Booker Short List and a Challenge

Yes, I'm posting in the middle of the night. S. has been on a fitness kick since he recovered from foot surgery, has signed up with a personal trainer and everything, and consequently, the home is free of all junk food, including caffeinated beverages.

Instead of supper I had a mocha frappe at work tonight and I am wired.

The Booker Short List. Not that I've read it, but I'm pulling for Ali Smith's The Accidental.

More importantly, Mental Multivitamin has listed the books that actually say something about her and has issued a challenge for others to do so as well. She was inspired by my post last Sunday when I commented that top ten lists that contain nothing but classics don't reveal much about their compilers.

I doubt I limit myself to ten books and I may open up my list to include music and the definitive movie or TV show (few and far between), but putting such a list together, revealing a life this way, will certainly entertain me even if it does no one else.

Can you timeline your life with books? What will it reveal about you?

Thursday Evening Goat Blogging begs for a bit of poetry:

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragonfly on the river.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Remember to check out The Ark on Fridays and the Carnival of the Cats on Sundays for a round up of the best and latest pet blogging photos.

I'm expecting a $50 gift certificate from Borders in the next week or so.

I'm intending to buy a cd (Patty Loveless' latest) and a mini-series on dvd (The Flame Trees of Thika).

Is it possible that I've reached my saturation point for books? It's true I'm expecting a shipment in the next few days-I wanted a copy of Robert Sapolsky's Monkeyluv to take on the Utah trip and adding D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths to the order insured I'd get free shipping-but lately I'm not feeling a burning desire to own most items I so eagerly place on my wish list.

Perhaps my disinclination to buy books these days is based on the fact that we're totally out of shelf space. I'm beginning to double-shelve, which I hate, and the sofa and chair in the study-usually the cats' domain-- have been put to use as overflow storage as well. R. and I have been trying to persuade L. to build more bookcases, but we haven't yet ripped up the carpet and installed the hardwoods in the bedroom, a job that definitely needs to finished before we seriously even think about putting in another wall of built-ins.

And then there's the fact that I always reason that library books ought to be read before the books I own. I must have at least 60 books checked out right now. That's practically a year's worth at my current rate of speed. I need to return some of these, recheck them out at a later date.

One book I do want to buy, though I'm definitely waiting until it's out in trade paper or I can pick it up used since I've already read a library copy, is Pinkerton's Sister. I actually want two copies of it since I intend to use a highlighter on one which will render it useless as a reading copy once I'm finished.

Sandra asked eons ago for my final verdict on the book and Danielle has asked as well. I've put off my response for so long that I've lost the link to a Rushforth interview that explained how he'd originally set out to write a book about Pinkerton himself, but the sister took center stage.

So my long overdue final verdict:

I loved it. I unabashedly loved it. But I don't think most readers who attempt it will.

It's too long. There are a couple fantasy set pieces that were too much even for me. And of its 729 pages I'd guess that less than 29 of those pages concern themselves with what takes place outside the main character's head (that's my highlighter project right there) on this wintry day in 1903 New York, the day that her brother is to leave for Japan-the rest is all the memories and musings of Alice Pinkerton, 34-year-old never-married still-at-home-taking-care-of-mama Alice, known throughout her Longfellow Park neighborhood as "the mad woman in the attic." (She technically lives on the third floor, not the attic.)

It's also terribly elliptical. Alice's mind freewheels from one literary reference to the next, from one horrid visit with her therapist to the next tedious tea party with the neighbors (she is to be re- institutionalized in Pughkeepsie on Wednesday, the reader learn fairly early on), somehow managing to circumvent, in spite of the wealth of words, because of the overflow of words, from what the reader believes she'd most like to know.

But I loved it. I love Alice Pinkerton.

Alice has issues. Alice has a formidable imagination that she frequently puts to use against those around her. Alice loves books and language. She is, albeit a secret one, a writer and has a writer's sensibilities. Although she is clearly out-of-step with the society around her, the depression she suffers from is due in large part to actions taken by her father years ago. The reader is free to conclude that these actions will never be mentioned in her therapy sessions and that the doctor would be nonplussed if they were.

For a large book, I read this one very fast. Next time through I'll take my time: Alice is for those with patience.

And speaking of patience, I'm making an effort to have it with Don Quixote. Sandra is no doubt finished with it already and Stefanie is probably a hundred pages at least further on than I am-I just finished the scene where Quixote and Sancho ride the wooden horse. It's been really hard for me to disengage enough from the news so that I can finish this book.

