Just finished the first thing that has ever made me want to have a crack at actually reading Proust, a biography of Proust's first English translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff that I picked up randomly in a bookshop while escaping from the cold on a recent trip to Seattle. Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, by Jean Findlay (his I think great niece) is not the best written biography I've read by a long shot, and Scott Moncrieff is not even (as Adam Gopnik points out in his much more articulate discussion of Scott Montcrieff's translation of Proust: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-a-flawed-version-of-proust-became-a-classic-in-english) the most remarkable of men, but it's rather lovely to read - even posthumously - about someone who was such patently good company. Despite the backdrop of trench warfare, the rise of Italian fascism, and eventual excruciating death by esophageal cancer, he was cheerful, affectionate, funny, brave, interested and tenacious in his translation work, devoted to his fellow soldiers in the trenches as well as to friends and family, irreverent, soulful, schoolboyishly dirty-minded... altogether a very endearing portrait. You have to love a man who likes to write letters and read as much as he did.
Speaking of cheerful grace in adversity, on the same fruitful bookshop visit, I also treated myself to Anne Lamotte's book on how to write, Bird by Bird, which did not remotely inspire me to try and write anything fictional ever (it would have been a tough sell in any case) but did make me giggle out loud enough times to seriously annoy my partner (who was trying to work), especially her descriptions of parenthood (the image of babies being born with one-fifth of their mothers' brains clutched in their fist, like the babies you read about being born clutching their mother's IUD, made me shed tears of recognizing joy).
And (guilty pleasure) three of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books... When you read three in a row without stopping (on the plane back from Seattle), certain formulae do start to emerge in terms of plot and character, but they are still fun fun fun and you can convince yourself that you are learning at least a little bit of legitimate history. I did start to wonder a bit what the trick is with her dialogue - it's sort of timelessly old-fashioned. If she were to write in actual 12th century English, it would be unintelligible, but paragraphs like:
"The truth will be known in the end. Since you certainly did not kill [ ], there's somewhere among us a man who did, and whoever uncovers his name removes the shadow from yours. If, indeed, there is anyone who truly believes you guilty"
- have a generically Tolkieny sound to them - quaint, but not pinnable down to any particular half century. You do have to admire, however, her casual use of words like paynim, Outremer, castellan, missal, merlon, embrasure, mangonel, brattice, espringale... (true confessions: the only ones I would have even had half a chance at guessing were paynim and missal, but I was glad to be able to do that guessing in the privacy of my own brain, rather than in front of a panel of judges).
Thursday 27 February 2020
Wednesday 30 May 2018
First post in nearly three years...
... and I am driven to it by Patricia Lockwood's 2017 completely hilarious and weird memoir, Priestdaddy, about her narcisstic rightwing nutjob of a Catholic priest father. (It turns out there is a papally-endorsed loophole by which priests of other denominations are allowed to keep their wives and families when they convert to Catholicism). There is not a single platitude in the book, and she nails the bittersweetness of her specific family and the bizarre unfairness of the religion at large, all in this slightly manic voice which still holds the echoes of what an excruciating (literally) adolescence she must have had. It's tempting to not try and describe this book, and instead just quote chunks of it... what the hell, Catholicism is all about giving in to temptation and subsequent redemption. Here's what she says when asked what exactly Catholics believe:
"First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you're causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."
She wrote the book when she and her writer-husband had to move back in with her parents when they ran out of money, and reading it made me spend two hours online researching local MFA creative writing programs in the hopes that someone somewhere might be able to teach me to write like her (fat chance), so parental units, be warned: I might be needing my old room back again one of these days.
The other Catholicism-related book I have been slowly, slowly picking my way through recently is Jack Miles' God: A Biography, which purports to analyse the Old Testament God as a literary character. Miles is described in Wikipedia as having been raised Catholic, and he was a Jesuit seminarian from age 18-28, and I am dying, dying to know whether he is still a True Believer, because he is deliciously eye-rollingly parental about the very bad behavior that the Old Testament God engages in, which makes me think he can't possibly be, right? except all his books are about Christianity and he teaches religion, so ?? Anyway. His thesis, broadly speaking, is that the O.T. God can be seen as a literary character who develops over the course of the Bible, but it's bit of a hard sell, to be honest, because frankly God is extraordinarily inconsistent depending on which bit of the Bible you're in, as approximately billions of people have noticed. BUT I did learn some very interesting things about some of the mistranslations of the King James version from the original Hebrew, and how God has different names depending on whether he's in lawgiver mode, loving father mode, creator mode, vengeful crazy mode, etc. I was also struck by Miles' point that the Old Testament God is unusual in his (a) asexuality - most other universe-creating characters have some sort of sexual element to their story, (b) his consequent solitude - the essential problem of monotheism is that you have no one to talk to unless you create humans, and (c) his consequent dependence on humans for his power (if there are no humans to boss around, what's the point of being God?). I haven't finished the book yet, but I will. I also read (a while ago now) Kathleen Norris' book The Cloister Walk, about a year she spent as a writer-in-residence at a monastery, and it sounded great except for all the conversations about God one is presumably expected to have.
I've read other books in the last three years (ones I remember: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionists; Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette; Three Junes and The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass; Mark Sullivan's Beneath a Scarlet Sky (terrible prose, interesting story); um um um a lot of others. Goal: at least write down when I finish a book so I have a chance of remembering that I read it, if not remembering anything about the book...
"First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you're causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."
She wrote the book when she and her writer-husband had to move back in with her parents when they ran out of money, and reading it made me spend two hours online researching local MFA creative writing programs in the hopes that someone somewhere might be able to teach me to write like her (fat chance), so parental units, be warned: I might be needing my old room back again one of these days.
