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.

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. 

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 5th: John Updike

now finished (hurrah! finally!): Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands
now reading: a book of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel in French, a novel in English, the non-fiction audio book I'm listening to on my mp3 player on walks and such, and a biography. the usual. 

Happy Independence Day, U.S.A.! I took the holiday off from my July short-story-per-day project. Sorry! I actually took the day off from computer/internet/posting entirely, so it's nothing personal, literature.

Today's Story: "Pygmalion"
Author: John Updike
My Rating: C+ or B-

Am I some kind of John Updike contrarian? Actually at first I was thinking about rating this a B but the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. There's no there there, as a certain other writer would say. It's really quite a small fragment of an idea and I wouldn't even say it's very fleshed out. I wish it had been a bit longer. This is just a blip. I could have seen our boy Updike doing a bit more with the idea of what men want from women they are married to and/or don't realize they don't want, but then again, there are those who would say Updike is too steeped in his own sexist world view to really examine such issues... who knows.

What I do know is that basically nothing happens in this shorter-than-short story. Short-short stories weird me out a little. I know some people don't care for short stories, preferring novels that fully develop/realize characters and action. I don't feel that way, but I think I do about short-shorts, as compared to normal short stories. This is more like just a thought. A fragment. It's shorter than some blog entries.

And, it doesn't really make sense. Why does Gwen suddenly start imitating people, too? What's the point of this particular little snippet of a marriage? What's the point of this story?

Now, let's think about Updike. First of all, I realize now that I have read a short story of his before, "A &P." Read it in high school, and if you had asked me a few years ago, I would have absolutely remembered the story, but had no clue who the author was. But yup, apparently that's by John Updike. That was certainly a more fleshed-out piece (in more ways than one). Secondly, I first read an Updike novel as the 'U' author in my A-to-Z Literary Blog Project. I chose The Centaur - which definitely breaks the tradition these last few days of my saying "Hey, I've read [insert most famous work here] by this author." I liked his writing enough to select him as one of the privileged thirteen in my A-to-Z Top Half Authors, and the second novel I read was Rabbit, Run.  Even though I didn't advance him to my A-to-Z Blog Project Semi-finals, I know I'm going to end up reading Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest because they won the Pulitzer, which means I need to read Rabbit Redux, the second of the four Rabbit novels, before I read those other two, of course. Rabbit, Run annoyed me (hence my calling myself an Updike contrarian) for many of the same reasons that this "short story" "Pygmalion" did. So, so, so male-centered. You can write a male character, with a male point of view, without having a male-centric worldview (as in, to the exclusion of women). Lots of authors do this (Tolstoy, etc.)  Updike not so much. He's a really, really good writer. He knows his way around a sentence, boy, does he ever! And I completely get what he's doing with Rabbit, and with the fact that Updike wanted to offer some kind of counter to Kerouac and the other Beats' free-spirit drop-out-of-society run-away-from-responsibility mentality, but does it have to come across as so alienating to all of womankind?

What do you think about Updike?  Is he challenging? Is he profound? brilliant? misogynistic? Is his writing good, boring, fascinating, or none of the above?

A Month of Short Stories & Their Authors July 1st: Margaret Atwood

now reading:
for a variety of reasons, too many books to get into here

Two things I can't believe: that I haven't posted on this Lit Supp blog since the day Maya Angelou died, and that the day Maya Angelou died was in freakin' May, more than a month ago. Where, time, June, where...? 

Well, that brings us to July, in which month I pledge to read a short story a day in addition to all the regular reading and other things that I am doing. Why? Oh, don't look too hard for a reason: this is strictly from the WhytheHellNot? files. I suppose you could say I was "inspired" (but please don't) by an online article I read that listed fourteen short stories (which the web site, Arts.Mic, called "brilliant pieces of literature") that can be read in the time it takes to eat lunch. Now, some people (hi Brian!) are unspeakably annoyed by all of the click-bait pieces that insist on two things: having a number in the title and being a list, but I kind of got used to that early, a few years back, when I was writing for About.com and they encouraged us to make list articles...I don't know what weird psychological thing makes people eager to read those, but pondering that is not our quest today. Our quest is to discuss the first story I read to kick off my month of stories, and also the author of said story. (And I suppose I have to confess that the handy article did provide links to the 14 brilliant stories they selected -- two of which I've already read -- making my read-a-good-short-story-every-day-in-July project very quick and simple for at least twelve of the days.) With no further ado, then: 

Today's Story: "Happy Endings"

Author: Margaret Atwood

My rating: B+

This story is short. You can read it in the time it takes to eat maybe a third of your lunch. If that. Like most Margaret Atwood writing, it puts its finger on some things that go on in women's minds and in women's interpersonal relationships, and in doing so, it slowly, emotionally builds so that the reader gets kind of angry at all the injustice in the world, although the author never seemed to have an agenda coming. 

The "Happy Endings" gimmick is that it starts out with John and Mary meeting, then goes through different "choices" of possible endings. But you don't really choose A, B, C, etc. You just read them all in a row, and that IS the story. 

Why do I give it a B+? I hate to be at all negative about my girl Margaret Atwood, but it didn't really blow my mind; rather, it's just a fun and you might say inventive little rumination on the prototypical male-female relationship. 

Like many, many readers, my first exposure to Margaret Atwood was The Handmaid's Tale. Unlike, apparently, many, many readers, when I initially read it (early 20s, L.A., had heard about it for years, totally wanted to finally read it) it struck me as remarkably anti-feminist. I know, what? I guess I was in bizarro-land. Maybe it's like when I recently read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and it struck me as pro-military despite the fact that no one else evidently perceives it that way--maybe I'm just so far past this particular "Wow, the Iraq war sure was a horrible idea" political standpoint that where others see preaching to the choir, I see a tiresome placating...  Of course, The Handmaid's Tale isn't exactly preaching to the choir, as it was a bold, truly inventive dystopian imagining of Where We Are Headed (and with the whole Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, we may have been edged a little further down the path this week) that rocked a lot of people's worlds, but I just interpreted it as pretty much the exact opposite of what everyone else got from it and what Atwood herself is and stands for. Still really not sure why. I seem to remember it being really in favor of women having (and caring for) their own children and instead of picking up on all the male-control-of-women's-bodies I guess to me as the twentysomething renegade  that I was, it seemed to be just a big defense of women having and raising their children (and not doing anything else). I wish I could remember why else I hated it, but it really angered me - then.  

