Citizen Reader

Two non-starters.

This past week I looked at two books that had great titles, but after I started them, I almost immediately realized they were not what I am in the mood for this week.*

The first was Arnold Weinstein's Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books, a scholarly book with different sections on different periods in a person's life, and the literature he has found that sums up the human condition at those various times in our lives. It's not a bad idea, but after I nearly fell asleep reading the following paragraph (in the introduction, mind you) I knew I'd be taking this book back to the library unread.

"And, of course, that is what I am arguing in this book: that literature shows us who we are; it never stops doing this. I've posited this view before, but never with quite the personal conviction that you'll see in the pages aghead. This (very likely valedictory) book also constitutes something of a conclusion to my career. The ground I cover--from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Art Spiegelman and Jonathan Safran Foer--represents pretty much a roll call of the works of literature I've dealt with over a lifetime, but I now undersand that they illuminate my own lifetime. And the personal voice I've allowed myself throughout this book is a voice that finds both its matter and its manner, its substance and its timbre, in the books I love." (p. xiv.)

Blah, blah. A lot of the authors he cites are not ones that do anything for me, either, including William Faulkner and Jonathan Safran Foer (one of my all-time least favorites, as a matter of fact).

The other book was titled All about Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion, and it's by Lisa Appignanesi. I didn't get far enough in it to do it much justice in a summary, but I think the author considers different types of love--new crushes, lust, friendship, familial love, etc.--and describes how all of those types have been described in literature, pop culture, and other references, as well as how she's experienced it in her own life. It was all right, but it wasn't doing a whole lot for me either, and its due date was rapidly approaching, so I just took it back. Very disappointing--I kind of had high hopes for both these titles. Perhaps they were both just too philosophical for me for summer/autumn reading.

*I'm not sure what I am in the mood for this week. I've been doing the crosswords in my New York magazine, and bouncing back and forth between a William Langewiesche title and a science fiction novel.

A girl can dream, can't she?

If I had world enough and time, I would take the book London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City (by Steve Roud) into a room with me, my fuzzy red throw blanket, and some coffee and bon-bons, and never come out. And I'd like to do this during a month like we're currently having: way too much snow and ridiculously cold.*

Roud shares tidbits of history and legend from every nook and cranny in London--and I do mean every one. It's a thick book, with dense printing, organized so that each chapter covers a different borough and is further subdivided according to its stories, with headings like "Cock Lane, Smithfield." I read a bit of the first chapter ("Cock Lane is an inconspicuous, narrow thoroughfare, off Giltspur Street, Smithfield, which suddenly acquired international fame in 1762 when a house in the road became the scene of one of the best-known hauntings in London's history..."), but the sad fact of the matter is that I'm not going to have time to read the whole thing, and truthfully, it just reminds me I'm not IN London and therefore makes me sad.

But I have a plan! Not to put too much pressure on CRjr or anything, but I have this dream that during college he'll study abroad for a year--at Oxford! And while he does Mr. CR and I will move to London for six months, to be able to see him once in a while and to take an extended look around ourselves!! And then I can take this book along and have time to explore with it. Right? It'll totally happen, right?**

*Cold is one thing, but next week our forecasted highs are set to be several degrees below the normal LOWS for this time of year. And we've got so much snow (yes, yes, I know, still nothing compared to what the East coast has been getting this winter) that backing blindly out of our driveway between the monster drifts/snow piles on each side has become a suicide mission.

**I know it'll never happen. For one thing CRjr probably won't be able to afford college anywhere (have you seen how fast tuition is going up these days?), much less Oxford, and for another, he may grow up to find someplace like, say, France, more interesting than Great Britain.*** But I can still dream.

***This is the sort of thing I worry about, to keep myself from worrying about his health and peer pressure and other mundane crap like that.

Follow-up: Running the Books

If you'll remember, a while back I briefly reviewed Avi Steinberg's Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.

When I reviewed it, I hadn't quite finished it. I just wanted to follow up here and say I did finish it, and I really did like it all the way through. The last 25 pages are actually quite spectacular, which is noteworthy (so many memoirs start strong, and then start sputtering on to less-than-memorable endings). My one quibble with the book is that I think it could be about 75-100 pages shorter, but that's primarily because I believe most memoirs shouldn't be longer than 300 pages.*

Still and all: a good read.

*This is a corollary to my rule about movies only needing to be 90 minutes long.

I need to remember to read this when I'm retired and have months to kill.

There are detailed biographies, and there are detailed biographies, and then there is Jenny Uglow's biography Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories.

