pages turned

2012-01-27T09:31:00.000-05:00

Some results from the Verso Digital survey of consumer purchasing behavior:

Avid readers--those who purchase 10 or more books a year--tend to be older, female, wealthier and better educated--and represent 30.2% of the U.S. adult population, about 70 million people. "They are the market that's a driver for our industry," McKeown said. These avid readers buy books for a variety of reasons, including entertainment/relaxation (32%), education and self-improvement (22%) and for gifts (14%).
and

Readers find out about books mostly through personal recommendations (49.2%), bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%), advertising (24.4%), search engine searches (21.6%) and book reviews (18.9%). Much less important are online algorithms (16%), blogs (12.1%) and social networks (11.8%). These results "reaffirm the power and necessity of bricks-and-mortar stores and traditional marketing efforts," McKeown commented.

Seventy million of us. I find that heartening. And while others may be bummed that blogs are even less influential than online algorithms, I'm not.

I'm quite amused.

2012-01-02T12:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm going to revive a practice abandoned a few years back . At the beginning of every month I'll post a list of the books that I hope to read by its end. There will often be more books on the list than I can possibly read, but I'll try to be realistic in my expectations and shoot for two books a week, with a small number of substitutions and extras to choose from in case things don't work out as I'd planned.

For January:

A World Elsewhere. Wayne Johnston
Earth. David Brin
State of Wonder. Ann Patchett (campus book club)
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Reif Larsen (Slaves of Golconda)
The Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham
Assumption. Percival Everett
Hard Times. Charles Dickens
The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells

if time enough:
Measure for Measure. William Shakespeare
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry Bates
The Paperbark Shoe. Goldie Goldbloom

Hello 2012!

2012-01-01T12:06:00.000-05:00

I've decided that making resolutions--for me, at any rate--is a lot like having Alzheimer's disease. In December I decide on the direction I want to go in, put some thought into my goals for the year. . . then check the preceeding January's resolutions and see that they're exactly the same, and were exactly the same the year before as well! Good grief.

And looking at the lists of books I intend to read is depressing. There are carry-overs that keep popping up year after year, so no more of that. There's much more brawn to my read-at-whim muscle than you might expect, although putting together my fill in the gaps list of one hundred authors back in 2009 allows me the flexibility to be both flighty and on task. I knocked off another 20 from that list in 2011, bringing my total to 60. I should have no trouble reaching one hundred by the project's end in April 2014.

I'm bringing in the new year with David Brin's Earth, the type of hard science fiction I intended to read last year, before I became sidetracked by a fairly steady supply of time travel fare. I'm also reading Wayne Johnston's A World Elsewhere, a book that won't be published in the U.S. until late summer. After I saw it pop up on a couple of Canadian blogs several months back, I added it to my wish list--portions of the novel take place in North Carolina, in a mansion modeled after the Biltmore estate, so how could I resist? And then I thought I'd see if I could get it through interlibrary loan, and yes, there was a library in Texas willing to send it my way, although they want it back this Friday.

In theory, I remain committed to avoiding all reading challenge entanglements, but there are so many fantastic ones taking place this month: Carl's Science Fiction Experience; Redhead's Vintage Science Fiction Month; Kim's Australian Fiction Month; Allie's Shakespeare Month; and Amanda's Charles Dickens Month. Might I squeeze in one title from each challenge before I swear off them all for the rest of the year? In addition to book group obligations?

And I'm definitely taking part in C.B. James's TBR Double Dare, although I am turning it into a book buying ban until April. In fact, although I'm not officially making any resolutions this year, I do have a catchy slogan--Eschew the New--and I'm going to chant it whenever my finger gets twitchy over at the Evil Place. My daughter's moving to Berlin for six months in a couple weeks and we're going to want to visit her while she's there; I don't need to divert any money on books that I could get from the library if I'm patient enough.

Eschew the new. Or, to quote Maurice Sagoff:

Eschew
The norm
(Dull minds conform)

Guess that means I'm bypassing the buzz books in 2012 to re-read some of my old favorites.

Oops.

I just made a resolution.

Let's pretend it never happened.

2011 reading stats and favorites

2011-12-31T22:29:00.000-05:00

I shouldn't have waited until the last minute to work on this post, particularly since I've known since the middle of the week that I wouldn't be finishing another book until 2012, but if I've been consistent about anything this year, it's been in being as bad a blogger as I could possibly be. I'll do better next year--but that's a good hour-and-a-half away.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this year's hastily-assembled reading stats?

That while 82 completed books (I've lost count of the number of books set aside, yet still in progress) is quite respectable, if not awe-inspiring, I'm still a little bummed when I compare that number to the 101 that I managed the previous two years.  Couldn't I have looked at less kitchen porn, read fewer political blogs? Couldn't I have tried harder to convince the guys that six seasons of Lost should take longer than five weeks to watch? Perhaps I could have finished a bit more nonfiction, read a volume or two of poetry, if I'd used my time more wisely.

But of course the most appalling stat is the number of new books that came into the house and remained unread. Dare I mention that I ordered three more this morning, before I go cold turkey for the next three months? Only one of those books do I intend to read right away; I should have waited on the others.

My reading stats for the last seven years (this year's in bold):

Books Total 82 / 101 / 101 / 78 / 81 / 74 / 77
Nonfiction 12 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 8 /  14 / 13
Novels   66 / 78 / 79 / 62 / 62 / 50 / 47
Short Story Collections 2 / 7 / 7 / 3 / 4 / 1 / 8
Library Books 39 / 26 / 48 / 27 / 14 / 31
Newly Acquired/Read 12 / 23 / 32 /32 / 31 / 24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled 120+ / 113 / 140 / 88 /141+ / 75+
E-texts Read 12 / 17 / 10 / 12
Free E-texts Read 6 / 9 / 5 / 7
Just-published books 21 / 36 / 55 / 41 /34 / 33
Classics    23 / 21 / 10 / 8 / 23 / 12
Pre-20th Century 10 / 9 / 7 / 4 / 12 / 11
Written by women 38 / 46 / 55 / 42 / 33 / 28

Two plays: Othello and Agamemnon

Authors with multiple books read: W. Somerset Maugham (Wendy and I read five Maughams over the summer); Alice Thomas Ellis (3); H.G. Wells (3); Stewart O'Nan (2); Mary Doria Russell (2); William Styron (2); Anthony Trollope (2); Rebecca West (2); and Connie Willis (2).

Rereads: Othello, Pride and Prejudice, The Razor's Edge, House of Mirth, Darkness Visible and Atonement.

I read several books this year that I finished knowing that I want to read them again some day. At the top of that list is Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, which the Slaves read back in April.

Other favorites from the year are:
Started Early, Took My Dog. Kate Atkinson
Who Was Changed, and Who Was Dead. Barbara Comyns
Galore. Michael Crummey
The Sisters Brothers. Patrick deWitt
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
Wounded. Percival Everett
We Had It So Good. Linda Grant
The Sundial. Shirley Jackson
Skippy Dies. Paul Murray
Doc. Mary Doria Russell
There But For The. Ali Smith
He Knew He Was Right. Anthony Trollope
Among Others. Jo Walton

The complete list of books read in 2011 can be found here.

See you next year!

Reading Shakespeare

2011-12-07T07:43:00.000-05:00

Three years ago, at one of the lowest moments of my life, I started doing something I never thought I’d do. I’m reading every single play William Shakespeare ever wrote. And I’m reading most of them aloud. From the three dour Henry VIs, through all of your Macbeths and Romeos and Hamlets, all the way to nutty Cymbeline and beyond.

--DG Strong, "How Shakespeare got me through unemployment"

Something beautiful

2011-11-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile Richard is demonstrating with his hands the goggles the police use to be able to see what the microdrone is seeing. Hugo puts his hands over his eyes too. Jen and Hugo, still with his hands over his eyes, start a conversation about democracy and internet porn. Mark feels queasy. He thinks about the couple of times he's brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shadows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

--Ali Smith, There but for the

What I read in October

2011-10-31T16:36:00.002-04:00

by Susan

The Revisionists. Thomas Mullen [on the Kindle]

It seems I am surrounded by text in this city. Even without my seeking it out, it haunts me, hovers in the background, is invisibly sent from one handheld to another. I am a mere punctuation mark--we all are--in stories someone else is writing. Or has already written.

Caleb Williams. William Godwin (for the Classics Circuit) [on the Kindle]

The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds necessarily, indispensably, to his species. He is like those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands; but if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction.

Nightwoods. Charles Frazier

At some point, Stubblefield wondered how much he was really learning about Luce. She would talk freely about dress patterns, the daily details of gardening, his grandfather. But Stubblefield kept feeling like he was watching a cardsharp shuffle the deck, all the fine subtle movements to misdirect your attention, and at the end, a reassuring spread of hands to hide the pit opening under her life.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Helen Simonson (for book club) [on the Kindle]

"I did give [Kipling] up for many decades," she said. "He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It's so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn't it?"

Pillars of Gold. Alice Thomas Ellis

Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely concerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.

Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis

One of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes get blocked up it is never because there is a hedgehog in it.

Zone One. Colson Whitehead

If the beings they destroyed were their own creations, and not the degraded remnants of the people described on the things' driver's licenses, so be it. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

The Island of Dr. Moreau: It was the wantonness that stirred me

2011-10-29T19:00:00.003-04:00

I've repeated a review only a time or two in the seven years I've been blogging. But I'm dusting off this one from August 2006 (it was a Slaves of Golconda group read) because 1.) I've been reading H.G. Wells this fall; and 2.) I wanted to participate in the Dueling Monsters challenge.