The other Catholicism-related book I have been slowly, slowly picking my way through recently is Jack Miles' God: A Biography, which purports to analyse the Old Testament God as a literary character. Miles is described in Wikipedia as having been raised Catholic, and he was a Jesuit seminarian from age 18-28, and I am dying, dying to know whether he is still a True Believer, because he is deliciously eye-rollingly parental about the very bad behavior that the Old Testament God engages in, which makes me think he can't possibly be, right? except all his books are about Christianity and he teaches religion, so ?? Anyway. His thesis, broadly speaking, is that the O.T. God can be seen as a literary character who develops over the course of the Bible, but it's bit of a hard sell, to be honest, because frankly God is extraordinarily inconsistent depending on which bit of the Bible you're in, as approximately billions of people have noticed. BUT I did learn some very interesting things about some of the mistranslations of the King James version from the original Hebrew, and how God has different names depending on whether he's in lawgiver mode, loving father mode, creator mode, vengeful crazy mode, etc. I was also struck by Miles' point that the Old Testament God is unusual in his (a) asexuality - most other universe-creating characters have some sort of sexual element to their story, (b) his consequent solitude - the essential problem of monotheism is that you have no one to talk to unless you create humans, and (c) his consequent dependence on humans for his power (if there are no humans to boss around, what's the point of being God?). I haven't finished the book yet, but I will. I also read (a while ago now) Kathleen Norris' book The Cloister Walk, about a year she spent as a writer-in-residence at a monastery, and it sounded great except for all the conversations about God one is presumably expected to have.
I've read other books in the last three years (ones I remember: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionists; Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette; Three Junes and The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass; Mark Sullivan's Beneath a Scarlet Sky (terrible prose, interesting story); um um um a lot of others. Goal: at least write down when I finish a book so I have a chance of remembering that I read it, if not remembering anything about the book...
Friday 17 July 2015
Audiobooks!
Listened to:
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart
Read in old fashioned print media, barely moving my lips at all:
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
The Hermit of Eyton Forest, Ellis Peters
Read out loud:
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
...and here's the sad thing: likely many more that I have already forgotten having read. But! we don't believe in dwelling on past failures (especially not when there are so many present and future failures to be obsessed over) so, onward.
I spend squoodles of time commuting, sadly along a route which is peculiarly unamenable to public transportation (I once calculated it would take me five hours to get to work if I went via public transport, and I would have to arrive either two hours early or 45 minutes late). And while there's some enjoyment to be extracted from pushing/twiddling all the various knobs and buttons in my zippy new little Honda Fit (functional air conditioning! so exciting!) the radio reception isn't great for large stretches of the 101 and NPR is annoying anyway now that they have embarked on endless pre-pre-pre-election campaign speculation, so audiobooks are my new best friend.
Everyone everywhere no matter what should read David Mitchell's completely brilliant amazing fantastic book The Bone Clocks, including those friends and members of my immediate family who disapprove violently of fiction in all forms. I am willing to consider a possible exemption for under-twelves and non-English speakers, but only if the former commit to reading it as soon as they are old enough and the latter commit to learning English in order to be able to read it and/or read it translated into a language they do understand. Like his also brilliant Cloud Atlas, there a zillion little moving pieces and interlocking stories and you spend probably 90% of the book thinking, hunh? this is weird? I have no idea what's going on, but his prose sure is great! and then the last 10% of the book is like that Welsh Youtube video of the sheep with LED lights on their back getting shepherded around a dark soggy field when the camera zooms out and holy shit, they have recreated the Mona Lisa in wet sheep and it all makes sense. While probably the underlying theme of most of the books of this month (possibly all fiction everywhere?) is that the writer is going to die and that's terrifying and there is nothing heshe can do about it, David Mitchell clearly is writing with the more generous meta-point that we are _all_ going to die and he is afraid for humanity in general as well as just for himself, and he is going to use his fiction to try and point out the stupid things we are doing to hasten that end in the almost certainly vain hope that someone somewhere might do something about it. So bravo to you, David Mitchell, wherever you are (London, I think).
Beowulf I read when it first came out, and remembered nothing but the delicious alliteration in the description of one of Hrothgar's daughters (sisters?) who married a Swedish king, and that the "queen... was a balm in bed for the battle-scarred Swede," which years later listening to it in the car produced a little grunt of joy at (a) remembering the phrase and (b) how evocative it is. It's an odd story, in that it leaves _out_ a lot that you want to know: why exactly did Beowulf take off across the sea to fight a seriously dangerous demon that was terrorizing a nation he had no allegiance to, why was he undervalued at home, what did Grendel look like, why did Grendel want to terrorize the Danes in the first place. Etc. I also, once we figure out how to solve the mortality problem (see above) and I have centuries worth of time to kill, want to sit down with the original and Heaney's translation side by side and try and get a sense for how literal vs poetic his translation is. (A sexist quote I like that I always thought came from Flaubert, but which I just looked up and is actually (apparently) from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who from his Wikipedia article is no stranger to either translation or romantic difficulties, given his transatlantic career and multiple marriages, "A translation is like a mistress: if it is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful.")
Salt Sugar Fat and The Rosie Project are pretty much polar opposites in terms of audiobook experiences: SSF was read by a guy with a really, really, really annoying voice and a breathy overdramatization, but had some good data in it w/r/t the specific ways (again see above) we are killing ourselves with food-substitute. Short version: don't eat processed food, because it has a LOT of salt, sugar, and fat in it, and those things are bad for you. As The Rosie Project's main character, Don Tillman, could/would tell you: this book had an ending you saw coming a mile away, and the ultimate tying up of romantic loose ends was irritatingly facile but the actor who read it had a flawlessly deadpan delivery, plus entertaining antipodean accent, and I was giggling helplessly over all the Aspergersy resemblances of the main character to previously mentioned members-of-immediate-family-who-do-not-approve-of-fiction. (ha! I just remembered something else I read this month: Bella DePaolo's Singled Out: How Singles are Stigmatized, Stereotyped and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After, which does a very reassuring analysis re: how the studies "proving" that marriage makes people happier are a load of codswallop. If you include data on people who get married and then divorced/widowed along with the currently-married data, staying single starts to look pretty bloody good. So hooray for us.)
BFG: Ostensibly for the four-year-old. She thought it was too scary and fell asleep. I thought it was great. It would be great to be the Queen and to read it to William, Harry, etc. when they were little, although maybe Diana wouldn't have let her or maybe they only let the nannies do bedtime stories. Funny to be a real person yet there be so many books in which you play a fictional part.
