Onward

now finished: March by Geraldine Brooks 

up next: something written by a woman because I am reading only books written by women in 2022 

Well, damn me if there isn't trouble and forgiveness all around, and within, us. 

That is my takeaway from my gal Geraldine's book here. Including that this mirrors my very reading of it. At first (say, 70 to 80 pages in), I was put off, uncomfortable, thoroughly not into her taking this silent side character and imagining him whole, totally disturbed by Mr. March's objectifying of women, of Black women, of people enslaved. I went so far as to not like the book at first. My, how the pages changed me. Because, you will see when you read it, Brooks has done something quite intense in depicting our awfulness without shying away from it, while also solidly reinforcing my very favorite themes: 

1. Is redemption possible? 

2. Life is a mess, an absolute total mess.  

3. You will absolutely fck things up. You will. And you must go on, keep stumbling forward, and try to do better the next day. 

(This is the part where I once again cite my favorite MILD SPOILER line from the fantastic film In Bruges SPOILER: "Well, save the next little boy!" I mean, sometimes it's all we can do.) 

I am very specifically not going to spoiler March at all, and I hope that you will read it. If you have already read it, feel free to talk to me privately, or talk without spoilers in the comments here, because I would love to know your thoughts. 

I am simply going to say that I changed in the course of reading this book from being so powerfully uncomfortable with it existing to realizing the talent and raw power of what Geraldine Brooks has done. And do I now want to read every damn word she has ever written? I do. Do I now regret shelving her and stacking her and mindlessly touching her books over the years without getting around to reading them? I do. 

It was inevitable that I would read this one sooner rather than later because hello, Pulitzer. But now I want them all. And I also love reading about her, and ahout how she wrote this book, and about her Bronson Alcott research, and her Australian, worldy, and UnitedStatesian-ness, and her marriage with Tony Horwitz, and how he brought her in some literal and figurative ways to see so much Civil War history. 

This book is vivid, and hard to bear.   (Do I really need to say it? LIKE LIFE.) 

And the insight she has about war with her foreign correspondent experience is next level, combined as it is with her artistic and emotional genius. 

Little Women has always, always been about so much more than it might initially seem, and I do think many people realize that, which is good. Despite my resistance to taking it, that something-more aspect, and all the layers of Louisa May Alcott and Concord, are part of why this book March works, too. 

Stunned, I immediately wanted upon closing this book to go walk around some Civil War battleground and feel the ghosts. And guess what, turns out that living in Georgia as I randomly do now, I can do just that. But it gets better: where I am in Decatur, in DeKalb County, I just learned, the majority of residents voted in January 1861 to NOT secede, unlike neighboring Atlanta/Fulton County. And during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate troops attacked General MacPherson's Union troops near the Decatur Courthouse (walking distance from my house), driving them back down the North Decatur Road (my intersection). 

I mean... as Amy (Ray, Indigo Girls) sings, "...before I realized / everywhere I stand..." 

Amy Ray being from Decatur and having taken those names Jonas and Ezekiel from tombstones she saw one day in a slave cemetery... 

My godz but we are all so fortunate to get to live and learn and feel pain and grow and read and write about it. 

Interpersonal relationships (as other Indigo Girl Emily Saliers would say) are so hard. 

Geraldine Brooks has scarred me. She's wondrous. 

Tumult Unceasing!

now finished: The Iliad by Homer 

 I have finally read The Iliad.

Wait, no. I have finally! read The Iliad! 

The epic thing, pages and pages and pages of hexameter, Books 1-24. Of which, I might add, I deem at least two unnecessary. We could easily do without the early on one that reads like the Old Testament, droning on and on about so-and-so and so-and-so and the son of so-and-so, just name after name after name. No one cares*, Homer. (Same to you, OT prophet scribes.)  And, that Book 23, fever dream, opponent-dragging, don't-call-it-a-climax, don't-call-it-a-denouement chariot race is just....what? Who took over the directing of this episode? Tarantino? That Enter the Void guy**? 

Anyway. 

I liked reading The Iliad! Did I mention it's epic? So violent by the way, much like a Game of Thrones episode. The various bone-splitting, tendon-slicing, helmet-crushing, brain-spurting injuries and kills are gruesome and vividly rendered. 

Here's what I didn't know: that there was so much Olympian gods chicanery involved in this. I really had spent four decades (or, three, I suppose) thinking it was more realistic than magical realism. Like, wheeeeeeee! gods just routinely step into our lives and do stuff. The whole (epic!) thing is honestly so similar to the impending biblical Christianity  sensibility of war-fate-storytelling that I don't understand how anybody believes in any one monotheism god as opposed to all-those-pagan-gods. It's all part and parcel.  Humans are so weird. 

On that note, one time Zeus points out how terrible humans are. Zeus. Zeus! The jerkiest of jerks! He has this to say: 

"For there is nothing more wretched than mankind / of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth. "              -- Book 17 

You are not kidding, son of Cronus. 

Besides Achilles hanging around his ships lamenting how things are, and everybody but everybody considering women "prizes" to be won, taken, and stolen, the other main thing that happens throughout The Iliad are these wandering metaphors. "Then the Trojan warriors came," he'll say, "like a pack of wolves, who trot up the mountain, you know the kind I mean, with snouts toward the moon, like a lost wandering beast who knows its meal waits just around the bend, the kind of meal he can sink his teeth into, a wolf's tooth, the kind you wear around your neck; up the mountain they went  like these wolves, as a clan of mystic seekers whose blood scent leads them on, like a man who has lost his only friend..."***   It goes on like that for a while, and then eventually the sentence ends and we can find out what the Trojans did. 

Why did I read The Iliad now?  (Besides the obvious why not, of course.) Well, lately I have been realizing that everyone seems to remember a whole lot more of the Greek mythology we read in junior high than I do. See, e.g., any given episode of Jeopardy! I was like WHY DO YOU ALL KNOW ALL THIS STUFF. Granted that it is definitely not because y'all have sat down and read The Iliad, I know that, but I am the Literary One, so I have to do the reading. I decided to invent an Ancient Greek Things class for myself and I have added some mythology and gods and classic epics books to my nearest stacks and I am filling in some knowledge gaps. 

Also it's college football season, which is a great time to get hyped when "A dark cloud of Trojans now closes round..."  (Book 16)

The Iliad! 

p.s. Agamemnon reminds me a bit of tr$mptydumpty. 

*yes I am aware it is of historical interest and some people care

**his name is Gaspar Noé. ugh. 

***I made that up, but barely

Christ Nailed

now finished: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
now reading: My Life by Bill Clinton
up next: The Wife by Alafair Burke

I've just finished reading Wise Blood, and I am here to say -- what a weird little book. Of course, for Flannery O'Connor that's a pretty tame comment. We emerge from so much of her writing with comments more along the lines of "Damn, that was dark!" or maybe "That was so fucked up!" so, you know, "weird" is no big, really. Then again, please don't get me wrong - there is twisted shit a-plenty in this novel, and I don't believe I'm spoilering you as a Flannery O'Connor reader by saying please don't expect a happy ending. But somehow this one, despite its showcase of the usual gothic depravity that is humanity, didn't leave me reeling as some of her others have.

And that, I think, is because I was so amused and delighted by her central character's invented not-religion, the Church Without Christ. Early-ish in the novel, Haze, who in Wise Blood is what passes for our protagonist, declares, "I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything" (p. 72 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631) and I perked right up. It reminds me of one of my favorite Pretty Woman lines I'm forever quoting at people: "I can do anything I want; I'm not lost."

A bit later, this man -- who, like everyone else in the novel, is pretty much a lost wreck -- begins "preaching" his Church Without Christ. Basically in response to someone on the street one day who mentions the Church of Christ, Haze invents his Church Without Christ and says, "I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redepmption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar." (p. 101 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Good stuff, right? I mean - this book is hilarious. Even though it's also Flannery-dark-and-twisted. Now, O'Connor herself was Catholic, right? To the end? I've finished this book but am still unsure of exactly what she is trying to say about religion herein. Or about people. Or wisdom or blood. The plot, such as it is, mostly involves a few characters running into and from one another in a weird little small town as they try to figure out something, anything about their weird little days, and there's all kinds of grotesque imagery, animals-in-cages symbolism, notions of freedom, automobiles, whorehouses...a real nice range of human fuckery. But it's peppered throughout with Haze's "sermons" and it's therefore kind of fun.