Also, I don't normally respond as viscerally to a book as I did to The Island of Dr. Moreau. As far as I'm concerned, The Time Machine and Invisible Man can't hold a candle to it, and as far as Dr. Moreau himself goes, he's the biggest monster of them all.

~~~~~~~

When I was pregnant with my son I developed preeclampsia. The doctors determined that they'd have to take him out two months early if either of us were to make it.

He spent his first month in a neonatal intensive care unit across town before being transferred to the hospital closest to us until he'd gained enough weight to leave hospitals altogether. A NICU is, of course, a miraculous place of care and compassion, but it is also a place where much pain is experienced.

S. fought against a respirator that insisted on forcing breath in and out at a rate to which his body didn't want to conform; with his face contorting in silent screams, he was continually pricked and poked for blood samples, then transfused with fresh blood when he couldn't make enough to keep up with the amount taken (the scars on his wrists and ankles from the blood-taking did not fade away for more than a decade afterwards). Repeat.

Wired, tubed, and for several days blindered, he suffered. The painful procedures continued until eventually we--doctors, nurses, parents-- could tell that he was not only going to survive, but thrive.

Not all the babies did. There were those of two or three years of age, still in no shape to live outside NICU, abandoned by their parents, depending upon volunteers and scraps of time from the nursing staff for a bit of human contact. And there were several who lasted mere hours or days before they died.

A nurse caught me finger-stroking S.'s tiny arm on one of my first trips to the NICU. Did I not realize how much pain I was causing him? she snapped. Because he had no fat stores, the lightest touch was an assault to the nerve endings just underneath his skin. She taught me to cup my hand around him and to keep it still.

A couple weeks later I saw a new mother stroking her baby the way that I had. I waited for a nurse to correct her, but no one said a word. I knew then that her baby was going to die. No one was going to deny her the bit of comfort she could gain from touching him, even if her touch caused him distress, because these moments with the baby were going to be all that she had.

As you've maybe gathered by such an introduction, I responded to The Island of Dr. Moreau on a very personal level. If a person, if an animal, is to suffer by someone's hands in a House of Pain, it had better be for a damned good reason.

Moreau, well regarded in scientific circles in London prior to the publication of a pamphlet that exposed his cruel methods of vivisection, left England for a private island in the Pacific where he could continue his experiments outside the strictures of society. By cutting and mutilating and grafting he molds an assortment of animals into a tribe of Beast People, teaching them rudimentary language and a form of religious law designed to keep them under his control even after he has turned them out for retaining undesired animal characteristics. Imperfection really bums the man out.

Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own.

Moreau isn't driven to mold animals into human shapes out a desire to help either man or creature, but merely because he wants "to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape." Ethics are not of interest to him: "The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature," he claims. Pain is immaterial; it is animalistic; intellectual desire transforms others into problems to be solved, nothing more or less.

Doctor Moreau is, in short, as psychopathic as they come despite the god-like appearance and demeanor that Wells has given him.

Edward Prendick, our narrator, is no match for him. Because Prendick, a shipwrecked gentleman taking shelter on Moreau's private island, has dabbled in natural history and studied biology under the famed T.H. Huxley, Moreau eventually reveals the truth about his experiments to someone he assumes can appreciate them and will henceforth stop hindering his work due to silly behavior. Instead Prendick is horrified, but offers weak and minimal objection. He reminds me of a journalist who lands an exclusive interview and then is afraid to ask any follow-up questions to the canned nonsense he's given. Time and again I wished the narrator were someone like Patrick O'Brian's Stephen Maturin, someone who both understood the science and was willing to argue the ethics of a situation, to insist that being human means behaving humanely toward those not on your level. Someone who could at least read the Greek and Latin classics shelved near his hammock instead of revealing yet another skill he's lacking.

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau's cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau's hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the hands. But now that seemed to be the lesser part. Before they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau--and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer; at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves, the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another, the Law held them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.

In these days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal fear of Moreau. I fell indeed into the morbid state, deep and enduring, alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau by his passion for research, Montgomery by his passion for drink, the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

I'd like to read more H.G. Wells and I intend to return to this one again as well, possibly in a few weeks with S. My response to it next time may not be quite as visceral. Perhaps I'll see Prendick in a more appreciative light; he does makes an excellent narrator even though his passive nature infuriated me on my first reading.

They lay, opened and half read, all over her house

2011-10-29T07:37:00.001-04:00

'It rubs off,' said Constance. 'All those models carried on the same way the artists did. You only have to read a book about the Left Bank.'

'I don't read as much as you,' said Scarlet.

'You should go down the High Street,' said Constance. 'You'd be amazed what you can pick up on the remainder counter for a song.'

'We've got no room for any more books,' said Scarlet. 'The shelves are full.'

'They say you can tell all about a person from looking at his books,' said Constance, who had become addicted to book-collecting since she had acquired a car-load of second-hand volumes from a fair in the Midlands. She had originally intended to resell them but found she had grown attached to them and had built shelves in her sitting-room. They lay, opened and half read, all over her house.

'I don't know what they'd make of ours,' said Scarlet. 'Brian only buys novels by those men, and I haven't bought a book for years--not since Elizabeth David, I don't think.'

'I can't read books by men,' said Constance. 'They will go on about their willies and chopping blondes to bits, and who cares?'

'I think they think we do,' said Scarlet.

'I don't think they do,' said Constance. 'I think they just can't really think about anything else.'

--Alice Thomas Ellis, Pillars of Gold

Caleb Williams

2011-10-28T07:30:00.000-04:00

by Susan

When the Classics Circuit announced its Gothic Lit Tour I thought I would need to take a pass on it. My sensibilities are more attuned with the Southern school of Gothic, Flannery and Faulkner, writers much too late for inclusion. Then my eyes snagged on Caleb Williams down at the bottom of the suggested titles list and I knew I'd be participating after all.

Caleb Williams had numbered among my tbrs since back in the winter, when I read what Rebecca West had to say about it:

"Once every five years or so I re-read two novels, which seem equally remarkable achievements. One is Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Everybody's heard of that. The other is Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, the philosophic radical whose political writings made a dent in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Nobody's heard of that. Yet I find it a great book, a serious, eloquent, important book with a great subject: it deals with authority, the authority of parents, guardians, teachers, God the Father, and asks the question can God the Father be forgiven for the existence of pain, can anything be made of the superior-inferior relationship. And it finds a perfect myth, a perfect plot for this discussion. Why is it not a recognised classic?"

How could I not want to read a forgotten classic, a novel that the formidable Rebecca West could not manage to suck dry on her first go-through?

Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, published in 1794, on the heels of William Godwin's Political Justice from the previous year, is often regarded as its companion piece, a way of popularizing its political philosophy for those who had not read his treatise, a way of pointing out the defects in the English social system, in its justice system. Many see it as the first detective novel, the first thriller, or as one of the first novels to address abnormal psychology. Is Caleb an unreliable narrator? Could he be gay? Is there a connection between Godwin's novel and that of Frankenstein, his daughter Mary Shelley's better-known novel? Should the novel be placed squarely in with the Romantics or the Gothics or allowed to straddle both?

Lowly-born Caleb Williams, largely self-educated and orphaned at 18, is quickly taken on as secretary and librarian by country squire Ferdinando Falkland following his father's funeral. It is a wonderful position for Caleb, a young man of insatiable curiosity who loves books. All in the household and the surrounding area regard Falkland as a man of great benevolence and integrity. Caleb soon learns that Falkland can also be peevish and tyrannical, but believes these negatives proceed "rather from the torment of his mind than an unfeeling disposition."

One day Falkland accuses the unwitting Caleb of spying upon him, of wanting to ruin him. He says he'll trample him into atoms; later in the day he presses money into Caleb's hand by way of apology. Mr. Collins, the steward, tells Caleb a lengthy story that fills out the rest of volume I, one with elements that remind me a great deal of Trollope's The American Senator; a story that explains why the once outgoing and chivalrous Falkland has turned paranoid and gloomy: ultimately, he was publicly and physically insulted by, then suspected of murdering, another aristocrat in the community. It is this story with its parallels to Caleb and Falkland's future relationship, and, indeed, even the similarity of names between those in Collins' story and those who find their way into Caleb's own, that call into question the reliability of Caleb's narrative.

Falkland is cleared of suspicion when the aristocrat's former tenants, Hawkins and his son, are found with evidence connecting them to the murder; they are subsequently hanged. Caleb, however, becomes convinced that a man with Hawkins' principles would never stoop to murder. He begins to delight in mentally tormenting his benefactor, who he suspects framed the Hawkinses, until Falkland calls him on it. Caleb then declares himself "a foolish, wicked, despicable wretch." He begs to be punished, to be turned out of service, then declares his loyalty to, his lasting love for Falkland. Falkland keeps him on, although his own moods darken.

One day, while Falkland is off on one of his "melancholy rambles," a chimney fire blazes out of control and Caleb supervises the removal of household goods to the lawn. Caleb goes a bit nuts. With his mind, as he says, "raised to its utmost pitch," he seizes the opportunity to break into a trunk in Falkland's private apartment off the library, a trunk Caleb's long thought contains documents that will prove Falkland guilty of the suspected crimes.

Naturally, Falkland comes in and catches him in the "monstrous" act. "One short minute had effected a reverse in my situation, the suddenness of which the history of man, perhaps is unable to surpass." Falkland points a loaded pistol at Caleb's head, then throws it out the window to keep himself from firing. The situation leads Falkland to extract an oath of silence from Caleb, then confirm all his suspicions: he's guilty as sin just as Caleb's thought. He says Caleb's to remain in his service, but will from this point never receive his affection.

The second half of the novel concerns itself with Caleb's efforts to leave Falkland's household and the extent Falkland will go to persecute him. Caleb will find that while the reputation of a man of Falkland's standing in the community is defense enough against a murder charge, Caleb's own reputation can be destroyed easily by his social better. Falkland frames him as a thief and he is thrown into jail to await a nonspeedy trial. Eventually Falkland will provide Caleb with the means to break from jail, but he will be unable to escape from Falkland's ability to track and the lengths he will go to to undermine all efforts to make a new life for himself. Things will become quite Kafkaesque for awhile. Caleb will be the first (and the last!) to tell you how no one has suffered as much as he.

Godwin wrote two endings to Things As They Are, and both are often included in current editions of the novel. In the original, Caleb gets his day in court, but he's seen only as a man out for revenge; he's imprisioned again and appears to go mad. In the version Godwin chose to publish, there is more emotional resolution, with Falkland admitting his guilt and much mutual forgiveness of wrongs committed.

While I can see that there's enough meat on the bones of this story to bring one back for subsequent re-reads, I cannot say that I intend to return to it. Caleb feels so sorry for himself that I felt no need to do so myself. There was something so hinky in his desire to undercover his kindly employer's guilt out of nothing more than sheer curiosity instead of an actual sense that justice should be served that I often wanted to just slap him. Plus, there's the fact that I vastly preferred Collins' story within Caleb's story to Caleb's own. I'm firmly in the realism camp and there are tons more Trollope and Gissing novels for me to get to. And there's Vanity Fair. Yes, Rebecca, I've heard of that. But I still haven't read it.

Read another review of Caleb Williams at Aesop to Oz.

Surviving it all, a sort of bloggiversary post

2011-10-27T19:55:00.000-04:00

by Susan

I told myself I would resume blogging once the kitchen remodel was complete. I expected that to be in July, then August, okay then, September.

The floor was installed, not the day after Labor Day, as planned, but that week. The cabinets came in in stages; the cabinetmaker and I got along once we left the general contractor out of the picture, who had issues with returning phone calls to either of us.

I wasted a lot of vacation days being stood up by people who couldn't be bothered to tell me they weren't coming in that day even though it had been previously confirmed that they were indeed going to do just that.

I painted walls. I painted the ceiling, now stripped of its protective but icky popcorn, in both the kitchen and family room countless times with a roller before resorting to brush painting it twice which it seemed to mollify it into looking considerably less splotchy. My hand ached a lot.

Eventually, the last week in September, the granite went in, followed quickly by the sink and the gas cooktop and the electric/convection oven with a computer for its brain.

The oven intimidated me and I was planning on having L. read the manual and then tell me how it worked before I attempted anything when the guys decided to make cookies late at night.

And it seemed to me that maybe they ought to have read the manual when after 30 minutes the oven had managed to heat itself only to 190 degrees. I resorted to reading the manual myself, figured out how to put it on speed-preheat, and about ten minutes later the temperature reached 210 degrees and something inside the oven's brain exploded from all that excess heat. The resulting smoke was efficiently exhausted outside thanks to the new chimney hood.

Me, behind the plastic used to protect
the walls from falling ceiling popcorn.

The oven flashed an 800 number at us and told us to call it, so we did, and that resulted in four visits, I believe, over three weeks from a two-man crew from a small appliance shop who would tell us different things were wrong each time they came out with a different motherboard or fan until they ran out of new parts to order that were under warranty. We then did what we would have done in the first place if we hadn't been following the oven's directives and called Lowes, from whom we'd bought it. The guy who came out did a diagnostic, came back five days later--this Tuesday actually-- with the necessary part, and while no one except the Lowes guy expected this to make a difference, expecially me, prone to frequent fatalist rants these days, the oven works beautifully now. I've made three loaves of pumpkin bread and two of sourdough and I'm feeling the need to swear off carbohydrates for awhile.

L. started a new job in August and he had to redo a lot of the plumbing done by the so-called professionals so it took him until yesterday to finish putting the hardware on the cabinets and drawers. He wore me down on the placement for the cabinets pulls so that they're two cm higher than I wanted them, but I wouldn't budge from the middle on the drawers, even though he wanted the pulls placed on the edge.

Still a lot to be done, mostly by us, but we're still waiting on the delivery of the glass shelves for the china cabinet (cabinetmaker's still too pissed at the general contractor to bother bringing them by) and I'm playing phone tag with the kitchen designer about when the backsplash is to be installed.

I love the new kitchen, I will post pictures as soon as the shelves and backsplash are in, but even if I didn't love it, I would NEVER go through another remodel. I'm too old for all the upheaval involved.

Monday the blog turned seven. I intended to post in honor of such an occasion, but we went out to dinner since it was also my birthday and then I had to sit around in a stupor afterwards until it wasn't too early to go to bed.

Next year I'll bake the blog a cake. I've got an oven now; I can do it. Y'all will all be invited to have a piece.

Thanks for being readers and my internet friends.

Tomorrow I'm actually posting a book review.

I know, I know. I don't quite believe it either.

Smokin' Seventeen

2011-10-23T10:17:00.009-04:00

by Wendy

Fans of Stephanie Plum’s escapades will not be disappointed by Janet Evanovich’s latest installment, Smokin’ Seventeen. Chapter one begins with a phone call from Grandma Mazur, who recounts a bizarre dream to Stephanie; moves to the Tasty Pastry Bakery, where Grandma Bella puts the eye on Stephanie; and ends at the site of the former bonds office with Joe Morelli, Vinnie, Connie, Mooner, and Stephanie stand, staring at parts of murder victim number one. As the novel unfolds, the reader is taken over familiar terrain: Yes, there are zany characters, such as 72-year-old FTA, Ziggy Glitch, who thinks he’s a vampire; yes, Grandma Mazur gets kicked out of a viewing; yes, Lula goes on yet another whacky diet; yes, Stephanie’s car blows up; and yes, Stephanie’s love life with cop boyfriend, Joe Morelli, is complicated by enigmatic hottie, Ranger.

If you’re new to the series or haven’t been keeping up, you can still plunge in because narrator Plum briefs us on key bios and background. And, whether you’re new to the series or not, if you haven’t listened to any of the audio/CD/digital recordings, waste no time in checking one out from your local library. Be sure and select those narrated by C.J. Critt. Her characterizations, especially of Lula, are spot-on and have made me laugh out loud. Speaking of laughter, I’ve watched the movie trailer for One for the Money, the first book in the series, and it wasn’t funny. Where are those New Jersey accents? Why wasn’t someone like Cloris Leachman cast as Grandma Mazur? And if only Sandra Bullock weren't a little too old to be playing Stephanie . . . but I digress. Anyway, you can check out the trailer on http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810168438/video/26714574.

So, the bottom line is if you’re looking for standard Stephanie Plum fare, read or listen to Smokin’ Seventeen. If you’re like my sister, who’s tired of the franchise and the romantic tug-of-war, skip this one and wait to hear what the grapevine has to say about the next one. As for me, yes, it’s predictable and light, but the pleasure of reading a comic novel, especially one that is set in Trenton, NJ (across the river from Yardley, PA, where I lived for ten years and which does get a shout-out in one of the books) and sharing a Hungarian heritage with the protagonist is worth a few hours of my time.

Boys

2011-09-25T20:43:00.005-04:00

by Wendy

At recess, in sixth grade,
we'd shoot out from school like marbles
The girls would go make dandelion chains,
play jump rope,
hopscotch with rock markers found in the grass,
where boys chased each other in PF Flyers,
or sometimes, chased us, swinging fat worms from pinched fingers

On the monkey bars, we practiced skin-the-cat,
legs upside down Vs, skirts and dresses and shoelaces dangling
over blacktop
We never fell
Boys hovered nearby like yellow jackets around jelly sandwiches,
eying our underwear

Fridays were marriage days on the playground
Girls who caught boys were married for the day
Whatever that meant
Whatever that means

Grown-up boys still play and chase and scare us,
Still thrilled by our underwear,
And still, like their playground selves, come Monday,
have cooties again

Reading plans? I got 'em; or, H.G. Wells, Gissing, and the gang

2011-09-18T11:24:00.002-04:00

by Susan

Back in the early days of January, I stated that David Lodge's novel about H.G. Wells, A Man of Parts (reviewed this weekend in the Sunday Book Review), was the book I was most anxious to read in 2011. I ordered it as soon as it was available in the UK and, naturally, it remains unread, as do seven other books from my Top Ten Books to Read list.

I am of course too distractable to stick with any list of ten, but in this case I also put pressure on myself to delay its reading because I needed to earn the right to do so. My interest in Wells derives primarily because of my Rebecca West project, and it just seemed as if I ought to have read a bit more by him (I'd only read The Island of Doctor Moreau with the Slaves) and about him before rewarding myself with the Lodge.

So in August I read The Time Machine, which led to the other novel published this year with Wells as ~~the~~ a main character, Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time. From there I proceeded to The Invisible Man and almost went straight on to The War of the Worlds, which would have given me the four books necessary to fulfill Peril the First in Carl's R.I.P. challenge if I should feel the need to cheat and count The Time Machine (and I don't. I have another time travel book all lined up. And Caleb Williams, which will count for both R.I.P. and Gothic Lit for the Classics Circuit. And was a favorite of Rebecca West's).

Instead I opted to take a break from the science fiction and go with Ann Veronica, the 1909 novel regarded as a roman a clef based on his affair with the other other woman--besides West--to bear him a child outside his marriage to Jane: Amber Reeves.

So I'm tooling along quite happily with Ann Veronica yesterday, enjoying my time with this representation of the New Woman until Vee's involvement with the Suffragettes lands her in prison and she undergoes a radical 180 in her beliefs and expectations.

And I think: I'm reading George Gissing. I'm reading a George Gissing novel. And I take to the internet to see if anyone else has noticed this. Could be it's just your typical sneaky underhanded misogyny.

And while I may very well have read this fact before, I must have glossed right over it: George Gissing and H.G. Wells were friends (or, at least, frenemies. It depends on which camp, pro- or anti-Wells, that you're in). Wells was there at Gissing's death bed, force-feeding him beef broth and stealing his final words to use as a character's final words in Tono-Bungay. There's actually an out-of-print collection of Gissing and Wells' letters: I ordered it immediately.

So now I have to at least read the letters and Tono-Bungay before I proceed to A Man of Parts, as well as more Gissing. And I want to read more about the suffragettes--I've been planning to do that since reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. I'll have a new book to add to my list in November--Susan Hertog's biography Dangerous Ambitions: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power comes out then.

For anyone who finishes Ann Veronica and feels a bit bummed at how Wells brings Vee to such a conventional, second fiddle status by the end of the novel, take heart. Amber Reeves, Margaret Drabble tells us, accomplished much more with her life than Wells would imagine for her on the page.

I'll have to resort to ILL to get my hands on Reeves' novels, but I will. Just as soon as I get caught back up with my Drabbles.

she walks in beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems

2011-08-28T18:45:00.016-04:00

by Wendy

A close girlfriend of mine gave me this book when we met at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. this summer. On the ride home on the Metro, I thumbed through it in anticipation. I am a woman! I am halfway through my journey (If I live to be a hundred, which is likely considering the shelf life my body must have, considering all the processed food I eat)! I write poetry! This is perfect! A book of poems by and about women!

Except it's not. I read the first poem, "She Walks in Beauty." By Lord Byron. Yes, by a man. And he has plenty of company. Of the nearly 200 entries, approximately a third are written by men. Now, I have nothing against male writers, I just thought this book could have been a wonderful opportunity to showcase female poets exclusively, especially considering the subject matter.

The collection, selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy, promises to be, as Kennedy writes in the introduction, " . . . an anthology of poems centered around the stages of a woman's life . . .." And, aptly, she walks in beauty is divided into several sections, including, "Falling in Love," "Breaking Up," "Marriage," "Motherhood," "Work," and "Growing Up and Growing Old," among others. There are classic poems, such as "To My Dear and Loving Husband," by Anne Bradstreet and contemporary poems, such as, "PS Education" by Ellen Hagan. There is a nice diversity in the collection, with poems by Dominican-American Julia Alvarez ("Hairwashing," Woman's Work," and "Woman Friend"), African-American Parneshia Jones ("Bra Shopping"), Arab-American Naomi Shihab Nye ("My Friend's Divorce"), among others. There are humorous poems, such as Dorothy Parker's "Sympton Recital" and touching poems, such as Jo McDougall's "Companion." (One of my favorites.) There are poems about heterosexual love, lesbian love, motherly love, sisterly love, and yes, chocolate love. When I finished reading the last poem, I decided that, although I consider the title misleading, ultimately, Kennedy's book is a nice addition to my collection of poetry books.

Companion
by Jo Mcdougall

When Grief came to visit,
she hung her skirts and jacket in my closet.
She claimed the only bath.

When I protested,
she assured me it would be
only for a little while.

Then she fell in love with the house,
repapered the rooms,
laid green carpet in the den.

She's a good listener
and plays a mean game of Bridge.
But it's been seven years.

Once, I ordered her outright to leave.
Days later
she came back, weeping.

I'd enjoyed my mornings,
coffee for one;
my solitary sunsets,
my Tolstoy and Moliere.

I asked her in.

Latest stockpile

2011-08-10T19:20:00.000-04:00

Granted, I haven't showcased my book purchases since early April, but I was so horrified once I'd gathered (most of) the newbies together for the above photo op, that I cancelled three Amazon pre-orders. I don't need to acquire books for awhile, even if I do have gift certificates.

(Please note that the first three titles tell a story.)

Left stack:

Jeanne Darst's Fiction Ruined My Family. These days I rarely try for books at LibraryThing, so I was delighted when I won a galley of this memoir. Should make a great tie-in with Reading My Father and Yossarian Slept Here.

Sarah Bakewell's How to Live. Talked myself out of getting this from the library, so that I wouldn't feel that I needed to rush through it.

Jacqueline Winspear's Among the Mad. From the free books shelf in the staff lounge. Guess I should read at least some of the earlier Maisie Dobbs' before I start this.

Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven. I'd hoped to read along with Iris back in June, but quickly realized it just wasn't the time for me to start a book this size.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg's Madison and Jefferson. Someone recommended David McCullough's biography of Truman to me today; I in return recommended Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. I need to devote more actual time to biographies instead of merely intending to.

Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke. I haven't even read Sea of Poppies yet!

Dale Peterson's The Moral Lives of Animals. A review copy.

David Lodge's A Man of Parts. My most anticipated book of the year. Why didn't I started this immediately? Now I'm planning to have an H.G. Wells month.

Middle stack:

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean. The Slaves of Golconda will be discussing this on Sept. 30.

Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb. Made the Booker longlist so I thought I'd give it a try.

Stephane Audeguy's The Theory of Clouds. A French novel recommended at book club.

Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time. Steampunk. Another book for the potential H.G. Wells month.

Ron Rash's Saints at the River. Rash is my go-to for Appalachian fare.

Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz. Was surprised that this didn't make the Booker longlist. Have high expectations here since I loved The Gathering.

Tessa Hadley's The London Train. I like Hadley.

Kate Christensen's The Astral. Haven't read Christensen since The Epicure's Lament, which I loved. Another book I have high expectations for.

China Mieville's Embassytown. R. gave me this for Mother's Day.

Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers. Loved The Northern Clemency.

Right stack:

Tim Pears' Disputed Land. Lots of buzz about this at Book Balloon.

Jane Harris' Gillespie and I. I've not read Harris before.

Buck Brannaman's The Faraway Horses. A gift from C. for catsitting.

Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers. And we finally reach a book that I've read. I even read it immediately after receiving it! I'm pulling for the western to win the Booker! Plus, this has the best cover ever.

John Sayles' A Moment in the Sun. Could I get this read in a month if I read nothing but? Jeez, it's huge.

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. Need to read the essays and short stories first.

Joe Scco's Footnotes in Gaza. Another freebie from the staff lounge. I have Palestine in progress.

Books read in July

2011-08-07T19:07:00.004-04:00

by Susan

I always like the Nick Hornby-style end-of-month posts outlining that month's reading and I'm trying to develop the habit of writing down my impressions, instead of simply appreciating when others do.

Here's what I completed in July (now that we're in the second week of August), with the most recent first:

William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness

Beautiful, alcoholic Peyton Loftis, the sole remaining daughter of the estranged Milton and Helen Loftis, kills herself in New York; her remains are brought home by train to the Virginia Tidewater to be buried. The dark humor of Peyton's funeral procession is interrupted by flashbacks revealing just how deep the dysfunction runs in this mid-20th century family. Everyone feels a victim; everyone behaves badly. Always.

The last chapter is an unholy Quentin Compson/Septimus Smith amalgamation, told in a Molly Bloom narration style. It comes across as more derivative than influenced by, although the fact that Styron managed a novel like this at a mere 26 years of age is awfully impressive. Wendy and I decided to read this after finishing Alexandra Styron's memoir, Reading My Father, back in June. I'm glad I read it and I'll definitely be reading more Styron, but I think I'd better space them out since they're so dense and dark.

Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf.

By now it should be a well-established fact that I have issues where thrillers, particularly thrillers dealing with the occult, are concerned. I can't suspend the little voice inside my head which pipes a persistant "This is stupid" refrain, although I will periodically give one a try.