I am on kind of a Gary Shteyngart roll recently - the Russian Debutante's Handbook is so deeply mired in the sludge of my memory (reference words: kooky - immigrant - clever) that I wasn't sure what to expect with the autobiography/peri-apocalyptic novels, but they are both very funny and perceptive. Especially interesting to see how much of his autobiography made its way into the periapocalypse. He wrote both books when he was younger than I am now. arghghh. Would I be able to write that well if I had done nothing but write fiction from the age of 6 onwards and attended a whole slew of creative writing workshops? Hm. Seriously doubt it. I think I would be very afraid of that kind of extremely personal writing - I wouldn't want zillions of readers to know that much about me, although look, here I am, blathering to my eight? nine? followers about exactly what's been on my bedside table the last few weeks. :p
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart
Read in old fashioned print media, barely moving my lips at all:
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
The Hermit of Eyton Forest, Ellis Peters
Read out loud:
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
...and here's the sad thing: likely many more that I have already forgotten having read. But! we don't believe in dwelling on past failures (especially not when there are so many present and future failures to be obsessed over) so, onward.
I spend squoodles of time commuting, sadly along a route which is peculiarly unamenable to public transportation (I once calculated it would take me five hours to get to work if I went via public transport, and I would have to arrive either two hours early or 45 minutes late). And while there's some enjoyment to be extracted from pushing/twiddling all the various knobs and buttons in my zippy new little Honda Fit (functional air conditioning! so exciting!) the radio reception isn't great for large stretches of the 101 and NPR is annoying anyway now that they have embarked on endless pre-pre-pre-election campaign speculation, so audiobooks are my new best friend.
Everyone everywhere no matter what should read David Mitchell's completely brilliant amazing fantastic book The Bone Clocks, including those friends and members of my immediate family who disapprove violently of fiction in all forms. I am willing to consider a possible exemption for under-twelves and non-English speakers, but only if the former commit to reading it as soon as they are old enough and the latter commit to learning English in order to be able to read it and/or read it translated into a language they do understand. Like his also brilliant Cloud Atlas, there a zillion little moving pieces and interlocking stories and you spend probably 90% of the book thinking, hunh? this is weird? I have no idea what's going on, but his prose sure is great! and then the last 10% of the book is like that Welsh Youtube video of the sheep with LED lights on their back getting shepherded around a dark soggy field when the camera zooms out and holy shit, they have recreated the Mona Lisa in wet sheep and it all makes sense. While probably the underlying theme of most of the books of this month (possibly all fiction everywhere?) is that the writer is going to die and that's terrifying and there is nothing heshe can do about it, David Mitchell clearly is writing with the more generous meta-point that we are _all_ going to die and he is afraid for humanity in general as well as just for himself, and he is going to use his fiction to try and point out the stupid things we are doing to hasten that end in the almost certainly vain hope that someone somewhere might do something about it. So bravo to you, David Mitchell, wherever you are (London, I think).
Beowulf I read when it first came out, and remembered nothing but the delicious alliteration in the description of one of Hrothgar's daughters (sisters?) who married a Swedish king, and that the "queen... was a balm in bed for the battle-scarred Swede," which years later listening to it in the car produced a little grunt of joy at (a) remembering the phrase and (b) how evocative it is. It's an odd story, in that it leaves _out_ a lot that you want to know: why exactly did Beowulf take off across the sea to fight a seriously dangerous demon that was terrorizing a nation he had no allegiance to, why was he undervalued at home, what did Grendel look like, why did Grendel want to terrorize the Danes in the first place. Etc. I also, once we figure out how to solve the mortality problem (see above) and I have centuries worth of time to kill, want to sit down with the original and Heaney's translation side by side and try and get a sense for how literal vs poetic his translation is. (A sexist quote I like that I always thought came from Flaubert, but which I just looked up and is actually (apparently) from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who from his Wikipedia article is no stranger to either translation or romantic difficulties, given his transatlantic career and multiple marriages, "A translation is like a mistress: if it is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful.")
Salt Sugar Fat and The Rosie Project are pretty much polar opposites in terms of audiobook experiences: SSF was read by a guy with a really, really, really annoying voice and a breathy overdramatization, but had some good data in it w/r/t the specific ways (again see above) we are killing ourselves with food-substitute. Short version: don't eat processed food, because it has a LOT of salt, sugar, and fat in it, and those things are bad for you. As The Rosie Project's main character, Don Tillman, could/would tell you: this book had an ending you saw coming a mile away, and the ultimate tying up of romantic loose ends was irritatingly facile but the actor who read it had a flawlessly deadpan delivery, plus entertaining antipodean accent, and I was giggling helplessly over all the Aspergersy resemblances of the main character to previously mentioned members-of-immediate-family-who-do-not-approve-of-fiction. (ha! I just remembered something else I read this month: Bella DePaolo's Singled Out: How Singles are Stigmatized, Stereotyped and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After, which does a very reassuring analysis re: how the studies "proving" that marriage makes people happier are a load of codswallop. If you include data on people who get married and then divorced/widowed along with the currently-married data, staying single starts to look pretty bloody good. So hooray for us.)
BFG: Ostensibly for the four-year-old. She thought it was too scary and fell asleep. I thought it was great. It would be great to be the Queen and to read it to William, Harry, etc. when they were little, although maybe Diana wouldn't have let her or maybe they only let the nannies do bedtime stories. Funny to be a real person yet there be so many books in which you play a fictional part.
