right now), but Gander's book is a gem (and it led me to order his nonfiction A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transendence within minutes after it was finished) and much deserving of a less frenzied pace: I won't be returning it to the library any time soon.

A couple of excerpts:

My last birthday. The living room unlit. I suspected a surprise, but before I could reach the light switch, you struck a match to the horse skull you'd hung from the ceiling and doused with lighter fluid. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. The slow liquid-blue flame in the shape of a horse's skull flowering into a new dimension, turning slowly on a string in the dark.

and

It's a barren feeling to know at the age of twenty five that you've already lived the most intense period of your life, that a vividness has blazed up and short-circuited something in you and you will remember what it felt like to be alive but not feel it again, and you won't even want to remember, can't bear it, it's too ploughed with guilt and pain. It seemed all of a sudden like a wind had slacked off and I was left leaning off-balance in a world something considerable had passed through. Once I had choices. Then it was as if my life leaped out of my body.


And I'm 40 pages away from finishing a reread of James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times; it's book 12. I love Thurber. Are students still required to read him? I don't remember seeing him in either of my kids' texts, so I suppose he's been long gone. A pity.

Three more books to go.

Marta Randall's Islands

Marta Randall was a Readerville regular for many years and when she quit posting in the forums there I missed her. So I was pleased when another poster sent me a reissue of Islands, Randall's first novel, first published in 1975, which, of course I managed to shelve before reading. Story of my life.

Islands was my 8th read in the Girl Detective's 15/15/15 project. The islands themselves are those of Hawaii, underwater due to global warming ice melt centuries in the past, and the location of an underwater excavation for 67-year-old Tia and a group of youthful immortals. Procedures now exist that wipe out both aging and death; Tia, unfortunately, proved resistant to these treatments and has spent her life being regarded as a freak, a mere animal instead of a real human. Despite her alienation, she has experienced as much of life as possible, while the immortals had "taken the most important advance in history and used it to stop advancement forever."

Things got a little too mystical for me to follow at the end, but a good read for anyone in the mood for some science fiction.