Strathern

oh my god, I nearly forgot:

the other book I read over Christmas was The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior, a sort of triple biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia by Paul Strathern. He gets a bit loopy and repetitive in bits, mostly when he is trying to take up space to fill in gaps in the historical knowledge banks, and is guilty of some slightly wonky oversimplifications (Leonardo was 'trying to create a comprehensive scientific description of the natural world,' and Machiavelli was 'trying to create a comprehensive logical description of human behavior'... therefore they were philosophically in terrific alignment and had loads to say to each other (?) hm. It seems more likely that they had loads to say to each other (if in fact they did) because they were both super sparky bright talented compatriots who lived much of their working lives away from Florence and did a lot of thinking about stuff, but what do I know.)

The overriding impressions of the three that I came away from the book with were

1) Leonardo: wow, what a colossal case of what my friend Tabby has self-diagnosed as Executive Function Disorder (inability to get stuff done) combined with eerily prescient total fucking genius level smarts (designing things in his notebooks that wouldn't actually be invented until 400 years later)

2) Machiavelli: sounds like he was actually a very impressively clever interesting person to hang out with as well, despite his reputation for raging cynicism, which (at least to judge by everything he wrote other than The Prince) was unfounded, and

3) Borgia: oh. my. god. what a raving, loony, total scary nutjob that guy was. He had absolutely zero compunction about murdering anyone that disagreed with him, basically. I was interested to learn that Borgia, and his father, Pope Alexander VI, were actually Catalan transplants, and used to annoy the Vatican courtiers by speaking in Catalan on purpose so that no one could understand them.

So, in summary, I liked the plotty bits of the book, but I lost patience with the attempt to find deep underlying similarities in the characters of the three men. Sixteenth century Florence must have been one hell of a place to hang out, anyway, what with all the seventy-year-old Popes with teenage mistresses; people getting burnt at the stake, garrotted, or poisoned all over the shop; Michelangelo and Leonardo getting in pissing contests over their duelling frescoes... it makes today's political and art world scandals look positively tame by comparison.

Barnes, Hornby, Grafton, Wallace (continued)

Books read:

Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw (at least that's the one I think it was)

Books reread:

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Ann Bramson, Soap

Books acquired:

Julian Barnes and Nick Hornby (above), plus

Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana

Alastair Reid, Ounce, Dice, Trice

Bill Gaston, Sointula

Vicky Harris & John Newton, The Food of Spain: A Journey for Food Lovers

The unabashed deliciousness of the first three I think are counterbalanced by some of the struggles implied in the rereading of the fourth and fifth. I still haven't quite finished Infinite Jest; what happened was that I got about 80% of the way through, and I realized that a lot of the stuff I had skimmed between pages about 200-400 might have been, er, relevant. I hadn't read them properly because I was dubious about my ability to actually follow everything that was going on in the book because it's so bloody convoluted, but as it turns out there is a plot, there is, really, it's just not enacted by actual characters. Here's what I figured out about Infinite Jest: the characters are either walking talking clever jokes (as in the undercover spy whose alias character that he has been assigned to impersonate not only is a different gender than he is, but is also not an amputee, so he has to go through all sorts of bizarre contortions to pretend that he is in fact an able bodied female, or the guy who (it took me a while to figure this out) speaks in a literal word-by-word French to English translation), or they are vehicles for absolutely transcendant and brutal descriptions of experiences (what it feels like to play high level tennis/be addicted to various substances/whatever). None of which is meant to downplay the impressiveness of the novel, it just makes it harder to keep track of who's who and what they're doing and why they're doing it, since no-one talks in any straightforward sort of a way. So anyway, I got to 80%, realized I did actually want to try and keep straight who everyone was and what they were doing, and... oh bugger, that means going back to the beginning and possibly even taking notes this time round. I might keep a dictionary handy as well. I'm sure it's all putting hair on my chest.

Soap wasn't a hard read, I'm just putting it in because a) my reading of it was under duress, so I want credit and b) it is actually a lovely book and very evocative of a simpler time. It's a soap-making recipe book, for anyone who might be mistakenly looking for a retrospective history of daytime TV programs, and I read it (and reread it, obsessively, desperately searching for clues) while trying to troubleshoot my last batch of orange almond soap. Rendering the beef fat was a revolting nightmare and then the bloody mixture went and curdled on me (I think) and the final product is still curing in bars on top of the fridge, so I won't know for another week or so how it actually turned out, but it was a very boring evening of endless, endless, endless stirring. But my favourite bits are her descriptions of working with lye, and how you should be careful, because it can sting if you get a bit on your skin, but how she's never really been burnt except for once working barefoot (!). so cute. I'm sure any modern-day soap-making instruction books are packed with strict edicts about no children and splash guards and safety goggles and rubber gloves and whathaveyou. For the record, I burnt myself several times, none remotely seriously, and did not use any safety equipment at all. I also plan to be making soap for years to come, since lye is not readily available for sale in small quantities anymore: I have a fifty pound bag that I had to order from an agricultural supply company, and it is squatting menacingly in the corner of my kitchen until I feel brave enough to attempt the next batch. I should probably seal it closed just in case the cat gets into it, hmm.

Anyway, enough about reading under duress: Sue Grafton's book was pure cheeseburger, consumed in one indulgent session over the Christmas holiday when everyone else was too fluey, too asleep, too working, or too busy sorting their thousand digital snapshots of birds-on-cliffs to provide other entertainment. The combination of funny, smart, and moderately trashy is an appealing one, and the alphabet series is all of those. Hooray for Sue Grafton. Yum.

The Nick Hornby and the Julian Barnes were a Christmas present to myself, and I have just finished inhaling both of them in one sitting (I did get up half way through Juliet, Naked to make myself a bowl of pasta, and I interrupted Julian just long enough to cut myself a slice of fruitcake, but apart from that, I have been wedged in between the same cat-hairy sofa cushions for the last, oh, good lord, four or five hours. (More, now that I got up for thirty seconds to fetch my laptop). I am starting to recognize Themes in Nick Hornby's work, and it gives you a little frisson of, I don't know, vicarious embarrassment, or something. You assume that the novelist is all-wise, all-seeing, all-comprehensive of all different characters, and that he is free, in his wise witty way, of all the hang-ups and stupidities that you yourself are prone to, and then you think, hang on, I've heard this before, this must be something that he thinks about a lot, and the personality, or more accurately, the interior monologue of the writer himself begins to reveal itself, and you think, eek, I shouldn't be allowed to see this, this is private. Such as: the feeling of having wasted one's life, the feeling that family and loved ones are (only just) enough to stop the average person from putting their head into a gas oven, the contaminating pernicious stigma of loneliness despite the fact that we all suffer from it to some degree (actually this is something that Douglas Coupland also writes about as well. Why is it so touching when funny and well-spoken men in particular talk about this? I don't know). I feel embarrassed to read those bits, because I think, oh crap, I don't know this guy from Adam, I've only read his books, and yet I know that he has in all seriousness at some point in his life contemplated putting his head in an oven, because it's come up in his books too many times for it to be a coincidence, fiction or not. I am less interested by his writing about music and obsessive male fan behavior about music, but there's another example of a recurrent theme that it doesn't take too much thinking about to realize, OK, the dude's a little funny about his music collection. How did I get off on this? I can't remember. I liked Juliet, Naked a lot, although my favourites are still I think About a Boy, How to Be Good, and the Polysyllabic Spree reviews. Don't worry, Nick, I'll still read everything you publish, as long as you don't convert to earnest Mormonism or something and lose your sense of humour.

I'm saving the Julian Barnes until the end as a treat - it had me nearly peeing myself laughing. I had to go back and reread I think three or four times his description of the beetroot sandwiches his dad once made him, painfully and hilariously reminiscent of the peanut-butter-and-ricotta boluses inside the sandwiches that my dad used to put in our packed lunches before my sister and I took over the lunch-making ourselves. It also made me want to go and raid my mother's bookshelf for all the Jane Grigson books so that I can read and/or try and cook from those. SO FUNNY. I am also totally jealous of his wife - he might be horrible, loutish, and abusive at home for all I know, but how irresistible to be immortalized in published prose as "She For Whom The Pedant Cooks," ("She For Whom" for short.) His writing is both warm and lovely and inclusive (describing his various humiliating messes and disasters) and the same time makes you feel slightly anxious that you will never have such a brilliant life, cooking up fabulous cozy suppers for all your literary and interesting friends and your spouse whom you call/who calls you "She For Whom." The other bit in the book that just cracked me up was a metaphor of cooking from a cookery book as being like the first time you sleep with someone, in that a) there is always the more experienced person (the cookery book author) and the less experienced person (the home cook), and the less experienced person always has the right to say, 'Eurgh, I'm not going to do that' (whether it be deboning a chicken or halving 300 cherry tomatoes to scrape the seeds out). At a couple of points I came dangerously close to actual urinary incontinence, and I did a lot of antisocial laugh-snort-cackles of the sort that would have earned me disapproving frowns had there been anyone attempting to share my sofa. But alas, there is no-one currently to call me 'She For Whom,' so I can snort with impunity, at least until it is time to have a bath and go to bed with David Foster Wallace (attempt the second...)

