Ye gods, is there anything worse than a reading slump?

"One last story left to tell. . ."

Inspiration up and left you? Writer's block getting you down? Burnout aggrieving your soul? Singer/songwriter Radney Foster's been there and put it to song.

L. and had a great time at Radney's show at the Double Door Inn here in Charlotte Friday night and his "Whose Heart You Wreck (Ode to the Muse)" was one of the highlights for us--I was thrilled that my video of this one turned out. And I got an autograph and a picture taken with Radney afterwards!



But alas and alack, while I was able to upload the video to Facebook, Blogger say the file is too large to upload here. (Really? Not enough space for a single song?)  Sigh.  So here's Radney Foster singing "Ode to a Muse" somewhere else back in 2013.

(Mine was better grumble grumble.)

Thoughts on The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

"She can't do that, can she?" I asked myself when I reached the last page of Barbara Comyns' 1959 novel The Vet's Daughter. "She can't have a first person past tense narration and then kill off the narrator on the last page! I mean, obviously, she can, but isn't it stooping kind of low?"

Then I looked back a few pages, spotted a one-sentence flashforward whose significance I'd failed to note previously, and all was forgiven. I love dead narrators. Alice Rowland has been playing this card--that she's talking to us from beyond the grave--close to the vest.

Many things are played close to the vest in The Vet's Daughter, leaving the reader at the end not quite sure how we're supposed to interpret certain events, or even certain characters. For example, the novel opens with a description of a "man with small eyes and a ginger moustache" who walks along the street with Alice while she "was thinking of something else. . . . He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn knee-caps." This man is not seen or mentioned again until the final pages of the book. Clearly Comyns intends the ginger man to serve more purpose than arouse Alice's pity--but what? I can't worry it out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the story of Alice Rowland, 17-year-old daughter of an abusive London veterinarian who is more apt to send an unwanted puppy to the vivisectionist for a pound than to put it down humanely as he is supposed to. He's broken Alice's mother's front teeth with a kick in the face, and even worse, her spirit. He mostly ignores Alice since she disappointed him by being born a girl, but she's still frightened of him. Their house is grotesque--dark, smelly, decorated with the rug of a Great Dane's skin and a monkey's jaw, filled with animals in cages that Alice is required to take care of.

One night shortly before Alice's mother, who is dying of cancer, is euthanized against her will by Alice's father, Alice listens to her mother reminisce once again of growing up  on a farm in the mountains of Wales: "Dark brown moss grew in the mere by the farm; and once I saw a little child floating on the surface. She was dead, but I wasn't afraid because she looked so pure floating there, with her eyes open and her blue pinafore gently moving. It was Flora, a little girl who had been missing for three days. . . "

The morning that Alice is told her mother has died, she sees a Jacob's ladder that the sun has made across the floor of her mother's bedroom.

After the funeral, Alice's father goes missing for three weeks. He returns with a barmaid --the strumpet from the Trumpet-- Rosa Fisher (a fisher of men?), who he euphemistically tells Alice will be their housekeeper. Rosa quickly assumes an evil stepmother-like role in Alice's life. One afternoon while fixing their lunch in a steamy hot kitchen Alice imagines--or so she thinks at first--that she is floating above water in the mountains. "This wonderful water world didn't last long because a mist came, and gradually it wasn't there, and something was hurting my head. Somehow I'd managed to fall on the kitchen floor, and knocked my head on a coal scuttle. Coal had got in my hair, but otherwise everything was as it had been before I'd seen the water garden--just boiling beef and steam, and heard Rosa's and Father's voices coming through the wall."

Alice hasn't realized it, but her mother's reflections and death have inspired her to begin levitating. For most of the book, I was prone to read these instances metaphorically, as they happen after times of great psychological distress for Alice. Yet Comyns has Alice read ghost stories and Alice mentions how happy her mother's ghost must be when she leaves home to be a companion on an island for Henry Peebles' mother (Peebles is a kind man who cares for Alice, although she does not particularly want to marry him).  There's no denying that there's something supernatural going on here, especially once you accept the story's being told from beyond the grave.