So you may be surprised by what I say now: I loved this.

(Granted, at least theoretically I've always been in the werewolf camp, even before my friends and I perfected The Werewolf and The Repossessed Werewolf facial expressions/hand gestures back in high school--yes, yes, we were immature for our age. Not that I ever read much about them or saw many werewolf movies, but just the fact that they were not vampires put me on their side. And we won't even get into how I was known for my wolf howl back in elementary school.)

I thought This is stupid only once while reading about werewolves and vampires and those who hunt them/rescue them and I fully intend to read the sequel. I was too busy enjoying Jacob Marlowe getting from I still have feelings but I'm sick of having them. Which is another feeling I'm sick of having. I just . . . I just don't want any more life to I've stopped abstracting. This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.

Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day

This isn't of the same caliber of The Sparrow or Doc, but it served my purpose, which was to learn a bit more about how the modern Middle East came about, and have a bit of fun in the process. Plus, it has a dead narrator, a device I always get a kick out of. Caught a whiff of Kevin Brockmier's The Brief History of the Dead in the afterlife, but I don't know if Russell intended it.

Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedman and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or were fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point-blank.

I knew from growing up in the South that generations had been taught a glossed over version of Reconstruction: Yes, the KKK caused problems but things wouldn't have been nearly so bad if it hadn't been for the carpetbaggers; let's move right along to the next chapter in the text and then we'd all go see Gone With the Wind a couple of times the next time it played at the theater and take it as holy writ. Budiansky talks about this, in case your formative years went lighter on the mythology than my own. Otherwise, the situations described in this book were revelatory.

And heartbreaking.

I'll leave it at that.

Linda Grant's We Had It So Good

My first Grant, and one of the books expected by many to at least be longlisted for the Booker; I loved it and wish it had been. My older siblings were first-wave baby boomers, same as the characters here, while I came along 15 years later at the tail end of the generation, and this all seemed very true to the times. But even more, I loved the book for its exploration of how the stories we're told by our families that we accept as truth are often anything but.

Brad Watson's Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

I finished the titular story in this collection of stories in early July, although I started the book back in the spring. Some I enjoyed quite a bit, others left little impression, perhaps because I was at the height of my kitchen remodel mania during May and June. This was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, but one the book blogging community seems to have overlooked. Give it a try when you're in the mood for something a bit weird.

Contemporary Lit

2011-07-31T19:00:00.002-04:00

by Wendy

What if writers texted their words
lol omg
Would we remember them?

What if Hemingway were a waterman
shucking oysters instead of words
setting aside the good ones
to slide Chesapeake damp down our throats
to the sound of open shells falling on open shells

And what if Frost had owned a GPS
to map the road not taken

Would he have taken it?

Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron

2011-07-24T19:53:00.004-04:00

by Wendy

Just as the sea, by turns rageful and indifferent, takes hold of those caught in it, so William Styron did with his family, especially his youngest daughter, Alexandra, whose recent memoir, Reading My Father, tells the story of their relationship. It was a relationship dictated by her father’s ferocity, aloofness, and depression, one that she writes of honestly and eloquently.

Of course, it’s not just the relationship that Styron relates, but her journey to understand the man himself. She takes us on that journey as she culls his papers, correspondence, manuscripts, speeches, and other writings, at Duke University, William Styron’s alma mater and home to his archives.

Her narrative begins at her father’s funeral then winds back and forth between the distant past and up to the more recent past when she was still researching him through his papers. In this way we learn more than just a chronological timeline of her father’s life and works and her growing up (and eventually out) of his shadow, but her reflections, insights, longings, and acceptances. (A small example of this is when she listens to him speak at LaGrange College in Georgia, where he is conferred with an honorary degree. During his speech he relates that he was an abysmal student. Styron notes that she “remembers thinking, How come I didn’t know he was such a goddamn bad student? Even I hadn’t flunked physics four times.”)

It seems fitting that she was born shortly before her father’s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, was published because his works served as a backdrop to her life. She writes, ". . . each phase of my youth is joined in my mind to the novel my father was writing at the time.” If his novels helped define her youth, his failure to produce a sixth one (his fifth, Sophie’s Choice, was published in 1979) helped serve as landscape later on.

But until she left the house it was his mercurial temperament that set the tone. A drinker, her father was by turns distant and angry, unpredictably turning on Alexandra and the rest of the family. When she was eleven, for example, he turned on her, calling her, “A fucking princess!” because she didn’t bake something for her grandfather. However, as the author came into her own, the father-daughter relationship was changed. “He wasn’t the antihero of my story anymore. The narrative was heading in a more pleasing direction.”

In the end, Reading My Father is her story as much as his. And what a story it is.

Mothering narratives

2011-07-20T15:52:00.002-04:00

by Susan

You carry a baby in the womb for nine months and then, when they're grown up, they call you collect, when they remember. She has her own life. And that's okay. I've learned to be patient. "Teach only love for that is what you are." The ups and downs; I live with it. And I've got a lot ahead of me and a lot to be proud of. I know: she is the reason I was born.

--Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here

Back in the spring, after my mind had settled into its All Things Kitchens All the Time groove, with room for nothing else, LomaGirl left this request in comments:

I'm looking for mothering narratives- novels, essays, short stories, memoirs. Can you think of any books that you would classify as this? I would really appreciate some help!

And I immediately thought of the ending to the Mona Simpson; Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here"; memoirs by Shirley Jackson and Louise Erdrich and Anne Lamott; Sue Miller's The Good Mother (although I never thought she was); Jill in Robert Boswell's Crooked Hearts, trying to keep the family together after the eldest son literally destroys their house; the mother of the autistic boy in Anna Mitgutsch's Jakob; Pearl Tull in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; the two moms in Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout; the mom in Joanna Cannan's Princes in the Land; and then, my mind went blank.

Since then:

Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream

A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows

Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons, Searching for Caleb, etc.

Jackie Lyden's Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

I think I would classify most of my reading in the They fuck you up, your mum and dad vein, or else the good mothers of literature outside Demeter have failed to leave a mark on me.

Anyone else have some suggestions for LomaGirl? Jackie compiled her own list of the Best Books About Motherhood a couple weeks back and received some suggestions as well (I was particularly chagrined to realize I'd forgotten about Roxanna Robinson's Cost), but I feel we've only touched on the surface of the mothering narratives out there.

Book orientation

2011-07-18T16:00:00.003-04:00

by Susan

I never did this particular meme when it was so popular back in the spring. Figured now was the time for it. . .

The book I'm currently reading William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. With Wendy. Summer is the perfect time for a Southern tale of family dysfunction. Will the second-person narrator that opened the book make a reappearance? Only I would hope so.

The last book I finished Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day. I loved, loved, loved The Sparrow, but hated its sequel with an equal passion (don't ask why; I don't remember). Refused to even look at another Russell until Doc came along, which I couldn't pass up because it was a western. I loved, loved, loved it. Now Russell is officially off my ignore list.

The next book I want to read Two books, actually. Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf and Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America. The Carey is for book club and the Duncan, waiting for me at the library, has a long waiting list so I won't be able to renew it.

The last book I bought Nuances here. Last book purchased was Stephane Audeguy's The Theory of Clouds. Last book downloaded to the Kindle was Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy. The last book bought that has shown up in my mailbox is Tim Pears's Disputed Land. Still waiting for Jane Harris's Gillespie and I. I bought the Harris before the Audeguy and the Pears. Such is life when you buy books through the Book Depository.

The last book I was given C. gave me a copy of Buck Brannaman's The Faraway Horses. (All horses seem very faraway right about now.)

The last book I checked out from the library From the public library, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. From the university library, Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River.

What was inside the last package a publisher/publicist sent me Five galleys from Random House. The one I'm most likely to read is Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower. I doubt I'll have it read by its September pub date, though.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

2011-07-17T18:00:00.000-04:00

by Wendy

Oh sure, I'd heard of Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, the shoot-out at the OK Corral, and Tombstone, Arizona before reading Doc by Mary Doria Russell, but they were names and places that held no substance, like placeholders at a dinner party, not the guests themselves. Russell's gift in this work of historical fiction is a well-told story tethered in fact, but allowed to graze.

Rooted in what facts the author could unearth (she writes of her source material in the notes at the end of the book), the novel takes us on the detailed journey of Dr. John Henry (Doc) Holliday whose fate rests not with Russell, but with history. What makes Doc so engaging is Russell's portrayal not of "[A] cold and casual killer," as he was caricatured by the newspapermen of his day, but of a man who is at the mercy of tuberculosis; a man who is an accomplished pianist, dentist, and card shark; a man in love with a whore; a man who is by turns gracious and enraged; and a man whose relationship with the Earp brothers is not so infamous as what legend would have us believe.

Doc is cleverly divided into chapters using poker terms--poker and a game called faro are integral to the story. And just like in cards, the author lays out her cast of characters in a section called "The Players," where she differentiates the fictional ones by putting their names in italics. This section is a particularly helpful resource.

My only complaint is the novel leaves off in April, 1879, just as Doc is about to leave Dodge City, with the final chapter focusing on Kate, Doc's lover, and summarizing the rest of the main characters' lives. I only hope Russell considers expanding that short narrative into a full-fledged follow-up novel. Please, Mary, play one more hand.

I'm back and I have big news

2011-07-16T21:44:00.002-04:00

by Susan

Okay, actually, I'm just sort of back. We're in the midst of a kitchen remodel, a kitchen remodel that I'd hoped would be finished just about now. But, as these things often go, it's taking longer than expected. The cabinetmaker (the second cabinetmaker; the first one hightailed after he was discovered stealing from the company) is now saying he'll have the cabinets completed in three weeks, but the kitchen designer is skeptical and advised me to plan on it taking more like five. Since we're doing the demolition ourselves, including removing the old soffits and ceiling; installing the recessed lights; replacing the ceiling and sheetrocking the new soffits (which should not resemble jutting eyebrows this time around), repainting the kitchen and the connecting family room, putting down subflooring, and no doubt a few other things I'm forgetting, we probably do need five more weeks instead of three. At least I can wean myself off the kitchen porn now that everything's been selected; that should free up some time to resume blogging. I have spent much more time than is healthy on kitchen porn the past three months and I'm tired of second guessing all my choices.

But the big news I have has nothing to do with the kitchen. You've no doubt seen me mention my good friend W. on occasion, with whom I've been reading and discussing books for a good twenty years. Last year Wendy helped me get through Ulysses; this year we've read The Waves and Skippy Dies and A Visit from the Goon Squad and In Persuasion Nation and Reading My Father as well as a whole slew of Somerset Maughams just last month. We're in the early pages of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness right now.

Wendy's an accomplished writer, of both fiction and poetry, and she's currently hard at work on a novel. I am thrilled to report that she has agreed to become a co-writer here on the blog. Her first review will post Sunday evening and she's hoping to keep to an early-in-the-week schedule hereafter, although I told her it's perfectly okay to post whenever and however often she desires.

I've given Wendy a long annotated list of blogs that I expect she'll enjoy as much as I do. Since she's totally new to blogging, though, it may take her awhile to make the rounds and keep you all straight in her mind. Please feel free to stop by over the next few days and introduce yourselves to her. I can't think of a better way of helping her to feel a part of this wonderful book blogging community.

From the inside-out

2011-05-05T15:33:00.000-04:00

Where history, psychology, and other modes of inquiry present a world made intelligible from the outside-in, novels seek to understand it from the inside-out; they obliterate the distance-producing egoisms that lure us into easy assumptions about the people around us, instead forcing us to confront the legion of shocks and heartaches and victories that hammer us into the adults we can’t help but become.

--Joshua Hardina, Smiling With Gritted Teeth

Is that you, or a bot?

2011-05-04T07:50:00.000-04:00

Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project’s analysis of 2009’s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a handful of people accounted for most of the Twitter activity there. The attempt to steer large social groups toward a particular behavior or cause has long been the province of lobbyists, whose “astroturfing” seeks to camouflage their campaigns as genuine grassroots efforts, and company employees who pose on Internet message boards as unbiased consumers to tout their products. But social bots introduce new scale: they run off a server at practically no cost, and can reach thousands of people. The details that people reveal about their lives, in freely searchable tweets and blogs, offer bots a trove of personal information to work with. “The data coming off social networks allows for more-targeted social ‘hacks’ than ever before,” says Tim Hwang, the director emeritus of the Web Ecology Project. And these hacks use “not just your interests, but your behavior.”

--Andy Isaacson, Are You Following a Bot?

Library Haul

2011-04-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

This picture is so out-of-date. I have three books "in transit" for me at the public library, three on my desk at the university library, and four that I brought home last week.

I cannot possibly get to them all, but I'm going to try!

Journey Into the Past. Stefan Zweig.

The Last Brother. Nathacha Appanah

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. Lola Shoneyin

The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. Patrick Somerville

Emerald City and Other Stories. Jennifer Egan

Model Home. Eric Puchner

Thirteen Orphans. Jane Lindskold

Father of the Rain. Lily King

Red Hook Road. Ayelet Waldman

Poems. Elizabeth Bishop

Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. Susan Jacoby

Wish You Were Here. Stewart O'Nan

The Illumination. Kevin Brockmeier

When the Killing's Done. T.C. Boyle

Ship Breaker. Paolo Bacigalupi

The Empty Family. Colm Toibin

The Collected Stories. Grace Paley

Stockpile!

2011-04-06T19:24:00.000-04:00

My hopes to keep my book purchases within the 2-4 books a month range have been dashed. I've received three books--David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock, and Sarah Blakewell's How to Live--since the photo was taken and expect a couple more within a few days.

In Great Waters. Kit Whitfield. Mermaids! Alternative history! I've had this on my wish list since it made the top ten of 2010 at Eve's Alexandria.

Purple Hibiscus. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Read for the staff book club at the library--but the book club dissolved before the discussion took place. Long story short, it was also the latest selection for the campus-wide book club, which met this afternoon. Good group, good discussion, and I put in a few good words for Half of a Yellow Sun.

The Aleph and Other Stories. Jorge Luis Borges. The idea of Borges scares me, but when I went to Borders to buy Purple Hibiscus and Purple Hibiscus wasn't there, I had to justify the trip somehow. . .

A Novel Bookstore. Laurence Cosse. From the Borders trip--a Slaves of Golconda suggested title.

The Yacoubian Building. Alaa Al Aswany. From the Borders trip--a Slaves of Golconda suggested title.

Going Out. Scarlett Thomas. An early Thomas. From the used bookstore here in town.

The Plot Against America. Philip Roth. I can't believe I haven't read this yet; a find from the used bookstore.

This Vacant Paradise. Victoria Patterson. I've already read, and enjoyed greatly, this contemporary retelling of The House of Mirth.

The Autograph Man. Zadie Smith. John recommended this to me ages ago. Whatever happened to John?

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. James Tiptree Jr. Tiptree's one of the science fiction authors mentioned in Among Others, and since I'd read a Tiptree story a few years back and enjoyed it, I therefore concluded I ought to read more.

Princes in the Land. Joanna Cannan. I can't believe I actually got this book! I've tried ordering it from Book Depository at least twice before and my order would always wind up cancelled. I practically lunged when I saw it was back in stock.

The Wise Virgins. Leonard Woolf. A used copy with only a bit of a coffee stain. . .

The Vet's Daughter. Barbara Comyns. This has been on my wish list for years; reading Who was Changed and Who was Dead moved it into the shopping cart.

Irretrievable. Theodor Fontane. One of the latest releases from NYRB.

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes. Anne Carson, trans. Sasha's review influenced this purchase.

The Towers of Trebizond. Rose Macaulay. Because of the famous first sentence about the camel.

Morte D'Urban. J. F. Powers. I think this was the first NYRB I've come across at the used bookstore.

Anathem. Neal Stephenson. A rainy afternoon spent browsing at Barnes and Noble and I come home with this. I think I must have been trying to get the most words for my money. Should I read Anathem or Quicksilver first?

Minding Frankie. Maeve Binchy. Review copy.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

2011-04-04T20:05:00.002-04:00

A conscious act of independent humanity is what society can least afford. If they once let that in, there'd be no end to it.

--Ted Tice, in The Transit of Venus

Although I had never heard of Shirley Hazzard before The Great Fire won the National Book Award back in 2003, I was so keen to read it afterwards that I plucked it from a cart down in tech services instead of waiting for it to make its way upstairs and out onto the library floor. It turned out to be a tough read, with its "often oblique writing style, more implication than explanation," as I wrote, after finishing it, at Live Journal. Till then I'd never read such elliptical writing, and while I determined that I did want to attempt The Transit of Venus, her previous novel that she'd published all the way back in 1980, I was of the opinion that Edward P. Jones' The Known World should have won the NBA. I'm a sucker for anachrony, especially flashforwards, and Jones left me swooning with his ability to go forward, backward, all in the same paragraph.

Had I known that Hazzard would hinge the reader's comprehension of what takes place at the end of The Transit of Venus on a couple of flashforwards, I'm sure I'd have quit intending to read it--someday, when my brain's up for it-- and actually read it long before now.

The Transit of Venus requires a lot of effort, a lot of focus, from the reader. Being me, I raced through it in a weekend, pencil both asterisking and underlining excessive sentences and paragraphs for further study. I'd read enough of several reviews to know that the ending tripped people up, that a line on the first page that seemed a throwaway at the time was of vital importance, and with that heightened awareness--somehow, that dead body under the bridge, mentioned briefly in the newspaper, is going to come back up--and my own love for flashforwards, I reached the end with a fairly good big picture understanding of what had taken place. Since then, I've been going back through the pages, rereading what I'd marked and noticing many many other glints of literary gold I'd previously missed, foreshadowings and insights and sentences that made more sense now that I was looking at them from the proper angle. Not that I feel that I've mastered the material, but that I'm sure that it's worth my time to read again.

And it seems a fitting book to be reading now, when I'm also reading A Visit from the Goon Squad (another book that breaks your heart in its flashforwards), so I can think how two writers concerned with what's left out, what's told slant, manage to create characters and stories that aren't reduced to the status of second fiddle.

Please join the Slaves of Golconda discussion of The Transit of Venus here and here.

What I've been reading lately

2011-04-03T11:32:00.001-04:00

I know, I know, I've been absent around these parts and I do feel guilty. I know what causes me to feel burned out on blogging and yet I still find it difficult not to be distracted by the malaise of other bloggers, by outbreaks of drama, usually from areas of the book blogging community that have little or no bearing on my own, by the realization that I'd much rather read than write a review designed to market product (and I am putting it that bluntly because I chanced upon a comment by a book blogger who said that's what she does--product reviews) for an industry that's found a source of free labor. Labor, of course, that is discounted, disparaged, demeaned by those who may or not--that's still hotly debated--benefit.

I just want to read, record my thoughts on what I read. I want to read blogs by other readers who do the same, who are more interested in recommending and discussing books than marketing them, than marketing themselves. (And watch me turn right around later this week with a giveaway from a publisher.) I want to follow Twitter links directly to interesting posts and articles, not be taken on a detour to a blogger's Tumblr posts that do nothing but repeat the tweet (and up stats across all social media) before sending you on to the full post elsewhere. What I want out of blogging is definitely not what other bloggers want.

Although I know all this, I'm too often sidetracked. My suspicion is that's related to how cruddy I've been feeling for quite some time: I find myself reading the stuff that irritates me, to justify how I feel. A couple weeks back, after two days of severe facial pain due to an especially potent crop of spring pollen, I broke down and went to the doctor. Since I was there, I mentioned how frequent and unpredictable my migraines had come, how often I felt overcome by feelings of free-floating rage--surely, menopause had to be right around the corner to account for this upheaval, right? My doctor kept asking questions until she determined that what I'd been seeing as purely a hormonal issue was actually due to lack of sleep. Bingo: I'd told L. months ago that I felt as sleep-deprived as I had when the kids were babies; I'd become so accustomed to it that I'd ceased to see it as a problem.

So, a sleep aid. I'm off caffeine. My sugar craving's gone. I've still not achieved eight hours more than a time or two, but I'm managing to go back to sleep when I wake in the middle of the night, I'm getting enough sleep to dream again. It feels pretty wonderful.

To help regain my blogging mojo, I've started reading through my favorite bloggers' archives and will continue to do so because it's turning out to be even more fun than I'd expected.

And now for the books I read in March:

Louise Penny's The Brutal Telling. My friend C. has raved about Bury Your Dead, and I read this in prep for reading its follow-up. Hated it. I have certain pet peeves, and one of the biggies is Shifting Perspective. Penny played hopscotch through her characters' heads--a sentence or two from one's perspective, a sentence or two from another's, and on and on, until we're even briefly privy to a horse's thoughts. C. laughed at me when I ranted about this, but B.S. said she didn't like shifting viewpoint either and that Penny doesn't do it in Bury Your Dead. I did like the duck and the trip to Queen Charlotte Islands, however.

Jean Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction, from the Art of series. I'd like to read the rest of the series, but I didn't like this near as Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. I was pleased when the library staff book club chose Adichie, but alas, the club was disbanded before the discussion took place. Very much a first novel--the main character narrates a scene she wasn't on hand to witness and the first person perspective keeps us from learning why the Catholic father would repeatedly beat his wife until she aborted (even crazy religious fundamentalism doesn't account for that)--but a noteworthy debut nonetheless.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors. The Tournament of Books crowd would label this one a White Male Fuck Up novel and there were several occasions when I wished someone would smack the main character/narrator upside the head. But it's also an interesting look at the contemporary South, at how thinking someone's a good guy merely because he isn't a racist, or someone's bad because he is, is ultimately an inadequate way of judging your fellow man (or self). Plus, there's an incredible set piece the Ole Miss library involving a deer that's crashed through a glass window that I'm glad I didn't miss.

Jo Walton's Among Others. Loved, loved, loved this. A fantasy novel that sings the praises of science fiction, a coming-of-age story that takes place in the aftermath of the story most authors would have chosen to tell instead of this one. Loved following the links about the book back to Walton's Live Journal and reading the discussion between Walton and Pamela Dean on whether fan fic between the worlds in Among Others and Tam Lin could sync up, as well as the original post that was the genesis of the book.

John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. One of the myriad books mentioned in Among Others, and one I happened to have on hand. Genetic mutations in a dystopian community where religious fundamentalism runs rampant. I want to read more Wyndham.

Barbara Comyns' Who was Changed and Who was Dead. I read Our Spoons Came from Woolworths years ago, but this was quite different. A flood, a very peculiar family, ergot poisoning. I'll want to read it again, after I've read the rest of Comyns' work.

William Faulkner's Spotted Horses. Reviewed for the Classics Circuit.

Victoria Patterson's This Vacant Paradise. I ordered this immediately after reading Kate Christensen's review. I love modern takes on classics, particularly when the writer takes inspiration from, instead of strick adherence to, the original. Patterson does this beautifully with this Southern California retelling of The House of Mirth.

Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. For the Slaves of Golconda discussion at the end of the week. All I'll say now is that I loved it.

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Because of the Patterson and because it had been at least a decade since I first read it. It holds up.

And now I'm going to try to stay current with what I'm reading instead of letting everything languish.

The Classics Circuit: William Faulkner's "Spotted Horses"

2011-03-25T07:15:00.001-04:00

If you are like me, you may have been surprised to see William Faulkner on the Classic Circuit's Lost Generation Tour sign-up page. If you are me, then you immediately followed up with the mental quip, "But of course, every generation in the South is a lost generation," before moving on into the "Why do you hate the South? I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!" territory. And then ~~you~~ I signed up for "Spotted Horses" instead of therapy.

I expected that there'd be a dead mule, or two, in the near future: As I Lay Dying is the gold standard where dead mules are concerned, and As I Lay Dying contains the first published mention of the story of the spotted horses:

"Then we saw him. He came up along the ditch and then turned straight across the field, riding the horse. Its mane and tale were going, as though in motion they were carrying out the splotchy pattern of its coat: he looked like he was riding on a a big pinwheel, barebacked, with a rope bridle, and no hat on his head. It was a descendant of those Texas ponies Flem Snopes brought here twenty-five years ago and auctioned off for two dollars a head and nobody but old Lon Quick ever caught his and still owned some of the blood because he could never give it away."

As I Lay Dying, with its passing reference to the auction of Texas ponies 25 years earlier, was published in 1930. The first published version of "Spotted Horses"followed in 1931. Described by its Scribner editor as "a tall tale with implications of tragedy," it was narrated by Suratt, a sewing machine agent. The story would be further expanded, switched into third person narration, and incorporated into The Hamlet, published in 1940, the first novel in the Snopes Trilogy. The version of "Spotted Horses" that's bundled these days with "The Bear" and "Old Man" is the longer, third person, account. Suratt's had his name changed to Ratliff. (And I haven't even mentioned the earliest mention of these spotted horses in "Father Abraham," written around 1926-27, but not published till 1983.)

So this is a story of Flem Snopes, who returns to Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi, riding in a mule-drawn covered wagon with a stranger from Texas, bringing along a string of wild, pinto horses, "larger than rabbits and gaudy as parrots and shackled to one another and to the wagon itself with sections of barbed wire. Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy, motionless, and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves."

1989 Boyd Saunders illustration

The horses are obviously untamed and dangerous, but the Texan insists all it will take to gentle them is a couple days work. The men of Frenchman Bend, chosing to ignore the evidence before their eyes, chosing to turn a deaf ear to Ratliff's warnings and scorn, are still enthralled by the idea of getting a horse at auction for next to nothing: "Anse McCallum brought two of them horses back from Texas once. . . . Anse McCallum made a good team outen them two of hisn. . ."

Besides, they don't really know if Flem Snopes owns the horses. Ratliff tells them, "when a man's done got trimmed, I don't reckon he cares who's got the money," but the men don't seem convinced. If Snopes isn't involved, the risk of being conned might be low.