Now, naturally, as a literary-type person, I am aware that this is not the book's message at all. I get it. I may have even reread it later in Boston, because I specifically remember reading a Q&A with Atwood printed in the back of it in which she talked about how Dubya was basically exactly the image of her worst nightmares realized and how the USA was going to be led to its most dismal fate by someone spouting religious jingoistic nonsense, not overtly fascist Orwellian stuff. Bam! 

But before that, it was a different Q & A, a live one, in Los Angeles, that helped me see the error of my ways about Ms Atwood. We went to hear her speak at some UCLA event and I realized she was absolutely brilliant, in fact totally feminist, and pretty much the embodiment of wisest-author-ever cool. So I shook off my lack of Handmaid's enjoyment and moved on to other books of hers, enjoying: The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. I think I enjoyed The Robber Bride the most; I definitely still think about it a lot when contemplating the march of historical events. (Which I do often, while plugging away on my Prez Bios project -- we're now up to FDR.) Sadly, I don't remember that much about The Blind Assassin and I kind of want to reread it. I remember more the feeling it gave me and random images of it. I actually have a distinct visual setting that pops to mind when I think of each of those books. I did enjoy Oryx and Crake -- it was weird, but good -- and I want to read the rest of that trilogy (is it a trilogy now? Just the three?) 

It's actually been a few years since I've read an Atwood book. I still mean to read lots more of her stuff. I try keep up on her in the news and on the internet, more or less. Margaret Atwood is awesome. I don't know why on Earth The Handmaid's Tale came across so differently to me than the rest of the world, but I do know that a lot of feminist truths Atwood speaks are things that I take as absolute givens on Earth; maybe that had something to do with it. I definitely feel inspired to read another Atwood or two this summer, to raise them up a few notches on my oh-so-long to-read list. 

Orderly

now finished: re-reading Alibi through Evidence of Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries series
now reading: Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3,000-Year Tradition ed. by Tony Barnstone with Chou Ping
now listening: My Story by Elizabeth Smart with some ghostwriter dude, Chris Stewart, I think? 

Yes, a lot going on. It's all different though. These past couple years I've had one audio book going pretty much all the time, which I listen to while on walks, or exercising, or commuting on buses with no working lights (ahem, that happened in Korea sometimes). They take me forever to get through, especially back when I had crappy headphones. Now I have good headphones, or should I say ear buds, that actually stay in my ears while I'm running, but we're training for the 25K River Bank Run (three days from now!) and I listen to music playlists, not books, during my long runs, so I still only listen sometimes, and ... yeah. The poetry is because I dabble, reading a poet or two per day, slowly working my way through the entire history of Chinese poetry. (Just kidding. A sampling.) My actual book-book at the moment is Mutiny on the Bounty, which I did read years ago, but about which I remember next to nothing, so I'm re-reading it and then am going to watch the Oscar-winning movie from the 1930s, and just for kicks I'm probably going to read the next two books in the Bounty trilogy as well.

But let's address my other little ongoing project--Sue Grafton. I have a serious question about that series. No, this isn't about their implausibility or weird characterization or whatever other little flaws impede a reader's enjoyment of them. This isn't about how I'm probably going to blaze through the alphabet as I've set out to do, despite my finding that F Is for Far-Fetched. The question I have is one that came up as I was perusing some Goodreads reviews of E Is for Evidence. Several reviewers mentioned that they were working their way through the series, that they were thinking of giving up, that since Alibi the books have gone downhill, and comments like that. And then...and then... brace yourselves!!...and then, a reviewer of E Is for Evidence named Ed writes: "Every few months, I've been checking out a Sue Grafton alphabet title. 'E' now makes for eleven, according to my Goodreads account, that I've read."

WHAT?! E is for eleven??!

Seriously, E-is-for-Ed, that is basically just like stabbing me in the heart with an icicle. You're reading them out of order?!?!

I don't understand how Ed can do this. How can anyone not read this series in order? I mean ... FIRST of all, I can't just read mystery series out of order, period. This is a big part of my entire problem with reading mysteries in the first place. Every time I browse them, just as with all those times at Borders when I would touch and shelve them, I look at them and get intrigued by them and make mental notes to get around to reading these authors one day but I can't just plunge in anywhere!! I have to start at the beginning, duh, obviously!!!! And if the first one is out of stock, or it takes too much effort to figure out which one in a certain series is even the first one (note to authors and especially publishers: that really sucks, by the way. Just make it obvious on the cover of the book, please, thank you), then forget it, can't try out that author that day. This is why we like Goodreads and authors' web sites that tell us clearly "Ellie Hatcher #1" or "Anna Pigeon #6" or whatever. Waaaaaaaaay back in my early Borders days I accidentally read Nelson DeMille's The Lion's Game, a Detective John Corey book, without having read Plum Island, which is the first John Corey book, and I have been traumatized ever since. I still think about it every single year when I read my annual Nelson DeMille. It's pretty terrible that that happened.

But..but...but, Ed. Ed! With the Sue Grafton alphabet mystery series it's TOTALLYF******OBVIOUS, dude! It's the alphabet!!  It is totally completely thoroughly 100% designed to be achingly obvious what order they go in. Only Janet Evanovich's One for the Money Stephanie Plum series could be possibly more obvious. But I don't think so. Some of Evanovich's titles are cleverly familiar phrases, at least, and you could be forgiven for seeing a random shelf with, say, High Five and To the Nines and not realizing it's even a series and that those are book #5 and book #9. But the Graftons!! Oh my god! A Is for.., B Is for..., C Is for...  It's clear! It's so clear! To anyone! There's no way you didn't know! Alibi, Burglar, Corpse, Deadbeat, Evidence, Fugitive, Gumshoe. You knew! You knew, Ed! And you chose to read them out of order?!?!

