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...