"A fellow can dodge a Snopes if he just starts lively enough," Ratliff tells them. "In face, I don't believe he would have to pass more than two folks before he would have another victim intervened betwixt them."

Grown a little wary overnight, they're not anxious to start the bidding the next morning, even when Flem Snopes doesn't make an appearance and the Texan starts without him. To start off the bidding, the Texan actually gives a horse to Eck the blacksmith, angering Henry Armstid. Despite his wife's pleas, Henry will bid all the money he has, five dollars that she's earned weaving to buy shoes for their children, feed for their stock, to secure a wild horse. By sunset the Texan will have sold the herd, hitched the mules to a buggy with a fringed parasol top, and claimed he's off to visit "Northern towns." Flem Snopes will ride with him as far as Varner's house, presumably to get his share of the money.

And that's when the story gets very lively.

No one had been permitted to catch their horse while the auction was going on and no man can catch their horse now: "for an instant of static horror men and animals faced one another, then the men whirled and ran before a gaudy vomit of long wild faces and splotched chest which overtook and scattered them and flung them sprawling aside and completely obliterated from sight Henry and the little boy, neither of whom had moved though Henry had flung up both arms, still holding his coiled rope, the herd sweeping on across the lot, to crash through the gate which the last man through it had neglected to close, leaving it slightly ajar, carrying all of the gate save the upright to which the hinges were nailed with them, and so among the teams and wagons which choked the lane, the teams springing and lunging too, snapping hitch-reins and tongues. Then the whole inextricable mass crashed among the wagons and eddied and divided about the one in which the woman sat, and rushed on down the lane and into the road, dividing, one half going one way and one half the other."

One horse, the one that was given to Eck, will "whirl and dash back and rush through the gate into Mrs. Littlejohn's yard and run up the front steps and crash once on the wooden veranda and vanish through the front door. Eck and the boy ran up onto the veranda. A lamp sat on a table just inside the door. In its mellow light they saw the horse fill the long hallway like a pinwheel, gaudy, furious and thunderous. A little further down the hall there was a varnished yellow melodeon. The horse crashed into it; it produced a single note, almost a chord, in bass, resonant and grave, of deep and sober astonishment; the horse with its monstrous and antic shadow whirled again and vanished through another door. It was a bedroom; Ratliff, in his underclothes and one sock and with the other sock in his hand and his back to the door, was leaning out the open window facing the lane, the lot. He looked back over his shoulder. For an instant he and the horse glared at one another. Then he sprang through the window as the horse backed out of the room and into the hall again and whirled and saw Eck and the little boy just entering the front door, Eck still carrying his rope. It whirled again and rushed on down the hall and onto the back porch just as Mrs. Littlejohn, carrying an armful of clothes from the line and the washboard, mounted the steps.

"'Get out of here, you son of a bitch,' she said. She struck with the washboard; it divided neatly on the long mad face and the horse whirled and rushed back up the hall, where Eck and the boy now stood."

Eventually the horse will break free of the house, soar "outward, hobgoblin and floating, in the moon." There will be an incident on a bridge, involving a wagon and mules; injuries, both long-term and -short; conjectures about and issues with Flem Snopes; longsuffering and attempts to get her five dollars back by Mrs. Armsted; and the story will end in a makeshift court of law, trying to work out who owned what and who's responsible for what.

Flem Snopes will refuse to attend, refuse the court summons, maintaining "They wasn't none of my horses."

And twenty-five years later Jewel Bundren will have him one of these gaudy pintos, and it will be as rattlesnake-deadly as the first spotted horses brought to Yoknapatawpha County by Flem Snopes.

If you're a fan of Mark Twain, or of Southern humor, don't miss "Spotted Horses." The only disappointment in store is in the dead mule department--there's a mention of an Armsted mule having died three or four plowing seasons back, but none within the story itself.

Are you reading enough?

2011-03-23T21:20:00.000-04:00

Let the Government stop thinking of reading and books as part of "education", and more as part of a healthy existence. If they can set a target of five fruit and vegetables a day for the adult population, why can't they set a target of 20 books a year? Why shouldn't the GP, faced with an aimless, purposeless, depressed patient, not inquire "Are you reading enough?" just as they might say "Are you eating sensibly?"

Fifty books a year while in education; 20 a year throughout adult life. That might turn our lives around.

--Philip Hensher, Fifty books a year is ideal, but why stop at school children?

Institutional patriarchy

2011-03-23T08:58:00.000-04:00

It is ironic that the more generous and ecumenical reading habits of women (who are the majority of fiction readers) should diminish the status of writing about women, but that’s institutional patriarchy for you. If women had any idea that just by watching other women play basketball in significant numbers they could really screw TV programming sideways, thousands of years of male dominance would be on shaky ground.

--Kevin Guilfoile, Nox v. Next commentary

2011-03-07T11:08:00.001-05:00

If you're me, you know it's going to be a good day when you hear, on the drive to work, Dwight Yoakam and Ralph Stanley singing "Some Dark Holler" followed by Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slave."

If you're not me, such a combo may not push the appropriate buttons.

What makes your Monday worth the effort?

Persephone Reading Weekend: Emma Smith and Margaret Oliphant

2011-02-27T11:45:00.008-05:00

Little sheep that I sometimes am, I started collecting Persephone Books in March of 2009. After accumulating eight, I read my first, Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a couple months later. While I certainly enjoyed it, I didn't find it deserving of level of fuss Persephone fans had lavished on these pretty dove-grey books. I ILLed an earlier edition of Christine Longford's Making Conversation, at that time one of the more-recent Persephone reissues, and it was at that point--now that I owned 11--that I began to wonder if I were wasting my time and money on these expensive books. Making Conversation was obviously an inside joke and I just. didn't. get it.

But here I am, participating in a Persephone Weekend, so you know this story's going to turn around, don't you?

Summer of 2009 I read Richmal's Crompton's Family Roundabout and Joanna Cannan's Princes in the Land and I adored the both of them. I have continued to enjoy all the Persphones I've read since, although these two remain my favorites. In fact, I wish Persphone would devote to Crompton the same attention given to Whipple--although I say that as someone who's managed to collect four Whipples without reading a one of them. Yet.

Last week I read one of my very first Persphone purchases, Emma Smith's The Far Cry, the 1949 winner of the James Tait Black Memorial prize for best novel.

He guided the Austin carefully over the planks on to the ferry. He wanted, he urgently wanted to say more, but hesitated, not wishing to antagonise her. He wanted to say: Yes, everything is different; differences are bewildering. Do not, in order to be rid of your bewilderness, attempt to reduce what is extraordinary to the limts of your ordinary appreciation. That is what most people do. They try to commonise, to reduce, because they are afraid of being bewildered. Let yourself be astonished. Be small. That is enough for you, and for me.

It's the story of a 14-year-old, Teresa, who is abruptly pulled from school and taken by her father to stay in India with a married half-sister and her husband. It seems that her father, a teacher, has a lot of unresolved issues where his ex-wife is concerned. When she writes that she'll be returning to England from the States now that her second marriage has ended, he determines, rather dog-in-the-manger-ish style since he doesn't have much of a relationship with their daughter himself, that he's not about to let them meet.

The novel details their hurried preparations, their journey to and through India, and life on a tea plantation, their ultimate destination. There's a lot of gorgeous description of India itself, the country, the people, its customs and celebrations. Midway through the book the focus shifts its focus from Teresa to her half-sister and husband, who despite their love for one another, have a most unhappy marriage, before circling back to Teresa, and where and how she should live.

I'm not in any way doing this book justice, but I highly recommend it!

Yesterday I read a selection from my latest Perspehone purchase--Margaret Oliphant's "Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond," the second novella published within The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow. Claire and Desperate Reader both wrote about this one yesterday, so I'll send you off to read their reviews and won't attempt to duplicate another here.

I will say that I am always drawn to stories where the husband, the father of a large brood, walks out on his family without a word of explanation and the woman is left to carry on. (My favorite of these, indeed, one of my all-time favorite novels, is Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I thought a lot about the Tyler novel yesterday, so much so that I decided that it's time for another reread.)

Unlike many of these stories, Eleanor Lycett-Landon actually undercovers what's behind her husband's disappearance. She decides to make no attempt to get him back; her main concern is to keep the children from learning the truth. There is to be no legal action taken, no attempt at punishing their transgressor. She and the children will have to evade, equivocate, endure the questions asked about why Mr. Lycett-Landon never comes home, but that is Eleanor's choice, made despite the advice of one of her husband's cotton-broker business partners.

'You are mad!' cried the old man. 'You have lost all your good sense, and your feeling too. What, your own husband! you would let him go on living in sin--happy--'

She stopped him with a curious kind of authority--a look before which he paused in spite of himself.

'Happy!' she said; 'I suppose so; at fifty, after living honestly all these years!'

He stopped and shook his grey head. 'I have known such a thing before. It seems as if they must break out--as if common life and duty became insupportable. I have known such a case once before.'

Why worry about punishment, or bringing daddy back home, when there is money enough for every day life to go on satisfactorily, happily, otherwise honestly, without him?

No wonder this Victorian era novella has been called un-Victorian!

I'm definitely interested in reading more works by Margaret Oliphant. I downloaded The Doctor's Family on my Kindle this morning.

And my thanks to Claire and Verity for hosting Persephone Reading Weekend. I would have let these books languish on the shelves for much longer without this little push.

Hello Monday

2011-02-21T07:56:00.000-05:00

I'm looking at ya.

First stockpile of the year

2011-02-14T13:39:00.001-05:00

I am trying to limit my book purchases this year to a reasonable number. At various times over the last few weeks, that reasonable number has shifted from an upper limit of two per month to an upper limit of four. If you subtract the book on top, which was a freebie, and Swamplandia, which I preordered in 2010 and therefore doesn't count in this year's purchases, and add one-and-a-half-Kindle downloads (explanation for that down below), I'm restricted from buying anything else for, oh, a couple of weeks.

The book on top of the pile is a "free copy" (it says so on the front cover) of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. I'm not positive, but I think going to ALA in DC a few years back had something to do with it showing up in the mail. Someone recently recommended the Outlander series to me, so I suppose I ought to read it now that I have my very own copy.

Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision. A collection of short stories by a North Carolina publishing house. I braved the mall to buy a marked-down calendar in mid-January, and this was my reward for making the trip.

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, second movement. Since I have yet to start on the first movement, I should not have bought this.

Rebecca West's Train of Powder and Family Memories. I don't feel guilty about ordering these one bit.

Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Gators and ghosts and good times ahead!

Jonathan Evison's West of Here. I'm probably the only blogger who didn't request it from the publisher, but I've got a history of buying Algonquin's books that goes way back. I like supporting North Carolina publishing houses.

And for the Kindle: Connie Willis's All Clear and Eleanor Brown's Weird Sisters. I'm counting the Brown as half a purchase since it was my mother-in-law who wanted to buy it (I was happy being on the list for it at the library). I figure we can split the price, though.

I'm going to stop buying books. . .

2011-02-13T15:06:00.001-05:00

Well, maybe not, but I ought to!

Last year there were a lot of changes at the university library including a new book distributor, one that provides us with books that come shelf-ready. Between the budget crisis from the previous year and a focus on filling the faculty's needs, there were long months on end with slim literary pickings on the new books shelves for the likes of me.

Things are much improved now; while there are quite a few worthy books from last year that the library still doesn't have, spotting Charles Baxter, Gryphon, on the shelf last week--just out last month--gives me hope that the lag between publication and purchase isn't to be as great as it's been in the past.

Coming home with me Friday afternoon were:

Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction. Baxter is series editor for the Art of collection, and I thoroughly enjoyed his own contribution, The Art of Subtext, back in 2007.

J. Robert Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand. Stories of the flash fiction variety.

Barbara Comyns's Who was Changed and Who was Dead. I read Our Spoons Came from Woolworths years back, so I know what a treat this will be. The first sentence: "The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows."

Michael Austin's Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature. According to the flap, a useful fiction is "a simple narrative that serves an adaptive function unrelated to its factual one."

Anne Carson's An Oresteia. I'm going to listen to all of you and read The Orestia first, but I wanted it on hand nonetheless.

Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period. This is Trollope's sole venture into dystopian territory, written after he'd presumably read Erewhon.

Louise Penny's The Brutal Telling. C. has been raving about the follow-up to this mystery, Bury Your Dead, which she wants to Kindle-loan to me. But the reviews at Amazon lead me to believe I ought to read this one first.

Percival Everett's Wounded. It's about a horse-trainer in Wyoming and it's been compared to Cormac McCarthy and Walker Van Tilburg Clark. This just might be my choice for C.B.'s western challenge in the spring.

Charles Baxter's Gryphon. New and selected stories.

Joe Sacco's Palestine. A landmark work of comics journalism, according to the cover blurb.

Tomorrow: the books I've bought since the first of the year.

2011-02-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

I'd ignored all the tweeting furor last week about the author who dissed bloggers until Jeanne weighed in on her blog--these day I'm not going out of my way to find the drama since so much of it seems to cycle around anyway. How many times does anyone need to read the latest version of the Bloggers are Unprofessional story? But of course once I followed Jeanne's link to the offending post I stayed around to read most of the 180 outraged comments despite the fact that I despise pink font.

(I don't care if you write romances or chicklit: proudly proclaim your pink pride with something other than the font, okay? Do you really want to cause ~~the pink eye,~~ eye strain in your readers?)

And then I read the reviewer's post that the author claimed didn't "quantify" why she'd called the plot predictable and the characters one-dimensional as well as all the following comments, including the ones by Anonymous, who seemed so emotionally invested in the book and in putting its detractors in their place that any reasonable person would bet a dollar to a doughnut that Anony had to be the author. By the time I clicked back to the author's blog, looking for additional comments there, she'd deleted them all.

Which of course was her perogative.

And I figured I'd wasted enough time on this particular brouhaha.

But I woke up this morning thinking once again about this:

Oftentimes, the people who set up these kinds of blogs have never written a thing in their lives, except maybe a grocery list. Most are avid readers who think they are qualified to review someone else's work. So it's very sad when they go about damaging the image of upcoming small press and indie authors with the rubbish they write.

and

Please bear in mind that writers work very hard at their craft and the last thing they need is a smartass who makes subjective comments because they don't know how to do anything else.

(Do you see what I mean about the pink font?)

I blog because I'm an avid reader, not because I've published poetry, fiction, journalism. Frankly, I think being an avid reader pretty much takes care of all the qualifications necessary for having a book blog, where basically we all share our thoughts and opinions on what we've read. There are bloggers who gush or snark or journal their way through a book instead of writing the traditional review and they seem to do very well for themselves. There are others who aspire to the Platonic Ideal of reviewing by carefully following the dictates set forth periodically by spokesmembers of the book industry. They market and brand and promote and network and they do very well for themselves, too. There's no right way or wrong way to write about books on a book blog; different approaches will lead to different audiences, that's all.

I don't know this for a fact, but I would assume it's the bloggers who don't have a writing background of some sort that are the most amenable to accepting an ARC from a self-publishing author. I know, I know, more writers are going that route and it doesn't carry the stigma that it used to, but still, it's a two-fold risk: the writing may be wretched, and even if it's okay and you provide a qualified review, the author may not have learned how to handle anything less than whole-hearted adoration with the necessary grace. Rowena reviewed The Other Boyfriend unfavorably three months ago and Sylvia Massara still hasn't gotten over it!

Massara is right on one account: there are best-selling authors who receive bad reviews. She glissandos over the fact that many of these bad reviews come from professional reviewers, though, not just the ones with the grocery list-backgrounds that she disdains, because she's clearly trying to make herself feel better. (There's no accounting for taste, people; that's why some crap books sell.) She also glides right over the fact that as a self-publishing author she's not likely to receive any attention from the professionals.

Sylvia Massara has gotten lots of attention from everyone else this week. This morning I decided not to be one of the bloggers swearing I'd never read any of her books because she'd made such an ass of herself--not that I blame anyone who's put her on their do-not-read lists. I decided to cut her a bit of slack; to separate the writer from the work; to be objective about it all. You know, the way Sylvia Massara wants us to be.

I downloaded the free sample of The Other Boyfriend onto the Kindle.

And I immediately felt as if I were once again in writing workshop, critiquing an early draft to a story. A draft where a person exclaims a full sentence in disbelief while simultaneously taking a deep drag from her cigarette [a group discussion would ensue over whether that's even possible and if it is, should it be left in if it drags a portion of the readers from the story]; where a character who's just requested that her best friend find a boyfriend for a third woman will assume that the subsequent "excited cry" of "Mike" refers to an unexpected mention of a karaoke microphone instead of an eligible male [question: is this supposed to be funny or a hint that the main character's kind of stupid?]. A draft wherein you will find sentences such as this: "It was at times like this that I wished I was a smoker like Monica so I could throw an ashtray at his head, in the hope that it would unscramble his brain and spur him into action so he could free himself of the ball and chain." Said ball and chain is also referred to as the "Singapore Hag," which undoubtedly would lead into a discussion of whether the writer wants her readers to dislike her main character for engaging in such name-calling, and if so, what could she do to make her more interesting, via the writing itself or the character's personality, so that the readers will want to stick with the story. Or, if she's supposed to be a character the reader likes and relates to, a suggestion to take that bit out.

In a writing workshop I'd be okay with reading a manucript of this calibre. I'd be interested to see the next draft, to see what improvements had been made. I'd be happy to be one of the first readers who questions everything in its construction so that once the story's ultimately finished and published no one would ever mentally question or reword how it is told. But I have no interest in reading a published novel of this same quality, even less in blogging about it in a way that puts the author's precious feelings above anything else I might have to say about it.

Book reviews are for readers, not authors. Whining about the ones that don't offer the writer "constructive criticism" when such criticism should have taken place before publication is simply ridiculous.

The only constructive criticism left to offer a writer after the book is published is this: Don't insult your readers. Don't dismiss their opinions as rubbish. Don't accuse them of malice because they didn't like your book.

Negative reviews can often lead other readers to pick up your book, readers who may like it--but not if you've managed to alienate them all through your unprofessional behavior.

George Gissing and Demos: A Story of English Socialism

2011-02-07T08:11:00.001-05:00

[Overwhelming proof that I'm the worst of bloggers: I read this particular Gissing last summer, intended the post for BBAW in September, as a thank you to Frisbee for leading me to this book, then abandoned the post, half-finished, when we had computer difficulties for a short period of time. Geez.]

In the end, it becomes fairly clear why [George] Gissing's books have always appealed to a few rather than to many. He was a lonely, conservative atheist, a sensitive and loving observer of nature, devoted to the classics, and gifted as few writers have been in portraying lower-class and middle-class life, thought, and character. Readers who respond to him are likely to be outsiders, "born in exile" too. --Judy Stove, New Criterion, Feb 2004

After completing In the Year of Jubilee back in the spring, I'd been torn as to which George Gissing I wanted to read next. I was leaning toward Born in Exile when Frisbee's post in May led me to pick up Demos instead.

If I tell you that Demos has been regarded as a prototype of Animal Farm, you won't pull a been there, done that on me, will you? (Granted, Animal Farm can be read in a mere 53 minutes or less and Demos will take several days, at the very least, but there's a slow reading movement afoot these days as well as plenty of e-readers for effortless/free downloading of the previously elusive if you don't want to spring for the gorgeous new edition being brought back into print next month by Victorian Secrets ).

Ahem.

So, anyway, George Orwell admired Gissing's work, saying he was "exceptional among English writers" due to his interest "in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives" and make "a credible story out of the collision between them."

Despite his admiration, Orwell found it difficult to lay his hands on very many of Gissing's novels since they'd already gone out of print (Orwell was born the year Gissing died, 1903), but he did mention reading a "soupstained" library copy of Demos in his 1948 essay on the novelist.

On Gissing himself, Orwell said:

Gissing was a bookish, perhaps over-civilised man, in love with classical antiquity, who found himself trapped in a cold, smoky, Protestant country where it was impossible to be comfortable without a thick padding of money between yourself and the outer world. Behind his rage and querulousness there lay a perception that the horrors of life in late-Victorian England were largely unnecessary. The grime, the stupidity, the ugliness, the sex-starvation, the furtive debauchery, the vulgarity, the bad manners, the censoriousness — these things were unnecessary, since the puritanism of which they were a relic no longer upheld the structure of society. People who might, without becoming less efficient, have been reasonably happy chose instead to be miserable, inventing senseless taboos with which to terrify themselves. Money was a nuisance not merely because without it you starved; what was more important was that unless you had quite a lot of it — £300 a year, say — society would not allow you to live gracefully or even peacefully. Women were a nuisance because even more than men they were the believers in taboos, still enslaved to respectability even when they had offended against it. Money and women were therefore the two instruments through which society avenged itself on the courageous and the intelligent. Gissing would have liked a little more money for himself and some others, but he was not much interested in what we should now call social justice. He did not admire the working class as such, and he did not believe in democracy. He wanted to speak not for the multitude, but for the exceptional man, the sensitive man, isolated among barbarians.

And in Demos Gissing takes a man who does want to speak for the working class, a man who's a proponent of socialism, of bringing the classes together, and proceeds to bring him to his ruin.

Rather unfairly, from my perspective.

The opening situation is this: a Midlands capitalist with an iron mine and factory blighting otherwise beautiful countryside burns his will and dies before he can write its replacement. His presumed heir, a young local aristocrat, has been sowing his wild oats in Paris and ignoring his mother's pleas to get himself home before it's too late to regain the family estate lost in a previous generation. It's very easy for the reader not to feel too sorry for the aristocrat when he manages to roll in, feverish and delirious from the gunshot wound he's sporting in his side, on the far side of the capitalist's funeral. You had your chance, bucko, and you botched it.

No, the reader's sympathies are with working-class Richard Mutimer of London, who never knew his great uncle, in fact was surprised to learn he hadn't died already years back, who now unexpectedly finds himself his principal heir. Richard has just recently lost his job as a mechanic due to his outspoken radical beliefs. Now he decides to operate his uncle's factory according to these same socialistic principles. He worries how best to prepare his younger brother and sister for the wealth they'll come into when they reach 21. He moves his mother and siblings into a larger house in London and provides financially for his girlfriend and her invalid sister, promising to marry Emma and move her into the manor house in the country once its current tenants have moved out and relocated.

Granted, Gissing has mocked Richard's efforts at self-education and pointed out enough of his shortcomings for the reader to know things won't go smoothly for him as he attempts the rise in class and status. Yet his initial inclinations seem so naturally correct, so well-intended, that it's hard not to expect most difficulties he'll encounter to arise outside himself, rather than from within.

This is the prototype for Animal Farm, however, so money and position corrupt him all too soon and ruin the lives of many. I'll leave the infuriating particularities of his downfall to be discovered by those who'd like to look at the nineteenth century from the perspective of one George Gissing, a man who pitied the poor individually, but didn't care to see the class as a whole promoted; who much preferred the aristocrats as a class, despite their individual failings. It's a bleak philosophy he puts forth in Demos, expanded upon near the end of the novel by a character presumed to be speaking for Gissing, one that reminded me a great deal of a viewpoint encountered in Germinal. (I'll post these sections that I have in mind tomorrow.) It's not a philosophy I endorse, but one I attempt to understand.

Read Demos when you're feeling isolated among the barbarians.

Reading update, a rather rambling one at that

2011-02-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

Reading-wise, I probably have too many irons in the fire right now. I'm three letters into the alphabet in Insectopedia; four chapters into Nixonland; one essay away from the book reviews in The Essential Rebecca West; one act completed in my reread of Othello; random scant stories into Binocular Vision. I've kept Choices in my In Progress widget as penance despite not picking it up since early December (people who tried this after I raved about Mary Lee Settle: oh, this one is not. at. all. like the Settles I've loved). I need to start rereading Atonement for library staff book club. I need to start Safe from the Neighbors just because I want to. I need to stop being afraid of The Waves and float luxuriously upon its waters like W., my poet friend and fellow Woolf reader, instead of remaining stiffly upright (so who's the counterpart to Forster? who's supposed to be Vanessa?), afraid of going out too far.

David imagines himself with octopus arms, but I wish I were an insect with multi-faceted eyes to take in all these books at once.

He Knew He Was Right is now my favorite Trollope. L. and I have had a running joke throughout the years--that the underhanded minister tricked a promise to obey out of me during our wedding ceremony--that I thought about quite often over the week I spent racing through this novel. I don't do obedience. If L. suggests we attempt to stick for a length of time to what he terms an "austerity budget" to achieve some financial goal, I'll concur. If he says DON'T you spend any money you don't have to, I'll come home with a bronze statue of John by-god Wayne or a sleigh bed sticking out of the back of the car and say DON'T you even ask what this cost. And he doesn't. Marriage means recognizing when you'd better back off and think of a better way to word your requests.

But what if there's no give and take, what if the obedience demanded of you also includes swearing that a base falsehood told about you is absolutely true? Would it have been possible for Emily to endure, let alone achieve contentedness in, a marriage to such a paranoid individual as Louis? Our cat Claudius suffers from paranoia* and while we all tolerate and make concessions for the delusions that dictate his behavior, we know his default settings aren't right and no one--human or cat--is willing to fall in line with his way of thinking.

Anyway, I'm rereading Othello, mentioned several times in the Trollope, since I haven't read it since high school and I'm trying to read as organically as I can this year.

Because the dovetailing in the books I've read so far in 2011 has been glorious, although none of it was planned. The Alan Turing and cryptoanalysis of WWII in the Connie Willises reappear in Scarlett Thomas's PopCo; the destruction of the London department stores during the Blitz, first encountered fictionally in Willis, happens in real life in a Rebecca West essay. A saying used to illustrate chaos theory late in the Willis shows up again as the epigraph to Started Early, Took My Dog. Plato's Symposium influences Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

And so it will go, if I'm lucky, through the rest of the year's reading.