I mean, I really couldn't do it. Like, couldn't. I actually could not read those out of order. If someone was all like: Hey, have you read any of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries? and I was all, Nope! and they tossed L is for Lawless my way and said, Here! Try this! I would be like No! No! No! Get it away!

How could you just do that? How?

My god, please tell me that you people out there understand the gravity of this situation.

M is for Mystery

now finished: quick re-reads of Sue Grafton's A, B, and C are for... mysteries
now reading: An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover by Richard Norton Smith
next up: a Project: Finally! entry, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

"Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point."
-- from C Is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

What happened was, I was working at Borders and touching lots of books every day and somewhere in the back of my head getting attracted to the idea of reading projects, and I had read all of Sandra Scoppettone's Lauren Laurano books and Sandra wasn't writing anymore, and in them even Lauren, a fictional person, mentions Kinsey Millhone, and Sue Grafton's alphabet mystery series just seemed like something I should try. Right? At that time (early '00s) I think we were up to about O or P or so. AND not too long before that I had heard an interview on NPR's Morning Edition in which Bob Edwards asked Ms. Grafton if she already knew what 'Q' and 'X' and 'Z' were going to stand for, and she told him she sure did, and he kind of nudged her, asking for maybe a hint, to which she was all no-way-you-have-to-wait-along-with-everyone-else.

Suffice to say I was intrigued and had mentioned that maybe I'd delve into Sue's alphabet, and then my friend/former bookstore co-worker/partner in reading crime happened upon A Is for Alibi at a used bookstore for like fifty cents or a quarter or something and he bought it for me because it was a cosmic sign. So I plunged in.

I got as far as E Is for Evidence before trailing off. I always meant to pick back up with the alphabet! But of course, you know me -- ever busy reading War and Peace and inventing new reading projects and then moving to different countries where I inevitably invent even more reading projects and I still have projects that have been going on for years now, Pulitzer winners and Prez Bios and Modern Library's Top 100 being chief among them, but there are others, and, well, you know. It has always seemed to me that I have plenty of time to catch up with ol' Sue--one summer, I assured myself and anyone who cared (so, myself), I would just sit down and blaze through the letters and catch up and then resume reading them along with Grafton's adoring fans who rush out to buy each newly released letter in hardcover. (UGH! to the very notion of buying mysteries in hardcover, but that's another blog post for another day.)

Well, it's do-or-die time, because the series has reached W (which is for Wasted, in case you are curious), and there isn't much more time to procrastinate if I'm going to get on this alphabet train.

And I had been thinking about that, and thinking about which beach books I will breezily read this summer as I stick my toe hesitantly into the The Genres (also considering A Song of Ice and Fire, natch, plus there's my annual Nelson DeMille or two, and a few other mystery authors who are in contention to have me plow through their oeuvres) while never fully committing to reading too much mystery and sci-fi in any one year because: genre fiction overwhelms me. (The series pressure!! I've talked about this before!) But I have been disappointed in my total-number-of-books-read over the last two years and that is partly because I have been reading long, laborious, sometimes multi-volume prez bios that, while fascinating, take forever. And I figure if I read, like, twenty mysteries this summer, then I won't feel bad about my tally.

And then, we were just strolling along the street in my mom's neighborhood on our last Sunday in Phoenix on our way to go get a morning coffee at the local Dunkin' Donuts when we passed a garage sale and lo and behold! there in the books! F Is for Fugitive, J is for Judgment, L Is for Lawless. And F is totally where I'd have to pick back up! Another cosmic sign! I purchased them for $1.45.

Then I sat there thinking -- what the heck happened in A, B, C, D, and E, anyway? Really couldn't remember. I could picture Kinsey's little "apartment"  in Santa Barbara Teresa but no traces of memories of plots remained a decade+ later. So maybe, I thought, I should "review" really quick before continuing on with the alphabet. I grabbed Alibi, Burglar, and Corpse from the library. And in the last week or two, in between Almanac of the Dead (awesome) and Herbert Hoovering, I have quickly reread the first three Kinsey Millhones and totally not even remembered whodunnit and how-they-dun-it as I was reading, so I had to actually read the whole things. Gotta grab Deadbeat and Evidence to "review" now, since I'm sure I won't get any aha! moments of remembering the ending in those, either. Then, I can pick back up with F, onward.

But the question is: are these books any good?  And if not, is that why I trailed off in my alphabetting to begin with? And why, then, do I feel compelled to start back up and complete this project?

These mysteries are all right. I've read better. We're just getting started, so I have hopes that amid the ups and downs I will find some letters to enjoy more than B and C,  but to be honest, they were kind of implausible and left some loose ends/distractions hanging. It's as if she didn't quite know how to follow up A Is for Alibi. That first one was all right, if a bit insane of an ending, but the next two left me furrowing my brow and shaking my head at how it all went down in the big moments.

But then again, they do hold my attention, and I more or less like Kinsey's observations and -- as with most mysteries -- you can get through them pretty quickly (although I'm not counting these re-reads of A through E in my tally of books read this year, p.s.) and you can read them while the TV is on and stuff, which is good for me right now because we're temporarily in a place where I don't have my own space or many quiet reading spots. So I'm sure that I'm going to just do this thing, if nothing else to check off one of my many reading projects-in-progress.  And maybe I'll be all caught up when X Is for whatever X is for comes out.

What I really want to know is this: Is there going to be a big party when we get to Z or what?! In California or something? There should be. I hope someone has thought of this. Does anyone know any real Sue Grafton fans I can ask?

Pulitzer Day!

And what a fun Pulitzer day it was this year. Let's check out some highlights.

Fiction winner: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Like many, I was wowed by her first novel, The Secret History. I worked at Borders when her disappointing-to-many follow-up The Little Friend came out, so I touched it a lot every day for a year or two but it's never quite made it from my to-read stack to my currently reading stack. Last fall, whilst I was in China, The Goldfinch was released to reviews that called it everything from exhausting to the best book of the year. I noted it, hopefully, in my Book Sphere section of In The Red. We now see whose side the Pulitzer committee agrees with! I'm looking forward to the read.

