If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

--Claire Messud, talking about anger, the books she loves, and oh, yeah, her latest, The Woman Upstairs.

My copy arrived this afternoon. Can't wait to start.

Paltry reading

This is sad. The entire first quarter was sad and the sluggish reading pace continues. Unless things change I'll probably finish out 2013 having completed fewer books than at any time since 1994.

I think I'm going to have to rethink all social reading commitments until I get a handle on the other obligations that have to take precedent--I'm still back at the Jean Rhys section in Stet and I never even started Doctor Glas for the Slaves back in January. And I think I'm going to need to restrict my reading to books that wholly engage my attention or else I won't get through them at all.

Anyway.

The last few weeks' meager few finishes:

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. James Lasdun. I had a one-night stand on the Double Dog Dare with this one and I do not feel guilty; if I'd known about it beforehand, I would have caveated it in, for reasons I won't go into. I take issue with Lasdun's insistence that Nasreen must be sane so that he can have a "morally engaging antagonist" for "interesting," "literary purposes," but otherwise, I have great sympathy for him for what she's put him through.

The Waterworks. E.L. Doctorow. I read somewhere that this was a tribute to Poe. I enjoyed it more for the period details and was perplexed by the narrator's overuse of ellipses. I don't believe this was a newspaper convention of the time and C. assures me that Poe wasn't overly fond of ellipses either, so I don't know what effect Doctorow was going for here. Read this if you want something literary for Carl's RIP Challenge.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. Ann Patchett. This was a Kindle single, really more of an essay than a book.

Good-bye to All That. Robert Graves. Dare I attempt The White Goddess now? Er, not anytime soon.

The Imperfectionists. Tom Rachman. For book club. I was the only one who truly enjoyed it, I'm sorry to say. Crazy sad newspaper people amuse me.

The Burgess Boys. Elizabeth Strout.Although I can find where Anne Tyler has recommended Elizabeth Strout, I cannot find confirmation that Strout has ever mentioned reading Tyler. Nevertheless, to me The Burgess Boys reads as if Strout has internalized all the Anne Tyler novels over the years. Spotting these influences, or intentional nods, as I went through this made me deliriously happy. I realize this book isn't working as well for the very people who originally turned me on to Strout back when Amy and Isabelle first came out (i.e., the old Readerville crowd), but I really loved this book.

Well, isn't this special. Now the library doesn't even have a New Books section.

Students complained.

Or so we've been told.

 Unless the froth of craziness whipped up by a particular family member (see: six-word memoir) extends even further in the coming weeks or months, and I am hoping it cannot, the worst coming from that direction is at an ebb. At least for now.

Caturday

 

 

"He'd always imagined distant stars as worlds 'where no animals were suffering' "

I didn’t know Walt Rave, but for years I saw him walking our Takoma Park neighborhood and swinging his fox pelt on a chain. ¶ I would learn that his cause was the ethical treatment of animals, though he still appeared intimidating. When I read of his death from a house fire in 2011, I immediately imagined a graphic narrative to encapsulate his life. ¶ I contacted two of his closest friends, Fred Hunter and Chris Nordby, and I started culling information and sketching. The more I learned about Walt, the more he stood out as an individual: a Vietnam War veteran who had been a tree surgeon, a nude model and a worker in Takoma Park’s tool library. He stuck solid to his principles against cruelty, even when he may have come across as unbalanced. ¶ Such utter conviction seems rare, and it is hard to capture even in black-and-white. ¶ Being, like Walt, an artist, a Navy veteran and a cat lover, I now find it unfortunate that I never stopped to chat with him once in a while.

--   Art Hondros, "Fox Guy" Had to Teach Us

(Disclosure: Art Hondros has been a writing buddy of mine for more than 20 years and I'm thrilled to see his multi-page comic strip in the Washington Post Magazine.)

The curse of the classics

Reading fiction is not a rationalistic act of enlightenment. Like life itself, reading novels has no definite final outcome, except The End. We are always changing throughout this campaign of page turning and our literary memories shapeshift too. Every book we read in some way nudges our stubborn psychological DNA into reaction and affects our impressions of the book we read before and the one we shall read after.

I have an aversion to being told what I should like or dislike so I abandoned reviews, critical consensus and the judgment of others long ago. For my answers I go where I always have - to second- hand bookshops. Meandering, you browse free of any concepts of canons and frantic opinions; the novels are refreshingly free of any order and the browser is exposed to a book display of random chance rather than of cultural weight, media promotion or the latest fad. The full variety and the exhilaration of all that humanity has written down can be right there. Or just Harold Robbins' complete works and 13 copies of Goldfinger. It is up to each of us to conclude which books we should not be reading. We might be missing out on something important, so we cannot trust anyone but ourselves. Let us not say we should celebrate a few select books. I say: profusion, abundance, read more, more, more!
--Alan Warner, The Curse of the Classics