~~~

*including the misguided notion that he might be safer disguised as a zebra

Ancient Greek Classics: Selected Myths by Plato

2011-01-30T10:00:00.003-05:00

When the Classics Circuit announced its Ancient Greek tour I was sure I'd go with drama--The Oresteia or An Oresteia, I pondered over the course of several days, occasionally wondering if perhaps I should sign up for a comedy--say, The Frogs--instead of always heading straight for a wallow in the grim and gruesome depictions of extreme family dysfunction.

Before I'd committed one way or the other, Plato's Selected Myths, with its lovely Joachim Patenir cover of Charon Crossing the River Styx caught my eye on one of the "just checked in" book carts at the library, and I realized my choice had been made for me.

Plato wrote myths? Did everyone know this but me? I'd been operating for years under the conviction that by the time Socrates and Plato came around, Greek mythology was, if not over for the society at large, at least brushed aside by these emerging powerhouse philosophers, who had more important matters on their minds than relating the further adventures of Zeus and Poseidon and the gang. "The Cave" was an allegory, not a myth, right? Plato was all Politics and Socratic Dialogues and the Academy, um, right?

Well, when I'm wrong (more often than I like to admit), I'm wrong. Plato's philosophical writings incorporate many myths, I now know, both traditional retellings and his own creations.

As Catalin Partenie's introduction tells the reader, "Both Plato's myths and his dialogues are narrative: in all of them a story is being told by a story-teller. But the mythical story is different from the frame-story of the dialogues, in which two or more characters--in a particular setting and at a particular time--carry on a philosophical conversation. The mythical story is a fantastical story, for it always contains a fair amount of fantastical details. Plato is aware of that and he often makes the myth-teller admit it. In Phaedo, for instance, he makes Socrates say, after expounding the long myth about the afterlife, that 'to insist that those things are just as I've related them woud not be fitting for a man of intelligence' . . . The myth, then, is not just fictional (made up), but fantastical (unrealistic), whereas the frame-story of the dialogues contains no fantastical details. This story is certainly fictional, for Plato has invented most of it, but it is a realistic fiction: apart for some incidental anachronisms, all dialogues describe realistic conversations between realistic characters in realistic settings. Thus Plato embeds philosophy-cum-fantastical stories into realistic stories."

Selected Myths pulls ten fantastical stories from eight dialogues of Plato, preceding each with a couple pages of explanatory context. We learn that Plato's setting for a discussion of the philosophical truths regarding love was a symposium, or drinking party, and that a discussion on virtue was set in the house of a rich Athenian where the intellectuals had come to talk. The story of the ancient city of Atlantis is told at a banquet where conversation is to be the "key entertainment."

My favorite myth, "Er's Journey into the Other World," comes from the end of The Republic. Er is killed in battle, but his body doesn't decay like everyone else's. Nevertheless he's placed on a funeral pyre twelve days later where he comes back to life and tells the story of what awaits us all: punishments or rewards both ten times the amount of the earthly deed, experienced for a thousand years in either Hades or Heaven; the Fates, the Spindle of Necessity, the harmony of the spheres, and the lottery that determines an individual's next life, the Plain of Oblivion and the River of Neglect. We're told of Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, Ajax, the incarnation of a lion; Agamemnon, that of an eagle.

"As the luck of the lottery had it, Odysseus' soul was the very last to come forward and choose. The memory of all the hardship he had previously endured had caused his ambition to subside, so he walked around for a long time, looking for a life as a non-political private citizen. At last he found one lying somewhere, disregarded by everyone else. When he saw it, he happily took it, saying that he'd have done exactly the same even if he'd been the first to choose. "

Er tells his funeral party that most souls met with a reversal of fortune during the lottery, but that it is best of us to "always keep to the upward path, and we should use every means at our disposal to act morally and with intelligence, so that we may gain our own and the gods' approval, not only during our stay here on earth, but also when we collect the prizes our morality has earned us. . ."

The quirkiest myth included in Selected Myths would have to be Plato's "The Androgyne," which relates an aetiological story on love. "You see, our nature wasn't originally the same as it is now: it has changed. First, there used to be three human genders, not just two--male and female--as there are nowadays. There was also a third, which was a combination of both the other two. Its name has survived, but the gender itself has died out. In those days, there was a distinct type of androgynous person, not just the word, though like the word the gender too combined male and female; nowadays, however, only the word remains, and that counts as an insult."

Nowadays we're just half of our complete shape (we were round like our original parent: the sun, the male gender; the earth, the female; the moon, the combined gender) because Zeus cut us in half to weaken us and keep us in our place. Love is our desire to once again be whole. Only those from the androgynous gender are heterosexual, the rest are homosexual.

I think anyone who's a fan of Greek mythology or is a Plato newbie like myself would enjoy Selected Myths. I'll definitely seek out The Republic as my next Plato based on my all-to-brief introduction to it here.

But first I want to read some of that grim and gruesome Greek drama. The Oresteia or An Oresteia? I still can't decide!

A progression for newbies to Rebecca West

2011-01-18T17:16:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled that Bernard Schweizer, president of the International Rebecca West Society, left a comment earlier today on the Rebecca West post from yesterday. I'm reproducing it here since he provides expert guidance on how to approach West's considerable body of work.

~~~~

I'm glad to see that people out there are finding and enjoying Rebecca West--her legacy should only grow, given her towering stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest public intellectuals and most gifted creative writers.

Here's the progression for newbies to West that I would suggest: start with The Essential Rebecca West to get a taste of just how multi-talented and brilliant she is. Is there a more delightful mini-memoir than "Why My Mother Was Frightened of Cats"!? Continue with The Return of the Soldier, an enigmatic and highly evocative tale about the time of World War I. Then read what I find her best long fiction work: the Aubrey Trilogy (i.e. The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund)--a real treat. Then approach Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. All other works are, of course, full of wisdom and beauty, too, especially A Train of Powder and The Birds Fall Down.

Don't expect to be always agreeing with West. She can be a thorny political thinker and hardly ever politically correct. But she was a pioneering feminist, an influential anti-communist, and an occasional blasphemer. Reading her is a bracing, invigorating experience.

Find out more about Rebecca West by visiting the homepage of the Society www.rebeccawestsociety.org

-Bernard Schweizer (President of the International Rebecca West Society)

Rebecca West project, internal adjustments

2011-01-17T12:51:00.001-05:00

Long-time readers may remember that I started my Rebecca West project back in June 2006. I read West's fiction and interviews with and books and articles about her pretty steadily for a couple of years, then, through no fault of her own (the first book I read in 2008, her The Birds Fall Down, was in fact my favorite book for the year), I stopped reading her. This was due more to my having become such a distracted-by-life/lazy blogger that I knew I wouldn't do her justice if and when I wrote about her.

And while I still feel too scattered to do her justice (not that I could, anyway), I do feel more inclined to make an effort: I'm getting older every day and I shouldn't count on any right time to do anything anymore. Carpe diem and all of that.

So far I've followed publication dates and read The Return of the Soldier, The Judge, Harriet Hume, The Harsh Voice, The Thinking Reed, The Fountain Overflows and The Birds Fall Down, all the novels published during her lifetime. I've skipped War Nurse, which she ghostwrote for Cosmopolitan and wanted to disown, although I intend to ILL it at some point. This month I read two posthumous novels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, part of the family saga that began with The Fountain Overflows and was intended to continue through a fourth, unwritten novel. I'll be posting my thoughts on the saga within a few days.

There are two additional posthumous West novels that came out in 1986 and 2002, respectively--Sunflower, which fictionalizes her love affair with Lord Beaverbrook and and the end of the H.G. Wells years, and The Sentinel, which is probably West's first full-length novel and draws on her days in the suffragette movement. And there's a 1992 Virago hardback edition of a collection of West's short stories, The Only Poet and Other Stories, with still more uncollected stories remaining to be gathered together. I want to get to these titles eventually, but right now I'm feeling the need to shift direction and delve into her non-fiction.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is of course her masterpiece, but I'm going to first dip into journalism and essays that don't run on for 1,100 plus pages. A Train in Powder (the first book I bought this year), subtitled Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time, a volume of uncollected prose entitled The Essential Rebecca West that was published last year, and West's biography of Saint Augustine are the ones most likely to be read this year.

And if you've never considered reading Rebecca West and don't understand the need of such a project, allow me to take the lazy blogger's way of introducing her to you via the Anne Bobby introduction to her previously uncollected prose: she's the "greatest writer you've never heard of."

Carpe diem.

The strangeness of the obsolete

2011-01-14T08:32:00.000-05:00

Late in Rebecca West's Cousin Rosamund, sisters Rose and Mary, first introduced to readers as children three books back in The Fountain Overflows, now professional musicians, are advised by their agents that they need not go on tour "in America" anymore; the stock market crash of 1929 has put a stop to the "good tours" they once could expect.

But they've had difficulty processing what's actually gone wrong there; they've grown up believing, indeed have experienced on previous concert trips, the providence of an "emptying [of] a vial of prosperity over the United States" and the conviction that anyone "poor and oppressed" there "would soon be rich."

As Rose expresses it, "We believed the Americans when they told us this. The United States is the child of Great Britain, and no parents wish to think that their children are not to be eternally happy. Also it seemed a shame, if people took the trouble to sail six thousand miles over the ocean and face the hardships of emigration, in order to found a society better than the one they had left, that they should not get what they wanted. It would have been as if, after all our practising, we had not been able to play any better than other people."

So they go to the United States and while staying at the white frame New England home of the composer Arthur Todd whose sonatas they will be performing, they encounter a poor, starving man whose physical collapse on the sidewalk in front of the house shakes them from these convictions:

"We had till then thought of starving people as slum-dwellers, or peasants in a blighted land, who would claw at food when it was offered them. A starving man so thoroughly geared to a complicated society that he dared not relieve his hunger till he had consulted a doctor struck on my understanding as strangely as atonal music strikes on an untrained ear. We were to be more disconcerted after he had gone, when we asked the Todds how much unemployment benefit the man would be getting, and we learned that he would get none. Mrs. Todd told us of neighbourhood projects to help the unemployed, and again what we heard struck us as strange, though not with the strangeness of novelty, but of the obsolete. This was Victorian charity of the soup-kitchen sort, which in England had long been rejected, because it offended against the idea of equality, which one had thought was specially dear to the Americans. The poor should not be put in the position of dependants on the rich; the state could not exist without their work, and therefore the state should keep them if by some accident it had for a time no work for them to do. . . . there came to us a frightened sense of America as an artificial society with insufficient artifice; and that had always to be succeeded by the admission that up till them America had certainly had all the artifice it needed. This was not a thoughtless, not a cruel country. It had been visited by an unpredictable event which had afflicted on it wounds of a sort it had not known before, and it had not yet improvised the bandage and the tourniquet."

One wishes Rebecca West were still around to help us with the continuing improv.

Unless that touch is withheld

2011-01-10T11:12:00.000-05:00

But really it did not matter if as a child I had practiced magic, or not. I might be deluded into thinking that I had raised a paper from the ground and held it in mid-air by supernatural means. But I was not wrong when I remembered that Richard Quin had turned from me and wept when I made him watch me at this trick, whatever it was, and had grown sick and nearly died. For he had been a saint. For he had been a saint whose repulsion from evil had been absolute; and at that time I had been evil. I had used that other trick, thought-reading, to confuse poor Queenie. I had shown her that for me life was not so rigid as was supposed; and she, crazed by her hunger, had drawn the conclusion that it was in all ways more flexible. She had seen me knock down the wall between one child's brain and another's, she had believed that I could knock down the wall between the present and the future, and she had rightly divined that all walls would tumble down at a touch. She had not perceived that unless that touch is withheld, unless the walls are left standing, the universe collapses, we are back in chaos again. So she knocked down the huge wall running across eternity and infinity which is the existence of a human being. She killed Harry Phillips, and would not have killed him had I not imparted to her my false belief that if one can break down walls one should break them down, that if one can alter the universe one should use that power of alteration to its uttermost. I had not then learned that one must move delicately, since creation is plainly a last and desperate resort, a danger improvised to avert another of a more final kind.

--Rebecca West, Cousin Rosamund

Time for the latest reading resolutions!

2011-01-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

Happy 1/1/11, everyone!

So I was mentally composing my reading resolutions post this morning, thought to check said resolutions against last year's, and then wondered why I should even bother presenting them as if they were something new:

. . .And in the same old same old department: I'm going to do my level best to read more books that I already own (or already have checked out from the library: ~~40 plus~~ tenish, or have already preordered: ~~five~~ one) than acquire more. Truly, I have reached the point where I maketh myself sick and I must get it through my head that any new books I hear about in the coming months will still be available in ~~2011~~ 2012, so why not wait until then to purchase them or get them from the library? I am going to grant myself permission to buy a few books for the Kindle simply because they won't take up any more space in the house and. . . more of the usual blah blah blah . . .

But I did read Ulysses last year. And I did start The Reading Habits of Fictional Characters, although I have been majorly slack about keeping it up. I've now completed 40 books from the Fill in the Gaps project, which started in April 2009, and would like to read at least 20 more by the end of 2011, most likely these:

The Children's Hospital. Chris Adrian
The House of the Spirits. Isabel Allende
The Adolescent or The Idiot. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison
The Hamlet. William Faulkner
Born in Exile. George Gissing
Far from the Madding Crowd or The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy
Transit of Venus. Shirley Hazzard
Shadow Country. Peter Matthiesson
John Adams. David McCollough
A Suitable Boy. Vikram Seth
Salzburg Tales or Letty Fox. Christina Stead
The Charterhouse of Parma. Stendhal
He Knew He Was Right and Is He Popenjoy? Anthony Trollope
This Real Night, Cousin Rosamund, Sunflower and The Sentinel. Rebecca West
The Waves. Virginia Woolf

I'm reading This Real Night and The Waves right now, so that's a start!

I'm going to remain impervious in the face of all reading challenges with one notable exception: I'm in the saddle for C.B.'s Western Read Along Challenge in May because I've noticed that anytime people blithely tell you they'll read anything, they'll usually qualify that almost immediately with an exception to westerns. And I know for a fact that westerns can be wonderful.

And in other genre reading, I expect to read more science fiction than I have in quite a while. My son requested and received several hard sci fi titles for Christmas and I doubt I can keep my greedy hands off them.

I really am going to try to keep my new purchases under control. Between the download-the-first-chapter-for-free feature on the Kindle (and not ordering the book until I'm ready to read it) and a change in ILL policy at the library, I'm hoping there won't be a need for very many purchases and the stockpiles around here won't continue to grow at abandon.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2011-01-01T05:00:00.001-05:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

(I started out 2007 with this poem. Thought it was time for a repeat.)

29 years ago

2010-12-31T20:14:00.000-05:00

Twenty-nine years ago it snowed on Christmas day and I did not appreciate it one bit.

L. and I were getting married two days later and I was sure that neither our out-of-town bridesmaids and groomsmen or our out-of-town guests would be able to make it to the wedding.

Twenty-nine years later, we had no such worries because now we're the travelers. Despite the forecast of snow, we made it to within 10 miles of our home town before we saw our first flake. We ate a huge breakfast with the family, opened presents, and I showed my mother-in-law how to use her new laptop while the kids went outside to take pictures.

This is the house we lived in for five years before we moved to Charlotte.

This is the gut-shot snowman at the gun shop that's now across the road from our old house.

This is evil hunter Santa who's been culling the reindeer herd. Boo! Hiss!

We visited with my sister, popped back by L.'s parents to see how they were getting along with the new computer, and learned that L.'s younger brother and wife had gone off the road on their way home and hit a tree. Luckily, though, they were no more than badly bruised.

We drove back home in the snow which rather abruptly changed to rain about 20 miles outside Charlotte. A couple hours later it began to snow here and the next morning the trees were glorious.

And we dragged out the photo album from 29 years ago, to remember the last time we'd had a white Christmas.

2010 reading stats and favorites

2010-12-31T12:39:00.176-05:00

This was the year I finally read Ulysses, which was enough of an accomplishment to mark this year down as an extraordinary one for reading no matter what else I encountered. And I encountered a lot of good ones.

Maybe one of these years I'll get better about blogging about them!

I completed 101 books this year, same as I did in 2009. In case you read offblog and never see my sidebar, you can find a list of all the books I've read here. And I read a total of 113 short stories, which you'll find listed here. I'd hoped to read 210, but failed to keep up the necessary pace to do so.

What I'm doing differently this year with my stats is providing, when available, stats for the last five or six years. I'm not trying to make any sense out of the stats yet (I'm still too feverish for that), but at least they're all nice and handy for me if I want to attempt an analysis later.
Books Total    101 / 101 / 78 / 81 / 74 / 77
Nonfiction        16 /   15 / 13 /    8 /  14 / 13
Novels              78 /   79 / 62 / 62 / 50 / 47
Short Story Collections 7 / 7 / 3 /4 / 1 / 8
Library Books     26 / 48 / 27 / 14 / 31
Newly Acquired/Read 23 / 32 /32 / 31 / 24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled 113 / 140 / 88 /141+ / 75+
E-texts Read 17 / 10 / 12
Free E-texts Read 9 / 5 / 7
Just-published books 36 / 55 / 41 /34 / 33
Classics              21 / 10 / 8 / 23 / 12
Pre-20th Century 9 / 7 / 4 / 12 / 11
Written by women 46 / 55 / 42 / 33 / 28

Authors with multiple books read: George Gissing (3), Anthony Trollope (3), Scarlett Thomas (2), Doris Lessing (2), Jonathan Franzen (2), Laura Lippman (2)

Rereads: Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle; James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times; Clyde Edgerton's Raney; Olive Ann Burns's Cold Sassy Tree; Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years; and Charles Portis's True Grit.

My favorites this year, in the order that I read them:

Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca Skloot

Cassandra at the Wedding. Dorothy Baker

In the Year of Jubilee. George Gissing

The Sweetest Dream. Doris Lessing

Ulysses. James Joyce

Our Tragic Universe. Scarlett Thomas

Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Pinckney Benedict

Composed. Rosanne Cash

Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

To the End of the Land. David Grossman

The Invisible Bridge. Julie Orringer

In Utopia. J. C. Hallman

December's new books

2010-12-31T06:07:00.000-05:00

Truth be told, I didn't get any books for Christmas--just a single gift certificate to Barnes and Noble, which has already been spent, on a Chatham County Line cd and Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It (not pictured).

Oh, but the Andrea Levy on the top of the stack which I ordered back in November didn't make an appearance in the mailbox until Christmas eve afternoon when I was frantically wrapping gifts, so its festive-red self wound up in a box with a pair of socks under the tree somehow, but didn't actually count.

The newbies are:

Small Island. Andrea Levy

Nightmare Alley. William Lindsay Gresham

Consider the Lobster. David Foster Wallace

God on the Rocks. Jane Gardam

Genesis. Stephen Mitchell, translator.

Since the photo op, I've also received Marcel Proust's Days of Reading and Charles Portis's first novel Norwood. I've pre-ordered Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, due out in February, and I'm going to do my level best not to order any more books between now and then. No, really!

I'm shoehorning everything in here at the blog at the last--I've got a couple more posts, including my yearly reading stats and my favorites, that I'll be working on between now and bed tonight--but right now I need to go take more cold medicine and determine if there's any way we can get the downstairs cleaned up in time for my son's birthday-eve party tonight (do all January 1sters wind up celebrating the night before?).

I'm enjoying everyone's end of the year posts!

The Classics Circuit: Trollope's The Way We Live Now

2010-12-13T07:49:00.000-05:00

The Way We Live Now, a satirical attack on the "commercial profligacy"of early 1870s England , is regarded as one of Anthony Trollope's finest novels, if not his masterpiece. In the summer of 2009, Newsweek put it at the top of its list of works that "open a window on the times we live in," explaining "[t]he title says it all. Trollope's satire of financial (and moral) crisis in Victorian England even has a Madoff-before-Madoff, a tragic swindler named Augustus Melmotte."

The audience of Trollope's day was less appreciative of its portrayal. Reviewers took issue with and resented the title itself; they argued that Trollope had not created a novel that was an honest characterization of their world. According to Marion Dodd, who wrote the introduction the 1950 edition, Trollope had peaked in the 1860s: "Mercenary marriages, abuse of the wealthy and their ill-gotten gains, satirical treatment of the nobility bereft of money, morals, and stamina, were so different from the material in Trollope's other books that the result was first shock, and then indifference and weariness."

(illustrations: Lionel G. Fawkes)

Trollope had intended to focus the novel on Lady Matilda Carbury, his notes show:

Living in Welbeck with son and daughter, spoiling the son and helping to pay his debts -- clever and impetuous. Thoroughly unprincipled from want of knowledge of honesty -- an authoress, very handsome, 43 --trying all schemes with editors, etc. to get puffed. Infinitely energetic --bad to her daughter from want of sympathy. Flirts as a matter of taste, but never goes wrong. Capable of great sacrifice for her son. The chief character.

The book opens with Lady Carbury dashing off letters to the editors of the London papers with the intention of securing the necessary reviews for her just-published Criminal Queens, a book in which she's spread "all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book but was painfully anxious to write book that the critics should say was good." Lady Carbury, the narrator tells us, "was false from head to foot, but there was much of good in her, false though she was."

Lady Carbury's greatest desire is to marry her handsome son off to an heiress. Sir Felix Carbury at 25 has already run through all the money left him by his late father and has no compunction against demanding and wasting the little that his mother and sister have to live on keeping horses in the country and gambling at the Beargarden, the club where all the young wastrels spend their time passing IOUs back and forth (living within one's means is not the way anyone lives now). Mother and son set their sights on Miss Marie Melmotte, only daughter of financier Augustus Melmotte, recently established in London and growing in prominence among the upper-crust despite a cloud of rumors.

It was at any rate an established fact that Mr Melmotte had made his wealth in France. He no doubt had had enormous dealing in other countries, as to which stories were told which must surely have been exaggerated. It was said that he had made a railway across Russia, that he provisioned the Southern army in the American civil war, that he had supplied Austria with arms, and had at one time bought up all the iron in England. He could make or mar any company by buying or selling stock, and could make money dear or cheap as he pleased. All this was said of him in his praise, -- but it was also said that he was regarded in Paris as the most gigantic swindler that had ever lived; that he had made that city too hot to hold him; that he had endeavoured to establish himself in Vienna, but had been warned away by the police; and that he had at length found that British freedom would alone allow him to enjoy, without persecution, the fruits of his industry."

Melmotte desires that his daughter marry well, in the upper rungs of society; Lord Nidderdale is willing "to take the girl and make her Marchioness in the process of time for half a million down." While the men are arguing terms, Marie, who's been developing a mind and opinions of her own, falls for the undeserving Felix, who at least is paying attention to her.

Melmotte refuses to consent to the match, telling his daughter that Felix is destitute and wants her only for her money. Undeterred, realizing that all men want her for is her money, Marie contrives to elope to New York with Felix, stealing money from her father and giving it to Felix to finance the trip. Felix, however, fearing that Melmotte will cut them off without a penny despite Marie's assurances that she has a fortune already signed over in her name, is too much of a coward to meet Marie in Liverpool as they've planned. He instead loses the money given to him gambling at the Beargarden while Marie is prevented from getting on the ship by men her father has sent to bring her back. Much to Lady Carbury's dismay, Felix gives up on the schemes to marry Marie. Melmotte and Lord Nidderdale, however, continue their negotiations for a mutually beneficial marriage; Marie is but chattel to them and nothing she says or does really signifies.

There are several other affairs of the heart that thread through The Way We Live Now--Felix's sister Hetta is loved by both her much-older cousin Squire Roger Carbury, who Lady Carbury wishes her to marry, although not because he's the most moral man around, and Roger's close friend Paul Montague, who Lady Carbury disdains. Hetta loves Paul, but more difficulties arise when Paul's former fiance, the American Mrs. Hurtle, follows him to London and demands he keep his promises to her. Ruby Ruggles, whose farmer grandfather is one of Roger's tenants in Suffolk, doesn't want to marry the slow-witted but loving John Crumb, who's always covered in meal, when Sir Felix Carbury is willing to see her on the sly, especially when she runs off to London to stay with her aunt. And Georgiana Longestaffe, whose father can no longer maintain a lavish lifestyle, is so desperate that she condescends to engage herself to an elderly Jewish banker (anti-Semitism abounds in TWWLN, unfortunately).

But the engine at the center of the novel is definitely Melmotte's maneuverings through the artistocratic society that doesn't approve of his kind yet cannot resist associating with him due to his incredible ostentation and power. And, of course, his shady investments and financial skulduggery--buying property without paying a dime to the too-afraid-ask-for-it Longestaffe, for example--keep the reader attentive. Melmotte chairs the London board of directors for the Great South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a railway proposed to run from Salt Lake City down to the port of Vera Cruz. There are no plans to actually build the railway; it is just a reason to float a company and engage in stock speculation.

Melmotte entertains the Emperor of China and is elected a conservative member to Parliament before it becomes impossible for society to continue to condone his fraudulence. Those who'd attached themselves to him earlier begin to break away and Melmotte is left alone -- his wife and daughter don't count -- to face a fast approaching arrest. Trollope provides a psychologically gripping portrayal of Melmotte's attempts to bully and bluff his way through, including a scene where he mortifies himself after showing up drunk in the House of Parliament.

What I found most disturbing in Trollope's depiction of Victorian England is its routine disregard for and mistreatment of women:

Henrietta had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance. She lamented her brother's evil conduct as it affected him, but she pardoned it altogether as if affected herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always did eat up everything.

A daughter or wife who refused to accept this natural order, or was unlucky in who her care depended, could expect and did receive violent treatment. Lady Carbury's backstory contains a history of physical abuse which she as a matter of course attempted to hide from the world; she bore the brunt of the scandal when she separated from him for awhile. Likewise, the independence of the American Mrs. Hurtle, who dared pull a gun on her ex-husband to keep him from sexually assaulting her, is presented as the grounds that justify Paul Montague's preference for the meek and innocent Hetta Carbury: Mrs. Hurtle is "a wild-cat" and just won't do in polite society.

Marie Melmotte is horribly beaten by her father during the course of TWWLN and accepts such treatment: Melmotte had certainly been often cruel to her, but he had also been very indulgent. And as she had never been specially grateful for the one, so neither had she ever specially resented the other. . . she. . .had come to regard the unevenness of her life, facillating between knocks and knick-knacks, with a blow one day and a jewel the next, as the condition of things which was natural to her.

Beaten by her grandfather, Ruby Ruggles is on the verge of being raped by Felix Carbury when John Crumb shows up to save her. Small wonder Mrs. Hurtle and Ruby's aunt do their best to ensure Ruby marries John despite her belief that the man is beneath her: he'll keep her well-fed and won't beat her. Isn't that all a Victorian woman could want?

After making it almost 50 years without reading anything by Trollope, I read my first, The Warden, in the spring of 2009 and quickly realized the error of my previous ways. Since then I've read The Vicar of Bullhampton, The Bertrams, The Claverings, Can You Forgive Her?, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, making The Way We Live Now my seventh Trollope.

It certainly won't be my last.

This post is part of the Classic Circuit's Trollope Tour. Dwight at A Common Reader is currently blogging his progress through The Way We Live Now; his posts are most recommended.

Back again

2010-11-30T18:04:00.000-05:00

So, after long last, I'm back, after never meaning to be gone more than a day or two.

I managed to miss my 6th blogiversary by letting the birthday aspect of that weekend in October take precedence; I had to become reacquainted with the judge's manual prior to the Nov. 2 election, then recover after the exhaustion of said election; I had to do much more thising and thating and the othering than usual, for the entire month, and I couldn't think of a thing worth blogging about in all that time.

Plus, I failed so fast at my book buying moratorium that I embarrassed myself there for awhile.

But I got over it.

Just a week after swearing off any new purchases, I got a whiff of good news at work, and couldn't resist celebrating by ordering Hannu Rajamiemi's The Quantum Thief. I blame it all on Pat D.

Then, a week later, after another hint of good news at work, I decided to treat myself to Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule and the first movement to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. By the time the package arrived, I'd come to doubt that dangle of good news ever actually coming to pass and had repented falling off the wagon; I tried to convince my son he wanted to give the books to me for Christmas, but he refused: "I want to get you something special this year." (Once Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award, I taunted him, saying he'd blown his chance.)

And I encountered the Lifetime Reader on Twitter, read her review of Ibrahim Fawal's On the Hills of God, and managed to justify an immediate purchase since it was the first novel from a Palestinian's perspective that I'd ever heard of.

Then there was a used book sale at the university library to raise money for the public library, and I couldn't resist a like-new copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer; the Library of America's collection of four Dawn Powell novels (My Home is Far Away, The Locusts Have No King, The Wicked Pavilion and The Golden Spur; Tim Page's biography of Dawn Powell; Jennifer Egan's The Keep; and The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant.

By then I'd gotten over the shame of failure; I could start another moratorium next month. I fell in love with the cover of Joan Thomas' Curiosity, I ordered the book from Canada--a totally compunction-free transaction.

And when we'd successfully found appropriate attire for S.'s induction into the international honor society at his college, I made everyone drop by Border's as my own reward for surviving the, ah, experience of shopping with two males. The store was so dead (a Wednesday night) that I convinced myself that it needed my money more than I did. I came home with Gish Jen's latest, World and Town.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of Bruce Machart's The Wake of Forgiveness from David Abrams. Yay!

So that was my month away from blogging. I did read quite a bit, but that's fodder for another post.

Stockpile, then stop (for awhile)

2010-10-21T18:30:00.002-04:00

If you've been over at Stefanie's blog this week, you may have noticed that I mentioned in the comments a(nother) book buying moratorium.

As of today, this afternoon, in fact, after opening four book packages. Many of these books are in anticipation of an expected birthday check from L.'s mom this weekend, but still. And there are a couple of books yet to come--Storm Jameson's None Turn Back and Mrs. Oliphant's The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow. Only one of these books is on my read-immediately list, which is the main reason I think I need to develop some restraint.

I don't think I can make it the full four months I've been mulling over, but I am going to do my best to make it until February 1--that's when Karen Russell's first novel, Swamplandia, is coming out and I'm dying to read that just as soon as I can get my hands on it.

The new books are:

Birdbrain. Joanna Sinisalo. Did anyone read Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story from a few years back? I pre-ordered Birdbrain months ago, based on how much I'd enjoyed the earlier novel. A Finnish couple go backpacking down under taking along a copy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Saint Augustine. Rebecca West. I'm going to give top priority to my Rebecca West project in the coming months.

Mistress of the Art of Death. Ariana Franklin. From C., who thinks I ought to read it soon if I expect her to retain enought detail to discuss it with me.

The Aeneid. Virgil. A birthday gift from W., chosen from my wish list, but given with the plea that I please not make her read it with me when I attempt it next year.

Surreal South. Laura Benedict and Pinckney Benedict, eds. Contains unsettling works by a lot of Southerners, plus, somehow, Joyce Carol Oates.

Chalcot Crescent. Fay Weldon. A futuristic satire.

Troubles. J.G. Farrell. Had to return the library copy of this that I'd checked out over the summer and got tired of waiting for it to be returned.

Poison Penmanship. Jessica Mitford. Subtitled the gentle art of muckraking.

Aurorarama. Jean-Christophe Valtat. First in a steampunk series set in the Arctic.

Doctor Zhivago. Boris Pasternak. For next month's group read at Nonsuch Books.

And yes, that is a new Kindle to the left of the bookstack, an early birthday present freshly loaded with Connie Willis's Blackout and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. He's my bus buddy and his name is Trey.

Pedigree by Georges Simenon

2010-10-20T08:18:00.000-04:00

No doubt he would not remember everything. However henceforth, in the Rue Pasteur flat, there were two eyes and two ears more than before, and only time would make a final selection from all the sights, sounds and smells. Henceforth, when she threaded her way along the narrow pavements of the Rue Puits-en-Sock where so many tram accidents happened, when she went to buy fifty centimes' worth of chips, a couple of chops or half a pound of pudding, when she complained of this or that, or when, from the fruit market, she looked through the windows of the cafe for Felicie's bright, slim silhouette, Elise was no longer alone.