Biography winner: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall It's not that often that we get a biography winner whose author and subject are both women. It has happened, just not as often as at least one of those being male. In fact, the first Biography Pulitzer was awarded to two women (co-authors), Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, for their book about their mother, Julia Ward Howe. Then it didn't happen again for decades, I believe not until Elizabeth Frank's Louise Bogan: A Portrait in 1986. Most recently was to Stacy Schiff for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Anyway, Margaret Fuller is a fascinating figure and has always been someone I admire and aim to learn more about. I love me some transcendentalists and that whole era/place from which she emerged; I look forward to reading this one, too.

Poetry winner: 3 Sections  by Vijay Seshadri
Vijay Seshadri becomes the first Asian-American poet to win, it was repeatedly noted yesterday. He was born in India and came to the U.S. as a young child, later attending Oberlin and Columbia (I'm jealous!) His poems use delicate but full and smart language to capture tiny moments juxtaposed with big thoughts about the universe, from what I can see in the smattering that I've read.

Also exciting, in the journalism prizes, the Public Service prize went to The Washington Post and The Guardian U.S.  for their revelations of the NSA's widespread secret surveillance -- basically, for publishing Edward Snowden stuff. Here's to the free flow of information and truth!

Potpourri of February/March Reads

Some recent reads, in rough order of worthiness from best to worst:

These were good and/or great
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
Lonely Planet's Phuket Encounter

These were meh/suspect
The Crazed by Ha Jin
Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

This one should be thrown across the room
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Yes, that's correct. Gone Girl is in dead last on the list. I'll get to that in a second. Oh wait, maybe I should say "I'll get to that in literally one second." Which is not true, because it's going to be more than one second, and the expression "I'll get to that in a second" is FIGURATIVE, but apparently the authors and editors in the publishing industry today (see also: The Hunger Games) don't actually have to know what "literally" means but they can use it over and over and over (literally dozens of times!) in these contemporary please-take-me-seriously novels, jarring the reader (but not literally jarring, because how could an author put me in a jar?) and making it so obvious it's the author's voice coming through. Not the literary voice or the writing voice, but the text message voice. That doesn't really work when you tell a story from the points of view of two different characters, but they both just sound like you replying to an email.

Contrast that with The Moonstone, a gem (see what I did there?) from Victorian England, but not your English teacher's Victorian England novel. It has been called "the first detective novel" (would Agatha Christie and the author of The Invention of Murder agree?) but what's so great about it is the narration. There are a few point of view shifts, and each character's distinct attributes are fun, but the snark of the old servant who tells the first half is an unbeatable delight. I love reading classics for numerous reasons, but the fact that they are better edited than most of the crap on front-of-bookstore tables is starting to become a main one. It's bad enough that we live in a memoir- and blog- and print-on-demand-glutted world where everyone who thinks they write can "publish" their words, but when the actual publishers allow sloppy, comma-spliced "voices" to infiltrate the bookstore shelves, it's the beginning of our decline and fall. And that doesn't mean reading can't be fun. I have found most mystery/thriller page turners to be generally well edited over the years, but I guess that is changing. If you want to read a classic that doesn't feel like slogging through a classic, hie thee to The Moonstone.

I read The Moonstone in Phuket, mostly while lazing by the pool and/or by the sea, and while we were there I also read Lonely Planet's Phuket Encounter. Obviously, I had skimmed that before (on our first trip to Phuket) and used it as a reference, but this time I read the whole thing. It just so happens that we also seriously considered moving to Phuket while we were there (I had a job offer, but didn't take it) and I was  enjoying thinking about getting to know the place more deeply as a resident, but still really enjoying it as a traveler, and the Encounter books are good for that: an enriching taste of a place, with where-to-go and what-to-do ideas plus tidbits and a real feel for the spot and its vibes.

I also sat in one of my favorite Phuket coffee shops and finally read Tracy Letts' play August: Osage County. I can't believe I haven't seen a stage production of it (yet) as it has been on my radar since I lived in New York, but it's gloriously funny and dark and I think it's wonderful. I love the wicked dysfunction when it is done so right. Once we returned to Phoenix, we saw the film, and I think Julia Roberts was robbed of a Supporting Actress Oscar.

On to the incredibly average! Our friends whom we met while teaching in Korea and who now live and teach in Shanghai came to Thailand while we were there so we could all hang out in our third country together, and one of them passed along to me Ha Jin's The Crazed, partly because she gave up on it out of boredom. She had heard quite a bit about it, which makes sense since it's about university grad students and professors in the north of China, kind of the exact life my friend is currently living only without the whole lead-up to Tiananmen Square uprising factor. I've still never got around to Waiting despite the many times I touched it at Borders, so this was my first Ha Jin. The story wasn't terrible -- the main character's emotional meandering was a little weird, as was his inability to focus, but it didn't really devolve into unbelievability until the end-- but the writing itself is, for me, filed under "What's all the fuss about?" The main thing about it is that it feels like reading a translation of Chinese language, even though Ha Jin writes in English. This tells you SO MUCH about language, and it is so interesting (for someone like me, who likes words and language) to contemplate the differences between what-we-call-Mandarin and English, and it opens up fascinating questions about translation of literature, our own personal translations of our inner voices, the neuro-linguistic processes of creating art, and so on -- but I really wanted a novel and not a case study. I don't see how people can fawn all over his writing if it all comes across like this, because it doesn't feel natural or like a native speaker at all. Should published writing have to feel like it was written by a native speaker of that language? Which is worse, that Ha Jin sense of prose detachement and not-quite-being-there in the language, or the Gillian Flynn feeling that someone is "literally breathlessly talking to my best friend!!!" as they jabber in a purposely casually unpolished first person?