Tolstoy, Sharp

Read this month:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

something else that was actually really good but which is totally escaping me right now and I am sure the title will come back to me but in the meantime I am going to worry about presenile dementia - HA! just remembered, Generation A, Douglas Coupland

Started this month and couldn't finish because its true owner took it away:

The Monster of Florence, Douglas something else

So, yuh, Anna Karenina. Where to begin. I should say that I went into this book with some preconceived notions, courtesy of my mother: she read it for a book-club when I was a teenager, and I have a very clear memory of picking it up and leafing through it in a "Huh, this is famous and I should probably have a clue what it's about" kind of a way, and she SNATCHED it away from me, and said, "No! You must _save_ this book for when you're older, because it will MEAN so much MORE to you then! You can't read Anna Karenina until your fortieth birthday!" and somehow, along with you-can't-drive-until-you're-sixteen or vote-until-you're-eighteen or drink until-you're twentyone became cemented into my head in a very permanent way. And then recently I saw an attractive-looking edition of AK (buxom beauty on the front, with bosoms and dark curls spilling out everywhere) in a used bookshop and I thought, what the hell, I'm thirtyfive now, I'm allowed to read WHATEVER I WANT. so I bought it.

I was surprised by two things, mainly: how easy a read it was, for the most part - Tolstoy has this very gossipy style and I found even his philosophizing bits to be so adolescently silly in tone that it was hard to really dig into them and try and take them seriously, so I sped through 1000+ pages in about a week, which was a surprise. The other thing that surprised me was how little _sense_ the whole thing made.

For example: Anna is described at the beginning as a wise, witty, sensible, attractive, worldly-in-a-good-way sort of person, who negotiates a domestic truce between her good-natured but sexually incontinent brother and his exasperated wife, and is an inspirational older-sister-type figure to sweet young Kitty Scherbatskaya. Count Vronksy - young, good-looking, supposedly intelligent and worldly as well, although you wouldn't know it from ANYTHING AT ALL THAT HE SAYS OR DOES THROUGHOUT THE BOOK develops a mega-crush on her with very little provocation, declaring his Eternal Love for her based on one little flirtyflirty encounter at the train station where they meet and a second one at a ball later on. Anna, in a move completely out of synch with her character as described thus far in the book, becomes his lover, and proceeds to make herself and absolutely everyone else around her miserable, especially after she runs off with him to Italy/St Petersberg, leaving her little boy behind, whom she supposedly adores, but yet she still just ups and goes to Italy knowing full well that this means she will likely never get to have any legal rights to her kid ever again.

If I were writing Anna Karenina over again, here's what I would try and do differently:

- have Vronsky be a much more interesting sympathetic character. As it is, he's just kind of a cardboard cutout of a Dashing Young Thing

- have Vronsky and Anna's relationship be actually believable and real, and not start until after they have known each other for a very long time, and have the reader witness several conversations between them that really establish that they are a match for each other in interests and intellect and sympathy and zinginess, so that when they finally do get together, you want to root for it to work out

- have Anna's feelings and behavior towards her kids be more believable. I am perfectly willing to believe that an aristocratic woman in nineteenth century Russia might have committed adultery, and might even have defiantly told her husband about it, but I CANNOT believe that even once her husband said, fine, do whatever you want so long as you're discreet, that she would have decided to publicly abandon son, house, social position, everything. me, i would have said ta, thanks very much, to my cuckolded husband, and smuggled my lover in at night when the butler and the footmen etc weren't looking, and had the best of both worlds; i wouldn't have even minded if my husband did the same. the book club meeting i went to to discuss this all agreed that 'it was perfectly normal for mothers to abandon their children vis a vis nannies and boarding schools etc.' but it's one thing for a mother to seldom see her child because the child is being raised by hired help and quite another for a mother to NEVER see her child because she was having a not-particularly-credible affair with a Dashing Young Thing and wanted to be able to spend the whole night instead of just part of the night with him?? i don't buy it.

Anyway, by the end of the book, Anna is a whining horrible clingy person, and I don't know whether Tolstoy intended to represent her as a tragic victim of her own circumstances or whether he intended her to be massively annoying, or what, but if, as the jacket copy suggested, the point of the book was to be a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of Russian society of the time, it was lost on me. Most of her problems she seemed to bring on herself and didn't actually have much to do with the hypocrisy of society.

- the whole Levin/Kitty thing was also very peculiar. Levin is the only character in the book who seems to be attempting to do something useful, running his farm and thinking about the best way to improve the lives of the peasants who work for him, but every time I started getting interested in what Levin had to say, he would go off into pastoral fantasies about how happy the simple creatures were, working all the day God gave them, and then going home whistling to their families to eat potatoes over the home hearth, and wasn't peasant life actually just idyllic, and it all got a bit too much like Marie Antoinette dressing up in "shepherdess" outfits. and why, oh why, was he so obsessed with Kitty, who was an emptyheaded cute little teenager, the female equivalent of Vronsky? Urgh! Silly!

anyway, so perhaps one of these days I will sit down and rewrite Anna Karenina. not.

The Douglas Coupland book was fun - he is a smart dude, even if all his books start to sound the same after a while, I will still keep reading them. I just wish I had discovered him when I was a teenager, because I would have REALLY loved them then. this one is about the post-apocalyptic world after the bees disappear completely and the human race is almost completely addicted to a new medication that erases any anxiety you might have about the future. we could all use some of that, hunh.

okay time to go to bed because my eyes are closing on me....

okay, so i'm a better reader than i am blogger...

Read since last post:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Alison Hoover Bartlett
The Rape of Europa, Lynn Nichols
Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
The Understudy, David Nicholls (how weird is that that I read two books this month by authors with nearly identical surnames...)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

Started reading:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Trailed off but still with the best of intentions of one finishing:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

The theme of this last month's reading, in retrospect, has to do with theft and taking what doesn't belong to you. Hopefully this is not an indicator of any kleptomaniac proclivities on my part (or a foreshadowing of a major burglary. I'm just going to go and check that the doors are locked...)

My reading was a little fragmented recently due to a two week trip away from home, during which I decided to be extra-macho about how little luggage I took with me; I brought only The Inheritance of Loss, which had come with such an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague that I was suspicious, and thus I let it languish next to my bed for ages and in fact was getting perilously close to just putting it away on a high shelf (which for me is basically admitting that I will never read it). But! having only one book while travelling is a great motivator for getting that one book read, as it turns out, and I'm REALLY glad I did, because it's really good in a phenomenally depressing kind of way. It's a family saga set in north India, and without being overly ambitious about it, Desai writes about the fortunes of a family as a miniature version of the fortunes of India as a whole in the years during and after Independence, which is to say that one horrible thing after another happens and things get more and more complicated and you begin to feel (like with so many situations involving long and violent armed conflict) that the only way to solve the problem is to go back and time and start from the very beginning. As with Rape of Europa, one of the huge huge questions that it presented (without a proper answer) is to what extent one generation must make reparations for the sins of the previous generation; in the case of Inheritance of Loss, the repercussions of the British occupation of India for 200 odd years is squeamishly painfully clear - and it begs the question that, um, even though technically India has been independent since 1946, shouldn't Britain still be making up for everything that was taken from the Indians during the occupation, because part of India's current chaos is the fault of the British administration during the Raj. Likewise in The Rape of Europa, at what point do you say, OK, enough reparation has been done for the families from whom the Nazis stole/destroyed phenomenally valuable art treasures that in many cases were irreplaceable? is there/should there be a statute of limitations? are there squatters' rights for art treasures acquired in dubious circumstances during the war?

Continuing the theme of taking what doesn't belong to you, I LOVED Allison Bartlett Hoover's book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is a book nerd's crime thriller true story about the rare book thief John Gilkey. From her portrayal of him, he seems to be a completely pathological conscience-free little git without any remorse for the consequences of his actions (and you end up really sympathizing with the book dealers who, even when the evidence of his thievery is proven, have an incredibly difficult time getting the legal system to prosecute him, mainly because (despite the fact that he stole more than $100,000 worth of books) stealing books is not a crime that's taken particularly seriously by the police). She does make the very good point, though, that there's not _that_ much that separates Gilkey from the rest of the book-lovers in the world - she herself ends up "borrowing long term" a beautiful early Renaissance German manuscript that a friend had asked her to return for him, and describes a Christie's auctioneer who found a first edition of William Blake poetry in a bureau that was up for sale, that no-one but him was aware of: "Ninety percent of me wanted to slip it into my pocket and leave for lunch, but my conscience wouldn't let me..." and the thing is, I would totally feel tempted if I saw a beautiful old book that I really wanted, lying out on some bookstall for the taking. I haven't stolen anything for years (I think the last thing was a screw from Home Depot when the line was really, really long and I had to go to the loo and didn't want to wait, and before that gummy fish from the local convenience store when I was five) but if anything was going to push me over the edge into stealing valuable objects, I think a beautiful old book would be it. Something medieval and illuminated, most likely, or one of the few Graham Oakley Church Mice books that I couldn't find on e-bay... I don't really get the appeal of the whole first edition thing, I have to admit. A handwritten manuscript would be exciting.

