I'd wondered if this would happen:

An additional 2,500 copies have been commissioned for “Story of My Life,” according to Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House, Inc. The book, first released in 1988, is narrated by a promiscuous, aspiring actress whom [Jay] McInerney has said was inspired by [Rielle] Hunter — then named Lisa Druck — and a group of friends the author had met in New York. (Charlotte Observer)

I pulled my copy off the shelf Friday night since I remembered very little about the book--wasn't there something about a horse, something designed to make the reader feel a bit of compassion for this awful girl? Or was that the story of my life, always focusing on the horse, dating all the way back to my Black Beauty days?-- and I hadn't liked it nearly as well as the told-in-the-second-person Bright Lights, Big City. And thumbing through it I remembered a conversation I'd had with a fellow classmate in '93, who'd confessed to a monumental crush on Alison Poole but could not adequately explain the why of that crush in a way that I could understand.

I still don't understand.

Silent stories

When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen. And until that person left my sight, I would tell them about Deng, who died after eating elephant meat, nearly raw, or about Ahok and Awach Ugieth, twin sisters who were carried off by Arab horsemen and, if they are still alive today, have by now borne children by those men or whomever they sold them to. Do you have any idea? Those innocent twins likely remember nothing about me or our town or to whom they were born. Can you imagine this? When I was finished talking to that person I would continue my stories, talking to the air, the sky, to all the people of the world and whoever might be listening in heaven. It is wrong to say that I used to tell these stories. I still do, and not only to those I feel have wronged me. The stories emanate from me all the time I am awake and breathing, and I want everyone to hear them. Written words are rare in small village like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if utterly powerless.

--Dave Eggers, What is the What

Other Worlds

Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?

Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?

What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?

(This came to me when reviewing a Jonathan Carroll book - I’m not sure I’d like to live in the worlds of his books.)

Oh, if ever a batch of questions cried out for caveats. . .

I spend more time reading about situations, experiences, worlds that I'd rather not experience on my own. (Or at least not if I were to remain female humbly born in my new incarnation. Do I have any control over that? ) Not that I'm a plot-hound by any means, but there's just not enough narrative drive in Eden to keep me sniffing around there for very long.

Although it might not be so bad to be one of Connie Willis's historians and get to dip in and out of different time periods without having to be stuck in any particular one.

And for worlds I wouldn't want to live in but suspect many others would: I would never want to inhabit Jane Austen's world. It's only Austen's sensibility that keeps those lives from sounding as tedious as they really are.

Who would I trust to write my life? Lorrie Moore. Clyde Edgerton. Anne Tyler. Although I would love to see what Virginia Woolf or Flannery O'Connor could make out of it.

Booking Through Thursday

How many people have bought a Kindle? According to this article, 240,000 reading devices have been shipped. And there's speculation a new Kindle next year will target the textbook market.

A High Wind in Jamaica

To prolong the pleasure of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica which I was speeding though yesterday at a great clip, I paused to track down the Rebecca West review from which the description A hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry on my copy's back cover was taken. And when my seach failed to uncover the source I decided that if I could wish any book into existence it would be a collection of West's book reviews. Why hasn't anyone already taken this endeavor upon their shoulders? I'll buy your book! I'll even pre-order it!

One good thing that came out of my seach, though: when I plugged in A High Wind in Jamaica's original title, The Innocent Voyage, I was brought back to a post of my own, three summers ago, when I quoted a New York Times reviewer during my E.C. Spykman Celebration who'd called Ted, Jane, Hubert and Edie Cares "probably the most uninhibited youngsters in fiction since Richard Hughes wrote The Innocent Voyage" more than a quarter century earlier. Why I didn't immediately go searching for Richard Hughes' book three summers ago is a mystery. I suppose I thought it would really be kind of innocent.

Clearly I have a lifelong love of uninhibited literary youngsters, and while I would prefer to live next door to the Cares children rather than the Bas-Thorntons if I were to have any say in the matter, I was quite happy to make their acquaintance in the pages of the book.

The Thornton crew is growing up uninhibitedly on the Ferndale estate outside St. Anne's following Emancipation in the West Indies:

It was kind of a paradise for English children to come to, whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home. Here one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it. The difference between boys and girls, for instance, had to be left to look after itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and were allowed to do everything the boys did--to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.

The children are banished unwillingly from their version of Eden following a hurricane; they are to be taken to school in England on a ship captained by a man who "certainly looked the ideal Children's Captain," but by the end of Chapter Two will have declared the children murdered by pirates instead of merely abandoned to them through his own cowardice and incompetence.

This inversion of expectation as well as the tone of Hughes's writing is what makes this one such a treasure: Parents don't know their children best or really at all; authority figures are anything but, as are the notions of justice, truth, solace; babies are more animal than human.

And the fate of a snake-killing cat called Tabby will be of more lasting concern to the children than that of any member of their own tribe.

Life won't actually do

A story is always on the move, and from the author's point of view there is nothing natural about it. Constant readers become writers at the point in life when they acquire a fascination with a process of falsification: with imposing shape while simulating the evolution of character and event, making determinations while fostering an illusion that in the next chapter anything might happen. A novelist spends a lifetime in the business of presenting what's life-like, but not like life. It's a sobering thought - life won't actually do. Verisimilitude and the truth are conjoined twins, one often flourishing at the expense of the other.

--Hilary Mantel, "Real Books in Imaginary Houses"

Widget fidgets

I added a "Currently Reading" widget to the blog a few days ago. The widget is still in its beta stage and I find its quirks interesting.

At first it appeared to work more reliably with Firefox than with Internet Explorer. Now it doesn't work with either when viewing the blog's main page, but shows up if you view an individual post.

Weird.