I really love Elizabeth Gaskell. (And reading her books too--not just watching the BBC versions of North and South and Cranford, although that's how my interest was piqued.) And a friend of mine is a very big fan of Jenny Uglow's writing. So I thought this would be a very happy marriage of interesting subject and recommended writer.

But I just can't do it. I made it all the way to page 27, and I have to admit that I am not going to get any further (for now) and take it back to the library. In all fairness, twenty-seven pages of this biography are equal to at least fifty pages in a less strenuously researched one. Consider:

"The whole 'Holland clan,' as their friends called them, played a part in Elizabeth's early years. Her uncle Peter Holland, an irascible, humorous man, who limped from a leg injured in a fall from a gig, was the local doctor. He lived in Church House at the other end of town and when Elizabeth was small, she travelled in his dog-cart on his rounds in the country practice--much as George Eliot, nine years younger, was to travel with her land-agent father. His practice flourished, and his apprentices (like those of Mr. Gibson in Wives and Daughters) lodged in Church House with his large family. His first wife, Mary Willetts, who died in 1803, was a niece of Josiah Wedgwood, and Peter, linked to the wider Unitarian network, was an influential figure, more involved with political and mercantile life than the term 'local doctor' implies." (p. 16.)

There is a lot going on in that paragraph. I can find no faults with Uglow's research or writing--both are very skillfully done--but I simply do not have the time right now to finish a biography in which every page is that dense, and there are more than 600 said pages. So, like I said: someday, when I am retired, and have the weeks and months to give this book that it deserves, I'll be back for it.

A tale of two fictions.

Over the past week I've been trying to match the nonfiction I'm reading, book for book, with fiction. It's not working--the current count is three nonfiction titles, two fiction titles.

The first novel I'm reading (well, listening to, as I do the dishes) is Elizabeth Kostova's title The Historian. It's a big old thick book which takes on the legend of Dracula, told from the multiple viewpoints (and during different time periods) of a historian's mentor, the historian, and his daughter. I wanted to like it, because it got a lot of good reviews, and the Lesbrarian* loved it. But I can't help it--I'm totally bored. I've been bored from the very first tape--and I'm only listening to the abridged version. (I do not believe in abridged books and would have preferred the unabridged version, but it wasn't available at my library.) It is so boring that I've actually started to make up my own dialogue for it. When the historian's love interest wakes up in the morning and discovers she has been attacked by Dracula, I supplied new dialogue: "Helen, you've been cheating on me with that mad fox Dracula, haven't you, you hussy?"**

In all fairness, I still have a tape to go; maybe that'll turn it all around. But the author simply takes too long to tell too little. Honestly, if I could tell modern fiction authors just one thing, it would be that you don't have to write a 600-page book to write a good book. Really.

The other fiction I've been reading is Suzanne Collins's YA novel The Hunger Games, which I loved. I had to summarize it for another project last week, and here's how I did so: "It’s set in a (maybe not too distant?) dystopian future, in which the ruling powers of Panem, ensconced carefully in their Capitol, keep the rest of the population under control by demanding 'tributes' from different regions of the country to compete to the death in the annual Hunger Games. The tributes are, of course, people’s children–every child between the age of 12 and 18 has their name entered in a drawing, and each region of Panem has to send a male and female tribute to the games. But when Katniss Everdeen’s younger sister is chosen, she does the unthinkable–and volunteers to enter the Games in her place."

I loved this book, and was happy to pass it along to Mr. CR, who blows through fantasy and science fiction at an alarming rate (and is thus difficult to keep fully supplied), and he also enjoyed it. In addition to liking the action part of the novel (which is rare enough for me; I usually prefer character-driven fiction to story-driven fiction), I loved the love triangle--both of Katniss's love interests are viable characters (unlike in Stephenie Meyers's Twilight books, which purport to feature a love triangle, but don't). And the best part? It's a very readable 374 YA pages. That's the way to do it!

*This post is dedicated to the Lesbrarian, who wanted me to read The Historian. Our tastes continue to be nearly exactly opposite! It's a wonder of nature, I tell you.

**Also, just once? I'd love to read a Dracula book where Dracula has a sense of humor. Really. I think you can be both evil and hilarious. In fact, I think a funny Dracula would be even more terrifying, in a weird sort of way.

Free at last, free at last.

I know. One should not use the words of Martin Luther King Jr. frivolously, especially during Black History Month. But I can't help it. Yesterday I finally finished listening to Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence on CD, and all I can say about it is thank God almighty, I am free at last.