I am on kind of a Gary Shteyngart roll recently - the Russian Debutante's Handbook is so deeply mired in the sludge of my memory (reference words: kooky - immigrant - clever) that I wasn't sure what to expect with the autobiography/peri-apocalyptic novels, but they are both very funny and perceptive. Especially interesting to see how much of his autobiography made its way into the periapocalypse. He wrote both books when he was younger than I am now. arghghh. Would I be able to write that well if I had done nothing but write fiction from the age of 6 onwards and attended a whole slew of creative writing workshops? Hm. Seriously doubt it. I think I would be very afraid of that kind of extremely personal writing - I wouldn't want zillions of readers to know that much about me, although look, here I am, blathering to my eight? nine? followers about exactly what's been on my bedside table the last few weeks. :p
Wednesday 15 April 2015
Boards done, taxes filed: and now for something completely different
Books read:
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransome
Rhyme's Reason, by John Hollander
The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard
A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman
English Verse, Early Lyrics to Shakespeare, various
So I really, really, really enjoyed the Stephen Fry book, up until the very last page: he's chatty and funny and passionate about his subject, and his examples are beautifully clear, and although I didn't quite feel moved to follow all his instructions to the letter (going to get a pencil and attempting actual poetry myself) I really did do as he asked and read a lot of the poems aloud and then on the very last page he BLEW IT. A book like this works because the author constructs, along with the how-to manual aspect of things, the cozy illusion that you (the reader) are (a) as competent/literate as he is and that (b) it's just the two of you, BFF's all the way, chatting about poetry. And then on the very last page, he says a bit pompously that he hopes you had fun, but whatever you do, do NOT send him any of your pathetic attempts at poetry because he's crazy busy and important, with all his squillions of fans and it's just too overwhelming (well, he doesn't quite say it like that, but that's the underlying message). What a snot! So I returned my copy to the library, bought a used copy (because one day when I have oodles of spare time haha I really am going to go through and do it properly, doing all the exercises), and as soon as it arrived, I tore out the last page. (Not that I would ever send Stephen Fry anything I'd ever written, but really. I should note that I have now, courtesy of my lovely sister, actually met Nick Hornby after a reading/interview in SF recently, and I was an extremely restrained well-behaved sort of fan. Mostly because he looked as if he was dying to go back to his hotel room and have a smoke and not have to talk to anyone, which is fair enough). So there you go, Stephen Fry, you have incited me to wanton vandalism of literature. I hope you're happy.
April is, it turns out, National Poetry Month, and I have been on a little mini-binge of poetry reading and semi-memorizing, as an antidote to all that studying for my boards exam, getting my taxes done, etc. It's distressingly easy to get through an entire day without thinking once about beauty and pleasure and the very particular joys of the English language, so I have been shopping around with me an elegant little leatherbound English Verse as well as a paperback of A.E. Housman in an effort to combat that. I know that words are the important part of all this, and physical books per se aren't supposed (?) to matter, but sitting down on the train and pulling out my ancient leatherbound English Verse with its funny indented type and little ribbon placeholder and age-spotted tissue-paper-thin pages to try and hash through the prologue of the Canterbury Tales made me HAPPY. (Wow, two paragraphs in a row ending with the word 'happy.')'
Julian Barnes: love/hate. Deliciously aquiline and clever the once I heard him speak (reading, SF) (and there I was _not_ a good well behaved fan: I gushed, and I recommended someone else's book to him, which I think is probably tacky), some of his books meh, some of them love love love. I really enjoyed Nothing To Be Frightened Of, because, well, I think about death a lot and how much longer I have and how I am going to die and whether I will feel ready to die when the time comes or whether I will be in a frantic panic suddenly realizing all the time I've wasted doing stupid things like writing blogs that no one reads, and knowing that other people, who seem to have things more or less together, are also terrified of death, somehow does make it a tiny bit easier. Here's a confession: when I have attended patients' deaths, I always say to family members that I don't think the person is in any pain, but the truth is I DON'T KNOW AND NOBODY DOES. Also, wtf, even if you're not in pain, what if you're absolutely terrified of ceasing to exist - I don't know that morphine does much for that. Anyway. This is not a paragraph that can easily be made to end in the word 'happy.'
Ha.
Anyway. Kate Atkinson: good, time-travelly, some nice strong images but I didn't ever feel that I knew the people. Rhyme's Reason - more concise less chatty/funny version of Stephen Fry's book. Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome has definitively replaced my Harry Potter guilty secret anti-insomnia aid. The Invention of Love - I think I'd need to see it staged. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article about A.E. Housman better...
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransome
Rhyme's Reason, by John Hollander
The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard
A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman
English Verse, Early Lyrics to Shakespeare, various
So I really, really, really enjoyed the Stephen Fry book, up until the very last page: he's chatty and funny and passionate about his subject, and his examples are beautifully clear, and although I didn't quite feel moved to follow all his instructions to the letter (going to get a pencil and attempting actual poetry myself) I really did do as he asked and read a lot of the poems aloud and then on the very last page he BLEW IT. A book like this works because the author constructs, along with the how-to manual aspect of things, the cozy illusion that you (the reader) are (a) as competent/literate as he is and that (b) it's just the two of you, BFF's all the way, chatting about poetry. And then on the very last page, he says a bit pompously that he hopes you had fun, but whatever you do, do NOT send him any of your pathetic attempts at poetry because he's crazy busy and important, with all his squillions of fans and it's just too overwhelming (well, he doesn't quite say it like that, but that's the underlying message). What a snot! So I returned my copy to the library, bought a used copy (because one day when I have oodles of spare time haha I really am going to go through and do it properly, doing all the exercises), and as soon as it arrived, I tore out the last page. (Not that I would ever send Stephen Fry anything I'd ever written, but really. I should note that I have now, courtesy of my lovely sister, actually met Nick Hornby after a reading/interview in SF recently, and I was an extremely restrained well-behaved sort of fan. Mostly because he looked as if he was dying to go back to his hotel room and have a smoke and not have to talk to anyone, which is fair enough). So there you go, Stephen Fry, you have incited me to wanton vandalism of literature. I hope you're happy.
April is, it turns out, National Poetry Month, and I have been on a little mini-binge of poetry reading and semi-memorizing, as an antidote to all that studying for my boards exam, getting my taxes done, etc. It's distressingly easy to get through an entire day without thinking once about beauty and pleasure and the very particular joys of the English language, so I have been shopping around with me an elegant little leatherbound English Verse as well as a paperback of A.E. Housman in an effort to combat that. I know that words are the important part of all this, and physical books per se aren't supposed (?) to matter, but sitting down on the train and pulling out my ancient leatherbound English Verse with its funny indented type and little ribbon placeholder and age-spotted tissue-paper-thin pages to try and hash through the prologue of the Canterbury Tales made me HAPPY. (Wow, two paragraphs in a row ending with the word 'happy.')'
Julian Barnes: love/hate. Deliciously aquiline and clever the once I heard him speak (reading, SF) (and there I was _not_ a good well behaved fan: I gushed, and I recommended someone else's book to him, which I think is probably tacky), some of his books meh, some of them love love love. I really enjoyed Nothing To Be Frightened Of, because, well, I think about death a lot and how much longer I have and how I am going to die and whether I will feel ready to die when the time comes or whether I will be in a frantic panic suddenly realizing all the time I've wasted doing stupid things like writing blogs that no one reads, and knowing that other people, who seem to have things more or less together, are also terrified of death, somehow does make it a tiny bit easier. Here's a confession: when I have attended patients' deaths, I always say to family members that I don't think the person is in any pain, but the truth is I DON'T KNOW AND NOBODY DOES. Also, wtf, even if you're not in pain, what if you're absolutely terrified of ceasing to exist - I don't know that morphine does much for that. Anyway. This is not a paragraph that can easily be made to end in the word 'happy.'