Coolidge was "meh" for entirely different reasons. Amity Shlaes apparently has writing skills and editors, but her structural and philosophical problems outweigh mere questions of storytelling quality. It's exciting to move into the modern presidents in my Prez Bios project, but I didn't know Shlaes was going to usher us in with this In-Defense-of-Reaganomics screed. She is so eager to prove that if we had listened to Calvin Coolidge's thrifty New England budgeting advice (not that silent Cal was discoursing to many people) we wouldn't have ruined our nation/economy/lives that she makes great leaps in both logic and paragraph construction.

Her book feels like this: "So, Calvin and Grace, now a settled married couple on the political rise, gazed with wonderment at the Boston politics Calvin was dipping his carefully scrubbed toe into, and they set up their Northampton kitchen and ordered new drapes that Calvin cleverly found in a catalog sent from his Amherst classmate who now runs a railroad car and why can't you people see that Wilson ruined everything by allowing Democrats to hang things in the White House windows!?! Those Democrats were signalling to all the world our fear, hiding from the economic truths of cost-cutting and good, solid American materials.  Also, you should pray at night before bed. Let's skip now to Calvin becoming vice-president. Oh wait, you mean I'm actually supposed to connect his life's timeline together in this biography? I'd rather show how his son dying clearly reflects the impending doom of our nation, with Franklin Roosevelt lurking somewhere on the White House lawn, poisoning the Coolidge boy himself. Or was that just a fever dream I had?"

In other words, I learned a lot, including how to read a biography/political interpretation skeptically, a lesson Shlaes teaches rather well.

Last, and very certainly least, we have Gone Girl, the book that took bestseller lists by storm. As one of my clearly brilliant Goodreads friends put it, "It is a book for non-readers who 'read' and like to recommend the book they are 'reading.'" The first half is engaging, if not engrossing, although it's only eighty or so pages before the intern who was in charge of removing "literally" from every other page apparently had to go back to class or checking Instagram or something. Frankly, I related a ton to "Diary Amy," which as I'm sure your book group pointed out gives us so much to ponder about relationships, psychology, how well we know people, blah blah blah. That's all well and good, but then the book starts to veer way off course with its (ideologically) flipped-about second half, and seriously, the less said about the ending, the better. Not because I can't say anything more without majorly spoilering (which is true) but because it's so awful and so doesn't quite work, despite how well Flynn thinks she has stacked the deck against one of her characters (get out! get out! get out! yes, you can get out! and by the way, you suck, too!) .... This book is just a big sigh. Also, a deeply troubling symbol of the state of the U.S. publishing industry: Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me, but don't waste time with silly things like editing, syntax, and vocabulary; what do you think we are, writers or something?

Ugh. I literally wanted to throw the book across the room when I literally  finished reading it, but I was literally reading it on a beach, so I literally had to drop it on the sand instead.

True or false: The word "literally" is used correctly in the previous sentence.

(I wouldn't suggest checking your answer with Gillian Flynn.)

A literary realist, a philosopher, and a crime novelist (walk into a bar?) Or, 2014: So Far

now reading: The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times by Francis Russell

Yes, yes, we're back. 2014 is going to be a year full of reading projects. No, this blog was not updated at any point in the latter half of 2013, a fact I most regret. But let's not dwell on the spilt milk, am I right? Let's pour ourselves a fresh glass - soy, if you please - and get cracking on all the books that are fit to read for 2014, which stretches so nicely ahead of us.

2014 reads so far

The trio with which I've opened the year are three oh-so-very different books.

The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
I've gone on a bit of a Henry James tear of late, not for any real reason other than that I had a collection of his novellas sitting around. I believe I got this packed-to-the-gills edition while I was at USC, but I also believe that I blew off some of my Henry James reading back in the American Lit major day, because I don't recall a thing.  Or is he just that unmemorable? The latter may be all too true. After mildly enjoying a few of the novellas/short stories (espcially "The Aspern Papers") (but that really is a short story, wouldn't you say? I think only Beast and The Turn of the Screw seem long enough to be novellas) I read this Beast last and thought it the most overrated of all. I've been hearing all my life about the homosexual subtext of this thought-provoking masterpiece and I've gotta say, I just didn't see it (neither the homosexuality, nor the provoked thoughts, nor the masterpiece). What on Earth happened between Archer (was that his name? I've already forgotten) and May Bartram?  Oh wait, Marcher. I knew Archer didn't sound right. Well anyway, what was that all about? These two might have the weirdest unconsummated relationship in all of literature, or maybe the weirdest of any relationship. Apparently Mr. James was trying to grapple with/tell us about fate and loneliness. So he has this guy who's convinced something big is going to happen to him and blah blah blah, but how does he get HER to join in with him waiting for this stupid fate? Why can't she wait for her own fate? This book blows me away by how unrealistic it is. Who lives like this? Literary realism, my foot. Anyway, it's over quickly enough, at least.

The Philosophy of Aristotle
Meanwhile, my philosophers project still hasn't really got off the ground, so I've decided to reframe it. I was going to read one philosopher per month each month of 2013, but instead all I did was read a bit about Thales online, then read The Dialogues of Plato (for Socrates) and Republic (for Plato) and then, wouldja look at that, 2013 was over. SO: we'll just say that doing the ancient Greeks was priming the pump, and now that I've done those guys AND Aristotle -- whom, surprise, surprise, I relate to the most (minus the misogyny) -- I will jump into a year of reading 12 philosophers, one per month, as soon as I'm ready to commence that project, which I think will be later this summer. (Because: so many other reading projects to get caught up with in the meantime.) I have to say that reading some of ol' Aristotle's Metaphysics and Logic can be tedious, but Poetics cheered me right up. And really, the guy was a genius. Except for the whole slavery and sexism, ugh, WHY?