~~~
He wasn't playing. He was gazing at the wonderful mist of fine golden dust which was coming from the bedroom and which was as it were absorbed slowly, irresistibly by the damp air of the street. When his mother beat the mattresses, it was as if there were thousands of little animals spinning around, coming together and parting again, while there were some feathers which stayed for a long time suspended in space. Just now, there was also the circle on the ceiling, another sort of animal, a luminous, impalpable animal, which trembled in one corner of the ceiling and suddenly rushed across to the other wall when somebody touched the window, for it was just a reflection of the sun.

~~~
The universe grew bigger, people and things altered in appearance, certainties were born at the same time as anxieties, the world became peopled with questions, and a ring of chiaroscuro made contours less reassuring, extended perspectives to infinity.

~~~
In the days when the world had been simpler, Roger had questioned his mother unceasingly.

Nowadays, he kept quiet. When he was found with his thoughts far away, he pretended to be playing. He listened to what the grown-ups said among themselves; certain phrases, certain words haunted him for weeks, while others translated themselves as pictures which imposed themselves on him willy-nilly and which he later tried in vain to dispel.

~~~
His father, now that they were on their way home, knew so well what he was thinking that he murmured:

'You'd better not say anything, for your mother's sake.'

Then he added--and this touched Roger much more:

'She thinks she'd doing the right thing.'

That was all. There must be no more talk about that subject.

'What are you doing this afternoon?'

'I don't know yet.'

'Is there anything to read at home?'

'Some Eugene Sue.'

For Roger went twice a week to borrow some books from the municipal library in the Rue des Chroux (the one in the Rue des Pitteurs had gone up in flames the day the Germans had shot three hundred people) and from the lending library in the Rue Saint-Paul. He chose books he liked. In the evening, or on Sunday, Desire would read one of these books, haphazardly, and if his son took it back before he had finished it, he did not even say anything, just began another of which he might never know the end.

That was what the two of them were like.

--Georges Simenon, Pedigree

2010-10-16T08:04:00.000-04:00

Rebecca West was a Booker prize judge the first two years it was handed out!

There were perhaps 60 books, which seemed a lot, though modern judges are said to read twice as many. Getting through the 60 was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca. "Miss Murdoch writes good and bad novels in alternate years," she said. "This is a bad year." Muriel Spark: "clever but too playful." And out they went.

40 years of Booker prize judges dish the dirt

2010-10-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

For what it's worth and if you're reading this from elsewhere and haven't noticed the birdie in the sidebar, I am now, as of just this week, on Twitter.

By TwitterButtons.com

This means Twitter has officially jumped the shark, right?

Part One, Madame Bovary: The Literary Habits of Fictional Characters

2010-10-15T09:24:00.000-04:00

On the other side of the hallway was Charles' office, a small room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. The volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, whose pages were uncut but whose binding had suffered from all the successive sales through which they had passed, by themselves almost entirely filled the six shelves of a pine bookcase.

~~~

She had read Paul and Virgina, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the Negro Domingo, the dog Faithful, but most of all of the sweet friendship of a good little brother who goes off to fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than church steeples, or runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.

~~~
At the convent there was a spinster who came every month, for a week, to work in the linen room. . . . Often the boarders would slip out of study hall to go see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the century before and would sing them softly as she plied her needle. She would tell stories, give you news, do errands for you in town, and lend the older girls, secretly, one of the novels that she always had in her apron pocket, and from which the good old maid herself would devour long chapters in the intervals of her task. They were always and only about love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and weeping like tombstone urns. And so for six months, at the age of fifteen, Emma soiled her hands with the greasy dust of those old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later, she became enamored of things historical, dreamed of studden leather chests, guardrooms, and troubadors. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like one of those long-bodiced chatelaines who, under the refoiled ogives, would spend her days, elbow on stone sill and chin in hand, watching a white-plumed horseman come galloping from the depths of the countryside on a black horse. At that time she worshipped Mary Stuart and felt an ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, La Belle Ferronniere, and Clemence Isaure, for her, stood out like comets against the shadowy immensity of history, in which there still appeared here and there, but less visible in the darkness and without any relation among them, Saint Louis and his oak, Bayard dying, certain of Louis XI's ferocities, a little of Saint Bartholomew, the Bearnis's plume, and alway the memory of the painted plates on which Louis XIV was extolled.

~~~~
She took out a subscription to Corbeille, a women's magazine, and to Le Sylphe des Salons. Skipping nothing, she would devour all the reports of first nights, horse races, and soirees, would take an interest in a singer's debut, the opening of a shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the good tailors, the days for going to the Bois and the Opera. In Eugene Sue, she studied descriptions of furnishings; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them the imagined satisfaction of her own desires. She would bring her book with her even to the table, and she would turn the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Vicomte would always return to her as she read. She would find similarities between him and the invented characters. But the circle of which he was the center gradually grew larger around him, and the halo he wore, separating from his face, spread father out, illuminating other dreams.

~~~
Finally, in order to keep up to date, he took out a subscription to La Ruche Medicale, a new journal whose prospectus he had received. He would read a little of it after dinner, but the warmth of the room, in combination with his digestion, would put him to sleep after five minutes; and he would stay there, his chin on his hands and his hair spread out like a mane as far as the base of the lamp. Emma would look at him and shrug her shoulders.