Links

Ang Lee on why he wanted to make "Brokeback Mountain":

"When I first read the story, it gripped me. It's a great American love story, told in a way that felt as if it had never been done before. I had tears in my eyes at the end. You remember? You see the shirts put away in the closet side by side."

Who could forget? When Annie Proulx's short story about two cowboys in love appeared in The New Yorker nearly eight years ago, it was so startling and powerful that for many people, the experience of reading it remains a vivid, almost physical memory. As for those shirts, the image is unique and indelible: hidden years earlier in the back of a closet, they hang from a single nail, the outer, denim one, bloodied by an old blow, the second, a torn and dirty plaid, carefully tucked inside the first, its sleeves worked down into the other's sleeves, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. It's an emblem of love so plain and homely that it could only be true.

"Brokeback Mountain" is set to be released in December.

Today, someone's taste for the "classics" can cover up no discernable individual or original taste of their own. Classic trumpeting can be a refuge for philistinism or nationalistic indolence. Unlike the word masterpiece, the classic category only pretends to be an aesthetic valuation.

--Alan Warner, "The Curse of the Classics"

There is nothing less revealing than reading someone's top ten books list when the list contains nothing but classics.

"Journalism isn't something I've learned. . . .It's a natural inclination. I grew up without brothers and sisters, I was not automatically part of a group, so I became very curious about the way things work, how people interact. I watch and learn."

--Lyle Lovett, "Lyle Lovett's J-School Days"

Make mine a cheeseburger.

Goethe's Faust reminds us forever that the devil is personal, not impersonal. That the devil is putting every individual to the test, which every one of us can pass or fail. That evil is tempting and seducing. That aggression has a potential foothold inside every one of us.

--Amos Oz, "The Devil's Progress"


Empathy is what we long for - not sadness for a house we own, or owned once, now swept away. Not even for the felt miracle of two wide-eyed children whirled upward into a helicopter as if into clouds. We want more than that, even at this painful long distance: we want to project our feeling parts straight into the life of a woman standing waist-deep in a glistening toxic current with a whole city's possessions all floating about, her own belongings in a white plastic bag, and who has no particular reason for hope, and so is just staring up. We would all give her hope. Comfort. A part of ourselves. Perform an act of renewal. It's hard to make sense of this, we say. But it makes sense. Making sense just doesn't help.

--Richard Ford, "Elegy for My City"


While circling the world in the HMS Beagle, naturalist Charles Darwin reaches the Galápagos Islands in September 1835. Amazed that "islands formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height [could be so] differently tenanted," Darwin on his return to England spends 23 years formulating an explanation for this and other observations. He publishes his theory of "natural selection" in On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin dies in 1882, age 73.

--Alison McLean, "This Month in History"

If you're still in a summer frame of mind, NPR's Summer Reading 2005 may be worth a leisurely browse. If you're already in the mood for fall, the Washington Post's Fall Book Preview will give you heads up on plenty of new titles. I've already placed holds on E. L. Doctorow's The March and Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. Kaye Gibbons' The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster is on the fall list although Amazon is listing it with a January 6 publishing date. That one I'll probably purchase.

Today's reading

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

--George Bush, today

"No one can say they didn't see it coming."

--FEMA, 2001

"It's kind of been like trying to give aspirin to a cancer patient."

-- Louisiana coastal activities office, 2001

"With the land around us constantly sinking, our natural storm protection is disappearing. Levees protect us, but they're not enough."

--The Times-Picayune


Timeline outlining the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration.

How to donate.

A brief history of Mississippi flooding and the levees policy.

And Mark Twain, on river floods:

This present flood of 1882 will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It put all the unprotected lowlands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the Mississippi was seventy miles wide! A number of lives were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not been promptly afforded.

Orhan Pamuk

ISTANBUL, Aug. 31 -- An acclaimed Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, has been charged with the "public denigrating of Turkish identity" and faces a possible prison sentence of three years, his publisher said Wednesday.

The charge stems from an interview that Pamuk gave to a Swiss newspaper in February in which he said certain topics were regarded as off-limits in Turkey. As examples, he listed the massacre of Armenians in 1915 and the ongoing war between Turkish security forces and Kurdish guerrillas. (Washington Post)

I mentioned back in April that Pamuk's detractors had ordered his books removed from the shelves before determining that there were actually no Pamuk titles on the shelves. (see Kurdish Media News)

His court date's set for December 16.