212 by Alafair Burke
Aaaaand, a mystery. Mostly because I didn't read my yearly Alafair Burke in 2013 (I didn't set out to make it a yearly tradition, but the last three years living abroad in three different places, I've acquired three of her books on my Kindle for PC (because I have YET to see her paperbacks on sale in any bookstores in Asia; what gives?) and happened to electronically read one in each ESL-teaching-abroad apartment...and though I didn't get to one in China in 2013, everybody knows that even though it was January 2014 it wasn't the new Chinese year yet, so I was still safe. 212 is the third in her Ellie Hatcher series, the spunky Manhattan detective, and there's actually a fourth already out that I will get around to in some future summer. 212 came out a few years ago, I think while I was living in Chicago. As always, reading her books makes me miss living in New York City. This one was all right: interesting banter, really interesting characters (who make terrible choices) (yes, I am judging what some gals choose to do with their lives), and lots of different things going on.  However  SPOILER ALERT!!!   *spoiler spoiler go on to the next paragraph if you don't want a spoiler*  I think that what's-his-name the former cop should have been given more to do --perhaps more banter!--because he was kind of lurking in the background but he was so pivotal, helpful, and involved with different characters in different ways that it made it kind of obvious that he was the bad guy. However to my however, that didn't actually ruin the reading or anything because you still don't quite know how it all fit together. STILL SPOILERING HERE !!!! I also wasn't sure how I felt about the #ambiguousI'mnotambiguous climactic shooting. It was definitely "kind of shady, morality-wise," as Skinny Pete (or was it Badger?) would say. And finally, throughout the novel there are some paragraphs that pop up in which somebody talks too long, uninterrupted.  I often think about this myself, when writing dialogue.  You don't actually write dialogue exactly as people talk, obviously, but you can't cross the line into the place where it's JUST an explanation/rant/showing off of wisdom and no longer resembles real conversation flow. (Are you listening, William Styron in Set This House on Fire?) It might sound like I'm criticizing the book, but I actually just compared Alafair Burke to the great and mighty Styron, so there's that.

Is it interesting that I warned you away from the above paragraph if you don't want spoilers but feel under no obligation to do so, on this blog at least, for Henry James?  Hmmmm.

And now, you ask? Why, I'm reading a prez bio of course.  Stay tuned; in my next post we'll check in with the status of my bio-of-every-prez-to-see-where-we-went-wrong(a project obviously conceived and named during the Dubya "administration").

Tramplin' out that there vintage

now finished: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Fun Fact: John Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in the first published edition of The Grapes of Wrath. Upon receiving some galleys/proofs/something, he wrote his publisher or editor (I forget which) saying No, the whole thing! Print the whole song! It's relevant!

The Grapes of Wrath. An evocative phrase that says so much while being admirably just out of reach of those who don't want to think too much ever in figuring out what something means. Another Fun Fact: Steinbeck was slaving away on the novel and really trying to get its essence right and his dutiful wife (who typed his freaking manuscript - ugh! - but also made corrections and suggestions, so there's that) suggested the title! And then he rejoiced and was thankful and told his editor that Wife had come up with the genius title. Who knew?

OK, maybe some people knew. Just like maybe some people -- by which I of course mean "thousands upon thousands" -- knew all about how totally, incredibly awesome The Grapes of Wrath is. This is one of my finally-finally-dreadfully-late-to-the-party-finally books that defies all finally books.  Earlier this year, while the particular blog you are now reading was still taking its Great Firewall break, I posted elsewhere my list of Seriously-I-Have-Meant-to-Read-These-Forever books, which inspired me to get off my reading a** and go out and acquire one of them, and so I finally got The Grapes of Wrath, thus enabling me to check off a book on many a list: the Pulitzers, the Modern Library's Top 100, the Nobel winners, etc., and most importantly the oh-my-god-why-haven't-I-ever-read-this?! list.

One of the astonishingly good things about Grapes is that every time Ma or not-preacher Casy or Al or the couple they meet by the side of the highway or just about anyone in the book opens his or her mouth, you just get to ooze with delight at the wonderful things they say. How anyone's heart can not be warmed is beyond me.

Tragedy. Americana. One heck of a  road trip. Observations. Disaster. Avoidable disaster. Greed. Selflessness. Poverty. Compassion. Mistakes. Togetherness. The desire to be productive, which must be tempered by the equally important desire to not be wasteful. It's all in there.

Should I get spoilery on here?  The ending is something to behold, undoubtedly. I think for the moment I won't spoil, but I'll just say that it stunned me as it has stunned many a reader over the years. And I do mean the ending-ending, as in, the last paragraph. Perhaps I'll do a future, spoilery post about the ending.

Basically, I revamped my approach to life while reading this book. I now want to ask everyone I know to read it. If they haven't read it, I want to give them my copy that they might do so immediately if not sooner. If they have read it, I want to rejoice over it with them (and also maybe ask them why they never checked to make sure that I, too, had read it).

I think that if you have read it and don't like it, maybe you're kind of a jerk. I'm just sayin' ... It's just really, really enjoyable, while simultaneously being soul-crushingly devastating and heartwarming. How does he do that?!

And of course, the obligatory early 2000s comments: my, how history repeats itself! The more things change...! When will we ever learn?  And so forth.

Stop reading my blog and go read The Grapes of Wrath.  (But then come back here and we'll talk about it.)

Where Are We On This?

Ahhhh, corporate-speak. As someone pointed out, Orwell's dire predictions of government doublespeak weren't wrong, and they have manifested not just in the military but also in the corporate jargon to which we all so willingly bow down... (Then again, the military is one giant corporation, profiting from violence and death, so there's that.)  Anyway, a favorite corporate line delivered by bosses and managers and "leaders" everywhere is "Where are we on that?"  What a great way to ask someone what the hell is going on, and to blame them without overtly blaming them, which is what corporate-speak is made for.

Well, where we are -- the royal we of this blog -- is a certain country that had me absent without blog behind a certain Gr**t F*r*w*ll for the last few months. Now the issue of access has been mended, we hope for the long haul, and once again I can crank out the bloggage on both Linda Without Borders and on this, its Literary Supplement blog.

But I'm not going to drag you people through tedious posts about each and every book I've read since I last posted -- when was it? -- last October! Um, gulp. Yikes. That can't even all be blamed on a certain country with whom Donald Trump would like to start a war whenever it is most convenient and profitable for him.

Just a rundown, then!