Neither Here Nor There doesn't have anything to do with stealing, unless you count the highway robbery of getting charged $12 for a used paperback just because I was desperate and only had three minutes to shop for something to read at the only English-language bookshop in Chiang Mai before getting on 16 hours' worth of airplanes. Bill Bryson is a frustrating writer for me, in that he occasionally makes me actually weak with laughter, and I start attracting annoyed glances from people around me because I am trying and failing to suppress all sorts of undignified snorts and giggles and whoops, and yet his attention span is distressingly short and his books (the travel ones at least) are so devoid of point. He spends about five minutes in each place he travels to, and half of the book is about checking in and out of hotels and mishaps with travellers' checks and whatever else, and you think, well, why not just stay at home, save yourself some money, think up an actual narrative, and then put the same quantity of jokes in that you would otherwise.

I don't think Sarah Thornton intended Seven Days in the Art World to be about stealing, but I certainly came away with the impression that the modern art market is one massive con. She's an anthropologist who spends a day each at a major auction house, at an art school critique, at the studio of a major production artist, at an art fair, at a gallery, etc., and just records what goes on without really imposing any judgement on any of the proceedings. The domination of 'conceptual art' in the modern art world, and the flip side of that, the dismissal of art that requires technical skill, is an interesting philosophical quandary: if Damien Hirst, for example, buys a medicine cabinet from a furniture shop, fills it with medicine bottles purchased from a pharmacy, and then calls it Art, is it worth millions? what about if he doesn't do it himself, but has one of his many employees do it, is it still Art? is it still worth millions? If people are only buying art for its value as a financial investment, and not because it is intrinsically interesting/beautiful/useful in and of itself, doesn't that mean that sooner or later the bubble will pop and it will, in fact, be a shitty financial investment? I think I was most horrified at how much the artists depended on their descriptions of their work to give it meaning - i.e. if Damien Hirst has to tell you that his medicine cabinet is art, and that it is intended to be a powerful political statement about sexual aggression and repressed despair in the search for meaning in the universe (or something), then surely it's not really art. Art should speak for itself with a minimum of explanation, shouldn't it? Then I started wondering, well, how much does knowing the story contribute to one's appreciation of, I don't know, a painting depicting a scene from classical Greek mythology? or knowing what all the objects symbolize in a Dutch Old Master? I don't think it's the same, but I can't quite articulate to myself what the difference is.

Anyway. It's freezing in here. Time to go put two jerseys on and turn the heat up.

still going strong...

Still reading:
The Rape of Europa, by Lynn Nicholas

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Actually finished:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer
Diplomatic Baggage, by Brigid Keenan
Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx
Resistance, by Owen someone or other

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Map of the Harbor Islands, by J.G. Hayes

Still languishing next to my bed and starting to collect a good layer of dust:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

Lots read in the last two weeks, mostly because I had a few days up in Seattle, which means access to my parents' bookshelves (why are other people's books that you haven't read so much more appealing than your own unread books? it's like we get eye-fatigue from looking at the same book jackets, and thinking, nah, still not quite in the mood to read that.)

I'm not going to write about The Rape of Europa yet except to say that WOW THE NAZIS WERE MEAN EVIL PEOPLE. It feels sort of trivial to be reading a book about the fate of art in Europe during World War II, when the horrific fate of millions of people is more important.... but then a tiny little part of me, the part that might dither over saving a drowning stranger versus the last extant copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (or Nick Hornby :)), says, but hang on, what's so great about humans except for the bit of us that _produces_ sublime art, so maybe the fate of all those beautiful Vermeers and Rembrandts _is_ just as important and relevant as that of all those people who were murdered, because, let's face it, as a species we are overall fairly crap. The thing that gets me most I think is the vicious hypocrisy in the policies: "degenerate art" should be destroyed because it's bad for humanity & artists/dealers should be severely punished for creating it/dealing it, BUT "degenerate art" basically meant whatever Hitler didn't like (Van Gogh, Picasso, the impressionists) which was difficult to predict until you actually stuck the artwork in question in front of him, and then although the official word was "destroy all degenerate art" half the Nazi war effort was funded with the millions they made on the black market selling other people's stolen art. I think the paintings I'm saddest about are the disappeared Vermeers. There was a bit in one of the early chapters that almost made me cry: during the Spanish Civil War, the Escorial near Madrid was bombed, and so the curators of the Prado realized that they needed to get their artwork out of the museum posthaste, as it was only a matter of time before a bomb hit the Prado. They arranged a caravan of high security trucks to transport the most valuable of the Prado's collection through the night to some underground vault in Valencia, and (this is part that got me), all through the night, regular citizens stood by the road along the route as these enormous trucks carrying the rolled up Velazquezes and Goyas, and as soon as the trucks had passed, they would go home and telephone the curators at the Prado (who were presumably biting their nails the whole night long) to say that so far the trucks were safe.

I'm realizing I've been on a little bit of a Second World War binge this last couple of weeks: Resistance was a fairly crapulent (I thought) overly pathetique imagining of a German occupation of a small Welsh valley in 1940 something - the general framework of the story is solid (seven small farms in a valley, German soldiers are coming, women wake up one morning to find all their menfolk have disappeared in the night to join the underground Welsh resistance, Germans arrive, women have to cooperate but can't give any information about their husbands away, German soldiers get snowed into the valley with them over the winter and truthfully are quite glad that their commanders seem to have forgotten about them because they're tired of being soldiers and just want to go back to being regular guys again, German soldiers plus abandoned farmwives end up leaning on each other to survive the winter, winter's over and valley opens again - dilemma of what to do.) but the prose is dreadful dreadful. No one in the book has even a glimmering of dimensionality to them, and I got very fed up with them all by the end the snow melted, and it was quite hard to care about what happened in the end.

THAT said, I loved loved loved the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (despite the retarded chick-lit title). Such a sweet book. It was a perfect antidote to all the macho misanthrope of Martin Amis, John Updike et al: intelligent, but warm and kind, and everyone in the book is a good person! that you would enjoy spending an evening with! possibly more! funny and yet with depth! Also about the (this time real) German occupation of the Channel Islands, it starts off very fluffy, and then slowly gets into more stern stuff, but the principal characters are so charming that there is almost a pleasantness to the ache of the sterner stuff. I think I have said before too that I do have a weakness for epistolary novels - it's the voyeurism of getting to read something that doesn't belong to you, maybe.

Diplomatic Baggage and Him Her Him Again The End of Him were both unabashed fluff. You don't need to read either of them. Diplomatic Baggage is a slightly self-serving string of anecdotes as told by a woman who has spent the last two decades trailing around after her husband on his various diplomatic missions - she expresses exactly the same amount of angst over Rwandan genocide as she does over having to organize a dinner party for six, and it could come off as cute and Bridget-Jones-like, but at least Bridget doesn't include both in the same _book_. The Patricia Marx book was funny (and she is a better writer than Brigid Keenan as well) but it also felt a bit too trivial - books that are entirely about women completely obsessed with men who are bad for them feel tedious to me now, which is either a sign that I am growing up or that I am an unsympathetic cow, not sure which.

The last book I am going to write about before I crap out and go to bed is The Map of the Harbor Islands which has been sitting in my brain ever since I finished it (late last night, one a.m., definitely past my bed time), and refusing to go away, saying thinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutme. The recommendation came from a source I was a little unsure about, book-taste-wise, but I was assured it was the Best Book EVER, and I have to admit, it's definitely got something. There's a lot in it, to start off with; there are a lot of words in this book and it might even qualify for quasi-saga-hood. The gist is as follows: two boyhood friends (the narrator, Danny, and his best friend Petey) are enjoying their rough-and-tumble South Boston Irish-Catholic semi-squalid but basically happy normal childhood until Petey gets bonked on the head by a baseball and emerges from his head injury a different person: he becomes totally unselfconscious, a truth-speaking angel full of poetry and love for the universe and the earth, (and an unrealistically literate and abstract thinker, for a twelve-year-old, I will also throw in) and, to the major freakout of Danny, Petey also announces that he is gay. Danny is a much more ordinary kid destined for ordinary join-marines-get-crap-job-settle-down-with-highschool-girlfriend life, and the rest of the book is about Danny's growing up and coming to terms with his love for his friend and thinking about stretching his own boundaries and making the most of his own life beyond the ordinary crap that's in the cards for him, and it definitely got its hooks into me, this book, even despite a few passages which stretched credulity, and another few which talked about God (as in the Irish Catholic version of God) in a way that seemed to imply that organized religion and homosexuality in America were PERFECTLY COMPATIBLE, no PROBLEM, you just have to think about it the right way and hang out only with the twinkly-eyed smart nuns rather than the evil spiritually-limited ruler-wielding ones... hmm, yeah, I have my doubts about that. But J.G.Hayes is definitely a smart and thougtful cookie, and kudos to him for writing a book that is going to keep me thinking about the exact nature of love for a while to come.

HA! i'm reading again!

Read (or at least started):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Magical Changes, Graham Oakley (does this count? it's all pictures. my kind of book, man)
The Rape of Europa,
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
random book titled something like "Character Analysis in the work of Enid Blyton" that I picked up in Powells because I could NOT believe that someone would write a serious book about this, but hey, they did.