And after Alice's father decides to exploit her talent, once she has returned home following Mrs. Peebles' suicide, to have her "rise up before all the people on the Common" it becomes clear that Comyns is turning Alice into a Christ figure, parodying the Christ story, since, as a character explains, the beauty in Alice's case is she isn't religious: Alice is given wine to drink and thinks it must be blood; she smells sour bread and cockroaches; she is kept prisoner; she exclaims, "Please God, don't let that happen to me. Father don't make me do this thing. I don't want to be peculiar and different. I want to be an ordinary person. I'll marry Henry Peebles and go away and you needn't see me any more--but don't make me do this terrible thing."

Alice's ordeal is not removed. Alice, in despair and humiliation, is brought in a bride's white dress, in a hearse-like carriage, to rise up and then come "down amongst the people." Trampled by a frightened crowd milling about in circles, she dies. Unlike the man with the ginger mustache, who dies with a terrified expression on his face, at the moment Alice's life is finished, she states, "[F]or the first time in my life I was not afraid."

And now I'm left with the thought: is the man with the small eyes and the ginger mustache a stand-in for the reader? A small-eyed someone Comyns and her characters briefly walk beside while thinking of something else?

2015: A dare and a new long-term project

I am horrified to look back and discover that last January I didn't even manage to recycle my usual Eschew the New! resolution, that my first post of the year (and sparse they were) didn't come until February 1. I am extremely grateful that Wendy was willing to share her thoughts on books over the course of 2014 and hope she will continue to do so forever and ever. I just need to get my groove back, so prepare for a lot of inane posts while I redevelop the blogging muscle, all right? Mixed metaphors will abound!

I finished the Fill in the Gaps Project very quietly in April. A five-year plan, the objective had been to read 100 books, but we were to count ourselves successful if we read 75. I read 86, then completed another six from the list by the end of 2014. Over the course of the project, I realized I liked long-term projects with large pools of books.

And that brings me to my new project, one I'm calling 60 by 60, although I certainly hope I manage to read more than 60 books on the list. It's heavy on the classics--Gissing, Trollope, Stendhal--and other authors I really ought to have read, or read in more depth, by now.

So that's the five year plan. Perhaps I can get a head start on it, since between today and April 1, I'm participating in James' TBR Double Dog Dare.  (I am so glad James didn't retire the dare!) I have a book on back order and of course I will buy the new Anne Tyler the moment it comes available in February, but other than that, I can think of no books that will break my determination to read from the books I already have stockpiled here and on my desk at the library. Of course, one reason my will seems so strong is that I have ten books from the Tournament of Books long list either on hand or on hold!

Happy 2015, everyone. Happy reading.

Reading stats, favorites and Claudius, the chemo cat

This year has been all about Claudius.

In February we noticed he had a ruptured anal gland. I took him to the vet, who wouldn't even fake concern over this injury; she'd felt a mass near his bladder during his exam. After a quick flurry of tests over the next few days, Claudie was diagnosed with large cell lymphoma, and his vet referred us to an oncologist.

In all honesty, I wasn't enthused at the thought of Claudius undergoing chemo. I've charitably called him "the startle puss" on the blog before, but closer to home I refer to him as "the family paranoid schizophrenic." He's had on-and-off liver issues all his life. He's been a terror to medicate. He'll ruin your shirt and try to scratch your innards out, is what I've always told anyone crazy enough to want to pick him up. Wasn't quality of life, not quantity, all that mattered to a cat?

Try chemo for a month and see how he does, Claudia, the oncologist, advised.

He came out of his muzzle during his first session of chemo and sent two vet techs to the ER. I had to deal with the required-by-law visits from Animal Control and Claudius was sedated before treatment from then on. But he handled the chemo itself well and we never thought about stopping. He didn't quit biting the blood out of me when I gave him his meds until sometime in August. He and I have been through a lot of stressful times this year, but I'd say his quality of life has been much improved.

We're all glad he's still around. I think he is, too. He's been sitting beside me on the couch, watching me blog this afternoon. He spent Christmas holidays playing with my daughter's kitten as if he were a kitten himself. (Very strange: remember when he was afraid of Ellie when she was a kitten? He didn't play then, He hid under the couch for 36 days.)

I'm sure sitting around waiting for him during his chemo sessions is part of the reason I managed to read 115 books this year--the highest number I've ever read, although I remain more impressed with the 112 I read in 2000 since that list included several lengthy classics. While I counted 12 books as classics this year, the two that were pre-20th century were definitely short.

And paying for chemo also helped me further rein in my spending on books, an expenditure that was already on the decline.