Well, okay, that's not ALL I can say about it. And my apologies to those readers who like Edith Wharton, and feel she can a) really tell a story, and b) wield language well. Those things may be very true. But I can't help it: I hate her. And I think I hate her because I hate her characters.

For those of you not familiar with the story, Wharton's classic is set in the 1870s (it was published in 1921) and concerns the upper level of moneyed New York society. The two principal characters are Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska; Newland is a prosperous and proper young man who is about to become engaged to May Welland, who is the daughter of another prosperous and proper New York family. Ellen Olenska, also known throughout the narrative as Countess Olenska, has recently returned home to the bosom of her family after leaving her scoundrel of a European husband. She is also May's cousin. Of course, Archer falls in love with Ellen, who he can never have (even if she were to get a divorce, it wouldn't be proper), and Ellen falls in love with him, but he goes ahead and marries young May anyway. Lots of portentous tragedy ensues.

Now. It may be true that the writing is beautiful, and after someone commented on that, I did try to listen more carefully to the words and sentences of Wharton's tale. But all too often the narration was drowned out as I listened and muttered "Newland, you're such a dick," "You can do better, May," or "Oh, Ellen, you're leaving forever, blah blah blah" (or countless variations thereof). Mr. CR was a little afraid of me, I think; he never likes to hear muttering coming from the kitchen. But I couldn't help it.

At the end of the day, I couldn't take the problems of rich people who have their health seriously. Good lord. Another fairly simple rule of thumb should be, if you love someone, don't get married to someone else. And if you do, don't expect me to think it's high tragedy. I'm just going to think you're a dick.

Should I stay or should I go?

Well, the question is really "should I keep reading or should I stop?" but that's not nearly as catchy.

All summer long I have been trying to read Dan Simmons's behemoth novel Drood,* set in nineteenth-century London, and I can't quite get it done. Either I don't get it started and it goes overdue at the library, or it just sits around and stares at me balefully while I pick up other books instead. But this week I decided to tackle it; one of my very favorite readers suggested I read it, and I want to be able to tell her that I tried.

And now I have a problem. Although the first fifty pages were pretty slow, I'm now at around the 150-page mark and things are picking up a bit. It follows the rather macabre activities of authors and friends, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, as they chase down a shadowy creature named "Drood." (That's really about all of the story I've gotten so far.) So what's the problem?

The book is 775 pages long, that's the problem. I mean, really. Almost 800 pages? Do I really have the time or desire to devote 800 pages' worth of devotion to a book that I'm not really sold on, as of yet? Add that to the fact that I'm no Charles Dickens fan (although the novel is narrated by Wilkie, who is way more interesting than Dickens, mercifully) and I'm just not sure why I'm slogging through. What I'm feeling like doing is re-reading Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night (which was also long, but spectacular) and finding a good biography of Wilkie Collins instead.

So: what's the verdict? Anyone out there read this one? Should I keep going? Or cut and run?

*Shows how much I know: evidently Dickens's last (unfinished) book was titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Do I really have any business reading this book if that's how clueless I am about Dickens?

Hiatus from the hiatus.

Okay, who knew it was going to kill me to stop blabbing my stupid book opinions for more than one day? The dandelions will just have to wait a minute, primarily because I have a question for you.

Has anyone out there ever read a Wally Lamb book? He's the author of the Oprah books She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, as well as the new novel (based partially on the Columbine school shootings) titled The Hour I First Believed.

I've never read any Wally Lambs (as I typically stay well clear of books longer than 500 pages, which all of his are), but I'm about halfway through The Hour I First Believed. And here's my question: Would it be fair to describe him as trumped-up, literary Jodi Picoult? That's just a feeling I'm getting, and it may be unfair, but I wondered if anyone else had ever had that feeling as well.

Last but not least, please excuse me while I use the blog as a title dumping ground for nonfiction books from the library that I don't have time to read right now but definitely want to get back in the future. I recognize this will be largely an exercise in futility, as by the time I come back to these books, roughly a million more nonfiction books that I will want to read will have been published, but you can't blame me for trying. So here's a few hiatus quick reviews:

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, by Rose George. This book looks so, so awesome I don't even know where to start. I'll just start where she does, quoting a Nepali sanitation activist: "Just as HIV/AIDS cannot be discussed without talking frankly about sex, so the problem of sanitation cannot be discussed without talking frankly about shit."