Stuff I want to read:
fictionalized biography of Artmesia Gentileschi, by Anna Banti
Biography of Arthur Ransome, by Roland someone
Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome, and THEN all the other Swallows and Amazons books
Twilight series, by Stephanie whosit

I haven't actually, you know, FINISHED, anything to speak of, but at least I have rolled eyeballs over print enough to qualify as reading the last week or so, which is better than I was doing before.
I did end up starting Infinite Jest; obviously I'm nowhere near finished with it because it's like five million very dense pages, but so far thumbs up. I'm skipping the footnotes, I've decided; the flow thing is more important, and while I do sympathize to a certain extent with the common criticism of his work that it is too self-consciously show-offy, it's FUN how much he knows about everything, and has this extensive and very precisely applied vocabulary (i.e., not just gratuitous big words, but perfectly placed accurate vocabulary that gives you a little tickle of pleasure of OHHHHH how nice that he put that word _there_ exactly where it belongs, and it's a word you only hear once every ten years so it makes you happy that it is still not just getting used but getting used in the right place to mean its right thing.) On a slightly unrelated note, it has occurred to me before that in English-foreign language translation dictionaries, especially ones that include slang or very idiomatic terms, they should also include an appropriate frequency for each phrase. "cool" can be used once every five minutes, easily, without being egregious, for example; "all that and a bag of chips" should be limited to once a year, at most; I have restricted my mother to "getting up at the butt-crack [of dawn]" to once every ten years, not that she respects that boundary. I think it would be really useful when learning a foreign language to give you a sense of how often you can use a given word or phrase without sounding weird. Anyway. So so far I heart Infinite Jest, and I do feel happy to be getting in on the tail end of the whole grassroots thing of 'Infinite Summer' (the project of reading Infinite Jest this summer, which may be just a Bay Area? thing or a U.S. thing? I don't know - as a tribute to DFW's life and horrific early death. So tremendously sad when smart funny people can't find enough to be worth living for.)
The other book which I am going to claim I finished (even though I skipped one of the longer middle essays) was a book of Susan Sontag essays, "At the Same Time," which was compiled posthumously. I will admit to having Trouble with a capital T with some of them: she nearly lost me with the first one, which is sort of a weird abstract pseudophilosophical meandering about the meaning of Beauty, and what beauty means and how it's defined and how it relates to ethical/moral issues and cultural standards and I found myself losing patience just a wee wee bit with it because a) her attempt to define beauty isn't really going to change what anyone else finds beautiful (I don't think) and b) I am the world's least abstract thinker. I do think that beauty is not as visceral a decision as we might like to think: I have grown out of liking a lot of pieces of art that I really liked 10-20 years ago, and come to really like several other things that I hated as a teenager, in large part because of extra stuff I have learned about the cultural context/artist's intention/etc, but I don't think Susan Sontag (or Oscar Wilde, or Plato, or anyone else) philosophizing about the meaning of beauty is going to do much to change what is ultimately a fairly visceral reaction to a piece of art/music; you love it, or you don't love it. Ennyway. She also does this thing of referring to herself obliquely as this ultra-highbrow persecuted intellectual character, and it just seems a little bit snotty to refer to yourself as one of the last remaining smart people in the world, the last guardian of the True Culture and the Intelligentsia. meh, get over yourself.

The essay that most most grabbed me in the Susan Sontag book was a review of a fictionalized biography by Anna Banti about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. First off, wow, what a great name, to be called Artemisia is pretty fantastic, and secondly wow, fantastic to be a successful (and apparently good) painter in Florence in the 1600's, in a world completely totally utterly dominated by men made me feel so vicariously proud and woohoo, you go sister! The part of the essay that was a little bit disheartening was where she talked about the decision that women (still) have to make about basically being hyperproductive in their life's work or having a family, and how that is not a choice that men really have to make. "For a woman to be free, free as a man, means choices - sacrifices - sufferings that a man may choose but is not obliged to incur... Feminism has meant many things... about justice and dignity and liberty - to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation... that feminism suggests an avowal of strength - and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection)." I don't know how Susan Sontag felt about masculine support and affection, but I for one am grateful for what I got in that arena, and would be loath to give it up, although I think I am as guilty as the next woman in terms of not infrequently deferring to men without really thinking about it too hard, which I am sure has cost me in productivity points. Anyway, I am undecided about Susan Sontag, but I'm definitely going to read Anna Banti's book about Artemisia at some point.

I finally started the Jhumpa Lahiri, although haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to decide yet whether I like it; I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get over how much I liked her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. I also yesterday went on a pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore in Portland - my first time ever; next time I go I am bringing a sleeping bag and a campstove and just staying there for a week or two, or until they kick me out, whichever is longer - and I bought a nonfiction account of the Nazi pillage of so-called "degenerate" art from Jewish collectors which I am twenty pages into and which I can tell is going to be just whoppingly depressing, with lots of destroyed paintings and murdered artists and the whole bit) as well as a Graham Oakley children's picture book called Magical Changes, which is AWESOME. that dude is a genius. I am not surprised his books are going for $200 a pop on ebay. (I looked for the Church Mice books, in vain, but I did find a hilarious 'Guide To Enid Blyton's Characters' which offered a semi-serious brief psychoanalysis of all the major players (George/Julian/Dick/Anne/Timmy the dog/Silky/Moonface etc etc) as well as books 3-8 of the Swallows and Amazons series, which I recently re-read book one of, and decided it was excellent. I didn't BUY books 3-8 because I need to read book TWO (Swallowdale) first, and of course they didn't HAVE book two... I also looked for the new biography of Arthur Ransome (author of the Swallows and Amazons series) which my sister sent me a link about which sounds FASCINATING - he apparently (in order to escape a tedious marriage) got himself sent as a journalist/spy to Bolshevik Russia and was there for the revolution, had a long term affair with Trotsky's personal secretary (whom he later married), worked in China for a bit as a journalist/British Foreign Office having all sorts of hairy adventures, and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he came back to the UK and settled down in the Lake District to write these gorgeously appealing kids' books about sailing and pirates.

I also might have to read the vampire Twilight series, as I have now heard it's fun from several people. hmm. we'll see. I might have to read it in secret when nobody's watching. We have to at least pretend to maintain some pretense at High Cultcha.

All the books I haven't read...

okay this blog post is about all the books I have not read this month. are you ready? the list is horrifically long. _The Inheritance of Loss_, by Kiran Desai, comes top; I have had this book recommended to me over two years, in my possession for one year, next to my bed for SIX MONTHS, and still can't get myself to read it. There's something about the turquoise cover and cursive script on the front that makes me think it's not going to make me laugh, and I have been wanting a good laugh recently.
I have also failed to read _Infinite Jest_ (David Foster Wallace; I really really liked the idea of 'Infinite Summer' when I heard about it, but was thwarted by the number of people who also apparently really really liked the idea and who bought out the local bookshop/borrowed all the copies from the Santa Rosa library. Why am I bothering to resist Amazon? I don't know. I don't want to spend full price for a book that will lurk under my bed for six months. I'd rather wait until the next copy comes back to the library (in 2014, judging from the wait list for it) or until I've forgotten that I wanted to read it, whichever comes first.
Next comes _Map of the Harbor Islands_, which I think (based on the first two pages and dust jacket) is going to be sort of a gay coming-of-age tale; another one which was recommended to me eons ago. It was recommended so earnestly as The Best Book Ever Written that I did actually look on Amazon for it, but couldn't find a copy for less than thirty dollars, which I will not pay unless the earnest recommender is someone whose taste lines up with mine on every. single. point., from the Just So stories to the New Yorker to, oh, god, I don't know, something that only I like that no-one else likes, like eating lemons, or foot-washing right before bed. Now I have a borrowed copy. We'll see if the magic happens.
Also borrowed is the latest Jhumpa Lahiri novel. I'm nervous about this one: I loved loved loved loved loved loved loved the Interpreter of Maladies SO MUCH I just wanted to marry it oh my god what a perfect little book that was. And then she wrote the Namesake and I was so excited because it was like, wow, a whole juicy novel, what a treat this is going to be, and then it kind of wasn't - a little bit of the Martin Amis problem again, that none of the characters (at least in the younger generation) were actually that sympathetic, and the older generation felt almost caricaturey in their "why don't you get married to a nice Indian girl otherwise you will bring shame on the family"ness. So I'm skittish about the new book. It's on the trunk in my bedroom. It hasn't made it to the floor next to the bed stack. I avoid making direct eye contact with it. I think maybe if I just live with it for a little while I might get less afraid of it, and one day I'll pick it almost accidentally, like "oh, wait, what's this again?" and sort of flip through the pages in a casual sort of way, as if I'm not actually reading it, I just wanted to check out the type face, because I'm suddenly feeling really interested in font design, and then something catches my eye, and then ha! I'm in. It might work.
I saw Julie and Julia the other night (movie, Meryl Streep) which made me want to read Julia Child's _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_, since it sounds like it might be a) good for me in an improving educational sort of way and b) quite a chatty fun cookbook, sort of Jane Grigsonish, but I can't think about food right now, because I just went out for a medium-epic dinner with friends and am bulging at the seams. Tomorrow will contemplate.
I am embarrassed to admit what I am reading instead: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I can't help it. I need something cheerful, undemanding, familiar at night to fall asleep. It's not a book, it's a sedative, a transition prop to get my brain to shut up about all the things knocking around in it leftover from the day (I need to clean the kitchen, I need to fill out my licensing paperwork, I need to finish painting, I need to send off my tax thing, I need to exercise, I need to ring xyz specialist about xyz patient) so that I can go to sleep. I read three pages and I'm out cold, happy sound sleep, with no side effects, unless you count happy, vaguely erotic dreams about Daniel Radcliffe and what a little hottie he is turning into. I used to use the Stalky & Co. stories for my bedtime sedative, until I found out that Kipling based the character of Beetle on himself, and somehow I found that obnoxious and couldn't read them anymore.
I will start reading more, I promise, since I have discovered that the universe is punishing me for not reading the last couple of months: I found out that Nick Hornby himself, unknowing spirit guide of this blog, is going to be in San Francisco, reading at City Arts and Lectures at a benefit thingy for 823 Valencia, at the beginning of October, and it is SOLD OUT. Full on tragic, man. Next time. Nick, if only you knew us, I know you'd like us, really.