Ha.
Anyway. Kate Atkinson: good, time-travelly, some nice strong images but I didn't ever feel that I knew the people. Rhyme's Reason - more concise less chatty/funny version of Stephen Fry's book. Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome has definitively replaced my Harry Potter guilty secret anti-insomnia aid. The Invention of Love - I think I'd need to see it staged. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article about A.E. Housman better...
Sunday 22 March 2015
Quick March!
Books read March 2015
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
About ten Rumpole anthologies in quick succession, by John Mortimer
Specialty Board Review for Family Practice, by some committee in Iowa somewhere.
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Shitty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by Kilmartin et al
Old Peter's Russian Tales, Arthur Ransome
Gotten from the library on my daughter's brand new library card (!) and much looking forward to:
Life after life, by Kate Atkinson
Not a book, but deserves a mention since it has given me nightmares about falling off cliff faces every night for the last week since watching it:
Reel Rock, a documentary about rock climbing in Yosemite
Usual excuses re: not having written anything between September of last year and now: blah blah blah. Have been reading normal amounts but have stepped it up a bit this month (and I am bothering to write a blogpost about it) because I am engaged in the seductive game of productive procrastination. You may or may not have noticed, buried subtly in the 'Books Read' list, that innocuous-looking Specialty Board Review for Family Practice - it is actually a giant telephone directory-sized memento mori of my impending recertification exam that I have been carting around everywhere with me for the last month, in the hopes that it will impart knowledge through my bag into me. Unlike everything else on the list, I haven't actually finished it. Hm. Yes. Well.
Continuing where I left off in September: race relations in this country and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I went on a blind date recently with a very nice (black) West African guy (well-educated, definitely upper middle class, living the fabulous single techie lifestyle in SF, lattes, windsurfing, etc.). (Yes, this will ultimately be about Henrietta Lacks.) During our conversation, I was continually distracted by his 'otherness' - not so much specifically the colour of his skin so much as the whole package - the dreadlocks, the accent, my acute awareness that, despite the high-thread-count dress shirt and ordering of organic low-carb entrees, he comes from a place where people share living quarters with their chickens if they are lucky enough to be able to afford chickens, a place which is poor and corrupt as a direct result of what my great great great grandparents did to his great great great grandparents. While the positive effects of biculturalism on intelligence and personality are well-documented (and as I said, he was a fun guy), I think it would be actually quite difficult to have a relationship with someone who lives with that level of schism in their brain (a dirt-poor country of origin suffering all the effects of postcolonial fallout vs current first-world existence, sitting in a coffee shop in the SF Ferry Building, debating the relative merits of different Tahoe ski resorts) and when there is the larger cultural elephant in the room of centuries of history of white perpetrators/brown victims. Which all circuitously confirms, in a way, my own racism, despite myself: it's difficult to have a relationship with someone with a vastly different life experience, and if most brown people have suffered and white people have not so much, we're going to have some pretty whopping chasms in our life experiences.
To paraphrase Nick Hornby (hello, Nick, if you ever read this :)), there's a bit I like in one of his Believer essays where he takes issue with novelists writing books from the perspective of characters who are already articulate, well-educated, and clear thinking, because "they don't need the help," and that actually it's a more interesting and more worthwhile challenge to help give a voice to a character without those advantages. Which is what Rebecca Skloot does, beautifully, in the Henrietta Lacks book: it's a history of some cells taken from a poor black woman dying of cervical cancer in the 1950's which became HeLa cells, which are the standard line of tissue culture cells used all over the world today (and on which I spent two years in my twenties, running experiments on their interleukin activity, without any knowledge of their provenance), and in addition to a nice concise rundown of the basic science and a clearsighted presentation of the moral quagmire involved in taking unwanted cells from another human being and disseminating them widely for research purposes, she also really loves and provides a voice for the bewildered/angry/poor/sick/uneducated descendants of this woman (who rightfully fail to understand how their mother's cells could have provided the basis of a squillion dollar medical-research industrial complex and yet they don't have health insurance).
Anyway.
Gone Girl is really good and I wish I could write like Gillian Flynn. She's VERY SMART. and funny. Also I wish that I could write like John Mortimer. I spent the weekend recently with a group of women I didn't know particularly well, and everyone was just tremendously nice and earnest and wholesome; all the under-40's said 'like' every other word (also there was unironic discussion of astrology), and by the end of the weekend, I was kind of climbing the walls for a little viciously articulate wit. Gillian Flynn and John Mortimer between them scratched the itch perfectly.
The Ode Less Travelled is only half read at this point - it's a how-to guide for writing poetry, which I'm not 100% convinced I want to do, but I can't resist Stephen Fry, so for now I'm just skimming it rather than actually going through and doing it properly,
But you'll know if in April's post appear
A rhyme or two in beauteous iambs here
That I have read the book on writing verse.
Hmm. Compared to Shakespeare, definitely worse.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
About ten Rumpole anthologies in quick succession, by John Mortimer
Specialty Board Review for Family Practice, by some committee in Iowa somewhere.
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Shitty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by Kilmartin et al
Old Peter's Russian Tales, Arthur Ransome
Gotten from the library on my daughter's brand new library card (!) and much looking forward to:
Life after life, by Kate Atkinson
Not a book, but deserves a mention since it has given me nightmares about falling off cliff faces every night for the last week since watching it:
Reel Rock, a documentary about rock climbing in Yosemite
Usual excuses re: not having written anything between September of last year and now: blah blah blah. Have been reading normal amounts but have stepped it up a bit this month (and I am bothering to write a blogpost about it) because I am engaged in the seductive game of productive procrastination. You may or may not have noticed, buried subtly in the 'Books Read' list, that innocuous-looking Specialty Board Review for Family Practice - it is actually a giant telephone directory-sized memento mori of my impending recertification exam that I have been carting around everywhere with me for the last month, in the hopes that it will impart knowledge through my bag into me. Unlike everything else on the list, I haven't actually finished it. Hm. Yes. Well.