~~~
Sometimes, too, she would talk to him about the things she had read, such as a passage from a novel, a new play, or the high society anecdote being recounted in the paper; for, after all, Charles was someone, always an open ear, always a ready approbation. She confided many secrets to her greyhound! She would have done the same to the logs in the fire in the fireplace and the pendulum of the clock.

~~~
"I've read everything," she would say to herself.

And she would hold the tongs in the fire till they turned red, or watch the rain fall.

--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis translation)

Madame Bovary - First, the memories

2010-10-14T15:08:00.001-04:00

I've read Madame Bovary before, 30 years ago in a comparative lit class in college. I remember quite a lot about about that semester--I took my first journalism class; I fulfilled my math requirement and consequently threw my statistics notebook into the trash as I left the classroom after completing the statistics final; I got an A plus on my paper comparing Hamlet and Faust despite my T.A.'s conviction that contrasting the men was the only logical approach; my mother had her first heart attack the week before spring break and my dad was hospitalized along with her since he was at that time incapacitated with back pain. And I spent what free time I had over that spring break plowing through Hard Times, which I hated, for my history class, only to be told in the next class that time was short, and we wouldn't have to read Dickens after all. Etc.

But Madame Bovary--I'm afraid it's not a book that's stayed with me through the years. Adultry, debt, poison, mainly it's the poison that I remember since L.'s mother's Shetland sheepdog puppy ate rat poison not long after I read this--Sunny survived, incredibly enough--so I had mental reinforcement for that portion of the book, along with little sidebar memories of a carriage ride, the fact that it was reading that led Emma astray, as well as a bit of a class lecture on shifting points of view--did Flaubert start a sentence alone with Emma playing the piano and then pull out far enough to bring in the entire listening village, or is that from some other book? I honestly don't remember.

So I'm very happy Frances arranged a group read to celebrate the new Lydia Davis translation and am very curious to see if any other memories come back to me over the course of reading the book a second time.

Edited to add:

I've found the paragraph about Emma playing the piano!

In the Davis translation:

She would draw, sometimes; and Charles found it most entertaining to stand there and watch her bending over her pad, half closing her eyes to see her work better, or forming pellets of bread crumbs on her thumb. As for the piano, the faster her fingers raced, the more he marveled. She would strike the keys with assurance and run down the entire keyboard from top to bottom without stopping. When it was thus assaulted by her, the old instrument, with its buzzing strings, could be heard as far as the edge of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, who was passing on the main road, bareheaded and in slippers, would stop to listen, holding his piece of paper in his hand.

And from the Francis Steegmuller translation, which I orginally read:

She drew occasionally; and Charles enjoyed nothing more than standing beside her watching her bent over her sketchbook, half shutting his eyes the better to see her work, or rolling her bread-crumb erasers between his thumb and finger. As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew the more he marveled. She played with dash, swooping up and down the keyboard without a break. The strings of the old instrument jangled as she pounded, and when the window was open it could be heard to the end of the village. The huissier's clerk often stopped to listen as he passed on the road--bareheaded, shuffling along in slippers, holding in his hand the notice he was about to post.

Who's reading the original? Why don't the translators agree on who is closing their eyes, who is rolling the bread crumbs on their fingers?

Latest stack of books aka Mailbox Monday

2010-10-11T05:34:00.002-04:00

I think it's time for a book-buying ban. Any day now it shall commence.

(Yeah, right.)

And while I usually never get my act together enough to join forces with Mailbox Monday, today is an exceptional day because I have.

David Sedaris. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I'm already two Sedarises behind, but I figured S. would like this.

Charles Yu. How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe. My husband started this the day it arrived. He suffers from 30-pages-or-so syndrome, usually setting books aside at that point, so the verdict is still out on whether he'll finish.

The Lydia Davis translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. A giveaway from Frances at Nonsuch Book, for her group read of Madame Bovary that begins on Thursday. I've already finished Part I.

Kim Wright. Love in Mid Air. A giveaway from Becca at Bookstack. Kim's local, and we were in a writing workshop together back in the early 90s, so I'm definitely looking forward to reading her first novel.

Rick Perlstein. Nixonland. Because I need more history in my life.

Ron Chernow. Washington: A Life. Can it top my favorite biography of all time, Chernow's own Alexander Hamilton?

Adam Levin. The Instructions. This book is humongous. It's supposed to combine "the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace."

And my download finger has evidently gotten a little twitchy. I still can't figure out how Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence was ordered for the Kindle--I want to read it, yes, but I ordinarily don't buy novels that are readily available at the university library. Plus there's the fact that it's been a few months since I've even glanced at any Pamuk pages at Amazon, so it's all very weird. Could the cats have ordered it on accident?

I consciously bought Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, since I've been intending to read for several years, and I've also acquired James Patrick Kelly's The Secret History of Science Fiction and Craig Sherbourne's Muck: A Memoir. My mother-in-law wanted several books downloaded onto her Kindle, so in the future I'll have access to the latest Sara Gruen and Julia Glass novels, if I need them.

And I surely will.

Yes, we haz Bob Dylan ticketz!

2010-10-01T16:03:00.000-04:00

Currently reading

2010-09-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

What are you reading right now? What made you choose it? Are you enjoying it? Would you recommend it? (And, by all means, discuss everything, if you’re reading more than one thing!)

Let's see. Of all the books in progress right now, I'm furthest along in J.C. Hallman's In Utopia. I have maybe a chapter and a half to go, and I ought to finish it (this weekend, maybe?) and write my review instead of allowing it to languish any longer. Instead, I've started Hallman's earlier book, The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe, and then stopped, out of guilt, because I haven't finished In Utopia. Whenever I do finish it, I'll be recommending it.

I've read three essays, the ones dealing with reading and writing, in Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone since the weekend. I've read the first story, the Steve Almond one on poker players and their tells, from Best American Short Stories 2010. Fun so far for the both.

I'm reading Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge with a friend. Three chapters in, just started it yesterday, and I can already tell it's a good one.

I'm reading Amos Oz's memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, because I was so impressed with David Grossman's To the End of the Land last month and wanted to read another book set in Israel, but it's kind of on the back burner right now. As is Georges Simenon's Pedigree, although it's in my book bag and I'm looking forward to getting back to it--if I don't just start from scratch all over again (only one chapter in).

And last, but not least, I'm reading Henry James's The Ambassadors, so that I can read and properly appreciate Cynthia Ozick's soon-to-be-released Foreign Bodies. Maria Gostrey has just joined Strether in Paris and Chad has yet to make his appearance. Sometimes I know precisely what's going on, and sometimes it's all a bit fuzzy. We won't get into the percentages of how much time I'm spending in either of the those two camps.

What are you currently reading? Do you think I'd like it?

Booking Through Thursday

Wordless Wednesday: St. Petersburg

2010-09-22T19:38:00.000-04:00

2010-09-22T01:08:00.001-04:00

Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.

--Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," 1925

Freedom: The Reading Habits of Fictional Characters

2010-09-21T06:45:00.001-04:00

Richard was wearing a black T-shirt and reading a paperback novel with a big V on the cover.

~~~~

She ate stale doughnuts and turned some pages of Hemingway until it was eleven and even she could see that the math wasn't going to work.

~~~~

She sat in Dorothy's favorite armchair, reading War and Peace at Walter's long-standing recommendation, while the men played chess.

~~~~

She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over.

~~~~

For sheer respite from herself, she picked up War and Peace and read for a long time.

The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn't reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming. Pierre's loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion. Things probably would not have gone any differently, but the effect those pages had on her, their pertinence, was almost psychedelic. She read past midnight, absorbed now even by the military stuff, and was relieved to see, when she turned the lamp off, that the twilight finally was gone.

~~~~

"This is D.H. Lawrence," Richard said impatiently.

"Yet another author I need to read."

"Or not."

~~~~

She cleaned the house, read half of a Joseph Conrad novel Walter had recommended, and didn't buy any more wine.

~~~~

He sat down at his ancient enamel-top table to distract himself from the taste of his dinner by reading Thomas Bernhard, his new favorite writer.

~~~~

Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game.

~~~~

"I'm sorry, this book? This book is ungodly boring."

He took cover behind a chair. "What's it about?"

"I thought it was about slavery. Now I'm not even sure what it's about." She showed him two facing pages of dense prose. "The really funny thing? This is the second time I'm reading it. It's on like half the syllabuses at Duke. Syllabi. And I still can't figure out what the actual story is. You know, what actually happens to the characters."

"I read Song of Solomon for school last year, " Joey said. "I thought it was pretty amazing. It's like the best novel I ever read."

~~~~

He took out the novel his own sister had given him for Christmas, Atonement, and struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings, but his mind was on the text that Jonathan had sent him that afternoon: hope it's fun looking at a horse's ass all day.

~~~~

The English couple grabbed the next two seats, and Joey found himself sitting toward the rear with the mother and her daughter, who was reading a young-adult horse novel.

~~~~

He got his best friend, Mary Siltala, to drive him down to the lake house with a duffel bag of clothes, ten gallons of house paint, his old one-speed bike, a secondhand paperback copy of Walden, the Super-8 movie camera that he'd borrowed from the high-school AV Department, and eight yellow boxes of Super-8 film.

--Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Latest book stack

2010-09-17T18:28:00.000-04:00

I'm trying my best to limit the new books coming into the house, but I'm not living up to expectations (my husband's). The stack looks decidedly shorter than usual this month, but that's simply because I'm stockpiling them on the Kindle.

From the top:

Georges Simenon. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. Because I couldn't wait until I'd finished Pedigree to buy another Simenon reissued by NYRB.

Carla Damron's Death in Zooville. Third in the Caleb Knowles mystery series by Columbia, S.C., writer.

E.C. Spykman's Terrible, Horrible Edie. I've already squeed about this one.

Alison Johnson's The Eleventh Hour Can't Last Forever. Review copy. A memoir about growing up with a gold-hoarding father.

Karen Joy Fowler's What I Didn't See and Other Stories. Includes a Shirley Jackson Award and two Nebula Award winners.

Frances Osborne's The Bolter. Biography of Idina Sackville, who inspired the creation of "the Bolter" in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. From the book exchange in the staff lounge.

Not pictured: Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, deep in the recesses of my book bag. For book club.

And for the Kindle:

Edith Wharton's The Children. A Slave of Golconda suggested title from a few months back.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. For next month's book club--my choice. (Bet they'll never let me choose again.)

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. Someone on a message board wrote about attending a Shteyngart reading and he came across as someone I'd really enjoy.

This weekend I'm going to focus on finishing China Mieville's Kraken. I've been parceling it out all week in little bits of time here and there. I think it's time to get serious with it: it's the end(s) of the world, afterall.

Happy weekend, everyone.

A Forgotten Treasure - Mary Lee Settle

2010-09-16T06:32:00.000-04:00

. . . he wondered in the dark if it was only he, and men like him who were fated to be the know nothings, to question, to see beyond their attitudes, but not to speak.

~~~

"Oh, I am a lady and I'm not supposed to know anything. Ladies and slaves, look after their wants and rule their minds and keep them innocent. You men!"

She laughed again. "It's a woman's joke. Ladies always know the father of the mulattos on the next plantation. Never their own. How do you think we feel?" She waved her hand, pushing at him blindly. "I don't care for your fine ideals. I reckon women are more consarned with the facts. Lord God"--she sighed--"we have to be. You. . ."

--Mary Lee Settle, Know Nothing (1960)

Know Nothing is an antebellum novel written by the National Book Award-winning and PEN/Faulkner Award-founding author Mary Lee Settle who--get this--dropped out of college and auditioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind before moving to New York to work as an actress and model.

Despite a writing career that spanned 50 years, she appears to be a relative unknown in the book blogging community. That's unfortunate. Several years back I read more than 200 pages in her I, Roger Williams before setting it aside--too much Williams in Jacobean London, not enough colonial New England as I'd expected. But I gave her another chance in 2006 with The Scapegoat, which I thought a fantastic book. I've seen no mention of any Settle novel in the blogs since.

Anyway.

Know Nothing, just as fantastic as The Scapegoat, proceeds it in The Beulah Quintet, the series of novels, written out of order (and which I'll most likely continue reading out of order), focusing on the families who settle in the Alleghenies of West Virginia. It begins in 1837, with an eight-year-old Johnny Catlett, thrown in the river by his father as a means of teaching him how to swim. It ends in 1861, with Johnny, now fatherless and a captain in the confederate army, "swept up as a swimmer by the sudden flood of fear, but still with his head above water." In between Settle shows us what it was like to be a slave owner, a slave, a poor relation or a wife treated as a perpetual outsider by her husband's extended live-in family. Any resemblance to "Gone With the Wind" is an ironic one.

Settle regarded herself as an "archaeologist of language," one who researched primary sources to learn exactly how each of her characters should speak. Is it socially acceptable to use the word "ain't"? Who has more social standing--the woman who refers to her "pin money" or to her "egg money"?

And getting beyond language into the nuances of behavior, can a genteel mother survive the tackiness of a daughter approaching the mourners' bench during a tent revival? Is having new furnishings instead of hand-me-downs a sign of social inferiority? Can a man be both an abolitionist and a gentleman? (And why will a reader such as myself find it harder to forgive a character for a single witnessed act of abuse against an animal (a cat) than for that perpetuated by the same character over the decades against his fellow humans?)

If I'm making it all sound too academic, I apologize. It really isn't. Know Nothing is at heart the story of thwarted love--Melinda, the penniless orphaned cousin, is raised by Johnny's family, who won't be particularly happy if the two wind up together. And when Johnny is reluctant to commit-- "Cain't you give me time, Melinda?"-- Melinda, who knows the typical fate of an unmarried aging extraneous woman in the house, allows herself to be persuaded into marrying besmitten fourth-cousin Crawford, whose fatal flaw is to have no flaws. Can good come from it?

I've just received a used copy of Settle's Choices, a novel not in The Beulah Quintet but one whose main character bears the same name, and no doubt the same lineage, as Melinda in Know Nothing. That's my next Settle before I delve back into the Quintet.

(This post originally ran on August 19, but seemed too appropriate for today's BBAW prompt not to repeat. Since then, Danielle has begun reading Choices, which makes me very happy.)

And then there was a flash of light

2010-09-15T09:02:00.000-04:00

So I got up this morning, turned on the computer, and it exploded.

Or rather, there was a flash and then a big nothing that wouldn't stop.

L. suspects the motherboard. I suspect I won't be finishing my BBAW post for today later this evening since our other computer has issues involving internet connections: it's opposed.

Feel free to go to Terri's blog and read my interview with her. I admitted to being a commie slacker, among other things.

Now I have to go to a meeting.

Bye

An interview with Terri of Book Speak

2010-09-14T07:00:00.001-04:00

I had the pleasure of plying Terri from Book Speak with questions for today's interview swap portion of BBAW. Terri lives in Memphis, is a self-described hardcore reader, and a book blogger who recently celebrated her first anniversary. She's frugal and green, a homeschool mom and one of the founders behind Books And, a virtual touring company that promotes authors of color.

Our e-mail conversation:

Could you tell us a bit about yourself. About your blog.

I'm a mom, wife, student, vegetarian, and a bunch of other boring stuff. My book blog is the anchor of my website BrownGirl Speaks. I read and blog about works of literary fiction predominantly by authors of color.

You homeschool. Has this made it easier to turn your son into a reader? Were you a hardcore reader from an early age or did you have to develop the taste for books over time? Do you come from a family of readers or is reading something that set you apart?

My son is a reluctant reader. He reads very well once I can get him to do it. I hope that he eventually finds himself unable to function without books in his life like myself.

I, on the other hand, have always been a book fiend. Ironically, I don't come from a family of readers. When I was four I would read the signs at every business we'd pass whenever in the car so, my parents started buying books and taking me to the library and I've had a book in my hand ever since. It's just an innate passion for me.

Let's talk book selection. You read a lot of authors I've never even heard of. How do you find out about them? And, since you're frugal, how do you get your hands on them? Are you more a library user or a buyer of books? How have your tastes in books changed over the years?

I discover my book selections in a variety of ways. I get recommendations from Amazon and other bloggers/readers. I check Publishers Weekly's upcoming releases and sometimes the author or publisher will contact me for a review. Since I became a book blogger, I acquire books from publishers or authors for reviews and when I purchase them it's mainly from used book stores or getting them free on BookMooch. Occasionally I use the library, but I've found myself buying some of those books second hand as well.

My taste in books got a complete makeover in college. I went from solely reading English classics like everything by the Bronte sisters to solely reading Black authors to solely reading all authors of color. And my reading taste is still evolving. . .

Did you read other book blogs before you started or discover them afterwards?

Actually I did not. I thought there might be a few out there but was in for quite the surprise to find this whole subculture of book bloggers. I felt silly for not spending my first four years of blogging about books like I was constantly nudged to do. So, I discovered all of my fellow book bloggers after I started.

Do you enjoy participating in reading challenges?

I do enjoy reading challenges and decided to start one of my own on the fly this year. I'm already planning for what I'll do next year. I like giving myself a goal and focusing on a theme or genre, especially ones that make me expand.

You seem much more adept at social media than me. I managed to set up a Twitter account a year or so back and I've never even signed on. I don't remember the password. Am I missing out?

Social media has its place. I've got my Twitter on auto pilot most of the time because I have so much going on with being a homeschool mom. I think it can definitely help expand your audience and retain the one you have. It's good to check in sometimes on Twitter to do some real time chatting. It can be as time consuming as you'd like and this I know is a concern for those hesitant about getting into social media.

Are you pro-marketing and branding?

I am for marketing and branding but done lightly. I don't care for hardcore marketing. Just let it happen organically in its own time. Those pushy blogs/websites seem insincere and are not looking to build a following because they have something to say but because they want to build revenue.

Are there some favorites, or simply some books you wish you could convince/require everyone to read? How much influence do you have over what your friends read?

One book that I've found myself recently recommending over and over is Marlon James' The Book of Night Women. It's set on an 1800's Jamaican sugar cane plantation. He beautifully reveals the status of women both enslaved and seemingly free and their often unknown power. Some others I frequently push are Let the Lion Eat Straw by Ellease Southerland, Girl In Translation by Jean Kwok, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

I think my book recommendations carry quite a bit of weight with my friends. I've always been "the" reader in my circle and I've yet to recommend a dud.

Any controversial subjects out there that make you want to rant?

Yes, I'm turned off by e-readers and audio books. I've been called a book snob because of it. I get the convenience of them and that e-readers are space savers. However, I love the tactile experience of books. I need to feel and SMELL those pages.

Describe your dream library. How does reality compare to it?

My books are organized in some quirky system only I can understand and is an aversion to those thinking they'll just come into my sanctuary to rummage through and poach my books. There's a nice sized window for natural lighting and an oversized chair and ottoman covered in organic cotton or bamboo. I haven't nailed down a color scheme for my retreat.

My reality is not in the same galaxy with books stacked on two sets of bookshelves two rows deep, on the floor, and under tables with no rhyme or reason other than "have read" and "tbr". And forget about a comfortable, quiet spot to read.

Worldwide Freedom Giveaway

2010-09-13T05:48:00.000-04:00

As part of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, I'm giving away a paperback UK-version (NOT Claudius's very own 10th birthday copy) of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. And, because my daughter waltzed through customs in the Moscow airport without any difficulty Friday afternoon carrying her own just-purchased copy of Freedom (which kinda blows my raised-during-the-Cold-War mind), the drawing for this one's worldwide.

Contest runs through September 24. I'll draw a name on Saturday, September 25. The winner will have until October 1 to send me his/her address, or else this Freedom's forfeited.