Martin Amis, The Information

Book I just finished reading: Martin Amis, The Information

Book this blog entry will be about: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that was the bane of my existence for the last two weeks: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that I can't decide whether I liked or hated: Martin Amis, The Information.

My sister suggested that I restrict each post to just one or two books so that she doesn't have to wade through pages and pages of rambling (or rather she still does, but if it's only one book at a time she doesn't have to lose her place in the rambling) so, here goes, What I Thought of Martin Amis' The Information.

First off, sorry, but this is a mean boy book, and I don't mean this in the John Grisham sense of the term - I can deal with evil corporate lawyers and their scheming, since you know the good guys will win in the end - more in the Saul Bellow/John Updike sense, where everyone is mired in their lives of quiet desperation and unhappy tense marriages that are seething with horrific untold secrets and bad behavior but everyone keeps playing bridge and drinking cocktails anyway. It's the combination of hyperarticulateness combined with a teensy bit of arrogance about said hyperarticulateness that results in a misanthropic miasma over the whole book, and the poor reader (me) feeling alternately too stupid to be an adequate audience for all the literary gymnastics and irritated at him for thinking he's that much cleverer than the entire rest of the world. Minor revelation: the act of reading (I am thinking of this for the first time, so this thought might not come out right, but bear with me) puts the reader in the same situation as the _characters_: i.e. none of you really know what's going to happen next, you're all quite invested in finding _out_ what's going to happen next, and you're all at the whim of the author, so when the author creates mostly despicable characters you feel depressed yourself, lumped in with all these people who cheat on their spouses and spend their child support money on drugs and sabotage their friends' careers out of jealousy (just to pluck a few random examples out of the air), even if you yourself are a decent-ish person who doesn't do any of those things. Yes, I think that's it.

He (Martin Amis) is indubitably a fantastic writer on a sentence-by-sentence basis: there were some really, really, really nice phrases that just stopped me in my tracks (although if the writing stops you from continuing to read is that good writing? hmm. to ponder), and a few metaphors that had me giving little out-loud grunts of pleasure. I didn't, of course, bring the book with me to the coffee-shop where I am sitting now - in fact, it was a loaner copy, so it is out of my hands forever - so I can't flip through and look for particularly juicy ones, but I do remember "the eye-hurting metallic colour of the sky" in Miami mmmmm yes eye-hurting perfect adjective.

HOWEVER, big-picture beef with this book (I won't say Martin Amis, since I haven't read any of his other novels, but I am definitely wary) is the lack of any even remotely sympathetic character anywhere in the book - they really are all either stupid, mean, petty, grasping, unreliable, psychotic, or a combination of the above - and the stops and starts in the plot. It was a bit like an opera, in that the action happens in brief flurries of slightly wacky recitative (which if you haven't read the plot synopsis in the program might not make a whole lot of sense), and then everyone stands around and sings for ten minutes about how they feel about what just happened. Sort of the same with this except it doesn't come with a handy plot synopsis, so when on the third to last page there was an apparent child-abduction followed by random release of unharmed same, another character getting assaulted (vs. murdered, I couldn't tell), and either a spontaneous or purposely-staged episode of cheating spouse caught in flagrante with vengeful backstabbing friend, after pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of nothing happening, I was totally thrown for a loop.

I will sneak in a brief mention of The Piano Teacher, by Janice Lee, which I am probably not going to finish. I was hoping a dumb novel about glamorous 1930's Hong Kong would be full of spicy sex and political intrigue, but the spice/intrigue/glamour factor is, I think, too far outweighed by the dumbness. I'll give it another chapter before I pack it in...

Heller, Townsend, Undset

Book I am reading right now (or at least I would be if I weren't blogging):

Martin Amis, The Information

Zoe Heller, The Believers

Books on my to-read list recently recommended:

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Independent People, Haldor Laxness

Re-reads for comfort:

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

one of the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael medieval murder mysteries, can't remember the title

The Water Babies, Charles whosiwhatsit

Boy & Going Solo, Roald Dahl

New books actually read:
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sue Townsend
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller

lots of New Yorkers (finally caught up!)

Books bought:
The Piano Teacher, Janice Lee
When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson

the Zoe Hellers

I am finding it more and more difficult to be scrupulously honest about what I am reading, because setting myself the project of writing about it publicly makes me realize a) how much brain candy I read b) how much comfort re-reading of old books I do and c) how disorganized I am about having multiple books going simultaneously, depending on what happens to be next to the bed when bedtime rolls around. Oh, well. Luckily I don't think anyone's actually _reading_ this :).

Several of the books this month were picked up in an airport bookshop, so they come with the extra adrenaline-soaked frisson of having nearly missed a plane in order to purchase them (I got myself into a state of metaphysical crisis over the 4-books-for-the-price-of-3 deal: really I could only justify buying two for the plane ride, but then three is so _close_ to two, and once you have bought three then you get the fourth one _anyway_... oh GOD. I bought four, and just barely made it onto the flight in time.

The Martin Amis and the first Zoe Heller I am going to leave for another time, BUT I loved loved loved Notes on a Scandal. I definitely have a weakness for novels narrated by a character who is delusional about their own role in what is going on around them (viz: Kashuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure oh god, and of course, Lolita, favourite book of all time) and Notes on a Scandal is quite delicious on this score. (I had already seen the film, yay Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and liked it, and so was very pleased that the book-being-better-than-the-film rule also held true in this case.) Brief summary: young posh arty bohemian new teacher in enormous rough-and-tumble London comprehensive school befriends slightly creepy (as we discover) older female teacher, has affair with fifteen year old student, confides in older teacher, things go pear-shaped from there. I also love books with an edge of moral ambiguity: on the face of things, you think, "Teacher having affair with fifteen year old student? that's disgraceful/immoral/terrible; she should know better!" and then you read the story, and you start thinking, hm, well, I kind of see how she could have gotten into it... There is an interesting bit where the older teacher (who narrates the story) is trying to justify to herself the younger teacher's actions, and she asks how many of us can say that we have never had sexual thoughts about someone inappropriate (presumably meaning a minor, a relative, the partner of a close friend, etc. etc.), and extrapolating from there, if that person then suddenly took the initiative with you, are you sure you'd be so well-behaved...? and you think, oh my god, could I be the next Mary Kay LeTourneau? do I have that in me? I haven't seduced any underage patients yet, but I'll be sure and post it if I do, in the interests of science.

Speaking of unreliable narrators, Adrian Mole was the guilty pleasure of the month, although a mixed pleasure at this point. The self-absorbed cluelessness that made his adolescent diaries so hilarious and endearing becomes nearly excruciating to witness in an adult (in this last installment he is now in his mid-thirties, divorced with two kids) and the possibility of a genuinely happy ending for him seems infinitesimally small (is it possible to strip yourself of all your dearly held fantasies about yourself and do a total realignment with reality in order to trade in your insecurities after your teenage years? I am skeptical), although Sue Townsend does very gamely keep trying to provide him with true love and reality in equal doses, despite his gigantic, horrific character flaws. (In this installment, he becomes accidentally engaged to a terrifyingly neurotic Georgian dollhouse enthusiast named Marigold, extricates himself at the very last minute, and semi-inexplicably ends up with Marigold's sexy, rich, cosmopolitan, beautiful sister Daisy. We don't ever really get given an adequate Daisy's-eye view of him, particularly, but by the end of the book I was so desperate for him to get himself out of all his various disasters that I was more than willing to accept last-minute salvation by an attractive sane new girlfriend.

Last but not least on the new-books read: the long awaited Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (I read The Wreath and The Wife; The Cross is going to have to wait until my next trip to the UK,where the book got left.) I had been saving it for this trip, and it turned out to be a nice concordance of length/heft of book to free reading time. It is an odd, odd book in several ways: it was written I think in the 1920's (in Norwegian), and Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize for Literature for it, which seems pretty avant garde, no? that a 1000+ page rambling proto-feminist family saga in Norwegian would be the pick of that year? The other thing that was odd was how _modern_ it felt - it's set in the fourteenth century, and I have always thought of historical fiction as being a relatively new genre: most 18th, 19th, and early 20th century novels are just set when they're written, as far as I know. I was a bit nervous starting it, as I had premonitions of tedium (understandable, given the length) and of too many characters (I was flipping back to the family tree thing in the front constantly when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude and it got frankly old) but actually it was fine on both counts.