Continuing where I left off in September: race relations in this country and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I went on a blind date recently with a very nice (black) West African guy (well-educated, definitely upper middle class, living the fabulous single techie lifestyle in SF, lattes, windsurfing, etc.). (Yes, this will ultimately be about Henrietta Lacks.) During our conversation, I was continually distracted by his 'otherness' - not so much specifically the colour of his skin so much as the whole package - the dreadlocks, the accent, my acute awareness that, despite the high-thread-count dress shirt and ordering of organic low-carb entrees, he comes from a place where people share living quarters with their chickens if they are lucky enough to be able to afford chickens, a place which is poor and corrupt as a direct result of what my great great great grandparents did to his great great great grandparents. While the positive effects of biculturalism on intelligence and personality are well-documented (and as I said, he was a fun guy), I think it would be actually quite difficult to have a relationship with someone who lives with that level of schism in their brain (a dirt-poor country of origin suffering all the effects of postcolonial fallout vs current first-world existence, sitting in a coffee shop in the SF Ferry Building, debating the relative merits of different Tahoe ski resorts) and when there is the larger cultural elephant in the room of centuries of history of white perpetrators/brown victims. Which all circuitously confirms, in a way, my own racism, despite myself: it's difficult to have a relationship with someone with a vastly different life experience, and if most brown people have suffered and white people have not so much, we're going to have some pretty whopping chasms in our life experiences.
To paraphrase Nick Hornby (hello, Nick, if you ever read this :)), there's a bit I like in one of his Believer essays where he takes issue with novelists writing books from the perspective of characters who are already articulate, well-educated, and clear thinking, because "they don't need the help," and that actually it's a more interesting and more worthwhile challenge to help give a voice to a character without those advantages. Which is what Rebecca Skloot does, beautifully, in the Henrietta Lacks book: it's a history of some cells taken from a poor black woman dying of cervical cancer in the 1950's which became HeLa cells, which are the standard line of tissue culture cells used all over the world today (and on which I spent two years in my twenties, running experiments on their interleukin activity, without any knowledge of their provenance), and in addition to a nice concise rundown of the basic science and a clearsighted presentation of the moral quagmire involved in taking unwanted cells from another human being and disseminating them widely for research purposes, she also really loves and provides a voice for the bewildered/angry/poor/sick/uneducated descendants of this woman (who rightfully fail to understand how their mother's cells could have provided the basis of a squillion dollar medical-research industrial complex and yet they don't have health insurance).
Anyway.
Gone Girl is really good and I wish I could write like Gillian Flynn. She's VERY SMART. and funny. Also I wish that I could write like John Mortimer. I spent the weekend recently with a group of women I didn't know particularly well, and everyone was just tremendously nice and earnest and wholesome; all the under-40's said 'like' every other word (also there was unironic discussion of astrology), and by the end of the weekend, I was kind of climbing the walls for a little viciously articulate wit. Gillian Flynn and John Mortimer between them scratched the itch perfectly.
The Ode Less Travelled is only half read at this point - it's a how-to guide for writing poetry, which I'm not 100% convinced I want to do, but I can't resist Stephen Fry, so for now I'm just skimming it rather than actually going through and doing it properly,
But you'll know if in April's post appear
A rhyme or two in beauteous iambs here
That I have read the book on writing verse.
Hmm. Compared to Shakespeare, definitely worse.
Friday 26 September 2014
Race relations
Books read since, oh, lord, I have no idea. Recently:
House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O'Brien
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
plus a whole lot which (this is tragic) I can't recall even titles of, let alone major plot points.
Mainly I wanted to do some thinking out loud about the two books set in Nigeria. I was given the second, Americanah, for a birthday present (plus gift receipt - such a discreetly sensible but somehow uncomfortable innovation, don't you think?) and the back cover was all blurbs for her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won a prize), which (the very next day) got lent to me by someone else, in a spooky coincidencey sort of way. So I thought, OK, well, on the grounds that first novels are bound to have the author's juiciest semi-autobiographical stuff in them, plus this one won a prize, plus she wrote it first, I'll give Half of a Yellow Sun a go first, and then if I like it I'll read the other one, and if I don't like it, then I'll use my gift receipt to go and buy myself a Prancersize DVD (thank you to my sister for finding Prancercize. A gem.)
Anyway, (a) WOW am I glad I read them in the order I did (b) people are terrible, especially white people and (c) I had no idea there was such a wide wide world of black hairstyling out there.
Half of a Yellow Sun is not the best book ever in strictly literary terms (prose a bit leaden in many places, characters unmemorable, plot consists mainly of white people being awful to black people alternating with black people being awful to other black people), but is very good as a piece of meta-journalism (fiction, but fiction set in an episode of painfully real recent history). It is a usefully lacerating reminder of the injustice in the world, just in case the more complacent among us had gotten too distracted by our teeny tiny first world problems to remember that. The whole way through the book, I was cowering in embarrassment at my own ignorance: just over a generation ago, a genocide happened that I had never even heard of as part of the Biafran War, which I had also never heard of, in a country that I would not have been able to confidently identify on a blank map of Africa (northish westish biggish would have been as good as I could have done). Many many people died in terrible horrible ways, arguably as a direct consequence of British (my people!) incompetence, arrogance, and greed, and I have spent more time watching Tim Minchin videos on YouTube than I have learning about Nigeria.
After Half of a Yellow Sun, I plowed straight into Americanah, at that point urgently needing to know the worst about what the U.S. had done to the Nigerians, prepared for another holocaust (my only faint hope was that at least one of my nationalities would turn out to have behaved reasonably well. O Canada, My Home and Native Land, At Least You Don't Drop Bombs on Developing Countries, well, not very often, anyway.) but Americanah is thankfully a much kinder, gentler, and less memorable book: no one dies of starvation or torture, they just make wry poignant/funny observations about racism and culture shock that reinforce the message that white people are infuriatingly clueless, but black people can be pretty mean to each other as well.
