Two months' worth of reading

I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up the reading pace I had going in June and July. But still, even if my tempo slows a wee bit more, I'm on track to finish 100 books this year if I manage but five books a month. Although it doesn't matter, I really like it when I manage to break into three digits in my reading. I also know my low three digits are put to shame by many of you, so I like it even more than reading isn't a competitive sport.

Anyway.

August

Sarah Canary. Karen Joy Fowler. I pulled this one from the shelf when Teresa and Jenny decided to focus on science fiction and fantasy for the month. It's a novel that can be read as a first encounter novel or literary historical fiction. I need to read more Fowler.

The Winds of Heaven. Monica Dickens. My entry into the world of Monica Dickens. It won't be my last; I've downloaded samples from several to help me decide which I want to read next. A widow without a financial cushion is forced to divide her time among daughters who don't want her.

To the North. Elizabeth Bowen. I came to this via Frisbee's delightful post. I didn't read it as carefully as I should have (Wendy was coming to visit and I had to clean) and I can definitely see myself rereading it.

Treasure Island!!! Sara Levine. All the cool kids at Book Balloon were reading this. I attempted to buy it at B&N, but I couldn't remember the author, and I got the distinct impression from the woman who attempted to locate it in the system for me that all my talk of exclamation points and the book not being by Robert Louis Stevenson simply led her to believe I was insane. There's a section that was terribly hard for me, as a former owner of parrots, to endure, but otherwise I enjoyed reading about this awful, awful character who becomes fixated on Treasure Island.

Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell. A reread; my suggestion for real life book club. Only three of us read it; the rest bailed quickly, although one did manage to read the Luisa Rey sections when I suggested she just focus on any storyline that caught her interest. Of the other two who read it, one loved it and the other I'm in awe of, because she read it on sleepless nights after undergoing chemo. It took me a bit longer to get into the story this time than it did back in 2004, but once I engaged, I loved it as much as the first time. So now that Cloud Atlas has held up to a second reading, it's secured a spot on my Lifetime Favorites List.

More Baths Less Talking. Nick Hornby. Oh, how I wish more bloggers would model themselves on Hornby's columns instead of serving as publicists' willing accomplices!

September

The Gooseboy. A.L. Barker. After learning that Rebecca West held her in high regard, I started collecting A.L. Barkers. I've been slow to read them, though, and I've been saving the ones West expressively praised-- A Heavy Feather, The Middling -- for last. The Gooseboy won the 1988 Macmillan Silver Pen Award and was republished as a Virago Modern Classic in 1999. I think anyone who's enjoyed Ivy Compton-Burnett would get along well with Barker.

Too Many Magpies. Elizabeth Baines. I've had this on hand for a couple years and decided it would provide me with the quick breather from Red Mars (see next item). The main character drove me nuts for the first half of the book, although of course I liked the writing or I'd never have finished it.

Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson. I'd downloaded a free copy of this a few years back and was inspired to begin reading it by all the news regarding Curiosity. Can't remember if I started it before or after the Bowen, but obviously, I needed to read other books while making my way through it. Wonderful world building, interesting characters, but it just went on and on.

April Witch. Majgull Axelsson. Loved it. It deserves its own post. One of my favorites for the year.

2312. Kim Stanley Robinson. It felt like cheating to read this before continuing on with the Mars series, but I have been craving up-to-the-minute hard science fiction this year, so cheat I did. It took a couple weeks to get through, much less time than Red Mars, but I wasn't reading anything else on the side, so I hated myself every time I put it down after just a few pages. Again, wonderful world building, much more fantastical this time around, but I was less invested in the characters, except for wanting to periodically slap the main one.

A Touch of Mistletoe. Barbara Comyns. My third Comyns. Provided an unexpected look at the treatment of schizophrenia in the late 1920s-early 1930s and attitudes toward and method of obtaining an abortion. More Comyns, please!

Three Pears

It's been like the night before the night before Christmas around here all weekend, folks. Tuesday's the release date for Dwight Yoakam's latest cd, Three Pears. And since it's been a long seven years since the last cd from my favorite fella, I've had that baby pre-ordered for months.