There is also a great (terrible) argument with an even-more-pathetic-and-stupid-than-Haze (if that's possible) (and it is) character, named Onnie Jay, who tells Haze, "It don't make any difference how many Christs you add to the name if you don't add none to the meaning, friend." See what she does there? This clown actually thinks Haze is trying to preach Christ because, I'm telling you, he's reeeeallllly dumb, but O'Connor manages that jab at religious hypocrisy nicely. Onnie Jay goes on to say, "You ought to listen to me because I'm not just an amateur. I'm an artist-type. If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet. You got good idears but what you need is an artist-type to work with you." (p. 157 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Ha ha ha ha ha. That last sentence there in those exact words might be the very advice I'd give to, well, the whole world, if I were a consultant to the world. (And really, am I not, though, a consultant to the world? Just a decidedly unpaid one.)

Now in this book Flannery has touched me with not just the darkness, the worst zoo ever, an exploited gorilla, the religion, and this little artist-type bit, but she outdoes herself with one more passage that became my favorite with how nicely it sums up my religious worldview, like, really and truly.

I'll get to that in a second, but let me remind you that this is not to say I 100% agree with Haze. His nihilist Church Without Christ (it still makes me smile every time I type it) is actually antithetical to me in some ways, such as when he delivers this sermon: "I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth...No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!"  I dig his blasting of religion and all there is to unpack in O'Connor's literature, but I definitely DON'T believe in "no truth." There absolutely are absolute truths. I just think they're not being taught by religions, on the whole.

However, he moves from this directly into some of what I DO think, starting with his very next sentence:

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. 

"Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backward into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was a Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

"Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?" he cried. "Show me where because I don't see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?"   (pp. 165-166 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

That, my friends, is some excellent preaching. In the past, when I have tried my ablest to get people to explain to me how Christianity works, perhaps I should have just hurled that question at them, demanding to be shown where in your time and body Jesus has redeemed you. Show me, people. Show me damn where.

And just for some icing on this cake of Wise Blood, there's a (fucked up, obviously) character who swears, and boy does he swear excellently. He has introduced me to two new excellent swears, in fact: "Jesus on the cross!" and "Christ nailed."  I shall endeavor to incorporate them into my vocabulary at the earliest opportunity.

Why We Need a Manual for Writing (Wo)men

just finishedabandoned: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
now reading: Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
up next: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin Bergen

I'd heard a lot about A Manual for Cleaning Women around the time it was published to great acclaim and mass pronouncements of self-on-the-back-patting "I've discovered an overlooked writer!" And it's been on my radar since then, making me think I should maybe check it out.

Ugh.

For me, reading this collection of "short stories" (more on that in a sec) is excruciating, and therefore I am abandoning ship. I made it through 163 out of 399 pages, and I dutifully read some of the foreword, biographical info, etc., so I thoroughly get the "importance" of this. What I don't get is why y'all enjoy it so much. To each her own! Speaking of "her," the reason I was reading this is that it was this month's selection for my Women's Classics Book Group. I therefore had all kinds of motivation to actually finish it, such as the book group ladies, a deadline, adding it to the list of our completed selections (you know I love me a checklist!), the discussion at the meeting, etc. But nope.

However, the book group meeting did help me clarify why I hate it, namely that the selected stories are neither a satisfying whole nor a satisfying sum of parts. You see, Lucia Berlin wrote lots of fragments and story bits over several decades, the vast majority of which drew on her real life experiences (so far, so any writer). Sometimes she was published, and sometimes even acclaimed in small literary circles, and a few academic ones, but obviously did not hit the world fame jackpot or anything. After her death, some peeps saw fit to collect these stories -- so very many -- into A Manual for Cleaning Women, which naturally includes the story titled "A Manual for Cleaning Women" and have I mentioned that it's SO DAMN ANNOYING when short story collections have a title lifted from one of the stories - the pretentiousness starts there and I can't even, because selecting the title of one story to represent a collection either means you see this title as representative of the writer's life and work overall or you were too lazy to think of a title, and it's usually the former, and it's stupid because when writing ONE story, the writer is not writing all of their life's work. And if they were, if that there were anything that centrally important, then it should maybe have been shaped and crafted into a full-length book -- ever try that, Lucia Berlin and other "wondrous" short story writers? No, no you did not. Because writing a book is hard, and writing short stories and snippets and fragments and paragraphs about things that happened to you is not as hard. Crafting a truly great short story IS hard, though, and that's why so many short stories suck.

And all of that is why so many collections of short stories are published. I might even publish one myself someday, because we writers definitely churn them out. I will hope that each story is a good story and do my damnedest to make sure they're all good individually if they're published together in a collection. Lucia Berlin couldn't do that, because she was dead. Would she have wanted all of these stories published? Would she have wanted them ordered and collected like this?

Because here's the thing: as much as this book is excruciating to read in long stretches of snippet-after-snippet-after-snippet, it's also not as if you could read one "story" a day and then move on because you'd be super left hanging, as most of them don't really have things you need to feel complete, such as a beginning, middle, end, plot, or point. They don't really stand individually. But they also don't really go together quite right. They are wisps and fragments of her life. Which brings us to the next part of the problem: she should have shaped these ideas and words and life bits into a memoir. (I can't believe I'm actually saying that anyone "should" have written a memoir. Seriously - if I say that, it's worth at least a glance, based on my usual call for widespread memoir eradication). But she didn't. Yes, I get that she was busy, and an alcoholic. But. She didn't do the work that needed to be done, so I don't need to sit here reading her and praising her to high heaven for her fragments and bits. And I definitely don't need to praise stories that aren't good stories, just because they're collected together and show this woman's life rendered as sort-of fiction.

The strongest moments are the occasional story with either a point ("Carpe Diem") or a beginning, middle, and end ("Friends") or, very occasionally, both, as in "Her First Detox," which also contains some of her strongest writing because she is at her best when describing alcoholism and withdrawal symptoms. I mean, that is her strength, and she actually struggled as an alcoholic and overcame her problem. That is amazing. And she writes so well about it. So what's with the pretending to write fiction and refusing to admit it's true?

Believe me, I've thought about this, as most writers have: am I writing fiction or memoir? Yes, it's OK to use real-life true shit in your fiction. No, it's not OK to make up shit in your memoir. Blending means fiction. So that's where we're at with Lucia Berlin, her fictional blend. BUT! But! But! the entire book group, as my fellow group members heaped praise on the book (yes, I was the lone voice of dissent), they kept coming back to "Her life is so fascinating" and "She overcame so much" in their defense of her. Which means that they, too, see the strength here in her writing about her life. So then, just do it, lady. Or, if you don't, that's fine, but IF you are going to call something a story (or the people who posthumously collect it are going to call it a story), the writer has to have something more than just a way with words and an arrangement of fragments to have crafted a literary work.

But this is not a beautiful literary work. This is Ms. Thang breaking the fourth wall in "Point of View" to tell us, meta-ly, that if great short stories such as Chekhov's "Grief" and, apparently, her stories, were written in first person we'd feel "embarrassed, uncomfortable, even bored" but because the narrator tells us authoritatively and third-personly that so-and-so with blue eyes went to the store or whatever, we "feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens."  A.) She is comparing herself to Chekhov, and I'm thinking, hmmmm, maybe not. B.)Spare me the meta-analysis, but thanks for admitting, Lucia, that your content might be a bit lacking, but hey, nothing a third person point of view can't fix. Sheesh.

She admits in the next line, though, "Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet." I find that an apt description of much of her book.

As for what IS written, this is a heap of things like "Toda Luna, Todo Año, in which our protagonist abandons her touristy resort and hangs out with divers (real ones, fishing under deep water for seafood) and falls in lust with one who inexplicably teaches her to scuba dive in five minutes and then on one of their underwater adventures, "They embraced, their regulators clanking. She realized then that his penis was inside her." What? Are we still seriously heaping praise on this, Publisher's Weekly and The New York Review of Books and Elle and Entertainment Weekly and The Boston Globe and on and on and on; are we really? She just suddenly realized that it was inside her, did she? Wow. Did she also realize she was secretly a 12-year-old writing in a note to her best giggly friend about what she thought a sexy story might sound like? Because then the sperm "drift[s] up between them like pale octopus ink" and you have got to be kidding me. Don't forget the big payoff ending to this story, when she literally pays off the man - this diver/lover of hers - who comes to her room as she packs the night before she leaves, where he asks for 20,000 pesos to pay off his boat. She writes him a check. Oh, after their supposed "romance," how disillusioning. Kind of like reading this crappy book.