Happy BBAW, everyone!

~~~
". . . maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. . . . That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else."

--Jonathan Franzen, interview with Gregg LaGambina

Random little reading details

2010-09-12T08:44:00.001-04:00

I don't think I've mentioned it, but I joined the brand new staff book club back in the spring. So far the group's discussed Indemnity Only, Rich in Love, Cold Sassy Tree and Ladder of Years. Since I'd read the Josephine Humphreys a couple times already, I mistakenly thought it'd be okay to skip another reread, but it turned out I'd forgotten everything anyone else wanted to discuss, so I spent a great deal of the hour at that that month's meeting wondering why my mind will latch on to some random, irrelevant little detail, like the fact that sheets with Lucille's menstrual stains circulate freely throughout all the beds in the household, which will then remain with me forever instead of clearing space for a memory of something more useful. What's that all about?

I particularly enjoyed rereading the Anne Tyler. Up until Ladder of Years, I'd reread all my Anne Tylers, some of them many times. I loved them, yes, but part of my incessant rereading up until then was due to other factors--limited funds for buying new books, awareness of new books dependent only on the local newspaper, Book of the Month and a couple of catalogs, pre place- an- online- hold- on- any- book- in- the- system- and- it- will- be- brought- to- the- branch- closest- to- you libraries. I might as well have reread my Anne Tylers and Margaret Drabbles to the point of internalization as bother finding anything new.

So, anyway, it was good to finally reread Ladder of Years. And it was fortuitous to reread it not long after reading Manservant and Maidservant because otherwise I would not have noticed that Tyler had a minor character named Horace Lamb, a strange guy, a traveling salesman of some sort of storm window or insulation product, and I had to wonder if she had Ivy Compton-Burnett's Horace Lamb in mind when she wrote him, no doubt laughing hysterically inside all the while. I think I mentioned this to a book club member outside the actual discussion, but not having read Ivy Compton-Burnett, she didn't know whether this was likely yea or nay.

This week we're discussing Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. There had been a copy of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress on the book exchange shelves for most the summer and I hadn't touched it because I am not partial to books with covers showcasing little black dresses and high heels. Fortunately, the cover wasn't pink, and it also didn't showcase hair, which is another book cover staple I usually manage to keep a healthy difference from, so I didn't have to deprive myself of an altogether pretty relatable read as a matter of principle or neurosis. I did have to buy my own copy, however, as someone else had claimed the free copy by the time the book club chose it.

Last night I started Henry James's The Ambassadors since I'm dying to read Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies, a retelling of The Ambassadors, when it comes out a couple of months from now. Considering the number of sentences I'm having to read multiple times to halfway understand them, it may well take me all of the two months until Foreign Bodies's release date to make my way through it.

I've also started J.C. Hallman's The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe, which seemed appropriate to read right now with so many Americans insisting upon their right to go bat shit, instead of finishing up the final pages of In Utopia, which would probably be even more appropriate since I need to review it before I forget all but a few random details that won't matter to anyone even me.

And I'm trying to get in the spirit for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I signed up for an interview buddy, something I haven't done in the past, but mine hasn't been in touch, hasn't blogged in a couple of weeks, which leads me to worry more that something untoward may be happening in her life than that she doesn't want to partner up with the likes of me.

Tune in tomorrow morning for a BBAW-inspired book giveaway--the hype's right, it's a good one!

Bookish Mad Libs

2010-09-10T19:00:00.004-04:00

It's Friday! Let's go with something brainless.

Mad libs, based on this year's reading:

In school I was: The Possessed

People might be surprised I’m: In the Year of Jubilee

I will never be: To the End of the Land

My fantasy job is: Composed

At the end of a long day I need: Private Life

I hate it when: The British Museum is Falling Down

Wish I had: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

My family reunions are: Things We Didn't See Coming

At a party you’d find me with: The Little Stranger

I’ve never been to: The Big Rock Candy Mountain

A happy day includes: Freedom

Motto I live by: Memento Mori

On my bucket list: Overhead in a Balloon

In my next life, I want to be: Orlando

Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

2010-09-06T07:07:00.003-04:00

Montanan Rick Bass went to Nashville a few years back, angling for an interview with country music star Keith Urban. The interview, intended primarily to impress his then Urban-smitten young daughters, proved elusive, as might be expected, since Bass has a reputation for award-winning literary fiction, for nature and environmental writings, instead of celebrity puff-pieces.

But it wasn't a wasted trip east. Bass soon found himself sidetracked into talking with former country-pop crossover star Maxine Brown, who'd achieved chart-topping success in the 1950s and early '60s as part of the singing trio the Browns. Bass would wind up writing Nashville Chrome, his just-released novel, based on the lives and careers of Maxine, the eldest, her brother Jim Ed, and her middle sister Bonnie.

The Brown children grew up poor during the Great Depression, helping out in their father's sawmill in a hardscrabble swamp in Arkansas.

The secret to his lumber's quality lay in his children's ability to discern pitch. At the end of almost every lunch break, the Brown children would be summoned to the saw-sharpening table, where the newly honed blade would be placed on an axle with a motor and then spun rapidly, as if being made ready for a cut. . . . The sound they listened for -- the perfect blade -- held an eerie resonance, the faint sirenlike echo of a high harmonic that was little different from the tempered harmony the Browns were already learning to achieve with their voices.

The children could imitate any performer heard on the radio. When Maxine secretly records Jim Ed imitating Hank Snow and sends a tape to the local radio station, he's invited to sing in a talent show; within a couple months, the children have formed the trio the Browns and are performing regularly. Fabor Robinson presents them with a contract after a show; they naively sign away all their rights, soon making their exploiter a multimillionare and leaving themselves with only what he deigns to pass on to them, which isn't much.

They may be Fabor's slaves, but success-wise they're equal to, and usually above, the likes of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Bonnie has a sweet romance with Elvis before fame changes him. A pre-Ringo Starr quartet of Beatles spends a week with the Browns in an effort to learn how to duplicate their sublime harmonies (they can't). Jim Ed is as popular with the ladies after the shows as Elvis is, and Maxine falls first into the bottle, a predisposition she's inherited from her father, then, an unhappy marriage. And, too quickly, their star sinks below the horizon. Bonnie marries, happily, eagerly, a man with damaged hearing. Jim Ed goes solo. Maxine plots a come-back and drinks a lot.

It's unfortunate then that Bass seems as enamored with the Browns and their "no accident of circumstance" musical ability as his daughters undoubtedly were with Keith Urban; I grew weary of the repeat-play cosmic beat of fate and destiny to explain their extraordinary talent. Bass's style keeps us back, at a remove from all the interesting stuff that's happening, distancing us from these mythic performers he admires so much when he could have shown them to us up close.

Because, even more unfortunate than that repetition, is the fact that Bass too often gives short shrift to the rudiments of fiction. The language in Nashville Chrome is lovely, but comes across as that of a finely-crafted essay. Where's the dialogue, where're the actual scenes? Why write a novel if you're not going to put your characters (performers all!) in action, let the reader hear them speak, or think in their own words? I will admit to often appreciating a writer's connective tissue (as I think of it) between the scenes more than the actual scenes themselves, and heaven knows I'm not that interested in plot, but I don't think fictional trappings should be dispensed with nearly altogether--unless a writer's working in the experiemental or meta realm-- if you're going to call it a novel.

Perhaps Bass set out to do no more than to polish his prose until it shone like chrome, a literary counterpart to the Browns' own smooth sound. Perhaps it simply was a marketing decision to publish Nashville Chrome as a novel instead of putting it out as creative nonfiction. He mentions in the afterward that he has a new editor. I wonder.

I've been reading Rick Bass for a good 20 years -- "Wild Horses" in The Watch, his first collection of short stories, is still one of the most affecting stories I've ever read. Frankly, though, if it hadn't been for my previous experiences with Bass, I'd have left Nashville Chrome unfinished -- a shame, since the novel hits a late stride in the final third when there's less telling and more showing. An elderly Maxine, living on Social Security, alone and in poor health, wants to assure her musical legacy by locating a filmmaker willing to make a movie about her life (all country stars get a movie, she reckons). She places an ad on the Piggly Wiggly bulletin board and before long a young man with a vision as big as her own -- if not quite in synch with it -- enters the picture and expands Maxine's narrowing life.

If you're new to Bass, I'd start anywhere but here; try The Ninemile Wolves for his nonfiction, or The Lives of Rocks or The Watch for his short stories. If you're interested in the Browns, Maxine Brown has written an autobiography.

And I hear she's on Facebook.

(I reviewed a pre-pub e-galley of this book.)

She back! She's back in print!

2010-09-04T14:53:00.000-04:00

E. C. Spykman's Edith Cares! The New York Review Children's Collection brought her back! Eric Hanson illustrated the new cover of Terrible, Horrible Edie (you can check out his evolution of Edie at A Different Stripe) and thank goodness that I'm still within my free-month trial period for Amazon Prime, because I ordered it immediately.

Thank you, JudyBG, for leaving a comment Thursday on my Celebrating E.C. Spykman post from July 2005. Somehow Edie (sneaky devil that she is) managed to get herself republished back in June without any awareness on my part.

I've got my fingers crossed that Edie on the Warpath (read an excerpt here) will follow, and that maybe the NYRB will loop back and republish Spkyman's first books in the series, A Lemon and a Star and The Wild Angel not long after that.

Even more links about Edie, Jane, Ted and Hubert:

Reviews at time of publication

Personal bio of E.C. Spkyman

R.I.P. V

2010-09-01T08:50:00.002-04:00

Ah, September. Time for Carl's fifth R.I.P. challenge.

I don't know how many of these I'll get through by the end of October, but I'll be reading from the pool below:

China Mieville's Kraken and The City and the City. Giant octopus and general weirdnesses.

Thomas Mullen's The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Bullets and bandits.

Laura Lippman's I'd Know You Anywhere. Kidnappings and death row.

Jon Clinch's Kings of the Earth. Not so sure this one really qualifies, but Stewart O'Nan calls it an Upstate Gothic.

Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog. Jackson Brodie!

Matt Haig's The Radleys. A family of vampires.

Michael Sims's Dracula's Guest. Lots and lots of Victorian vampire stories.

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. Steampunk zombies.

Happy tenth birthday, Claudius!

2010-08-31T20:31:00.000-04:00

What can I say? While I got Beth Brown's All Horses Go to Heaven for my tenth birthday, Ivan Claudius Rex's tastes are a bit more refined.

Hope it lives up to the hype, ya pretentious little furball.

Remember the Browns?

2010-08-28T08:01:00.001-04:00

I'm reading an e-galley of the latest by Rick Bass, Nashville Chrome, a novel based on the lives and careers of the Browns, Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie, who were the first group to have a hit on both the country and the pop charts.

At first, since I was reading a novel, I thought I was reading about a fictional group, but a side trip to You Tube quickly set me straight: I may have forgotten their name, but I grew up at a time when the Browns were radio regulars.

I remember them now.

Turtle hearts beating slow, slow, slow

2010-08-27T12:10:00.000-04:00

They were down there in the dark, the turtles that had survived unchanged from the age of the dinosaurs, with their spines buckled so that they fit, neatly folded, within their shells; and their eyes closed fast, their turtle hearts beating slow, slow, slow, waiting on the passing of another winter. And what if the winter never passed and spring never came, as looked more and more likely? How long would they sleep, how long could such creatures wait in the dark? A long time, Vandal suspected. Time beyond counting. It might suit them well, the endless empty twilight that the world seemed dead-set on becoming.

--Pinckney Benedict, "The Beginnings of Sorrow," in Miracle Boy and Other Stories

Booking Through Thursday - Two weeks' worth in one!

2010-08-26T06:33:00.002-04:00

If you’re not enjoying a book, will you stop mid-way? Or do you push through to the end? What makes you decide to stop?

Depends on the reasons why I'm reading it in the first place.

If I'm reading it with another person, or with a book group, it will depend on how disruptive my bailing out will be. It also depends on the reasons why I'm not enjoying it--bad prose or story will usually make me stop, unless I think there'll be enough pleasure in mocking the book later on to keep me going. If the reasons why I'm not enjoying it are more complex and say more about me than the book, then it may be worth the time to finish it and ponder why I reacted the way I did.

If I think it's just a matter of reading a worthwhile book at the wrong time, I'll put it aside and come back to it when I'm feeling more receptive.

If it's a book that I can read quickly, or that I've invested a lot of time on before things soured, though, I'll probably continue reading.

And last week's, the 55-questions meme:

1. Favorite childhood book?

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

2. What are you reading right now?

A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz

3. What books do you have on request at the library?

Twenty in all (I'm maxed out). Cherie Priest's Boneshaker's waiting for pick up. New/upcoming releases on active request: Bound, Antonya Nelson; By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham; Lives Like Loaded Guns, Lyndall Gordon; My Hollywood, Mona Simpson; Nemesis, Philip Roth; Witch of Hebron, James Howard Kunstler; Ape House, Sara Gruen; Adam and Eve, Sena Jeter Naslund; You Lost Me There, Rosecrans Baldwin. I'm first on the list for the rest, but I've inactivated the requests so that everything doesn't come in all at once --have to read some of my own books! Some of the above will probably wind up going inactive for awhile as well.

4. Bad book habit?

The worst: Buying books as soon as they come out in hardback and then not getting around to reading them until long after they've come out in paperback. I need to either quit buying hardbacks or quit using the library.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?

From the university library: Ghostwritten, David Mitchell; A Writer's Diary, Virginia Woolf; The Mulberry Empire, Philip Hensher; Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon; The Wise Virgins, Leonard Woolf; Demos, George Gissing; Martha Quest and Love, Again, Doris Lessing.

From the public library: Composed, Rosanne Cash, and I'd Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman.

6. Do you have an e-reader?

Yes, a first-generation Kindle. It isn't evil and it isn't as good as a book. But it's quite useful.

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?

One at a time is ideal, but I usually read nonfiction or collections of short stories in fits and starts instead of straight through. Maybe I should just say I prefer to do whatever meets my readerly needs at the time.

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?

No.

9. Least favorite book you read this year?

Richard Hughes's The Fox in the Attic was a major letdown after the incredible High Wind in Jamaica a couple years back.

10. Favorite book you’ve read this year?

I can't decide. It's been a good year and I've read a lot of things I've loved--Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope; Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker; The Sweetest Dream, Doris Lessing, among them, but I'm still sorting my feelings out about which book will prove to be my favorite.

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?

My comfort zone's pretty large, so not often.

12. What is your reading comfort zone?

I prefer literary fiction and classics, but I'm okay with just about anything that's well-written.

13. Can you read on the bus?

Yes. I don't get motion sick reading on the Kindle.

14. Favorite place to read?

Living room, in a big leather chair with an ottoman for my feet.

15. What is your policy on book lending?

I want them back!

16. Do you ever dog-ear books?

Frequently, to mark pages I'd like to return to. I use bookmarks or post cards to keep my place.

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?

Not often. But I usually dog-ear.

18. Not even with text books?

Been a long time since I've had a textbook.

19. What is your favorite language to read in?

English.

20. What makes you love a book?

Words on the page.

Okay, sometimes the illustrations or photographs are the best part.

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book?

If I think the book and the person will be a good match. I don't try to match my favorites with people any longer--my tastes are my own and I realize that.

22. Favorite genre?

Literary fiction

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did?)

I wish I read more history and science, more philosophy and poetry.

24. Favorite biography?

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.

25. Have you ever read a self-help book?

Yes, but it's been a long time.

26. Favorite cookbook?

I still like the spiralbound compilation from the Methodist church we used to go to.

27. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or nonfiction)?

Ulysses.

28. Favorite reading snack?

Pop corn and Coke. Usually I just drink coffee, though.

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.

I don't hold a book responsible for the hype surrounding it. I've been rolling my eyes a lot this week due to the hoohah surrounding Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and the Nicole Krauss blurb on David Goodman's To the End of the Land.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?

Depends on the critic.

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?

I don't have a problem writing a bad review, but I'd prefer not to waste my time on a book I dislike in the first place, so there's not a lot of opportunity.
32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?

Russian or German.

33. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?

Ulysses, which I finished last month. Yay me!

34. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?

Finnegans Wake. I'll never attempt it. Never.

35. Favorite poet?

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?)

Varies. I'm terribly proud of myself for having less than ten checked out from the university library right now, I'll tell you that. I think I've had 30 plus for most of the last decade.

37. How often have you returned book to the library unread?

Very often. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.

38. Favorite fictional character?
Stephen Mauturin

39. Favorite fictional villain?

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?

Whatever I'm interested in at the time.

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.

Without reading anything? A few hours, maybe. I go a few days between books, sometimes.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I was skimming before the end of the first chapter, so I knew there was no point in continuing with it.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?

Other people.

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?

Howards End.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?

Crooked Hearts

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?

A couple hundred or so while Christmas shopping.

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?

If I'm reduced to skimming, it's not worth reading.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?

Total lack of interest. An author who'd undermined my trust. The presidential campaign of 2008 (I have a couple of books started from then that I still need to get back to).

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?

Enough so that I can find what I'm looking for. Not so much for other people.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?

Keep them.

51. Are there any books you’ve been avoiding?

This is the category of books given to me by other people based on their own tastes, not mine.

52. Name a book that made you angry.

Hmmm. Earlier this year I found the ending to George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee rather infuriating, but it wasn't the type of anger I think you're looking for, since I still love Gissing.

The ending to Ender's Game made me so angry that I've never picked up another Orson Scott Card. How's that?

53. A book you didn’t expect to like but did?

Master and Commander , Patrick O'Brian.

54. A book that you expected to like but didn’t?

A Fox in the Attic, Richard Hughes.

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?

Rereading an Anne Tyler novel.

Booking Through Thursday

What if they come in the middle of the potato?

2010-08-21T07:31:00.002-04:00

During this eternal moment, she, and faraway Ofer, and everything that occurs in the vast space between them, are all deciphered in a flash of knowledge, like a densely woven fabric, so that the very act of her standing by the kitchen table, and the fact that she stupidly continues to peel the potato--her finger on the knife whiten now--and all her trivial, routine household movements, and all the innocent, ostensibly random fragments of reality that are occurring around her, become nothing less than vital steps in a mysterious dance, a slow and solemn dance, who unwitting partners are Ofer, and his friends preparing for battle, and the senior officers scanning the map of future battles, and the rows of tanks she saw on the outskirts of the meeting point, and the dozens of smaller vehicles that moved among the tanks, and the people in the villages and towns over there, the other ones, who would watch through drawn blinds as soldiers and tanks drove down their streets and alleys, and the quick-as-lighning boy who might hit Ofer tomorrow or the day after, or perhaps even tonight, with a rock or a bullet or a rocket (strangely, the boy's movement is the only thing that violates and complicates the slow heaviness of the entire dance), and notifiers, who might be refreshing their procedures at the Jerusalem army offices right now, and Sami too, who must be at home in his village at this late hour, telling Inaam about the day's events. Everyone, everyone is part of this massive, all-encompassing process, and the people killed in the last terrorist attack are part of it too, unaware of their role: they are the casualties whose death will be avenged by the soldiers now setting off on a new campaign. Even the potato she is holding, which is suddenly as heavy as an iron weight and she can no longer continue to slice it, it too might be a link, a tiny but irreplaceable link in the dark, calculated, formal course of the larger system, which comprises thousands of people, soldiers and civilians, vehicles and weapons and field kitchens and battle rations and ammunition stores and crates of equipment and night-vision instruments and signaling flares and stretchers and helicopters and canteens and computers and antennas and telephones and large, black, sealed plastic bags. And all these, Ora suddenly feels, as well as the visible and hidden threads that tie them to one another, are moving around her, above her, like a massive fishing net, tossed up high with a sweeping motion, spreading slowly to fill the night sky. Ora quickly drops the potato, and it rolls off the counter and onto the floor between the fridge and the wall, where it shines with a pale glow as she leans on the table with both hands and stares at it.

--David Grossman, To the End of the Land

Know Nothing by Mary Lee Settle

2010-08-19T15:08:00.003-04:00

Latest stack of books

2010-08-18T17:15:00.000-04:00

I decided to go on and take a picture of my latest book stack instead of waiting until the new Kate Atkinson arrives.

From the top:

David Quammen's The Soul of Viktor Tronko. A Nancy Pearl recommendation.

Molly Keane's Queen Lear. From Kathleen.

Georges Simenon's Pedigree. Spotted this on Danielle's wish list and had to have it.

Pat Conroy's South of Broad. From the publisher.

Nancy Mitford's The Blessing. Another Mitford for the collection.

Rafael Yglesias's A Happy Marriage. Heard about this on NPR. Haven't read Yglesias since Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil.

Mary Lee Settle's Choices. Because I want to read more Settle.

Donald Lystra's Season of Water and Ice. Because of the cover.

Belle Boggs' Mattaponi Queen. Another because of the cover.

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. Long-listed for the Booker.

Jon Clinch's Kings of the Earth. Because of all the love at BookBalloon.

Like we need blood and oxygen

2010-08-17T15:14:00.000-04:00

We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person's depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer's unflinching eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline to which I cling in a confusing, unfair, sometimes dehumanizing world. In my childhood, the nuns and priests insisted, sometimes in a shrill and punitive tone, that religion was where God resided and where I might find transcendence. I was afraid they were correct for so many years, and that I was the one at fault for not being able to navigate the circuitry of dogma and ritual. For me, it turned out to be a decoy, a mirage framed in sound and fury. Art and music have proven to be more expansive, more forgiving, and more immediately alive. For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

--Rosanne Cash, Composed

Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

2010-08-16T07:04:00.000-04:00

Fictionless fiction, I realised, was what all realist writers, including me, wanted to create: something super-authentic and with so much emotional truth that none of it seems like a story at all.

Meg Carpenter, our narrator in Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe, ghostwrites young adult thrillers and leads workshops on genre writing; her own science fiction series is being dropped by the publisher. Most of the progress on her literary novel involves using the delete key on what she's previously written--a particularly bad state of affairs since the novel was due years back and the unpaid bills keep piling up on Meg's desk.

To supplement her meager income--since her live-in boyfriend is exceedingly depressed and useless--she reviews science books for the local newspaper. But then Meg reviews the wrong book, a book "about how to survive the end of the universe," a book she doesn't even like, and her going nowhere life is given a gloss of narrative drive. Meg, though, doesn't believe in apophenia, "the perception of meaningful connections where in fact there are none," and her friend Vi has a theory of the "storyless story":

Characters in storyless stories, she said, didn't worry about what they wore or said or did. They were Fools stepping over the edge of the cliff on all our behalves, so that we can also step out of the restrictive frame of contemporary Western narrative. Surely, she argued, we should have stories not to tell us how to live and turn our lives into copies of stories, but to prevent us from having to fictionalise ourselves. Maui is a Trickster who shows us the non-sense of the world. Perhaps Tricksters, the character you're not supposed to identify with, are in the end much more interesting role models than the princes and princesses of fairy tales, and the characters in American sitcoms that only exist in order to make us feel that we should be perfect, like them.

Now if the idea of a storyless story doesn't appeal to you, then Our Tragic Universe might drive you mad. Much of the book simply involves Meg walking the dog, discussing philosophy or writing with her friends or students, learning to knit socks, eating tangerines--nothing that's going to satisfy a keen craving for a plot that does more than follow a woman's daily thoughts and experiences. I still haven't decided whether Thomas has actually written a storyless story, since I can identify a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as the fact that Meg's quietly gathered a few of the metaphorical "bottles of oil" that she imagines teaching her genre-writing students to put in their books to spur the plot: "I wanted to make my 'real' novel less formulaic and more literary, of course, but if I listened to Vi's theories, then my only narrative strategy would be 'shit happens.' "

No matter to me either way. This is my kind of book and I enjoyed Our Tragic Universe tremendously. I have a suspicion I'll be reading all of Scarlett Thomas's previous books while I wait for her next. And I'm moving Chekhov's A Life in Letters and Aristophanes's The Frogs closer to the top of my mile-high tbr stack thanks to the reading habits of Thomas's characters.

(For those who care about such matters, I read a review copy of Our Tragic Universe on my Kindle. This was my first download from NetGalley and I'm still unsure whether the books there are all time-limited downloads or ones that will remain unless deleted by the device's owner. Which is to say, FCC, I don't know whether I should classify it as a free book or merely a loaned one.)

Reading a Good Book

2010-08-16T06:52:00.001-04:00

Jon Clinch Q&A

2010-08-15T10:19:00.000-04:00

I'm not officially back (although I think I will be before the end of the month), but I wanted to pop onto the blog to mention that Jon Clinch, author of Finn and the newly-released Kings of the Earth, will be participating in a Q&A session at BookBalloon Monday and Tuesday this week.

I've ordered a copy of King of the Earth, but of course it won't arrive until after the Q&A. I'll just have to be content listening to his answers since I won't know the questions I ought to be asking!

Come and participate, or lurk like me. :)

See you in September

2010-08-05T08:40:00.001-04:00

Folks, I know I kind of regularly disappear from these parts without saying much of anything to you, but I always feel bad about it and wind up spending much of my time dealing with the guilt of being such a terrible blogger to behave in such a way, so this one time I want to be upfront about it: I won't be posting this month, but I expect to be back, better for the time away, by Labor Day. Well, maybe I'll get my belated post up for the Slaves discussion of Manservant and Maidservant before then, but all the other reviews I'm inclined to write aren't going to get done till then unless I become a totally different person. Doubtful.

But before I go (to work, and then to the gym--memo to self: Go. to. the. gym), a thank you to Kathleen at Frisbee: A Book Journal for Molly Keane's Queen Lear. It looks great and I am looking forward to reading it!

And why the waterfall picture above? It was taken in western North Carolina a few years back when we went to a Dwight Yoakam concert at WCU and I am spending my reading time this week in Appalachia via the short stories of Ron Rash (who teaches at WCU and mentions Dwight --and my other fav, Steve Earle--in one of his stories) and Pinckney Benedict (whose strange stories are giving me weird dreams that I'm grateful every morning not to remember in any detail). And I've just started Mary Lee Settle's Know Nothing, which is as Southern as they come, so there you go. I like to think about higher elevations and white water when it's as hot and humid as it's been all summer long.

See you back here in a few.

The chosen directors of his prejudice

2010-07-26T07:27:00.001-04:00

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

2010-07-09T11:27:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-09T08:14:00.001-04:00

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!

2010-07-08T10:00:00.000-04:00

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!