I've been so excited that I couldn't help myself this morning. When I saw that L. had some pears out for juicing, I co-opted three of 'em for a photo op in honor of the album cover.




I've been listening to on-line early releases of several of the songs:

Three Pears itself (Following Dwight's incontrovertible thought process, this is a song inspired by John Lennon's three pairs of shades)

Take Hold of My Hand (lead track)

Heart Like Mine (co-produced with Beck)

Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (cow punk version of the country standard)

It's Never Alright

Long Way to Go 

Nothing But Love (Jay Leno performance)

And Dwight's been on NPR, talking about the new songs.

Like I said: Christmas.

The weekend in reading

Start Saturday with a cup of coffee and Majgull Axelsson's April Witch. Mentally berate yourself for having this book unread on your shelves for the past decade. Decide you really ought to read Ray Bradbury's story "The April Witch," which was an inspiration for the Axelsson novel.

"The April Witch" isn't found in the Bradbury collection you own. Take to the internet to determine where you can find it. Check local library catalogs for The Golden Apples of the Sun, attempting to place a hold on the latest James Meek, The Heart Broke In,  while you're at the public library site. When you can't find it, go to Amazon and pre-order it.

Determine that you can find "The April Witch" incorporated into the Bradbury novel From the Dust Returned. Write the LC call number from the university library catalog on a scrap of paper and stick it in your back pocket.

Run by the public library on your way in to work and pick up Zadie Smith's latest, NW.

At the university library, go up to the tower for Bradbury. Your eye snags on a Virago Modern Classics version of Kay Boyle's My Next Bride nearby. Read the back cover --hmmm, it's largely autobiographical--then take both books back downstairs with you.

Start the Bradbury while eating your sandwich at lunch. Read up to the chapter that introduces the April Witch.

While working at the circ desk, follow a link to a John Jeremiah Sullivan essay that touts Guy Davenport. Recollect having The Geography of the Imagination on your wishlist some time back. Check the catalog. Go to shelves and pull both Geography and a story collection, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon.

Back at the desk, find a scrap of paper in your very own handwriting tucked in the card sleeve at the back of the essay collection. Evidently, you've checked Geography out before, along with Salvation on Sand Mountain, whose title and call number are also on the scrap of paper. Has no one else checked out these books since the last time you had them?

Think about going back up in the tower to get the Covington (because no, you didn't get it read the last time you checked it out). Decide you've already met your quota on Appalachian snakehandling books for 2012. Another year.

Stick that particular scrap of paper back in the card sleeve. Stick the scrap paper with several other books recommended by John Jeremiah Sullivan into the back of The April Witch.

Read "No, But I've Read the Book" and "The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward" from the Davenport.

Check Amazon to see if either the Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312, or the A.L. Barker, A Source of Embarrassment, ordered last Sunday, have shipped yet. Nope.

Read the April Witch chapters. Note that she's called a last-of-summer witch, not an April one, as you presume she must have been in the story version.

Read book blogs for awhile. Read through "The Homecoming" chapter in the Bradbury.

Read a few more pages of the Bradbury after returning from hearing Pete Anderson at the Double Door.

Sunday morning. A few more pages of Bradbury, including the afterward. Mademoiselle magazine put out an October issue centerpieced around "The Homecoming." Bradbury says that Kay Boyle wrote one of the essays in the October issue; in fact, she's the only writer he mention by name. Serendipity!

Read the threads at Book Balloon, where you find a link to a Philip Hensher review of Zadie Smith's NW (will read this later). Due to a glowing endorsement at BB, realize you must read Alice Munro's "Labor Day Dinner" immediately. Fortunately, you have The Moons of Jupiter on hand, so you can do just that.

You've had Amazon Prime since the day after you ordered the Barker; it still feels like a new pony in need of proper exercise. You also have enough remaining credit card rewards points to cover Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Plus your husband dumped wheat grass seeds in the sink while you were soaking the exhaust fan grids this afternoon and he hasn't been nearly remorseful enough. Click.