There's a foreword by Lydia Davis that slathers all kinds of fawning lackey praise on the stories, citing examples of "incredible" things Berlin does that would have me giving Davis a C-minus on her paper if she'd handed it in in my English class. There's also a note by editor Stephen Emerson, in which he kowtows to Lucia Berlin and then says he "can't imagine anyone who wouldn't want to read her." Well, you don't have to imagine, buddy, because here I am, in the flesh.

My Own Canoe: A Tale of Linda and Louisa

There was that one day early on I related to Bronson Alcott. ("Although Bronson Alcott was unfortunate in never being understood by the many, he was singularly blessed by being understood by the distinguished few.")  But then, I kept reading Invincible Louisa and shit got real and I came to see how scarily similar I am to Louisa herself. And not just 'cause we both got names that start with an L and end in an A, yo.

Let's check it out.
(Quoting from Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs, Alcott Centennial Edition, ISBN: 0-316-56590-3)

"At the end of the day, both little girls would write in their journals, Anna [sister] filling hers with quiet, pleasant reflections and a record of the work she had done, Louisa covering her blotted pages with accounts of her turbulent thoughts, of her glorious runs on the hill, with the wind all about her, and, alas, of her quarrels..."    p. 41

I, too, have an older sister. We did keep journals when we were young, but I'd say that passage above is basically an apt description of Lesley's and my Facebook pages.

Oooohhh, here's a part about life's work....very much related to current work...which is NOT my life work...? (Don't worry, I've already had this conversation with my boss...)

"What she had learned...made her a good teacher, but it could not make her love the task of instruction. Besides knowledge, she brought to the task energy and an enthusiasm for succeeding, along with that boundless friendliness which is the heart of a real teacher's success.  [That's me, ever "establishing rapport"...]  The little girls got much from her; she in turn got much from them....Louisa gave generously and taught well, but she could not learn to like her work. She was too restless and impetuous..."  p. 63

Right, then. Moving on, to her sister's marriage:

"...after going to see Anna in her new house and observing her sister's happiness in her new life:
'Very sweet and pretty; but I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.'" -p. 94

Seriously. I would rather paddle my own canoe. Who can put it any better than that?

From personal back to professional, she struggled at first, as we all do, don't we? to write and succeed at making a living writing, and specifically to write a novel.

"She remarked finally that she was tired of long stories, that she would rather 'fall back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best and I can't starve on praise.' It was a belief unworthy of her, unworthy of her real powers, of her father's principles, of Emerson's teaching..."   p. 134

Ahh, that's my problem - falling short by slacking off and being unworthy of Emerson's teaching! But there's still hope because:

"Things, just the same, were bound to be better for one of Louisa's spirit. She was a strange mixture of impetuousness and toiling perseverance, of wild, impossible fancies and practical sense."

I'm pretty sure no one has ever summed up Lindouisa so well.

Eventually, she gets to travel the world (Louisa without borders?) and "stopped at Frankfurt to see the house of Goethe, for Louisa would never be anything but an ardent hero-worshipper, and here was the shrine of one of her literary idols."  p. 137   The problem with this trip, though, is that she was able to go abroad by working, as the companion/helper/nurse-ish personal assistant to a woman with issues. "It was very hard for her to be hampered by the inabilities of another." p. 138, which is basically my motto. But she does meet a good guy whom she befriends (and who inspires Laurie, for ye Little Women aficionados) but who is not her suitor -- he's twelve years younger than her, for one thing. She does have suitors, though, in her life, but...

"She was so busy...that she rarely gave thought to matrimony...Life was so full for her without marriage, so beset with activities and responsibilities, that certainly matrimony was something which she never consciously missed. She had a great desire for independence, which it would have been hard for her to give up for any person's sake."  p. 140

I have had that exact conversation in those exact words so very many times.

"On the other hand, she had great capacity for affection and sentiment, for romance and for happiness."  p. 140

See, e.g., crying at Coca-Cola ads and the like.

Writing is a struggle. At one point, "she planned various novels later -- indeed, her mind was always a seething ferment of plans..."  p. 182  Check and check! And there's the obligatory moment in every writer's life (mine has lasted for a decade) in which she lives in a pleasant house with the family but, natch, "There is no mention of a study or of any privacy for herself, where she could write in peace." - p. 183  The eternal goddamn fucking struggle.

Yet, as we all know, she meets with success! Will this be my future, too?

"With Little Women, Louisa achieved what she really wanted, a piece of work which she actually knew to be her best. With it she achieved also the appreciation of the world and such prosperity as gave her full power, at last, to do just what she wished. It is delightful to read of how her name came to be on every tongue; how she grew to be not merely famous, which mattered little to her, but universally beloved, which mattered much. After all the years of doubting her own power, of looking for her true field, of thinking of herself as a struggling failure, she was obliged at last to admit, even in the depths of her own soul, that she was a success."  - p 155

May it become so.

Walking a mile/life in Aurora Greenway's (many) shoes

I finally read Terms of Endearment,  which means that I finally have come to know the character of Aurora Greenway.  I have never related so much to anyone who is so different from me.

It was my first Larry McMurtry in quite some time. It has been more than a decade since I read and adored Lonesome Dove, which I am still forever telling people to read, and another Gus and Call book, Dead Man's Walk (which wasn''t as good as Lonesome Dove- few things are - not that I had much hope as I am always super wary of prequels, even more than of sequels.) During that time I have always meant to get around to reading more McMurtry, but you know how I am with my books and projects and piles and lists of things to read...

Terms of Endearment, however, was always steadily up there on the urgency scale, if nothing else because of another looooooongtime but almost finished project of mine, that of watching all the Oscar winning Best Pictures. The movie Terms of Endearment is one of the few Best Picture winners I haven't seen, largely because I wanted to read the book first. Well, I've at long last attended to the reading portion of that goal.

Frankly, I don't know that the book was all that great. Kind of like Ordinary People, which I also finally read recently, for reasons of see above. I mean -- these books are okay, but to spawn super famous Best Picture winners? Hmmmph. It remains to be seen whether Out of Africa, my last lingering '80s-Best-Picture-winner-source-material-so-I-can-finally-watch-the-movie, underwhelms similarly.

But Aurora. Holy cow. We are the same. I wasn't even born when Larry McMurtry wrote this, but it's as if he channeled my spirit, the entity that would soon be me. It's weird, because, as I said, she's not actually like me. She is into, just to name a few things, cooking, shoes, and having lots of suitors hang around her. I'm not like that. AND YET, we are so very, very similar in our sort of essential (as in essence) approach to being in this world. I will here and now share a few quotes to show you what I mean. Let's start with Aurora speaking to her daughter Emma, early on, page 94:

"When I'm mellow and the air has a nice weight I do so love to speak elliptically, you know...As for your question, which happily you phrased grammatically, if rather dully, I can tell you quite distinctly that I don't care if I never hear the phrase 'really felt' again....No, I've not finished...I may have new heights to rise to. For all I know, my dear, good grammar provides a more lasting basis for sound character than quote real feeling unquote."

There's more. On page 225, for example there's another exchange with her daughter:

"Everybody's afraid of you. Why don't you try being gentle for a change?"
"I do try--it's just that I seem to be prone to exasperation," Aurora said .

How about her early days with Vernon?

"Yes, you're much too polite, I know that," she said. "It's a pity I'm not..."

"I don't want you to be scared!" she yelled. "I"m just a human being! I just wanted you to sit and drink some tea...with me...and be my companion for a few minutes.  ... I'm not scary! Don't tell me I'm scary! There's nothing frightening about me. You're all just cowards!"

I mean, clearly we could stop there. But what the heck, let's continue.

"...she was as she had been that afternoon--spiritless, convinced of nothing except that there was not much point in trying to make things right. Things would never be right."

"For all I know the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening."

As she sat at the window, looking out, her sense of the wrongness of it was deep as bone. It was not just wrong to go on so, it was killing. Her energies, it seemed to her, had always flowed from a capacity for expectation, a kind of hopefulness that had persisted year after year in defiance of all difficulties. It was hopefulness, the expectation that something nice was bound to happen to her, that got her going in the morning and brought her contentedly to bed at night." 

"Oh well, you know me," Aurora said. "I'm not one to hold grudges. I acquire so many of them that some have to be discarded."

How will we top that one?  Let's try.

"Why, after all these years, do people still think I mean anything?" she asked.