• The End of 2012

After finally reading The Brothers Karamazov down yonder in Mexico (seriously, finally -- I even have a "Finally" shelf on Goodreads now, inspired by that and Cloud Atlas), I spent the remaining time in Mexico reading John Updike's Rabbit, Run (my "U" pick for my Top Half of my A-to-Z Literary Blog Project), Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph (one of my reading-five-essential-books-and/or-authors-to-familiarize-myself-with-more-literature-in-Spanish project), and Benjamin Harrison  by Charles Calhoun (#23 in my Presidents: Where Did We Go Wrong? project). I spend a lot of time in the projects. No thanks to the Mexican post office/customs/federales that stole my B. Harrison and McKinley books shipment the first time around, forcing me to re-order them. I still like picturing some cartel king somewhere learning all about these random Midwestern presidents of the late 19th century. Rabbit, Run was OK; I wanted something more from Updike but should appreciate it more for its time, perhaps. (Yes, I just called you old if you are an Updike contemporary - sorry about that.) It also has officially eclipsed The Shining for Most Memorable Bathtub Scene. Borges, on the other hand, is an unequivocal genius. Benjamin Harrison is significant mainly for being the point at which we depart from the chronology of presidents matching the chronology of presidencies, and from here on out when you say so-and-so is the twenty- or thirty-whatever-eth president you annoy me because really it's that they are the twenty- or thirty-whatever-eth presidency and you are counting Grover Cleveland as two people.

I then returned to the U.S. on a bit of a Pulitzer tear. I had just finished listening to the audio book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, which was all kinds of fascinating and one of my favorite things I've listened to because I just learned so much (the purpose of my listening to audio books at all -- I still hate being read to, but I pretend I'm listening to, like, really in depth public radio features). Back in Arizona, I launched into my next audio Pulitzer winner, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which I really kind of hated. It's pretty terrible, and the combination of Pulitzer and learning just a few things barely kept me hanging on.  As for actual book-books, I returned to the U.S. reading Gone With the Wind, which seems appropriate, and I of course have to wonder why I never read this before, it being so Atlanta-y as well as famous and Pulitzery, and I just adored it. It's remarkable and misunderstood. Next up were The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (good!) and the Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (also good, and even inspiring on the eve of my departure).

• It's 2013!  Let's go read in Asia. 

Continuing the Pulitzer and the Prez Project themes, I spent January reading In the Days of McKinley  by Margaret Leech, a really well done bio and one that made me feel lots of warm fuzzy things for its subject. McKinley just genuinely tried to be nice to people, almost all of the time. Couldn't we all use a bit more of that?! I commenced my new audio book with the advent of my new job's commute: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson, whom you may know as the author of The Devil in the White City. Good stuff. I like German things, and I like learning about what the hell is going on behind the scenes when people are violent warmongers. There's never any excuse for it, of course, but we must try to understand.

• February: Lunar New Year and reading on the beach in the Philippines!

Not the whole month, unfortunately, but we did have a nice vacay and on the trip I was pretty excited to go to Manila and see Taft Avenue and McKinley Drive after just having read all about the beginnings of their unfortunate involvement there. Before the holiday I completed William Styron's Set This House on Fire, my "S" pick for the A-to-Z Top Half, and it was a fun Italian lesson and good for the whole self-indulgent-writer-thing, but kind of a sophomore effort compared to Lie Down in Darkness. I spent my beach time reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, volume one of the magnificent (as pretty much everyone says) trilogy bio of TR (don't call him Teddy!)

• In Like a "Finally!", Out Like an A-to-Z Top Half Project

In March I completed two novels, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which I came to rather enjoy and which reminded me with so many strong sentimental feelings of Amanda and everyone else at Cambridgeside as well as some other books I have also meant to read since that time (but none more meant to read since Cambridge days than Cloud Atlas), and Creation by Gore Vidal, my "V" pick for the A-to-Z project top half, which was pretty long and rambly but interesting, too, it can't be denied. Then it was back to Theodore...

• April Was Actually Not the Cruelest Month This Year. Go Figure.

...and to be honest, Theodore Rex, volume two, was not quite as good as Edmund's first TR, but it was still really, really interesting and better than a lot of bios. A bad day in the TR trilogy is like a good day in some other books. Including, through no fault of the author but unfortunately in my experience, the audio book I was listening to during April, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1850 by Daniel Walker Howe. The book itself (another Pulitzer winner) is informative and fascinating, and I knew I would enjoy listening about that era, which I have been saying as I read all my prez bios from that era is a massively interesting and under-appreciated time in U.S. history. The narration and splicing together of apparently two different narrators were horrible and nearly drove me batty. Why do I persist with Audible? Sigh. Sometimes it really is great, though, to listen and learn. Anyway, after Theodore Rex I read The Dialogues of Plato because I have another project this year (yes, really) in which I am reading a bit about/by one philosopher per month. I'm actually pretty far behind on this project, which I meant to start in January and then February but didn't until Thales in March (just online reading about him) and then Socrates in April. Notice I said Socrates, as the Dialogues were really about him. In May I am moving on to actual Plato-Plato.

• Which Brings Us to the Merry Merry Month of May

And I squeezed in a novel while we traveled to Vietnam, appropriately (I figured) my annual Nelson DeMille. This year was The Gold Coast. Oh, how hilarious to revisit Long Island and its totally out of touch rich assholes! Worth it for that alone, but of course we all know how much I love me some Nelson DeMille biting wit and sarcasm.

And, there! We are caught up! I am now in the middle of a bunch of books at once, due to a series of unfortunate coinciding factors, but a couple of them are just about China and Chinese learning and whatnot. I am actually read-reading the third Edmund Morris volume, Colonel Roosevelt, as well as The Grapes of Wrath, whose praises I will sing next time I post.

Be sure to check in here with the Literary Supplement blog, posted every Sunday, as we are now back with a vengeance! Or at least with lots of bookmarks!

Trouble With the Karamazovs

now finished: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reading the same book for a month? Wishing I had more time to devote to it? Folding down pages and lamenting my lack of ability to read in the original language? Ahhh, must be time for another Big Russian Novel.