Where has the day gone? All you want to do now is read Majgull Axellson. Why haven't any of her other books been translated into English?

You close out the weekend with a bowl of pop corn and The April Witch.

First sentence

In the aftermath of my adventure, I decided to write down the whole thing, starting with my discovery of Treasure Island and keeping nothing back, not even the names of the friends and family members whose problems plagued me; and so even though I'd love to go into the other room and stab someone with a kitchen knife, I take up my pen--a nifty micro-ball which had been incorrectly capped and would have dried out had I not, at the crucial moment, found it and restored its seal.

--Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!!

Not Juliet

Ha! So I'm cleaning the study this morning and I unearth the piece of flash fiction below. I'm not even sure when I wrote it.

Anyway, I'm greatly amused because it prefigures in its own way a particular novel that everyone's reading this summer--even down to the use of a particular name there at the end.

Amazing.

(I'm more laid back than a lot of bloggers about warning people not to reproduce their work without prior consent, but I'll be quite blunt here: Don't do it.)

~~~~

Not Juliet

It messed you up for a good long while: Ben's parents holding you personally responsible, and why not, since he left a letter so poignant and detailed that no one but you cared that it was totally fabricated (maybe he thought you would be impressed with how convincing he could be, when he cared to try), and your parents shamed by your femme fatale designation. Someone placed Cliff Notes to Romeo and Juliet between the storm and front doors the morning of the funeral; for the longest while you believed that Ben had orchestrated that, too, as well as a whole host of plagues that would befall you when and if you regained your equilibrium.

You escaped to college when the time came, managed to concentrate long enough for a degree. You proved capable of self-support, sought with unerring precision the men women with half your sense would dodge or deflect, men icy and glazed, hardened like statuary. Your hands were so clean the skin puckered.

In time words that rolled and surged through your head like a stormy shoreline surf--He never loved you--He was only happy when you were unhappy--He was nothing but an angry, manipulative son-of-a-bitch--cease to be mere noise and spray; they become groundwater seeped deep in your soul, silent and laden with minerals. Your hands dirty, life bloomed around you, as technicolor and lush as a rain forest.

Yet there's a snake in every jungle, a coil of cobra, a hooded helix that hisses his name in the most unlikely places. Standing in the grocery check-out, your check filled except for the amount, your cashier stops scanning your items, calls to a woman leaving the store, an arrangement of baby's breath and carnations in her hands: "How's Amy?" Have you seen her?" The woman stops, swaying slightly in her heels. "I'm on my way over there right now," she says. "She's not doing too good." Your cashier watches the woman until she steps from the curb, then, before she returns to your cabbages, takes you into her confidence. "Amy's boy hung himself last night," she says. "Over some girl."



~~~~~~

Hmmm. Should I assume the reader will supply a sibilant last name to Ben, or change his name to Sam or Steve?

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

I procrastinate everything. Since Byatt's Ragnarok is short, I thought starting it the Friday night before a Tuesday Slaves of Golconda discussion deadline would be ample time. Unfortunately, I ran into that Byatt thing that sometimes trips me up, where she's obsessively going on and on listing, categorizing, something that doesn't line up with my own items-worth-obssessing-over criteria. Remember the marbles in The Biographer's Tale? You have to be in the right mood for that kind of thing. (It's why I hold the opinion that while Byatt at her best is a better writer than her sister Margaret Drabble, Drabble is a more consistently interesting storyteller--for me, at any rate.)

And so when I reached Byatt's Midgard serpent-long list of creatures that live in the sea, with subcategories for all the kinds of sharks and crabs, and her lengthy list of every type of animal, vegetable, mineral, disease, etc., that cried for Baldur to be released from the underworld, I was ready to put this title on my own mental list of Byatts That Don't Work for Me (unlike the more lengthy list of ones I love--The Children's Book's in the number one position there). I couldn't keep from zoning out.

And I hated that. I have such a shallow background in Norse mythology and I'd bought this book the moment it was released in the UK in order to remedy that. Surely the fault was all mine.