Once, Emma tells her: "I hope I never become arrogant, like you...You dismiss whole classes of people with a wave of your hand."

Later on, the General has some words: "You just talk to hear yourself talk." In her reply: "I've gone to quite unusual lengths to be accommodating to you, and we still seem to fight all the time. What's life going to be like if I suddenly decide to be troublesome?" "You can't be any goddamn worse than you are," the General said. "Ha ha, little you know," she said. "I've made almost no demands on you. Suppose I decided to make a few."  

Moving on. "Of course, being away from home has always made me feel quite gay," she added. "I believe I'm a born gadabout. One of my problems is that I frequently need a change."

Don't overlook this conversation with Rosie.

"Don't like to impose," Rosie said.
"No, I'm the only one who seems to. I'm only sorry there aren't more people willing to be imposed upon."

Those are just the choice lines whose pages I noted along the way. Reading these bits of Aurora was almost unnerving, like, is someone inside my mind? And if so, why is that person Larry McMurtry? Apparently there was a lot of praise heaped on him for writing women so well in this and a few other books. Well, I don't know about all that -- and much of what happens in Terms of Endearment is bizarre, implausible, or straight up farcical. But McMurtry is certainly onto something. Or someone. (Me.)

Once more, with feeling:  "There's nothing frightening about me. You're all just cowards!"

Yeah.

The Reivers

Well, if one is going to return to one's literary supplement blog after far too long away, The Reivers is certainly a good choice with which to do it.

Y'all, Faulkner is one of those writers that we've all heard of and many have even dabbled in (by literature teacher force) or come to have ideas about. But how many among ye have actually read a bunch of his stuff? Lots of people get turned off early, like in high school. I did, but not by slogging through As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury -- no, I was horrified by the experience I had reading a mere (as if anything is "mere" with Faulkner) short story, "Barn Burning." I hated it. I hated it in an intense, passionate, irrational way. I can't really remember now, decades later, why I hated it so, so, so very much, but I loathed it. I'm pretty sure I hated the characters and I know I hated the outcome. So I did what any self-respecting, literature-loving 16-year-old would do: I took a stapler, sat down with my AP English textbook, and stapled shut the pages containing that story, starting with the page before and ending with the page after, a series of staples advancing like a row of ants around the edges of the pages, so as to prevent myself from ever  accidentally letting the book fall open to that horrid story and making me see it ever again.

I then spent my next several years -- in which I was, mind you, an English major with an emphasis in American literature-- complaining about Faulkner and telling anyone who would listen how much I hated his writing (and occasionally throwing in the "Barn Burning" stapling story for good measure). Of course, I had also read "A Rose For Emily" in high school and didn't hate it nearly as much, but I conveniently overlooked that.

Fast forward a decade or so from high school, and by my mid-to-late 20s I had become obsessed with the Pulitzer prizes and decided to embark on my project of reading all the Pulitzer-winning fiction. This came with a realization that I would be reading not one but two novels by Faulkner, although I didn't do those right away, of course. (In fact, I'm still in the midst of that project, because I mix projects together and read other stuff in between, instead of just blazing through one project at a time, which is very not-Charles-Emerson-Winchester-the-III-like of me.)  Not to mention Faulkner's appearances on other lists of greats with which I concern myself, such as the Modern Library's Top 100 and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. But before I got to any of that, during the summer of 2014, a summer in which Brian and I had many a day at his family's Lake Michigan vacation home (that I am Southwesternly unable to refer to as a "c*ttage" as they all do), I spent some time reading The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Yes, all of them. One of them was by Faulkner.  "That Evening Sun Go Down" (published in slightly different form sometimes as "That Evening Sun") was a good story. A really good, well-written story. And there I was, a thirtysomething, forced to sit on a porch one summer, in the midst of being back from Asia and kind of sort of settling down in the U.S. again, in a day-of-Americana-reckoning, realizing that my high school self really might have not had that good of a reason to hate "Barn Burning," ya know? Not that I can particularly remember that much about it...

Well, now here we are, with me having finally rectified this major gap in my literary life, having finally got around to reading a full Faulkner novel, and it is The Reivers. Yes, this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by our boy William Faulkner. His other Pulitzer winner? A Fable. What't that you say? You've never heard of these novels of his? You figured he must have won the Pulitzer for As I Lay Dying, or The Sound and the Fury? Or at least Absalom, Absalom!  Fun fact: No novels with exclamation points in the title have won the Pulitzer, although Swamplandia!  was a finalist for the year 2012, when no award was given. Well, Faulkner may have won the Nobel Prize after writing those famous novels (those of you who've been with me a while will undoubtedly recall that you don't win the Nobel for a book; you win it for a body of work), but his Pulitzers came later, for A Fable and then for his last book, The Reivers.

And yes, I had to look up what on Earth a "reiver" is. Turns out it's an old word for "robber" used in the Scottish borderlands -- at least that's what I read -- and brought to the U.S. by people from there. An interesting choice of Faulkner's definitely, for the title.

I hate describing/spoilering plots, but the "robbery" in this book is more of a free-wheeling escapist weekend journey that ends up being a coming of age experience. It's definitely not about, like, career burglars or street thugs, but rather people who get swept up in an opportunity and plunge themselves into a feverish few days of learning and growing, from mistakes and other things that come along.

What this book does incredibly well is take you into long, winding sentences without letting you get so lost that you can't find your way out of the paragraph; it also gives the reader a vivid sense of place and the characters inhabiting the places rendered.

What it did for me, more importantly, is get me fired up to read more Faulkner novels. He has a beautiful command of sentence structure (long and involved though that structure may be), life journeys, introspection disguised as regular-ol'-folks-livin'-life, and the striking interpersonal turmoil of life. He makes you want to crawl inside the book and hang out with these people, even though no part of you would rationally want to, say, have Everbe's job, or Boon's...or necessarily live in rural early twentieth century Mississippi...

What I also loved about The Reivers: his social commentary, particularly about the way cars and the automobile society we've embraced have erased some very real things. Nature, for one thing, in the form of wild, untouched spaces; those are basically gone. Also, some part of our human selves has been forever altered. The car/train/horse/walking layers of symbolism that pile upon themselves in this story could take years of literary analysis to fully sort out.

One thing I must point out, though: I've seen multiple reviews/commentaries where people describe the book as "funny" or "one of his funniest novels" or "a comic masterpiece," Um, hello? Do these people also work for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association slating Golden Globe nominees into categories? To me, The Reivers was anything but a comedy. It was a coming-of-age tale and a slice of life. Sure, there was wit -- there were clever and sly bits slipped in all sorts of places in this book. It was real and endearing. A "comic masterpiece" though? Did we get what Faulkner was showing here at all?

If you've read The Reivers, what do you think -- comic masterpiece or no?

Two thousand sixteen or, The Triumphant Return of My Literary Supplement Blogging

Yes, it has been a while. I had blogging issues in 2015 (laptop issues, really), but it's a new year, fresh start, etc. I won't bother doing too much detail in a '15 recap; let's just quickly mention that the year basically included continuing to trudge through my many simultaneous reading projects.

The best books I read in 2015 were Room by Emma Donoghue, Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, A Room With a View by my boy E.M. Forster, and Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z by David Sacks. Some other interesting finds, well worth checking out, were Les chercheurs d'os by Tahar Djaout, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (which essentially restored my faith in contemporary literature and made me believe there are actually good writers writing out there), Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (thanks, book group!), and Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. Overrated, or maybe just overfussed about: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt (apparently some people think she's dismissing or defending the perpetrators of the Holocaust? Hello? Did they actually read the book?), One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I really need to read in Spanish, which is why I was reading/suffering through it in English, to prepare for this necessary Spanish reading that I'm going to get aroudn to any minute now), and Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, which I was really prepared to enjoy more than I did, it being her Pulitzer-winner and all, and me having really loved the other book of hers I'd read. I didn't really hate hate hate any book I read in 2015, unless you count Wild, which I mostly came to hate after I read it, when I actually thought about it. The process of reading the book was enjoyable enough, but the author, Cheryl Strayed, is more than a little full of shite and not that great of a writer, and one starts to realize this when one applies a little thing called critical thinking to Wild, but if that sounds too hard, and you prefer to be entertained laugh-out-loud style, go read the entirety of this anti-Wild blog.

So anyway. Now we're in 2016. Wheeeeee!  Here we go.