This one was destined to be anti-climactic. I've been meaning to read The Brothers Karamazov for SO long. I kept trying to persuade my Los Angeles book group peeps to read it (L.A.! That's so many cities ago!...although I need to go back there, by the way) when we had our The Books We Should Have Read in High School book group. That being said, they were probably right about not reading it at that time; I guarantee we would not have had a 100% successful finish rate. And, I no longer think of this as a Book We Should Have Read in High School whatsoever. College, maybe, though. In fact, college definitely. It's that kind of book. I probably would have loved it in college. I didn't really love it right now. I thought it was long-winded.

Now, recall that you are reading someone who absolutely loves her some long Russian novels. (And short Russian novels, but aren't there fewer of those?) Who read Anna Karenina (the whole thing! really!) in high school. Who considers reading War and Peace one of the top five greatest life experiences. Who has often pondered how Russia, much like the American South, does it -- how those two places crank out so freakin' much good literature, although they never make readers actually want to live there or anything.  Long is great. Long-winded is quite another thing. I'm not entirely sure that Dostoevsky edited this book at all.

It turns out that The Brothers Karamazov should be even longer; he was planning to write a three-part saga, but he died. This was his final novel. I kind of see him as this old man (even though he was only sixty-ish) with a life's great work behind him so everyone just lets him write and create and do whatever he wants in his art, without trying to stop/edit/finesse him to make it better. Kind of like Clint Eastwood does now. We don't really demand anything of Clint anymore; we just take what he gives us and continue to praise his genius. I think Dostoevsky was kind of rambly in the Brothers but no one cared. Why not? Just let it all wash over you. (No word on whether he kept an empty chair around to stimulate discussion.)

So, there are a few great things about the book. One, he has this crazy ridiculous insight into the human mind. So you can actually get through the book on that alone, marveling at the way these flawed characters are depicted and delighting in some of his pithy summaries of thought processes that are a bit like Kerouac's in the way they make you think, "Wow, he finally said what my brain has been trying to say for twenty years."

But then you kind of want the plot to go somewhere instead of reading five mystical pages about what place love and Christ and death have in our jacked-up world...

Eventually the plot goes places, of course. I frankly think the book got really good around page 500. (I am aware that this is FAR too much to ask of, oh, most readers.) And despite the fact that SO few people read this blog and even fewer are planning to ever read The Brothers Karamazov, I just can't offer up spoilers, which means I can't talk about huge, gigantic, major, point-of-it-all happenings like "whodunnit" and why.

I can say that Alyosha was annoying at first, but then I really got to like him, once I kind of understood him. Dmitri seems like a big jerk, but once you tap into his confusion you start to understand him a little better, too. Ivan is presented as all dark and dismal and atheist but I kind of liked him more in the first place than I did the others.

Another great thing about this book is that there are definitely great quotes. Like:

"...you, I, all of us are in a state of aberration, and there are ever so many examples of it: a man sits singing a song, suddenly something annoys him, he takes a pistol and shoots the first person he comes across, and no one blames him for it."   --p. 528, ISBN: 1-59308-045-X

He wrote that line in 1879, kids!

Speaking of the edition I read, I would really like it if the Barnes and Noble Classics edition hadn't told me a major plot point on the back cover. I mean, I guess everyone is just kind of expected to know what the book is about, but I am still of the belief that anything that happens after three hundred pages should not be on the back cover, period.

Basically, this book is really different from Crime and Punishment and Notes From Underground, my two previous Dostoevsky endeavors, both of which I loved. This book is more winding, more overtly philosophical about Big Questions (is there a god? what is family? what is love? death? society? justice? and so on), more pointless in some ways (Ilusha and Kolya Krassotkin....why? just, why?), and definitely more long-winded. Which, I already mentioned that.

However, I will say one thing: this book would be really hard to fake. The experience of it is quite different from its fame and all you hear about it in the world. I think one could fake The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick or Hamlet a lot more easily. The Brothers Karamazov is really famous, but what do we know about its details in the world? It's about a family. With brothers. It's big and Russian. It's full of ideas and peasants and society. 'Cause it's Russian. With brothers. This, my friends, barely scratches the surface. As much as I think Moby Dick is utterly wasted on high school and college students and has so much more to say to adults who are disillusioned with life in the workplace, I still think the famous ideas about The Whale match the book itself, more or less. Not so with this book. So that's my advice to you: if you are one of the millions who has not read this book, don't try to fake it to impress that potential date at the bar who adores it. You will be called out faster than you can say Smerdyakov.

When Yalom Babbled

finished Sept. 4th: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom

Apparently, this book has a subtitle. The whole thing is When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession. Well, as I noted on Goodreads when I first finished it, it didn't strike me as a novel of obsession at all, more like a novel of jabber.

I mean, with a title like When Nietzsche Wept I would expect it to be most if not all of the following: dark, literary, intellectual, profound, edgy, dense.  This book has been on my bookstore radar for years, bought by lots of those black-clad young professionals and artists and dark-side-of-preppy university students. I had high hopes. But, Yalom's novels just really aren't like that at all. They're downright lighthearted.

In fact, as I read When Nietzsche Wept, I began questioning myself as to why Yalom even made it to the top half 13 authors of my A-to-Z literary blog project.  The first book I read of his, when I originally chose him as my 'Y' author, was The Schopnhauer Cure, and it was like this in a lot of ways:  oddly frivolous,  pretty contrived, and in many ways not really a novel at all, but forced into the format of one.

Anyway, it's interesting to learn about Nietzsche and the psychologist Dr. Joseph Breuer whom Nietzsche apparently never met but whom Yalom imagines him meeting for this novel. But then, as with all historical fiction, I find myself wondering how much of the imaginings are just distortions that would never have happened but exist only in the author's mind but are now going to be forever associated in MY mind with these real historical figures (and this is why I hate historical fiction, duh.)

But if this book hadn't skipped along quickly like the trifle it is, it would have annoyed me. I am definitely not passing Yalom on to the semi-finals. His books remind me how interesting these philosophers are -- I mean, I totally get his love for/admiration of/desire to write about cool people in Western Philosophy -- but mostly they just make me want to put down his novel and go read the philosophers' actual words, myself.