So Monday night I started rereading the book that failed to hold my attention on Friday night. I was more focused than I'd been over the weekend, plus in the meantime I'd done some dipping into The Prose Edda and Norwegian Mythology, which I conveniently had--unread-- on my shelves. (I definitely want to read The Prose Edda after this quick dip.)

I was much happier with it the second time round. I even appreciated the lyrical nature of the ineluctable listing of things.

What I, here in the Bible Belt, found most interesting first time through and what I continued to marvel at on the second was the young Byatt's ability to reject Christianity at such an early age. She finds the Old Testament and New Testament gods numbing: neither "the sweet,cotton-wool meek and mild one, the barbaric sacrificial gloating one. . .. made her want to write, or fed her imagination."

The thin child walked through the fair field in all weathers, her satchel of books and pens, with the gas-mask hanging from it, like Christian's burden when he walked in the fields, reading in his Book. She thought long and hard, as she walked, about the meaning of belief. She did not believe the stories in Asgard and the Gods. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive. She read the Greek stories at school, and said to herself that there had once been people who brought 'belief' to these capricious and quarrelsome gods and goddesses, but she herself read them as she read fairy stories, Puss in Boots, Baba Yaga, brownies, pucks, and fairies, foolish and dangerous, nymphs, dryads, hyrdra and the white winged horse, Pegasus, all these offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be. But they didn't live in her, and she didn't live in them.

The idea of eternity bored her. A string of days "going nowhere" bored her. She prefers the "stories that ended, instead of going in circles and cycles," finding them "grimly satisfactory." The Norse gods who know Ragnarok, the final battle of the gods and the end of the world, is coming, but are too stupid or too resigned to letting the story they find themselves in play out, are the ones she returns to.


Before Ragnarok, I knew of Byatt and Drabble's mother primarily through Drabble's writings, a portrayal that Byatt's taken issue with. Drabble wrote The Peppered Moth in an attempt to better understand her mother, claiming in the novel's afterward she "went down into the underworld" looking for her, mentioning a myth in which a woman rubbed herself with dead rat water in order to gain admittance to the underworld so that she could search for her loved one there. Drabble said writing about her mother left her unable to get rid of the smell of dead rat and mentions feeling biased in favor of her father. Her experience of the mother was one of a manipulative, intellectually frustrated depressive prone to outbursts of rage. Nonetheless, Byatt has stated that Drabble was the mother's favorite.

In Ragnarok, Byatt's describing the time when the same woman was actually happy. She was a highly intelligent woman, "gallant and resourceful in wartime," permitted to teach,  shoehorned back into the life of a housewife, suffering "a fall into the quotidian," once her husband returns. "Dailiness defeated her. She made herself lonely and slept in the afternoons, saying she was suffering from neuralgia and sick headaches. The thin child came to identify the word 'housewife' with the word 'prisoner'."

Despite the war, the nights spent behind blackout curtains, worrying about the Germans "dealing death out of the night sky," the young Byatt finds these years a kind of paradise. If her family had not evacuated from the city, her asthma may have killed her. The bleak Norse myths hum in her head while she's walking through a countryside covered with flowers. When the family returns to urban life, her father takes an axe to a wild ash tree that's rooted itself on the sill of the garden shed in their walled garden. For a child who's loved the World-Ash, Yggdrasil, the removal of the tree closes a gate in her head. She's now on the quotidian side of life.

Please feel free to join the discussion of Ragnarok over at the Slaves of Golconda, or in our discussion forum. 

July's books

I've been tearing through books this summer at a hellbent-for-leather speed, thanks in no small part to how slothful the heat has made me: I hate the feeling of heat rising off my chest and hitting the underside of my chin, so I do nothing as often as I can to avoid that sensation.

This is what I've read in July:

Existence. David Brin.
Aliens from various worlds have been virtually uploaded into an artifact that's found orbiting Earth in a future 40 or so years on. One of the myriad storylines involves a pod of uplifted dolphins, so I'm feeling the need to raid my son's collection to catch up with Brin's earlier works. (I came in towards the end of a Star Wars fans vs. George Lucas show my son was watching on Netflix last week and he said, Look at that poster. That guy's also a fan of the Uplift series. And I said, Maybe that's because he's David Brin, the author.)