Yes, my projects continue, but I can definitely see the light at the end of their tunnels! In my Prez Bios project (wherein, you'll recall, I set out to read a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong, a goal clearly conceived during the Dubya administration), I've recently finished --and reconsidered--Nixon and am now at Ford. Totally in the home stretch of this project: I've reached my lifetime! In my A-to-Z championship, I have one more finalist to read and then will select my final winner (which I wasn't even planning on doing when I first read the 26 novels, one author's last name for each letter of the alphabet, but that project evolved after I finished what became the first round). When that wraps up, I'm going to embark on a reverse-gender A to Z, because I realized that I read far more men than women in my A to Z selections, so I've decided to remedy that.  As for prize-winning Pulitzer and Newbery novels, I've read a few each year and continue to plug away.

Speaking of that, I've just finished William Faulkner's The Reivers.  The Faulkernization of my adult life continues, as well it should. More on that in my next post.

Not THAT A to Z ... A Blog Book Survey

Stolen from another blog, I give you my answers to the A to Z Book Survey! I'm pretty sure all the Kidz 2-day doing the survey include images for each letter...you'll be lucky to get a handful of pictures from me! I always say, a thousand words are worth a picture...

A - Author You've Read the Most

Oh gosh, I'm not sure! Look at me already failing on the first question. But I mean, should this be the most individual books? Because that would be Dr. Seuss, I think. Number of pages? That might be Tolstoy, after only a couple of books. If we're not counting Seuss and Tolstoy, then it's gonna be either Sandra Scoppettone, Nelson DeMille, or Virginia Woolf - I've read about a dozen books from each of those three. If I weren't lazy about images (see above), I'd post a lesbian/mystery Venn Diagram to illustrate this answer.

B - Best Sequel
Ooooh, good question. Oh, man, The Two Towers doesn't really count as a sequel, right, book-wise, because The Lord of the Rings is actually all one book, even though it's not. Hmmm. Well, if not that, then let's go with Men Against the Sea, the second book in the (Mutiny on the) Bounty trilogy. I adored Men Against the Sea.  I felt so impressed by and fond of the men and their boat that saved them. What a great yarn. Worth a look!

C - Currently Reading
I'm in the middle of the very good Truman by David McCullough, the current selection in my prez bios reading project, but also fiction-wise quickly blazing through Inherent Vice on the side (my second Thomas Pynchon) so then I can go see the movie.

D - Drink of Choice While Reading
So, coffee. Obviously.

E - E-reader or Physical Books?
I do not enjoy e-reading books. I have done a few, and found it convenient to be able to purchase and borrow books that way, especially when living abroad, but I do not really enjoy it. Here's to page-turning!

F - Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Dated in High School
Um. I had no idea who I was or who the people I wanted to date were in high school. With that caveat, and knowing that it would probably not have been a good idea, I probably would have dated someone truly messed up like Laurent in Therese Raquin, or at least someone very confused, like Rob in High Fidelity -- confused but who likes music. Definitely, there would have been music involved.

G - Glad You Gave This Book a Chance
Let's go with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Before it became cool for adults everywhere to shamelessly read Young Adult because staring at screens has altered their brains and attention spans so much that they can't read lengthy amounts of words on pages anymore, I worked at Borders and there was an intriguing little green paperback bestseller that I became inspired to pick up and Oh.My.Goodness do I just love the hell out of that book. Read the sequels, saw the movie, and did a bit of spreading the gospel, but just in general, if you think The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is for some reason not worth your time, think again!

H - Hidden Gem Book 
This has got to be either Night and Day by Virginia Woolf , which seems to get exactly no attention, even from academic/feminist/Anglophile/literary devotees but which I maintain is one of Woolf's best, or Tepper Isn't Going Out  by Calvin Trillin, which gets no attention from anyone except me and Brian.

I - Important Moment in Your Reading Life
The obvious answer would probably be something about War and Peace, no?  But I think it might actually be when the Modern Library published their list of the Top 100 books (two lists, actually, one for novels and one for non-fiction) and I printed them out and highlighted and set out on a quest, and have since continued finding quests and projects and lists of books to read and I absolutely love doing this!! (Making lists of books to read next is a hobby of mine.)

J - Just Finished
Um, speaking of lists, Smoky the Cowhorse. Among other checklists I'm working my way through: the Newbery Medal Winners. Good ol' Smoky hails from the early days of that award, the 1920s.

K - Kinds of Books You Won't Read
Twilight.

 L - Longest Book You've Ever ReadOh my goodness, so many candidates. Now I have to go check which is longest out of  Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Infinite Jest, or Dream of Red Mansions/Chamber aka The Story of the Stone....ahhh, forget it, you can go look up how many pages yourself. I like long books. Proust, I'm coming for you.

M - Major Book Hangover Because Of...P
robably Into Thin Air. I couldn't shake that for months. And all I did was talk about it, with other people under the influence from it.

N - Number of Bookcases You Own 
There are three here in this living room, with Brian's and my books. Before my Great Book Sell-Off of 2006, I had about five tall ones and then some filled in Boston...there are books in houses in Phoenix...I don't really know/care how to answer this question other than literally. I guess I co-own three.

O - One Book You Have Read Multiple Times Again, besides Dr. Seuss? That would be Candide. Voltaire forever!


P - Preferred Place to Read 
Anywhere quiet.
A steady hum of sounds is OK. Jabbering, cell phone conversations, sitcoms, etc.? Not.

Q - Quote That Inspires You or Gives You All of the Feels From a Book You Have ReadObviously, Candide: "That is very well said, but we must cultivate our garden."

R - Reading RegretOther than maybe Cynthia Ozick, nothing I've actually read, but more all the time I've wasted not reading in this life.

S - Series You Started But Need to FinishSome people would say Harry Potter (I've read the first half of the first book...twice...)  Definitely not Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone ABCs, as I am So done with  all that. Let's see, what could it be? I haven't started Game of Thrones, really, though I did read the first few pages of the first, and that's my next-up series, I believe...I can't really think of any. Wait, Alafair Burke's Samantha Kincaid and Ellie Hatcher books are series, right? But she's still writing, and this is supposed to be a complete series. Ugh. Can I use Proust here, too?  Well, wait, actually, I think Alafair Burke is done writing Samantha Kincaid, she said, now that she's in New York. And I've read two of the Portland-set Kincaid series and need to read the third. So, that.

T - Three of Your All-Time Favorite Books(You see where I've already mentioned Candide and War and Peace multiple times, right?)
How about:
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

U - Unapologetic Fangirl For...
Um.
Fangirl? Me? Ummm...
Anna Quindlen?

V - Very Excited for This Release More Than Any Other
 Would it just be wrong to say my own book?
I'm so not the release-anticipating type with books. I've fallen behind on all my still-writing living authors (Atwood, Berg, DeMille, et. al.) I've got one word for you, kid: classics.

W - Worst Book Habit
Sitting here with a laptop on my lap instead of picking up a book?
Judging people who read trash?  (I mean real trash, like Twilight; I'm not disparaging the genres here.)
Disparaging genre fiction?
Forgetting what I've read?

You tell me; which is the worst?

X - X Marks the Spot: Pick the 27th Book on Your Bookshelf (from the upper left)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Y - Your Latest Book Purchase
Pretty sure it was at Schuler over Christmas when I picked up Night Train by Martin Amis and Game of Thrones by the inimitable conscientious objector George R.R. Martin. Have I bought anything since then? I don't think so. I tried to get Vanity Fair at our neighborhood bookstore in Lincoln Square, The Book Cellar, but couldn't find it, and at Women & Children First, I tried to get our next book group book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,  and they were sold out of that! So, back to the library...

Z - ZZZ Snatcher: Book That Kept You Up Way Too LateThis has not happened in SO long. I am a champion of falling asleep these days. I love getting sleep. I can't remember staying up reading, sucked in, since I was in Andong (Korea, in 2011)...either Freedom by Jonathan Franzen or Long Gone by Alafair Burke; I remember being up late reading both of those that year.

What a fun survey!

How about you?

Check-in time A look at what 15-year-old me declared she would read...

In case anyone thought this whole making-lists-of-books-I-want-to-read habit was a new thing or started in adulthood or (god forbid) a Goodreads-inspired internet solution (in that last case, you should probably go read To Save Everything, Click Here and stop thinking about the internet as the only and ultimate solution for everything), we have actual evidence to the contrary. I have here an old notebook from my junior year of high school in which I wrote some goals for the New Year, including the aspiration to "read 100 books (as in, good ones)."  I'm terribly curious as to what kind of unworthy books I thought I would  be tempted to read that needed to be excluded from the list...young adult, maybe? *smirk*.. but in any case I then gave some examples

of what I should read. Here's the list, from my 15-year-old self to you:

• The Scriptures
• Les Miserables
• Jesus the Christ
• A Marvelous Work and a Wonder
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• [The] Catcher in the Rye
• Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Wuthering Heights
• War and Peace 
• etc.