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

Books Total 115 /  74 / 100 / 82 / 101 / 101 / 78 / 81 / 74 / 77
Nonfiction  14 /13 / 5 / 12 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 8 / 14 / 13
Novels 84 / 57 / 80 / 66 / 78 / 79 / 62 / 62 / 50 / 47
Short Story Collections  15 / 3 / 4 / 2 / 7 / 7 / 3 / 4 / 1 / 8
Library Books 53 /36 / 29 / 39 /26 / 48 / 27 / 14 / 31
Newly Acquired/Read 17 / 14 / 21 / 12 / 23 / 32 / 32 / 31 / 24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled 26 / 58 / 78 / 120+ / 113 / 140 / 88 / 141+ / 75+
E-texts Read  11 / 12 / 20 / 12 / 17 / 10 / 12
Free E-texts Read 3 / 4 / 10 / 6 / 9 / 5 / 7
Just-published books  35 / 35 / 30 / 21 / 36 / 55 / 41 / 34 / 33
Classics 12 / 7 / 22 / 23 / 21 / 10 / 8 / 23 / 12
Pre-20th Century 2  /1 / 8 / 10 / 9 / 7 / 4 / 12 / 11
Written by women 87 / 49 / 38 / 46 / 55 / 42 / 33 / 28

Ten authors with multiple books: Alice Munro (5); Jane Gardam (3); Joan Didion (2); Linda Grant (2); Tessa Hadley (2);  David Mitchell (2); Lorrie Moore (2); Anthony Powell (2); Elizabeth Taylor (2); Rebecca West (2).

Three rereads: Anagrams by Lorrie Moore; A Lemon and a Star by E.C. Spykman; and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

It was a very enjoyable reading year for me, but an unusual one in that I feel more favorably disposed to authors than to particular books. I don't know if it's a sign of my age, that I'm not finishing nearly as many books thinking that I'd like to read them again some day, but without that feeling, I don't regard that book as a favorite, no matter its quality.

What did I finish in 2014 that I can imagine rereading? Jane Gardam's Old Filth and its sequels? David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, despite its flaws, just for the fun of it? Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven?

I want to read more Elizabeth Taylor and Dorothy Whipple. I want to read everything Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald have written.

Reading resolutions tomorrow.

Happy New Year.

Books, you know, they're not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art--the art of words.

 --Ursula LeGuin, "We will need writers who can remember freedom"

Reading vacation / readathon, with updates

I convinced my husband to take me on a reading vacation way back in the mountains the first weekend in October; unfortunately it was right before the leaves began to change and there was enough rain that most of the reading had to take place indoors instead of under the 400-year-old trees in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest as I'd planned.

I read Tana French's latest and L. read Lorrie Moore short stories.

Perhaps I can get him to read a couple more today so that he can say he participated in the readathon.

I am quite blown away realizing that Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon, which started most humbly back in fall of fall of 2007 with just 37 participants, has 959 people signed up as of  7:23 am today.

Back in 2007, I began the very first readathon by reading Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Today I am starting things off with Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch. Gordon is an author I've been meaning to read for years and one I included in the last readathon I participated in, although I had so many books in my stack of possibilities that year that I never got around to her volume of collected stories.

I intend to do updates here, but not frequent ones. I haven't signed up for cheerleaders, so there really isn't a need.

And now I'm off to make some tea and give my cat his meds before the reading commences.




It's taken six and a half hours, but I've finished my first book, Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch. Published in 1944 and regarded as one of her best, it is exceedingly Southern. There are no dead mules in it, but let me just be cagey for a moment and say if there had been, Gordon's capacity for creatively killing them would rank up there with Truman Capote's. I will give away no more than that. But if you can tolerate casual racism and homophobia in your Southern lit along with its peacocks and Tennessee Walkers and moonlight trysts between cousins, do give her a try sometime. Her civil war novel, None Shall Look Back, is said by some to be a better novel than Gone With the Wind.

As for me, I've had enough Southern lit for the day and I'm turning by attention across the pond: hello, Hilary Mantel and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

2nd Update
A belated midway report here, since I've been sidetracked by dinner and the "Am I being catfished?" article at the Guardian. . .

I have now completed my second book of the readathon, Hilary Mantel's The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I've now read a total of 558 pages since 8 this morning.

I really don't have a clue what I'm in the mood for next, so I think I'm going to pull books from the shelves and read first sentences until something grabs me.