The reference above to black hairstyling is not entirely trivial: at the beginning of the book, the main character goes to a salon to have her braided hair extensions done, a process that is supposed to happen monthly and which costs a bomb, and which takes 6-8 hours to do. (I can't imagine devoting 6-8 hours of my lifetime to hair maintenance, let alone monthly, but it did go a long way to explaining to me what I had always thought was the bizarre prevalence of hair salons in Oakland and the Central District in Seattle.) The main character subsequently decides to go natural, with a short Afro, which provokes a generally negative reaction from the chemical-hair-relaxing/straightening majority of her girlfriends but which is a liberating moment for her. While I have noticed (who hasn't?) that black women (in this country, at least- what Adichie refers to as NAB's, or Non-African Blacks) do frequently have seriously fancy hair compared to white women, the irony hadn't really struck me that the more 'white'-looking (straightened & styled as if it were naturally straight) a black woman's hair is, the less likely I am to assume that she is 'like me' (white, upper middle class), since the more educated upper-middle class black women I have met generally tend to favour more natural hair (i.e. Afro, braids, dreads, twists etc).
So while it would be stupid and disingenuous to claim to be indifferent to race (no one who has lived in the US can be colour-blind unless they're in a coma), here's my working hypothesis: common accent/educational level is a pretty instant leveler (for me) of racial differences, but if significant linguistic/educational differences exist, I am probably more likely to be guilty of racial stereotyping. The definitive experiment would be to hook me up to a polygraph machine, and measure my physiologic stress responses to having an argument with a black vs white university professor of medieval English literature over a grade, and then an argument late at night with a black vs white yahoo at a gas station over whose turn it was to use the pump. I _think_ there'd be no difference between stress responses induced by the black and white professors, but that there probably would be a difference in the stress responses induced by yahoos of different races.
Would be very interested in thoughts from others, especially black others, if anyone outside my immediately family is reading this ;)
House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O'Brien
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
plus a whole lot which (this is tragic) I can't recall even titles of, let alone major plot points.
Mainly I wanted to do some thinking out loud about the two books set in Nigeria. I was given the second, Americanah, for a birthday present (plus gift receipt - such a discreetly sensible but somehow uncomfortable innovation, don't you think?) and the back cover was all blurbs for her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won a prize), which (the very next day) got lent to me by someone else, in a spooky coincidencey sort of way. So I thought, OK, well, on the grounds that first novels are bound to have the author's juiciest semi-autobiographical stuff in them, plus this one won a prize, plus she wrote it first, I'll give Half of a Yellow Sun a go first, and then if I like it I'll read the other one, and if I don't like it, then I'll use my gift receipt to go and buy myself a Prancersize DVD (thank you to my sister for finding Prancercize. A gem.)
Anyway, (a) WOW am I glad I read them in the order I did (b) people are terrible, especially white people and (c) I had no idea there was such a wide wide world of black hairstyling out there.
Half of a Yellow Sun is not the best book ever in strictly literary terms (prose a bit leaden in many places, characters unmemorable, plot consists mainly of white people being awful to black people alternating with black people being awful to other black people), but is very good as a piece of meta-journalism (fiction, but fiction set in an episode of painfully real recent history). It is a usefully lacerating reminder of the injustice in the world, just in case the more complacent among us had gotten too distracted by our teeny tiny first world problems to remember that. The whole way through the book, I was cowering in embarrassment at my own ignorance: just over a generation ago, a genocide happened that I had never even heard of as part of the Biafran War, which I had also never heard of, in a country that I would not have been able to confidently identify on a blank map of Africa (northish westish biggish would have been as good as I could have done). Many many people died in terrible horrible ways, arguably as a direct consequence of British (my people!) incompetence, arrogance, and greed, and I have spent more time watching Tim Minchin videos on YouTube than I have learning about Nigeria.
After Half of a Yellow Sun, I plowed straight into Americanah, at that point urgently needing to know the worst about what the U.S. had done to the Nigerians, prepared for another holocaust (my only faint hope was that at least one of my nationalities would turn out to have behaved reasonably well. O Canada, My Home and Native Land, At Least You Don't Drop Bombs on Developing Countries, well, not very often, anyway.) but Americanah is thankfully a much kinder, gentler, and less memorable book: no one dies of starvation or torture, they just make wry poignant/funny observations about racism and culture shock that reinforce the message that white people are infuriatingly clueless, but black people can be pretty mean to each other as well.
The reference above to black hairstyling is not entirely trivial: at the beginning of the book, the main character goes to a salon to have her braided hair extensions done, a process that is supposed to happen monthly and which costs a bomb, and which takes 6-8 hours to do. (I can't imagine devoting 6-8 hours of my lifetime to hair maintenance, let alone monthly, but it did go a long way to explaining to me what I had always thought was the bizarre prevalence of hair salons in Oakland and the Central District in Seattle.) The main character subsequently decides to go natural, with a short Afro, which provokes a generally negative reaction from the chemical-hair-relaxing/straightening majority of her girlfriends but which is a liberating moment for her. While I have noticed (who hasn't?) that black women (in this country, at least- what Adichie refers to as NAB's, or Non-African Blacks) do frequently have seriously fancy hair compared to white women, the irony hadn't really struck me that the more 'white'-looking (straightened & styled as if it were naturally straight) a black woman's hair is, the less likely I am to assume that she is 'like me' (white, upper middle class), since the more educated upper-middle class black women I have met generally tend to favour more natural hair (i.e. Afro, braids, dreads, twists etc).
So while it would be stupid and disingenuous to claim to be indifferent to race (no one who has lived in the US can be colour-blind unless they're in a coma), here's my working hypothesis: common accent/educational level is a pretty instant leveler (for me) of racial differences, but if significant linguistic/educational differences exist, I am probably more likely to be guilty of racial stereotyping. The definitive experiment would be to hook me up to a polygraph machine, and measure my physiologic stress responses to having an argument with a black vs white university professor of medieval English literature over a grade, and then an argument late at night with a black vs white yahoo at a gas station over whose turn it was to use the pump. I _think_ there'd be no difference between stress responses induced by the black and white professors, but that there probably would be a difference in the stress responses induced by yahoos of different races.
Would be very interested in thoughts from others, especially black others, if anyone outside my immediately family is reading this ;)
Thursday 29 May 2014
After a long hiatus...
Pathetic, pathetic - no entry since 2012?? and yet, I have been reading, I have, I have.