Gotta love the "etc."  Couldn't be bothered to actually list 100? Or is it because I reached the end of the page? The top of the next page of the notebook begins with a new topic, "WAR." Oh, yes, I was me. Gotta also entirely love that War and Peace made the list. I feel satisfied knowing that even at such a tender age, I was fully aware of my destiny. Great stuff, teenage Linda. (Who was at that time, as evidenced by some of the more Christ-y entries on the list, most assuredly still a Linda With Borders, eh?) 

So, then?? Status report? Well, here we are two decades later and I have completed more than half of that list, but not quite all. I did apparently start at the beginning, because I remember that school year I indeed delved into scripture (and yes, I did read The Whole Thing, though it took a few years) and Les Miserables. I am terribly sad to report I read only about 250 pages of that long novel (obviously, unabridged; what do you take me for?!) that year. Well, guess what, it is totes on the 2015 list anyway, for me and Brian. How about that! What else? I read The Catcher in the Rye later, during the summer after my senior year, then finally got around to  Wuthering Heights and To Kill a Mockingbird a few years after that, in adult life. In Boston, I read a good chunk of Uncle Tom's Cabin, maybe 100 pages or so, but didn't finish, and of course we all know that in 2005 I had the good sense to tackle War and Peace. I wonder if I ever read much of Jesus the Christ and A Marvelous Work and a Wonder...hmmm. I know I've touched those (and they're still on my mom's bookshelves to this day) but nothing sticks with me, and I can't say I have any interest in reading them now. The Mormon General Authorities and higher-ups are kind of like tenured professors, I think, in their writing. They might be technically competent and even have interesting things to say, but they're not really inspired to write a book so much as they are compelled by their life situation to write about their topics of expertise. And we all know how I feel about reading academic journal articles that are more concerned with citation than narrative.

Now, about that "etc."...

On to the Finals! (finally!)

Unless you've just discovered this blog in the last few months -- unlikely, since I've been an utter slacker about posting during those few months -- you're likely aware of my "A-to-Z Literary Blog Project," a long simmering notion that I put into action beginning over the 2006-2007 New Year's holiday (I miss that era of life) (except for the Dubya & Company of Usurpers' occupation of D.C.)  The project involved me reading one book by each of 26 new-to-me authors that I had long meant to read, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Martin Amis to Emile Zola. There were hits (Styron, Vidal, Forster, I swooned!) and misses (die, Ozick, die) and a few shrugged shoulders (Jong, Palahniuk) and raised eyebrows (Ishmael....what? a gorilla? but there weren't a lot of 'Q' choices).

Well, the project was so much fun, and I lived with it for so long (it went from the anticipated year -- yeah, sure 2-3 novels for fun each month of law school, super likely -- to more like two-and-a-half years, which may still be impressive seeing as on top of the law school reading I also threw Infinite Jest in there, which by the way is oddly appropriate for a law student, I maintain) that I hated to see it go. So it didn't! Upon completion, I selected my A-to-Z Top Half and read another book by each of those thirteen. (This was not exclusive...I just mixed them in along with other reading over the next few years.) After the thirteen? Sure enough, I chose six "semi-finalists" and read a third book of each of theirs. That brings us to today. Three, count 'em, three finalists have been chosen, a tough call indeed, and I will now read one more book from each of those authors before choosing the winner of my A-to-Z Literary Blog Project (which, when I began it eight years ago, I had no intention of anyone 'winning').

With no further ado, then, the three finalists are: Martin Amis, E.M. Forster, and Salman Rushdie. Congratulations, boys! (And by the way, I am aware that my finalists are all men...more on that in the weeks to come, by the way.)

I do have to say that Umberto Eco was such an honorable mention. I really had a hard time deciding between him and Forster. I know I want to read  more Eco, in the future, too, but for now I had to go with my judgment on their semi-final round novels, and I guess I found that Forster crafted a more perfect Howards End than Eco's slightly more inscrutable Foucault's Pendulum. I've long been looking forward to reading Foucault's Pendulum,  after thoroughly enjoying his writing and his intellect and his ideas and his breadth (and rooting for him to win the Nobel for a a few years now!) but Foucault's Pendulum... I don't know. It was a little bit of a slog at times. It never lost its fun/interesting-ness, but it could have been shorter. I know that's a lame cop-out as a criticism (and hey, I like long things!) but in this case I say it because it just started seeming repetitive. I started to not really keep straight all the subculture/cult/gatherings/secrets/girlfriends-in-a-trance etc. and I reached a point where I just wanted to figure out how this was all going to go down. I must say, without spoilering, that it all goes down pretty intensely -- I definitely recommend the book, but I had to choose one and I'm sorry Umberto.

So now, I get to read another Amis (I picked up a used bookstore copy of Night Train last week), another Forster (it's gotta be A Room With a View because no, I still haven't read that, and it's on lists and stuff, which totally matters), and another Rushdie. This last one is the hard choice. I've now read three of his: first, The Satanic Verses (so wacky! I still can't fathom why something so outlandish and bizarre inspired people to murder), Shalimar the Clown (so astute. so brilliant. so packs a punch you don't see coming), and Midnight's Children (which I did also enjoy greatly while learning a bunch about India). But what's next?  Should it be Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Enchantress of Florence, or The Ground Beneath Her Feet?  Any advice? What do you recommend? What should my next Rushdie be?  For some reason I'm drawn to The Moor's Last Sigh but is there something I should consider about the others?

Books, books, books, books, books!

The Best and Worst I Read in 2014

I read 72 books in 2014! Well, OK, I read sixty-something books and I listened to a handful as audio books on my mp3 player while out walking or running. But for the purposes of this blog entry, same thing. Let's take a look at my 2014 year of reading in review!

I read more truly great non-fiction than truly great fiction this year. While I enjoy reading non-fiction and obviously love when it's great, I would also really like to be able to read more great novels, too, and by that I mean, I would like to stop being so disappointed in more than half of the novels I pick up. But we'll get to that in a second. First...

THE GOOD:
Easily the two best novels I read this year were Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko and Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. Both deal with the utter horror show that is humanity but in completely and totally different ways. The former is a gargantuan tome of Native American-Mexican-Arizonan-bring-on-the-revolution wisdom that will shock, horrify, and awe you if you have any ethical bones in your body. It will also teach you some history, make you homesick for Arizona if you're from there, cause you to seriously ponder your role in society and humans' role on the American continent and the globe, and possibly inspire a little tiny eensy bit of hope for the world. (But not too much.) There's also a fair amount of sex and drugs mixed in. It's hard to explain. The latter is Amis' famous novel told in reverse about a Holocaust "doctor" -- in order to grapple with the how-could-this-happen and how-did-he/they/we-become-evil questions, he tells the story backwards and it's basically genius.  I cannot recommend these two books highly enough.

The other good novel I read this year was Men Against the Sea by Charles Bernard Nordhoff, the second in the Bounty Trilogy. Actually, the first, Mutiny on the Bounty, was all right, too, but the struggle of the men in the boat in the second book is just so hardcore, and you end with so much respect for them and an understanding of their deep love for the boat that helped them and brought them to safety.