The story follows Kristin from happy childhood on farm to dramatic elopement with and subsequent marriage to a difficult (for lack of a more unifying descriptor) man to motherhood. According to the introduction, it also goes through to her death at age __ of ___: I couldn't BELIEVE the guy who wrote the preface would drop that bomb on the second page of the introduction!! boo on him. but I didn't read the third book on purpose; I am hoping that by the time I get around to it I will have forgotten about the spoiler in the introduction and thus can jump into the third part of the trilogy with a clean slate). I was impressed by how earthy, overall, the writing was: there are descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding and sex that, while they're not gratuitously gross or anything, leave you in absolutely no doubt that the author has experienced all those things firsthand and is not going to bother being coy about it (which again, feels very modern for the 1920's.). I did get a bit irritated with old Kristin towards the middle, I have to admit; she is touted on the back cover as a Strong Independent-Minded Woman, and yet she lets herself be seduced by a guy who is actually a bit of a drip, and not only sticks around to have about a million kids with him, she also does the irritating thing of continually misreporting her emotions, by which I mean: 'Kristin lay in Erlend's arms; although it was great to finally be in bed with him, she felt totally miserable because she knew how badly she was betraying her family and how incredibly disappointed her parents would be in her for letting herself be seduced by such a drip because even though she loved him w/ all her heart blah blah she realized he was a bit of a drip.' Then later on, 'Kristin was really pissed off with Erlend for being such a drip but she stayed with him because of the memory of how happy she had been that first time when she lay in his arms..." and you think, hunh? wait, she wasn't happy then either! wtf! why is this supposedly Strong Independent Woman making such drippy decisions for herself? anyway. I'll get over it.

I'm not going to write about my comfort re-reading this month, except to say that re-reading Boy and Going Solo was a bittersweet experience: I loved both those books when I was younger, and now, as with other previously intense childhood loves (the Narnia series, The Sound of Music), they are starting to look embarrassingly dated. Boy not so much, because his life is limited to family and school, which are fairly transcendent experiences that we can all relate to (and he does a brilliant job of bringing his childhood voice to immediate and vivid life) but for the first time I noticed uncomfortable patriotic/colonialist overtones in Going Solo, and a few bits had me wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la while I read.

OH and one more very, very important set of books on the to-read list: I recently discovered there are MORE THAN THREE of Graham Oakley's fantastic Church Mice books. I got on Amazon and ebay, and they are out of print and selling used for up to several hundred dollars a pop, which is terrifying but understandable, given just how TOTALLY AND UTTERLY FANTASTIC they are. I bid on two that were in Australia, going for thirty dollars each, but I lost the auction. So put the word out: if anyone, anywhere, sees any Graham Oakley Church Mice books (other than the three I already have, which are The Church Mouse, The Church Mice Spread Their Wings, and The Church Mice Go to the Moon) buy 'em and either make a fortune re-selling them on ebay or, better yet, give them to me as a Christmas present...

Fitzhugh, Newman, Troost, Barbery, Tyler, Auster

Books read:

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

Robert Newman, The Case of the Murdered Players
J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo

Sort of an odd list this month; I think Amazon might have a hard time making recommendations (other than Nick) for me as a customer based on that, and admittedly all but the Paul Auster and Muriel Barbery were re-reads, but there is no point in blogging about what I'm reading if I'm not prepared to be truthful about the peculiarities of my reading habits, so here goes.

Harriet the Spy was part of last month's late night children's book nostalgia spree; the only part of it I had actually remembered was the bit where the kids run the purple socks up the flagpole and where Harriet gets caught in the dumbwaiter of the house of the rich lady she has decided to spy on. It's a really odd book to have become a classic in many ways: Harriet is not at all an appealing kid, and I think most kids reading that book would recognize her as kind of an unpleasant brat, and the book also violates one of the fundamental tenets of school-age kid books in that she has an intact reasonably intact family life (i.e. unlike the Lemony Snicket books, Harry Potter, pretty much all of Roald Dahl, etc. etc. she hasn't taken the basic precaution of getting rid of one or both parents in order to better be able to embark on dangerous and exciting adventures). The thing that most struck me (re)reading it was that, as in the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, having live-in maids is written about as being completely normal, which makes me want to do some research into how many American families actually had live-in maids in the fifties and sixties. (Harriet's family has a cook and a nanny; Harriet's an only child and as far as I can tell her mother doesn't have a job.) I mean, if you read Emily Post (as a theoretical example. not that I have a 1956 edition next to the loo that I occasionally dip into to find out what you would serve at an afternoon bridge party as opposed to an ordinary ladies' tea 'at home') she definitely discusses which member of your staff should perform which function at a formal dinner (butler announces, oversees drinks, footman/valet takes coats, parlour maid parlours, chamber maid chambers, cook cooks, undercook undercooks, etc. etc.) which all seems just ferociously high society victorian and unrealistic, but these kids' books written in the 60's all seem to take it as a matter of course, and the kids seem pretty normal in other ways (taking the schoolbus to their public schools, saving their allowance, liking macaroni cheese, etc.). Perhaps it was assumed that only upperclass kids _read_ these books? or maybe way more people really did have live-in maid service. Add to the to-be-looked-up list.

More Robert Newman, as well (the Sherlock Holmes spin-off, to borrow a useful TV word): this time what struck me was all the stuff that is left out that adults would want to know about. There's a bit at the beginning of the Case of the Murdered Players, for instance, when Andrew (age 14) comes home from his posh boarding school and greets Sarah (age 13, best friend, fellow mystery-solver, Cockney street-rat-turned-accomplished-young-lady since being rescued from the gutter by Andrew's famous actress mother) after not having seen her for several months while he's been away at school, and Robert Newman tells you that Andrew shakes hands with his stepfather (appropriate), gives his mother a hug (appropriate), and "greets" Sarah. Maybe not everyone is as prurient as me, but given all the sexual tension inherent in the 14 y/o boy & 13 y/o girl best friend dynamic (an unlikely enough scenario as it is), don't you TOTALLY WANT TO KNOW??? like do they hug? what? okay, I am being prurient. I'll let it drop. There's also a delightful scene in which Andrew's mother successfully identifies a kidnapping suspect out of a possible three gajillion women in England with two questions: "Did she smell familiar to you, Andrew?" ("Yes, funnily enough, mother, her smell reminded me of you, but I couldn't place why!") "I bet it was theatre greasepaint. She's an actress!" ("Yes! that's it!") "Tell me, was she wearing any jewelry?" ("Um, yes, an orange necklace and earrings") "Her name is Coral Lumley - she always wears that set; it was given to her by an admirer!" Fastest criminal ID in police history.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals (a misnomer, btw; there's no sex and no cannibalism) is fun if a little self serving: J. Maarten (first initials always make me wonder much more than middle initials, like, wow, if they choose to go by their middle name even in the book publishing world, their first name must be something REALLY AWFUL) is funny, but he knows he's funny, so it takes a little bit of the joy out of his funniness. The book is sort of a loose travelogue of the year or so he spent living on a shit-infested island in Kiribati in the South Pacific while his girlfriend worked for some sort of noble NGO garden-planting sanitation public-healthy type organization. My favourite thing in the book are the chapter headings: he does them like an 19th century serialized novel, as in "Chapter 17: In Which the Author Meets the Poet Laureate of Kiribati, Who Has Never Written Any Poetry As Such, And Also An Account of the Great Beer Crisis," (this is a made up example. Not an actual quote, as I don't have the actual book to actual hand. but you get the gist). 'sfunny.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (lent to me by my mother) was disquieting; it and the Paul Auster book are the only things with pretentions to Quality Books, I think, this month, but overall I found that there was a misanthropic streak through the hedgehog book that was hard to forgive. The main character (the concierge in a Paris apartment building) makes a point of constructing an elaborate and detailed (figurative) mask of herself to present to the world, and then despises the world for not being able to see who she truly is, and you think, hunh?? but then... that whole business with the mask...? hunh? which would make sense if the author was making a point about how foolish that is or something, but instead she seems to be on the narrator's side in despising all the people who are unable to appreciate the narrator for her true self. There were moments of intellectual name droppiness as well, which felt a little bit like Adrian Mole desperately trying to sound Intellectual and Educated - like a bit where she's "almost" caught quoting Marx or Hegel or someone under her breath as she takes out the garbage - how do you quote Marx or Hegel in front of someone else without a large part of you intending to be heard rather than "accidentally" overheard? - which feels very, very contrived. I am also less and less a believer in the canon of Great Books (having been completely unable to get through many Great Books in my time) and the importance of having read all of them: I would rather talk to someone who feels really excited about ten books that they've read that I haven't than someone who feels snooty about having read five Great Books only four of which I've read, even if we might have more of a common basis for discussion in the latter scenario. Luckily the narrator does meet someone at the end who a) meets her criteria for intellectual superiority b) recognizes her as an equal and c) also keeps himself somewhat aloof from the riffraff so she gets something approaching a happy ending. Although not quite. No spoiling here.
The Paul Auster I think was my favourite book of the month: I read it because it seemed to be following me; my old roommate left a copy when she moved out, and then I noticed it on my sister's bookshelf, so I decided if two people had read it whose taste I trusted, I probably should as well, and I really really liked it. It's a little plotless and random and there are a lot of things that go unexplained (it seems if there's copy on the dustjacket describing your book as "in the classic picaresque tradition" you can get away with an awful lot when it comes to plotlessness) but he writes so nicely and you really want the main character guy to succeed in his efforts to fly (premise of story: young guttersnipe boy abandoned by biological family picked up by mysterious guru-type person who puts him through horrendous trials to teach him to fly and then takes him on the road to show off his abilities, which become ever more wondrous but fraught with difficulty) and I was quite devastated at several points in the book when scary/bad things happened and quite gleeful when really cool things happened. I am going to read some more Paul Auster soon.
Eek - have to go catch a bus. Anne Tyler maybe next time.

