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....