The great non-fiction I read this year includes:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown -- This history of what happened to Indians in the American West should be required reading for everyone. The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times by Francis Russell -- Yes, you actually do need to read a biography of Warren G. Harding, if for nothing else than for the shenanigans of the smoke-filled rooms at the 1920 Republican convention and for his kindness to puppies.
The Walrus and the Elephants: John Lennon's Years of Revolution by James A Mitchell -- I was born too late (to live in the early '70s) but John Lennon wasn't and he was incredible and I previously had no idea how hard the U.S. government tried to get rid of them. (And succeeded?)To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov --  If you hate when people say "X changed my life" or when people are hailed as brilliant because they gave a TED Talk even though they are physically incapable of critical thinking, you'll dig Evgeny's thesis. If you are bristling at these notions, you are in need of Evgeny's thesis.Zola and His Time: The History of his Martial Career in Letters by Matthew Josephson -- When I finally got around to reading a Zola book (Therese Raquin) the other year, I was less than impressed. But! This bio re-fascinated me about him. And poor, poor Dreyfus (he of the Affair) -- such a fascinating bit of history and a groovy group of literary pals, who are definitely not without their flaws. 
THE BAD: 
Get out of my face, Gone Girl, The Interestings, Sue Grafton, Sharon Olds (Stag's Leap and her undeserved Pulitzer in particular) and, frankly, Sophie's Choice, too. So much disappointment!
THE UNDERWHELMING: 
The Fault in Our Stars, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Little Women (re-visited as an adult), No Ordinary Time, and some of Truman Capote's short stories included in the volume along with Breakfast at Tiffany's.  SOME FUN SURPRISES: The Wicked Pavilion  by Dawn Powell. Who knew?
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Check it out if you want a classic novel that's also basically a pioneering mystery novel and not on everyone's radar.
Missing Justice by Alafair Burke. Even though I've read a few of her novels previously and I am well acquainted with her and her life commentary, I was still delighted by the sharp feminism in this page-turner.
Also, 10 A ños con Mafalda, a collection of the Argentine comic strip Mafalda, opened my eyes to a bit of social history I never would have otherwise known. 
And you? How was your 2014 reading?

Project Finally: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

now finished: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Um. Well. Comic books. Golems. Books I started more than a decade ago and got a hundred pages into and never finished and took this long to get around to re-reading...it's all here, folks!

This was for sure going to be a two-star rating until the last 60 pages or so. You redeemed yourself a little, Chabon, but barely. Escapistry, indeed! By the way, the three stars should not be construed in any way to mean that I suddenly liked the characters at the end of the book, because the big three are still pretty dismal attempts at How to Treat Each Other Well, but the ending was just better than the rest of the book, is all I'm saying. Weirdly, it was set on Long Island while most of the rest of the book is in The City (that would be New York) (except that part in Antarctica! yeah, don't ask...) so you'd think that wouldn't be a selling point for me, but anyway...

Have I mentioned this book is about comic books? And that there's a golem? Basically my two least favorite things ever. I was really, really starting to love me some Michael Chabon back in the day (circa 2001) and Wonder Boys made my list of Greatest Novels Ever and I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World.. and I was just devouring it all and I worked on a production of the play Poor Super Man and was totally digging the profound secret identity/comic book superhero as growth metaphor and was so ready to just love! and adore! The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Then I started reading it.

Slow going. Got to around page 90 or 100. Never finished. Haven't read any other Chabon since then, either.

But, you know, what with this being a Pulitzer-winner and all, I knew I was going to read it eventually, and I meant to and meant to and meant to and now I have FINALLY done it and my entire experience while reading it, before those last 60 pages, was that it drags and drags and that everyone in it does some stupid stuff and that the woman's feelings don't much seem to matter, and a few other spoilery things that aren't even worth going into because who cares?!

I actually think the whole overarching metaphor works; I don't think Chabon was reaching or trying to be too grandiose or whatever in conceiving this -- although that Antarctica part could maybe try to make a bit more sense -- but I just think the straight-up page-to-page writing was borderline snoozy a lot of the time. Especially during the flashbacky tales of escape.

I'm sure there are people who don't love comic books who were nonetheless able to love this book. I am not one of them.

But, wheee! I finished another Pulitzer book! Always a fun day.

If you can't hold on, hold on

finished: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

Because the Holocaust doesn't make sense, how to make sense of the Holocaust? 

How can you write about it? How can you write a novel about it? Lots of people have, of course. How do you approach it?  You can't make sense of it. Can you try? 

Martin Amis has taken some flak for writing Time's Arrow. Some of it was how-dare-you-write-about-the-Holocaust-you-weren't-there. I'm not sure I find that point very convincing. Some of it was your-telling-of-the-story-backwards-is-just-a-gimmick. Some of it was you're-the-same-old-Martin-Amis-as-in-your-other-novels-and-I-like-to-bash-you. On the other hand, some reviewers apparently fell all over themselves to praise it when it came out in the early 1990s, what with its heavy, important subject matter, and Amis' important self. (Word order chosen carefully there.) 

I came later to the Martin Amis party. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of him when I was in high school. I had heard of his pops, Kingsley Amis, by the time I finished college, but it was working in a bookstore that really put Martin on my radar. I got around to reading him for the first time in 2007, when I commenced my A-to-Z project, in which I read and blogged about a book by 26 new-to-me authors, one for each letter of the alphabet. I started with him, for 'A'--I read The Information and loved it. A couple years later, after making my way through the alphabet (hey, I was in law school--and besides, I always have lots of other stuff to read; it's never just one project at a time), I decided to select the Top Half and read another thirteen books by each of those authors. Amis made the cut. I then read Money. And, as time has marched on, I've continued by selecting six of those thirteen and reading a third book by each of them. Yes, Amis is in this select group of A-to-Z project semi-finalists, along with Truman Capote, Umberto Eco, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, and William Styron. And this time around, my Amis selection was Time's Arrow.

Interestingly, this summer as I read third books by the likes of Capote and Styron and Amis, I was also preparing for my Habitat trip to Poland (which you can read more about here and here and here on my front page blog). And interestingly, it just so happened that I had months earlier, when I didn't yet know I'd even be going to Poland this year, acquired Time's Arrow for my Amis selection (at our favorite bookstore in Seoul, during our January layover) and decided to finally read Sophie's Choice for my Styron #3 (a decision made whilst we were still living in China). So there I was, in Michigan this summer, reading Sophie's Choice and also preparing to go to Poland. Naturally, I sought out some Polish literature by Polish writers at the library (all hail the GRPL!) and read stuff about the history of the country, too. But I also, in yet another twist of fate, happened to find myself this summer on Franklin Roosevelt in my read-a-bio-of-every-president project. It all came together. And what with Time's Arrow being a light, thin quality paperback, I brought it with me to Poland. 

There, I visited Auschwitz. 

I haven't yet shared with the world all my Auschwitz-visiting thoughts, of which there are many. It was such a mind-altering experience, being there. Here, let me just say this: I was so glad, when I read Time's Arrow the next week, that I had visited Auschwitz before reading it. 

To be honest, I wasn't all that fond of Sophie's Choice. I've seen the movie, years ago, so I knew all about the choice and the things that happen. And it seemed crazy that I didn't like it, because I have been so enthralled with my boy Styron up to this point, reading his earlier (more obscure?) stuff, like Lie Down in Darkness (my favorite book of the original A-to-Z 26) and Set This House on Fire (such a book for self-indulgent expat writers who think they have something to say to the world...)  But I thought that, frankly, Sophie's Choice totally failed. Styron's approach (gimmick?) was to narrate as a writer telling the story of Sophie, his friend whom he meets after the war, living in Brooklyn. Then she/the narrator recount her experiences in flashbacks, but they're all over the place, and the sexual overtones of it all are kind of abhorrent, frankly. Sophie desperately needed/needs to be rescued, but instead she continues to be taken advantage of and ravaged, by life and everyone. And everyone is a mess. Sure, these cynical things approach a truth about humanity, too, but they didn't really tell me the Holocaust/Auschwitz story it seemed Styron was trying to tell. 

Amis' approach was to get inside the mind of a former Holocaust doctor -- and I do mean, as a separate entity, who has somehow appeared inside the man's mind -- and go backwards from there. I thought Time's Arrow was incredible, and I admire it and Amis because he succeeds at demonstrating something for us. It's easy enough to say that only in a crazy, mixed-up world where time flows backwards could the Holocaust make any sense, but its another thing to write the novel that shows that. As we travel backward through time and through the life of Dr. Tod Friendly (and his several other later/earlier names), we know what's coming, and we read about him and his fellow Nazis "creating" a race of people out of fire and ashes. We all say that the death camp Auschwitz goes against all that humanity is. You certainly feel that during the portion of your tour when you step into the chamber that was once used to gas prisoners in the hopes of exterminating the Jewish people (along with hundreds of thousands of others). You can feel that again when you read Time's Arrow. 

When the backwards-running narrative finally arrives at Birkenau, you remember walking along that Birkenau train track, looking up at where it dead ends at the edge of the forest. Shit, you think. This world needs to be grappled with. You think that when reading, and when visiting. 

The story is basically too much to tell (not that we shouldn't try), and the "gimmick" of telling it backward turns out to be less gimmick and more way-to-access-this-thing. 