Russo - Orringer - Newman - Austen - Parks - Konisberg - Bianchini

Books read:
Richard Russo, Empire Falls
Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater
Robert Newman, The Case of the Threatened King and The Case of the Somerville Secret
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Tim Parks, Juggle the Stars
E.L. Konigsberg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Bianchini et al, The Paper Architect

Still on the list:
Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy
Anne Fadiman, Rereading

Not a particularly literary last couple of weeks, I confess, but I have been reading A LOT. Quantity over, hm, if not quality, then at least quantity over density.
To start with: the Richard Russo (Empire Falls). Totally not at all not at all what I was expecting. I didn't read the dust-jacket blurb before I started it, as a good faith gesture, so I was going entirely on the picture on the cover and the author's name, so my expectations were a little woolly, but I was definitely anticipating a hyperliterate thriller-type book (Richard being sort of a professorial hyperliterate name, combined with the fact that once a long time ago I saw the thriller heistykidnappy film in which Renee Russo's son gets abducted by creepy Gary Sinise and a girl with a tattoo on her neck. Superlative logic, hmm.) But instead it turned out to be a very peaceful book about a small town in Maine and a gentle nice peaceful man who lives in the small town and his small unhappinesses (depressed unfulfilled mother, unmanageable drunk father, bolshy soon-to-be-ex-wife, sensitive teenage daughter, miserable job) which he overcomes with small happinesses and ultimately everything works out OK. The most unexpected thing about this book was how profoundly alienated and un-American I wound up feeling while reading it: the characters (who for the most part are reasonable, relatively smart, articulate people) do things like attend football games and believe in God and say "Golly, I'm plumb tuckered out" as if those are all completely normal things to do (they're not, sorry) and I found myself doubting that Richard Russo and I would get along, although I have no doubt that he too is a really nice man. I think also I still slightly resent Maine, as a place; when I was small my friend Bug would disappear for the entire summer there with her family, and every year I would spend the month of August getting excited every time I saw an orange VW camper bus, thinking it was them, back from Maine, and then disappointed every time they weren't.
Julie Orringer's book, How To Breathe Underwater, was a holdover from my Polysyllabic Spree Amazon ordering binge that I hadn't gotten to right away - her stories are all unmistakeably about American characters, too, and you would think they would get monotonous because they're almost all about adolescent suffering in one way or another, but in fact they are quite a) different from one another and b) very interesting, and her prose is totally unaffected and translucent. I read it really fast in one sitting, so I might have to go back and read it again at some point.
The excellent Robert Newman series (not recommended for general adult consumption, unless you are like me and have an unexplainable fetish for re-reading (and re-re-reading) British preteen books) was given to me when I was eight or nine by my fairy bookmother, a sixty-ish literary-magazine editor with a hairy chin, an ability to talk uninterrupted for hours about the London theatre scene, and a fetish for British pre-teen literature that matched (possibly exceeded) mine. She had no kids of her own, and lavished (the only adequate word) literally hundreds of books on my sister and me over the course of about a decade before she died of ovarian cancer in the mid-1990's. The Robert Newman books started with a book called The Baker Street Irregulars, in which a motley gang of scruffy neighbourhood kids helps Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery (all set in dank, dirty, Dickensian London). Holmes doesn't turn up for the subequent books, but the kids are pretty much set by then, having made friends with one of the Scotland Yard inspectors and acquired a famous actress as long-lost parent in the first book, and they go on to solve lots more mysteries. I got them because I had a dream about them the other night and couldn't go back to sleep until I had gone online and ordered them (tragically, tragically, they are all out of print! how can this be?!) but luckily several grotty used library copies were still floating around out there looking for a good home and one by one they are arriving on my doorstep from all over the country. I heart the internet. What did we do before it? Don't know and don't care.
I feel a little silly listing the Jane Austen - how many gajillions of words have been written about her novels and life already? does anyone really need to know what I think? - but my two burning unanswered Jane Austen questions are:
#1. How can her characters be so black and white (the women are all either weak/silly/vain/ foolish or sensible/undervalued/quiet/witty/perceptive, and the men all either funloving blackguards or upright honourable stuffed shirts) and yet still be so appealing? and convince you that the most engaging of her love stories (Elizabeth & Darcy, Anne & Frederick) are between fully rounded adults?
#2. How does she manage to present a picture of a society in which women's scope of interest is so limited (and she is so obviously aware of the limits) and yet she doesn't get stroppy about it?
I don't think I'm ever going to get satisfactory answers to these, but enlightment is always welcome.
The Tim Parks book was recommended by my sister, whose taste in books is so fearsomely dense (she reads physics textbooks for fun. I am not making that up) that I was a bit nervous about it. She doesn't believe in fiction on principle (why read things that aren't real when you could be reading about quantum theory, after all?) so I was very surprised when she recommended a work of fiction. Once again, I didn't read the dust jacket blurb before I started it (this time out of fear that it might say something like "This fictionalized description of the work of some of the most obscure and difficult-to-understand quantum physics theorists of our time really brings home how dense and difficult this material really is...") and thus was extra bowled over to discover that not only was it proper fiction, it was arguably proper trashy fiction, covering the necessary basics of kidnapping and crime and sexy Italian people and dastardly deeds happening in beautiful exotic settings and a creepy narrator and everything. It was great.
The Mixed-Up Files is like the Jane Austen: why bother trying to come up with something new to say about it, as everyone's read it, everyone loves it, blah blah blah I love it too. It was another self-indulgent pre-teen late-night Amazon purchase that I couldn't resist. It's hard to believe that book is over 35 years old, yikes, older than me. The Paper Architect isn't really a reading book but OH BOY IS IT COOL OR WHAT. It caught my eye in, of all places, the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (which I started receiving mysteriously a year ago; someone out there clearly felt I needed more pop culture in my life), and I had to have it! had to. It's a book of do-it-yourself pop-up cutouts of famous buildings; last Christmas I was obsessed with Paul Jackson's The Pop-Up Book, which goes over basic techniques for different sorts of pop-ups, and had copied from his book a pop-up version of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs which was pretty much the coolest thing I did all year. The Paper Architect doesn't require you to do any figuring out yourself, as they have drawn out the patterns for you - I think the first one I am going to do is the Taj Mahal (see photo. beautiful, no?) and then perhaps I will get back to reading...

O'Reilly - Fadiman - Barnes

Books read:

Judith O'Reilly, Wife in the North

Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small

Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me

Real Simple magazine

Books to be read:

Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy

Several more back issues of the New Yorker

Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (ordered, hasn't arrived yet)

I will not, I will not, I will not start reading books that I know are going to be crappy, and if I do find myself reading such a book, I will PUT IT DOWN and not spend any more time reading it than is strictly necessary to discover it is crappy. If I do read a crappy book all the way to the end, however, I will spend time blogging about it... I don't like to speak ill of a fellow blogger, but grrrrrrr. I should have known better. Unlike my Semi-Famous-Person Spirit Guide, I can't reliably resist things that I know are going to be crap (I have seen dozens of episodes of Sex and the City, for example, despite the fact that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in cringing embarrassment at the puerility and crass consumerism and bad writing of that show). Brief summary of Wife in the North: Judith O'Reilly has fashionable London life, job as journalist; husband convinces her to move to Northumberland with their kids; she moans on and on and on and on and on and on about how miserable she is - in between ironic wry stories about motherhood and city mouse/country mouse misadventures that serve to convince the reader that she can't be THAT miserable (I have a lot, but a lot, of trouble feeling sorry for women who use the word "despair" about not being able to buy brand name high-heeled shoes). Then right near the end when she has whined you out of any vestige of sympathy for her, she drops the bomb that *spoiler alert* she delivered a stillborn baby several years prior. I felt totally betrayed. You can't say you're in despair about the lack of high heeled shoes or brand name olive oil in the shops as if you're in a normal stupid chick lit book and then right at the end try to turn it into a life tragedy. I will admit that there were several points in the book when I laughed out loud (there is a particularly nice line about sitting with her arms pinned to her sides by two small children reading a book together on the sofa and feeling like she's in the back of a car trapped between two Mafia hitmen) and I did tear up a bit during the bit about the dead baby, but my main emotion on finishing the book was annoyance. I also worry about what her kids will think, when they grow up and read about how totally miserable/trapped their mother felt taking care of them. I attended a delivery recently where the grandmother-to-be was filming the birth, and saying into the camera microphone the whole time, "oh, I hope it's a boy! I hope it's a boy!" and I thought, you silly cow, how's the baby going to feel watching this several years down the line if it is a girl? (It was a boy).

The Anne Fadiman book was good; not quite as good as Ex Libris, which is one of my all-time favourites ever, but still good. I can't remember much of it; I read it at desperate high speed, and worried the entire time about getting it dirty, because I had a day to read it before giving it to a friend as a birthday present, but I love how obsessed she is with polar exploration and vocabulary words. She lost me a little bit with the flag essay; patriotism is not a dominant emotion in me even during times of stress, and during and after 9/11 I felt horrified, sad, and helpless, but not patriotic.