The Pessimist's Guide to History, by Doris Flexner and Stuart Berg Flexner. A compendium of horrific and horrifying historical events arranged by year. I totally want to make a line of "What was Happening When You Were Born!" birthday cards listing historical events from this book. But then, I am a pessimist.

The Thoreau You Don't Know, by Robert Sullivan. If any author rivals my love for William Langewiesche, it is Robert Sullivan, author of the superlative micro-history Rats. I love him. I couldn't care less about Thoreau, but I'll follow Sullivan wherever he leads.

Becoming Queen, by Kate Williams. Beautiful and readable looking British history, about the life of Queen Victoria. A must-read for Anglophiles everywhere.

Now this is the stuff of nightmares.

Just a week ago I was having nightmares from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a dark novel of the apocalypse. Now I'm having them* from the most buzzed-about, feel-good, coming-of-age bestselling novel of the summer: David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

Now, granted. This is a novel about a boy and his dogs. I am not a dog person. Emphatically.** Ergo, I had no business reading this novel. But it had buzz! It's a first novel! It's set in northern Wisconsin! It's a bestseller! I felt that I had to.

Here's the first issue; the book synopsis is: "Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home. When Edgar's father dies suddenly, Claude insinuates himself into the life of the farm--and into Edgar's mother's affections." (From the dust jacket.)

Sound familiar? That's right--we have a modern day retelling of Hamlet on our hands. (Or, as one reviewer has referred to it, Hamlet meets Huck Finn.) It probably doesn't help that I've already read one modern retelling of Hamlet this year (and it was a LOT better), or that Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear, is one of my most-hated books ever. And I like it when old stories are cleverly retold. But Hamlet meets Huck Finn? God, talk about trading on the literary reputation of others.

Second issue: On page 30, we have the first chapter of several, told from a DOG'S point of view. I find that obnoxious. I do not find it literary. I do not find it brave. I do not find it avant garde. I find it annoying as hell.

Third issue: This book is 562 pages long. Maybe if I was the type of person who got four or more weeks of vacation a year, that would be acceptable. I don't, and it's not. Even if Wroblewski was going for a massive American epic marriage between Hamlet and Huck Finn (God help us), I'm sorry, but you should be able to do that in 400 pages. Where have all the good editors gone?

So yes. I am defying everyone who has loved this book, which is evidently pretty much all the reviewers and the majority of the American book-buying public when I say: Skip it. I don't care. I feel good saying it. And, also? If you're looking for Shakespeare retellings, try Lin Enger's Undiscovered Country (which is the other Hamlet book I read this year). Sure, it's a YA novel, but it's only 320 pages and roughly a million times better. Or, if you need a movie instead of a book, even watching the BBC's modern adaption of Macbeth (with James McAvoy, rowr) will still save you hours.

*I'm not kidding. Last night I dreamt I was reading some other novel, and although it was pretty good, the last chapter was told from a dog's point of view. I woke up screaming.

**This situation is not helped by living in a neighborhood where some of our "neighbors" regularly let their huge stupid dogs wander around unleashed.

Whew!

Well, I feel a bit like I've really accomplished something this week, when all I've really done is listened to all eighteen CDs of Alison Weir's biography Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England. I've been working on it for a month. If I'm this tired after listening to it, I can only imagine how tired Weir must have been after writing it!

I've been reading enough English history that I'm starting to feel the real story in British history has been the women. Seems like most of the men Kings kept themselves pretty busy with mistresses (male and female), tournaments, and fighting battles on and off, while Queens, like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella, were negotiating peace treaties, pulling political strings, and oh yeah, having all the babies. Just think about it; the sheer mass of ruling time, particularly during the past few centuries, for one thing, has been all girl: Elizabeth II and Victoria (not to mention, a bit further back, Elizabeth 1). Pretty wild stuff.

The book itself? Pretty good, but more suited for listening to than reading. Weir's always a bit detailed for me (but then,I always was a lazy student, so that makes sense) but it's perfect to listen to while washing the dishes. She started a chapter, I got the gist, I daydreamed for a while and washed a couple of plates, and when I came back to reality chances were pretty good that she was still on the same story so I didn't feel like I'd missed much. All in all I'd recommend it simply because it did give me the impression that Isabella was one formidable woman (you don't just overthrow your husband, the King, and set your son up in his place if you're the retiring sort, nor do you earn the nickname the "She-Wolf of France").

And, as a special (and coincidental) bonus fun fact: Isabella died 650 years ago today, on August 22, 1358. Weird, huh?