I read a biography of Martin Amis this summer, too. It was a light, I-think-just-this-side-of-unauthorized account, but it was interesting. Basically, I am jealous of Martin and his literary friends (Rushdie, Hitchens, Barnes, and the like, all those England Observer-writing literary intellectuals who get to just hang out being readers and discoursers together and writers when they are alone all the time) and I want to inhabit such a world (but hold the incessant womanizing, eh?) I read with interest about the friendships developed with Saul Bellow and the occasional arguments over Israel/Palestine politics. I must say that in a way, Israel/Palestine politics have nothing to do with the Holocaust. To equate critical analysis of Israel policy (or U.S. policy) with anti-Semitism and therefore "forgetting" (as opposed to, you know, never forgetting) is I think as insulting as what it's trying to insult. How can you make a political military issue out of this total affront to humanity? 

My incredible tour guide at Auschwitz said that the longer she works there, the less she judges people/countries/leaders, such as the Allies who opted not to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz, and the more she remains neutral as she learns and is glad she wasn't in the difficult position of making those decisions. This is a woman who routinely communicates with Auschwitz survivors, and she shared some of their thoughts with us. She was steady, somber, and very informative. We walked around on a gray, drizzly day, through the mud and dirt, through the exhibitions, around the remains. Nothing makes sense. She explained it all to us, and the facts and exhibits and piles of eyeglasses and shoes make no human sense. But there they are. 

It's not about reserving judgment, or not taking a stand, or not believing in what's right. Backwards, we can approach this event with all the knowledge and all the judgment and all the pain, and see what we can see. We (humanity) obviously didn't see the Nazis when we went in chronological order, so Martin helps us by approaching them the other way. 

Reflections on A Month of Short Stories

We're all forced to read a lot of short stories in school, from those elementary level "Reading" or "Language" segments of our day right on up through secondary English studies. Those of us who go on to be English majors tend to love novels. How many of us read as many short stories in adulthood as we did when we were young? 

Yet, there are certainly plenty of us writing short stories. It's just what so many of us writers do, and while we all read novels (yes, all writers--if someone says "I'm a writer" but doesn't read, then that someone is lying to you), we don't all spend as much time perusing short fiction, despite the fact that we want some magazine somewhere to publish all the stories we've written. Don't we owe it to ourselves to read some regularly, then?  

This, coupled with a random piece I stumbled across on Arts.Mic called "14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time It Takes to Eat Lunch" inspired me to read a short story per day throughout the month of July and blog about each one. The fourteen suggestions from the online article were, overall, just OK, in my opinion (though definitely short! you can read them in the time it takes to eat a few bites of your lunch!) but to fill out my month I also delved into a Norton anthology and The Best American Short Stories of the Century as well as a book of Kafka's collected stories that I had from the library. 

And now, we shall examine the results of the 30 stories from 27 authors (I allowed myself a holiday for the 4th!) of my July project: A Month of Short Stories (and Their Authors).I gave them each a grade, and I'm happy to report that no one failed; the grade distribution was like this:

A+: one, A: five, A-: six, B+: seven, B: four, B-: three, C+: four

My short story champion is "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell. It was so well-done! A rural couple of a previous era (the story was published in 1917) are drawn into the death of a neighbor; there's a sheriff, a home without its residents, an element of mystery, a decrying of sexism, a subtextual plea for people to be nicer to one another... I adore this story. It's, as we like to say, deep. 

There were several great stories that received an A but I think my other favorite, thus perhaps the best of the As or perhaps just the one that most spoke to me, was Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Oh my, do I like that one. It packs a punch in thematic ways I totally dig. I was also impressed by Ring Lardner, adored Katherine Anne Porter's writing (as always), and managed to give an A to both Chekhov and Faulkner, who have tormented me in the past. Really, my sixteen-year-old self  who read them previously was probably just tormented anyway, and I projected it onto those guys. It's interesting to read them in the cold, hard light of adulthood. 

All right then, so here's the list of my July short stories, by grade: 

A+  "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell

A  "To Room Nineteen" by Doris Lessing

A  "The Looking Glass" by Anton Chekhov

A  "The Golden Honeymoon" by Ring Lardner

A  "Theft" by Katherine Anne Porter

A  "That Evening Sun Go Down" by William Faulkner
A-  "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Judgment" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf

A-  "The Gate-Keeper" by Francois Coppee

A-  "Little Selves" by Mary Lerner

A-  "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

B+  "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood
B+  "The Road From Colonus" by E.M. Forster

B+  "A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka

B+  "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros

B+ "Adams" by George Saunders

B+ "The Other Woman" by Sherwood Anderson
B+  "Reunion" by John Cheever

B   "Clay" by James Joyce

B   "The School" by Donald Barthelme

B   "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway

B   "Double Birthday" by Willa Cather

B-  "The Last Night of the World" by Ray Bradbury

B-  "Zelig" by Benjamin Rosenblatt

B-  "Pygmalion" by John Updike

C+ "The Sock" by Lydia Davis

C+ "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro

C+ "Blood-Burning Moon" by Jean Toomer

C+ "Wild Plums" by Grace Stone Coates

Those were the original grades I gave them, and as I think back over the month, they are still for the most part how I feel.  Of the C-plussers, "Blood-Burning Moon" I at least have to give credit to for being a decent story, structured, with substance, etc., but I just didn't really enjoy it. Those other three at the bottom of the list were pretty weak. Two of the B-minuses, also nothing to write home about, are already faded in my memory, but I remember Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World" really well, so maybe it should be bumped up to a B for being so vividly rendered?  Lots of B and B+ stories, definitely. 

What was the best thing about this project? Well, probably that I found myself reading stories by fantastic authors. In how many given months of your life do you spend time with even one of those classic, prize-winning, critically acclaimed, famous, sometimes beloved, sometimes loathed, solidly-entrenched-in-the-canon authors, let alone a dozen of them? (Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Chekhov, Kafka, Forster, Joyce, Cather...) along with other 20th century stalwarts (Lessing, Updike, Atwood, Cisneros, Saunders, Bradbury, Cheever) and fantastic past writers whose stars have faded a teensy bit but definitely need to be revived (Glaspell, Lardner, Anderson...)? It's a great experience! 

What was the worst thing? Well, the hardest thing was definitely those few days that I didn't get around to reading a story until late in the evening; I was tired, it was 11:30, but I had to read a story and get something up on the blog about it before the day was done. Luckily, I had that "14 Brilliant Pieces..." article, whose stories were almost all very short, and on those days I clicked through to one of those, whereas on the other days, when I did my story in the morning or afternoon, I tended to go to the books that risked bringing me longer stories. 

Did I notice any patterns among my favorites? I suppose one could point out the feminism of my two favorite stories I read this month, Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" and Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Actually, all of the top-grade stories, the As and A+, had to do with marriage--"Theft" perhaps less than the others, but with it still in there a little bit. That's an interesting pattern I wouldn't have predicted. 

A C+ for Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize?!?!  What can I say? "Boys and Girls" didn't impress me much. Don't worry; I'm going to give her another chance. I just didn't care for the story, despite its apparent effort to challenge gender roles. It just left me reeling from all the acceptance of fur farming it oozed. 

Did I read anything else during month? Of course! This is one of those things like how busy people sometimes get more extra stuff done, like by forcing themselves to schedule a workout, and errands, and whatnot, they manage to fit it all in, unlike the person having some lazing days who thinks s/he has enough time to get to it all and then never does. Because I had to read my short story every day, I would often get that done and be pumped up for more reading time. I love to read anyway, but I was definitely focused on my reading plans. In July I also read Little Women (parts one and two, as they say), a couple of mysteries, two bios (of Martin Amis and Emile Zola -- this literary blog's A & Z from my original blog reading project, how about that!) and a few other things. 

Am I going to repeat this project? Well, I'm actually continuing with the rest of the stories in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, although I'm not forcing myself to blog about them and I am trying to do three or so per day, in order to get through them all before having to return the book to the library. And I have a couple of other books of short stories from the library right now, too, that I am working my way through (Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories because I-came-across-it-why-not? and a book of Polish short stories in anticipation of my upcoming trip to Poland -- fingers crossed, as I'm trying to raise another $500 for Habitat for Humanity here in order to take that trip). 

What other reading projects do I have going right now? Well. First of all, I'm still reading a poet or two a day from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3,000-Year Tradition), and I am also continuing to read Pulitzer-winning novels, my A-to-Z follow-up "semi-finalists," and a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong, a project obviously conceived and begun during the Dubya administration; I'm on FDR. 

And with that, let's get back to our reading, shall we!