Next up: Julian Barnes. Oh, Julian Barnes. What a weird cat that guy must be, despite his British Intellectual Man of Letters appearance (I have actually met the Man Himself once, at a book publicity interview he gave in San Francisco a couple of years ago; I had only read Flaubert's Parrot at that point, I think, and I was quite overcome and flustered with how deliciously tall and lean and long-nosed and floppy-haired and laconically witty and English he was - I live in a perpetual state of mild Englishness-deprivation - and I am mortified to report that in my discombobulation I ended up actually recommending a book to him. In my defense, I recommended a really good book (John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure) but, yeesh, still, I don't think it's the Done Thing to recommend books to visiting Men of Letters. He's almost certainly read more books than I ever have. He's probably written more books than I've ever read). Anyway. Julian Barnes is wicked smaht and can put words together in the yummiest way: my favourite passage (at least that I can find at the moment) is a bit when crass bad-boy Jack is giving advice to nerdy angst-ridden friend Graham:

'Been reading this tome of Koestler's. Well, started it, anyway.' (Jack could speak with authority about books glimpsed over a stranger's shoulder in a crowded tube train.) 'He says, or at any rate he says other boffins say, that the old brainbox isn't at all like we imagine. We all believe it's a big deal, our brain. We all think it's the shit-hot part of us - I mean, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that's why we aren't monkeys or foreigners. Computer technology, latest IBM equipment in there. Not so?'

Graham nodded. That's what he'd always believed, if ever he'd thought about it.

'Not so. No way. The boffin cunts, apparently, or some of them anyway, say bits of it are like that. Trouble is, there are a couple of other layers [...] One lot of these little cell buggers have been developing away like hell all these years, working on fuel-injection and zips and publishers' contracts and stuff. They're all right, they're quite socially acceptable. But the other lot [...] they've got to face up to the fact that they're really pretty dim. [And] that lot, the second eleven, they're the ones that control our emotions, make us kill people, fuck other people's wives, vote Tory, kick the dog. [...] You think of your skull in a different way: one layer of Four-Eyes, two layers of Sawn-Offs. Now why don't they get together, you ask; why don't they sit down at the conference table with some cerebral U Thant and just thrash out their difficulties? [...] I mean, you'd think the Sawn-Offs would see it was in their interests to keep their tiny heads down, not rock the boat [...] Might be true for a few - I mean, don't they think criminals have a defective gene; something gives a little pop in their skull and suddenly they're under the stairs again digging out the striped sweater and the sack marked SWAG.'

Anyway. LOVE it. You can tell he enjoyed writing that bit. The most worrisome bits of Julian Barnes inevitably for me have to do with the sex; there never seems to be any happy warm cozy lovely uncomplicated sex in his books; it's always repressed and unsatisfying and slightly sinister, and I worry about his wife in much the same way I worry about Judith O'Reilly's kids.

I'm still not ready to tackle the New Yorkers. Maybe next post.

An explanation - Tomalin - Woolf/Sackville-West

So my friend Alice and I decided that we needed more friends, and that these new yet-to-be-acquired friends should be funny, smart, articulate, and generally fun to hang out with. To this end, we have elected novelist Nick Hornby as our Semi-Famous-Person Spirit Guide, on the premise that the road to Nick (or Mr. Hornby, whichever he would prefer; we're very polite and respectful, both of us) would be likely to be paved with similarly funny, smart, articulate people. We picked Nick in particular because we both really like his books, and at the time that we were trying to decide on a Spirit-Guide-worthy Semi-Famous-Person I had also just finished re-reading one of his excellent and hilarious collections of book reviews, The Polysyllabic Spree, and had been vaguely thinking of starting a blog anyway to track what I was reading, mostly because I otherwise forget and years later will pick up a book only to realize halfway through that I've already read it. Alice (a terrifyingly brave extrovert) is probably standing on San Francisco street corners as I write this, randomly quizzing passersby if they have any connections that might help us get to our goal; I (introverted, good typist) am going about what is basically an exercise in communication and social networking the most twentyfirst century way possible, sitting at home alone at my computer. We'll see who gets there first. A fabulous prize (free blog subscription? your weight in rubber bands? TBA) to anyone who can get me there faster than Alice. Nick Hornby, here we come.

Recently read:

Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo

On the list to read:

Tim Parks, Under the Stars

J.G. Hayes, Map of the Harbor Islands

Books transported across state lines:

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Currently squashed under my pillow with the spine grievously split open:

Richard Russo, Empire Falls

More New Yorker back issues

My intention (ha! we'll see if that works out....) is to write at least a post a month; I think I can get through a respectable number (i.e. more than one) book in a month and also have time to write about it, in between my very busy schedule of trying to keep my house clean, turning up at work once in a while, etc. I read more books than usual during January, however, and will split my blather into two blogposts, so you can consider this one my post for January, and the next one will be for February. We'll see if I make it to March. My memory may be dire enough that I have to write a post after I finish each book.

Most of the books on the recently read list this month were started over a long weekend at my parents' house, the walls of which have been definitively proved to emit soporific brain-scrambling radiowaves that make it seem like a very good idea to begin several books at once and then have to lug them back in my carryon bag on the airplane, along with the (I am not kidding) four-inch stack of New Yorker back issues that I have yet to get through. (I can't talk about the New Yorkers, yet; I am still in the era of when-will-Sarah-Palin-be-unleashed-for-her-first-press-interview, and although I am... relieved is inadequate, here... that it's a moot point, I still feel honour-bound to read all of them. I will, one day. Perhaps McCain/Palin will run again in 2012 and I can just save them up to read then.) My mother is mainly responsible; she leaves books in stacks next to the spare-room bed, and when I wake up in the middle of the night at my parents' house, I can't go downstairs to do what any self-respecting chronic insomniac would usually do (raid the fridge, watch TV) because they keep changing the burglar alarm code and I'd set all the bells ringing so instead I read.

The first one was Claire Tomalin's biography of Nelly Ternan, Charles Dicken's mistress; that one I actually bought myself specifically because I read about in the Polysyllabic Spree and think Claire Tomalin's great. (She's married to someone famousish as well, I can't remember who, but I remember the little frisson of "whoa, crazy, man" when I found out. I should Google it. My favourite literary-couple-that-I-didn't-know-was-a-couple-until-recently is Anthony Lane, film critic for the New Yorker, and Alison Pearson, author of I Don't Know How She Does It, a witty and unabashedly feminist rant.) Anyway, I had read Claire Tomalin's biographies of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys previously, and even though I can't claim to have trekked around the UK checking all her facts, she definitely gives the impression of not being someone who makes shit up, and yet her books aren't at all horrifically footnotey or anything, they're very readable. My main problem with biography is that I get really attached to the person, and the whole way along you know the inevitable is coming (that they're going to die) but it feels like a story anyway, so you keep hoping for a happy ending, and when you lose them at the end in whatever grotty circumstances they die (because everyone dies in grotty circumstances, that being sort of the nature of death) it's just really depressing. That was particularly true for me of the Jane Austen biography. I kept hoping Jane would achieve fame and fortune in her own lifetime, recognition, true love, whatever, and... no, she didn't. Anyway, the moral of the Nelly Ternan's story was basically that Charles Dickens was a two-faced adulterous hypocrite. I knew there was a reason I didn't like him. (My previous poor opinion of him was based, somewhat unfairly, on A Christmas Carol (puke), A Tale of Two Cities (enforced reading for school - meh, uninspiring, what is WITH his total lack of convincing female characters?!?!), an abridged-for-children version of Great Expectations when I was eight, a copy of Bleak House which someone gave me as a birthday present ages ago and which I never read because it had such a depressing picture of a 19th century workhouse on the cover, and a medley of songs from Oliver! that we sang in choir when I was little. So, sorry, Nick, if an enjoyment of Dickens is on your list of must-haves in a friend, this might not work out. At some point, I promise to try David Copperfield for you, because I know you liked it, but I am going to have to let the Nelly Ternan story recede a bit for me first. Claire Tomalin 1, Dickens 0.)

Speaking of fame, fortune, true love, and death in grotty circumstances, I also plowed through the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West in two longish evenings. With the exception, I think, of T.S. Eliot, I find the whole pretentious/romantic ambience of the Bloomsbury crew (and attendant diaries/letters) so much more addictive than any of their actual published-in-their-lifetime writing. Reading the letters between Virginia and Vita is like reading the notes being passed between class periods in some bizarre Edwardian hyperliterate junior high school; the importance that they give their own emotions seems so over-the-top, somehow, and lacking in humour. Virginia's suicide is a puzzle as well; did she have to do it so publicly because she couldn't find anywhere more private to do it? or was it part of the over-romanticising of her own emotions? did she call what she felt "descending into madness" rather than "I'm really depressed" because it sounded sexier? and yet it feels so ungenerous to suspect the motives of someone who was miserable enough to kill herself. Vita apparently wrote in her diary years later that if she had only seen Virginia in the days before her suicide that she feels sure she could have turned her around and made her feel better. I dunno. And yet, and yet. I do love reading about them. I want to reread Nigel Nicolson's terrific book Portrait of a Marriage; I remember being very, very, impressed with Harold Nicolson. Not at all what I would have expected (a weedy passive guy who put up with his crazy wife); he seemed like a genuinely kind, funny, wise person with a lot to say for himself.

I mentioned the Junot Diaz book (which I read ages ago and was only returning it to its rightful owner) just because it was amazing and original and great. I haven't read enough of the Richard Russo yet, but it should be good - Alice recommended it, after all....