Our Friend the Charlatan. George Gissing
I read Born in Exile last month, the story of a lower middle-class intellectual young man with atheistic views who, in order to ingratiate himself with a wealthy clergyman and his family, publishes an article that condemns his own radicalism and commences studying to become a minister. Our Friend the Charlatan tells a story in a similar vein: an Oxford grad loses both his private tutoring position and his allowance from his struggling parents. Plagiarizing the ideas of a French sociologist, he gains the sponsorship of a elderly aristocratic woman and runs for Parliament. I'd recommend anyone new to Gissing to read Born in Exile before Our Friend, but since Gissing's Victorian views on women often infuriate me, I must mention that he allows his "new woman" to most gloriously diss his "coming man" in a most satisfactory manner.

Three Weeks in December. Audrey Schulman
I was a little wary at first. There are definite parallels to Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and I wasn't sure that having an autistic main character wouldn't prove to be anything but a trendy gimmick. But oh, I came to love this book. It's my favorite book of the year so far.

Reply All. Robin Hemley
It's been so long since I've seen a new collection of short stories from Hemley, I thought he'd quit writing them altogether. One story gives a nod to the Plaza-Midwood area of Charlotte, where he once lived.

Eve's Ransom.. George Gissing
Another late-Victorian working-class protagonist. After coming in to enough money to live on for a couple of years, a young man becomes obsessed with the beautiful woman whose photograph he'd spotted in his landlady's album.

The Wise Virgins. Leonard Woolf
Okay, so I meant to read Night and Day, the only novel of Virginia's I've yet to read, but I decided I ought to read Leonard's novel first as background. For some reason, I'd thought Leonard would make a difficult read, but instead I read it all in one day.

The Catcher in the Rye. J.D. Salinger
The Wise Virgins was so angsty I decided I'd rather revisit Holden before moving on to Virginia. I'd worried that now that I'm on the flipside of my own children's angsty years, I might have lost some sympathy for Holden, but no. It's bad enough going through that time without also having to deal with a beloved brother's death at the same time.

11/22/63. Stephen King
For book club. It went over well with everyone, including me.

Z. Lauren Baratz-Logsted
A chick lit/contemporary romance retelling of The Great Gatsby with a window washer who fancies himself Zorro taking the part of Gatsby. I took a chance with a book that isn't my usual reading fare because the e-book was free at Amazon, but it just didn't work for me.

Boleto. Alyson Hagy
I've always loved "a boy and his horse" stories since the days of My Friend Flicka and The Red Pony. In this  Graywolf Press version, a young Wyoming man determines to train a Quarter horse filly to play polo out in California. People keep interfering with his dream. Most excellent.

Broken Harbor. Tana French
French is one of the few mystery writers I read regularly, but I still think her first, In the Woods, is her best. Guess I'm just partial to mysteries that don't tie everything up neatly at the end.

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. Peter De Vries
De Vries is a big favorite with the Readerville/Book Balloon set and this one was touted because of its debate between a minister and the town atheist--they each manage to sway the other to their point-of-view. Mostly it's the story of an erudite 8th grader who gets his teacher pregnant and cannot secure an arbortifactant from local doctors or pharmacy. She moves away and he eventually spends the summers working for and sharing a bed with his new son's grandfather. Yeah, it's a farce. I've got another De Vries on hand to read soon.

The Year We Left Home. Jean Thompson
Interconnected short stories about an Iowa family of Norwegian descent. Most of the stories center around Ryan, who has a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to his girlfriends.

Ragnarok. A. S. Byatt
For the Slaves of Golconda discussion this coming week.

Walking Lessons. Reynolds Price
A novella based on Price's Christmas visit with a friend working as a VISTA volunteer at a Navajo reservation. Price transforms himself into a character whose wife has just committed suicide and his friend into a man whose Navajo girlfriend (married, with children) has just found out she has MS. I need to read more Price.