In the last two weeks I can claim:
Books read:
The Church Mice series, Graham Oakley
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max
Leonardo's Lost Princess, Peter Silverman
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Books part way through:
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Books gotten out of the library but not yet read despite best of intentions:
Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and read approximately three zillion times
This Little Bunny Can Bake (ceremonial burning to be held after the four zillionth reading)
Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter (why did we have to get it out of the library when we already have a copy at home? who the hell knows. Ask the three-year-old).
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and mysteriously lost between library and home:
Lucille Camps In
Starting with David Foster Wallace - death, I think, changes the conversation about a person more than any other fact about them. You can talk/think about someone without any need to reference to their hair colour or their day job or whether they had children, but their deadness or aliveness is ingrained in the discussion, if only through verb tenses. Suicide is sort of death squared: it's impossible to not think, every time you read something written by or about DFW, "Oh my God, and to think he killed himself," and that central tragic fact adds weight and pathos to every other more peripheral fact you might learn about him. The whole way through this (quite good) biography, I was bracing myself for the awful thing he was going to do to himself, thinking ahead of time, "HOW COULD YOU BE SO SELFISH/STUPID?!" but in fact, he did many selfish/stupid things, most of them involving women/drugs; suicide was just one of them. But he also obviously had a lot figured out as well, which is the weird part: that the abandonment of his hipster postmodern ultraironic persona in favour of an open-hearted desire to forge real connections should have ultimately driven him to suicide speaks maybe to the fact that we'd all survive to the next generation a little bit better if we did more posing and pretending.
A word in praise of the Church Mice books, and Graham Oakley generally: I more or less had a baby on purpose so that I would one day have someone to whom to read these books, and I cracked them out for the first time last week, a little uncertain whether they were still a bit too advanced, and I am so happy to report that they are getting read 2-3 times a day, pictures pored over, uncontrollable giggles at favourite pages, etc. Makes all those reiterations of This Little Bunny Can Bake and Peter Rabbit worth it (am I allowed to say I do not love Beatrix Potter? The illustrations are beautiful, but the stories themselves don't do it for me. A.A. Milne can write circles around her.)
Beautiful Ruins was unusual because it was the first book that has prompted me to ever _write_ to an author. I think about doing so periodically when I've read something I really like, but I haven't ever actually going around to doing it until now. I think I am possibly biased in favour of Jess Walters because of his first name, and the fact that he looks nice on his back cover photo, and the fact that Nick Hornby said nice things about Citizen Vince, which I have requested from the library, but Beautiful Ruins was enough of a juicy soap opera (set in 1960's Cinque Terre. With movie stars.) that I actually had it propped up on my steering wheel while stopped in traffic on the Bay Bridge. (Not recommended to try this at home. Or in front of the California Highway Patrol.) I thought that any writer who can get me to read while in traffic deserves at least a thank you email, so I found his website and I wrote to him and he WROTE BACK. Perhaps I overestimate the glamorous whirlwind life that authors of moderately successful books who live in Spokane, WA lead, but it was exciting.
I am finding this translation of the Iliad alarmingly Hemingwayesque. Not my cup of tea so far, but it's definitely easier to follow than the translation I had to read for school back in the day. Stay tuned.
In the last two weeks I can claim:
Books read:
The Church Mice series, Graham Oakley
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max
Leonardo's Lost Princess, Peter Silverman
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Books part way through:
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Books gotten out of the library but not yet read despite best of intentions:
Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and read approximately three zillion times
This Little Bunny Can Bake (ceremonial burning to be held after the four zillionth reading)
Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter (why did we have to get it out of the library when we already have a copy at home? who the hell knows. Ask the three-year-old).
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and mysteriously lost between library and home:
Lucille Camps In
Starting with David Foster Wallace - death, I think, changes the conversation about a person more than any other fact about them. You can talk/think about someone without any need to reference to their hair colour or their day job or whether they had children, but their deadness or aliveness is ingrained in the discussion, if only through verb tenses. Suicide is sort of death squared: it's impossible to not think, every time you read something written by or about DFW, "Oh my God, and to think he killed himself," and that central tragic fact adds weight and pathos to every other more peripheral fact you might learn about him. The whole way through this (quite good) biography, I was bracing myself for the awful thing he was going to do to himself, thinking ahead of time, "HOW COULD YOU BE SO SELFISH/STUPID?!" but in fact, he did many selfish/stupid things, most of them involving women/drugs; suicide was just one of them. But he also obviously had a lot figured out as well, which is the weird part: that the abandonment of his hipster postmodern ultraironic persona in favour of an open-hearted desire to forge real connections should have ultimately driven him to suicide speaks maybe to the fact that we'd all survive to the next generation a little bit better if we did more posing and pretending.
A word in praise of the Church Mice books, and Graham Oakley generally: I more or less had a baby on purpose so that I would one day have someone to whom to read these books, and I cracked them out for the first time last week, a little uncertain whether they were still a bit too advanced, and I am so happy to report that they are getting read 2-3 times a day, pictures pored over, uncontrollable giggles at favourite pages, etc. Makes all those reiterations of This Little Bunny Can Bake and Peter Rabbit worth it (am I allowed to say I do not love Beatrix Potter? The illustrations are beautiful, but the stories themselves don't do it for me. A.A. Milne can write circles around her.)
Beautiful Ruins was unusual because it was the first book that has prompted me to ever _write_ to an author. I think about doing so periodically when I've read something I really like, but I haven't ever actually going around to doing it until now. I think I am possibly biased in favour of Jess Walters because of his first name, and the fact that he looks nice on his back cover photo, and the fact that Nick Hornby said nice things about Citizen Vince, which I have requested from the library, but Beautiful Ruins was enough of a juicy soap opera (set in 1960's Cinque Terre. With movie stars.) that I actually had it propped up on my steering wheel while stopped in traffic on the Bay Bridge. (Not recommended to try this at home. Or in front of the California Highway Patrol.) I thought that any writer who can get me to read while in traffic deserves at least a thank you email, so I found his website and I wrote to him and he WROTE BACK. Perhaps I overestimate the glamorous whirlwind life that authors of moderately successful books who live in Spokane, WA lead, but it was exciting.
I am finding this translation of the Iliad alarmingly Hemingwayesque. Not my cup of tea so far, but it's definitely easier to follow than the translation I had to read for school back in the day. Stay tuned.
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