Sunday Salon: Petty Reading

I've focused on three books this past week, a small number for some of you. Yet I'd much prefer concentrating on one novel at a time and I kept hoping all week that one would grab my total attention instead of leaving me internally agitating to start one of the many library books that came into my possession over the past few days that seemed much more promising than those already in progress (more on the library books later).

Most of my time was spent on Les Miserables. I read Fantine in April, set the book aside in May since I knew I was too distracted then to make it through 50 pages of Waterloo, and am now determined to finish Cosette in the next day or two (I hope tonight); I've just "Cemeteries Take What is Given Them" to go.

I have always considered myself a great fan of literary disgressions, of authors going off on tangents. But Tristram Shandy poked a hole in that idea last summer and Hugo's doing the same this. Actually, Hugo's sewer systems defeated me years back, so I don't know why I expected things to go better this time around, in a novel even longer than the one attempted before.

All I can say at this point in Les Mis is without a bit more plot and character, I may resort to (that dread word) skimming. As Stephen Colbert would say: Les Mis, you have been put on notice.

Last weekend in the book store I spotted David Rabe's Dinosaurs on the Roof, a just-published novel of which I'd missed any previous mention. I was interested in how the writer would expand upon the opening premise--an older woman asks her best friend's daughter to take care of her animals because the Rapture's occurring that evening and she's to be taken--since it seems better suited to a short story than a novel. Instead of waiting to get it from the library, I bought a copy for the Kindle. It's okay, but so far I'm still waiting to get over the snit fit I had when Rabe claimed that the older woman watched both The Guiding Light and General Hospital--how can she when the shows are rivals? According to the acknowlegements at the end, tons of people read this book prior to publication; obviously, they all grew up in homes way too refined for the watching of soaps to have occurred, but surely it should have crossed someone's head to check a TV listing.

I have no petty complaints to make about Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. It's my exercise book, however, and I haven't been on the treadmill nearly enough this week.

I'm looking forward to starting the next book for the Slaves of Golconda, Edith Wharton's Glimpses of the Moon and I probably ought to start working out some of my readerly frustrations with Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge. I'm sure my mood will improve quickly once these books are underway.

Savages won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it a lot.

Gore Vidal

Who's read Gore Vidal? Where would be a good place to start? After reading this q-and-a, I want to.

Dickens vs. Johnson: a literary dispute

Captain Brown and Miss Jenkyns were not very cordial to each other. The literary dispute, of which I had seen the beginning, was a "raw," the slightest touch on which made them wince. It was the only difference of opinion they had ever had; but that difference was enough. Miss Jenkyns could not refrain from talking at Captain Brown; and, though he did not reply, he drummed with his fingers, which action she felt and resented as very disparaging to Dr. Johnson. He was rather ostenatious in his preference of the writings of Mr. Boz; would walk through the streets so absorbed in them that he all but ran against Miss Jenkyns; and though his apologies were earnest and sincere, and though he did not, in fact, do more than startle her and himself, she owned to me she had rather he had knocked her down, if he had only been reading a higher style of literature.

--Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

What's the internet doing to our brains?

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

--Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Where you from? Wanna read this review?

Respondents who identify themselves as residents of planet earth (62%) are much more likely than are those who self identify as residents of America or their city or town to agree that book reviews make them want to buy a book

--Zogby's Reading and Book Buying Habits of Americans survey

(via Readerville)