Reading, with twins?? Yes! During naps, in the evenings, on weekends.
Here are some of my favorite books from my posts. If you wind up clicking one of the links and buying a book (via Powell’s or Amazon) you help support this blog / the twins’ college fund. Thanks!
Short stories (great when you’re constantly interrupted!):
A collection of stories that capture the end of innocence or the end of eras, but beauty and mystery tinge the darkest moments.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon (especially if you’re an Amazon Mom and need good reading — stat!), click here
Odd, quirky, realistically-supernatural stories that invoke a sense of wistful nostalgia even when set in the present time.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here
Novels:
A fifteen year old girl, leaving her already troubled past behind, navigates the Stark River with little more than a rifle and a fierce desire to live on her own terms.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
The Appalachian woods can give privacy to a life … or concealment to a grave.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Nonfiction:
The title almost says it all … but with an otter pipe, a rhinoceros woodcut, a Hawaiian feather helmet given to Captain Cook, a Victorian tea set, a contemporary credit card — the pleasure is in the details.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Academic(ish):
Explores the silences in literature — how gender, class and race can stop the flow of words for a time, or a lifetime. Stunning.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Super-fun:
Henry VIII: a king who would bow to no one’s authority — not even the Pope’s … until the next full moon.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Katniss Everdeen takes her sister’s place in the Hunger Games, a punishing contest in which two teenage “tributes” from each of the 12 Districts are forced to fight to the death.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Katniss’s survival of the Hunger Games is seen as an act of defiance against the Capitol. Can she survive the Hunger Games again?
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
The mockingjay: a hybrid of government-spy jabber jays and naturally occurring mocking birds. Who’s mocking who? Rebellion is spreading …
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
A wall of ice, the threat of invaders, gigantic wolves, evil twins, questionable heirs — and Sean Bean plays Eddard Stark on HBO. What’s not to love? The first book in an on-going series.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Looking for something else? Try here:
Or, for Amazon, here: Amazon’s book page
***
This is the book that started me thinking, years ago, about drawing room life, the dangers of television and some long-forgotten lessons from The Age of Reason:
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future.
***
From Adieu Downton Abbey:
In my last Downton Abbey post I wrote about being a mother to baby twins, and how it felt like living in another, slower century — not much happened, but there was lots of time to ruminate about what did. It reminded me of drawing room life, which is what I propose to return to — at least a little bit — in honor of dear Downton.
But I don’t have sisters or servants and I don’t play bridge. So I think I’ll curl up on my non-silk sofa with a good book instead.
Perhaps I’ll choose …
Or I might go with
Then, of course, there’s downstairs …
***
Housecleaning with E.B. White:
Moving always makes me think of E.B. White’s essay “Goodbye to 48th Street” (which can be found in the Essays of E.B. White). In this essay, White tries to send some of his worldly goods back out into the world before a move to Maine. If I’m troubled by a plastic skull and a glass Last-Supper platter, White is confounded by such objects as an academic trophy and a wood chip that a beaver has gnawed on. He tries taking one object a day out to a street-side trash can but soon realizes that a “man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff.”
***
Years ago a friend loaned me this book, which I just rediscovered while purging my library:
It’s a little hokey in spots, but we became so into its basic tenants (although not so much the last chapter, about a different kind of cleanse) that neither of us really owns it. We pass it back and forth, whenever one of us needs a cleaning pep talk, or the other feels like the book is taking up too much space.
Kingston reminds us that the root of the word “clutter” comes from the Middle English “clotter,” which means to coagulate. Yuck — all kinds of junk clotting up your space, leaving you stuck and stale. I don’t know how much I believe in “energy flow” (or feng shui) but I do know that clutter seems to attract more clutter, and a clean and spare house makes me happier than a dusty junky one. And Kingston’s main point makes all kinds of sense: if you clear your clutter you have more room for your actual life.
***
What a terrific book! It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from obscurity (he was a blacksmith’s son — his enemies at court never let him forget it) to be Henry VIII’s chief minister during the king’s turbulent divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, the execution of Thomas More and various misadventures after that.
Usually More is painted as the hero of these stories — a Catholic martyr to his conscience, which wouldn’t allow him to name the King head of the Church or grant his right to divorce his wife — but Mantel makes Cromwell, who I always saw as simply a tool of Henry’s, a full-fledged person: husband, father, guardian, admirer of women, of fashion, of food, of learning, a man committed to his his work, his faith, his king.
It’s a difficult book — in a way. Mantel is slippery with pronouns: sometimes it takes a quick backtrack to figure out which “he” is speaking. But at the same time, I couldn’t put it down. Even when it was past my bedtime, even when exhausted by my one-year-old twins. I was pained, last night, to have the book end long before his story ends.
But then, this morning, on Amazon, I discovered Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel (Wolf Hall Trilogy)
Soon Henry’s marriage to Anne falters and she becomes nothing but in the way. Cromwell is called upon to try her for treason. And another lady-in-waiting is waiting — for Henry — in the wings.
***
… when the twins were around nine months old, I thought: enough. And I started to carve out writing time. Three books helped.
The first book was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
There’s a lot in this book that strikes me as hokey, but there’s more that feels useful. The book’s two main prescriptions, so to speak, can change your creative life:
- Every day, first thing, write “morning pages.” These should be handwritten in a notebook. It doesn’t matter what you write in your morning pages as long as you write them. Three pages. Every morning. (My own suggestion: if three pages seems like a lot, get a smaller notebook!)
- Every week take yourself out on an artist’s date. This should be done alone (not with your significant other — even if he, too, is an artist). This date can be as elaborate as flying to New York City to tour the Met, or as simple as poking around the used book store up the street. Again, it doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you’re doing something that’s fun and in some way supports your creativity and/or your identity as an artist.
The second book was Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues.
This book also prescribes writing daily pages — mother pages, Garrigues calls them. (If you are already writing morning pages, trying to fit another set of pages into the same day may be impossible — especially if you’re, like, actually a mother! I recommend alternating — or saving one set of pages for a weekend outing to a cafe or some other writer-friendly place.)
What I like about Writing Motherhood is that it prompts you to think primarily about your story as a mother — not your children’s stories (shrimp curls, head lifts, push-ups, etc.). Stories of motherhood are surprisingly — and sadly — few and far between; this book helps change that.
The next book wasn’t what I expected — not even what I wanted, really — but it turned out to be a very good thing: Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz.
This is a more practical, less reflective book. If you want to publish your writing in magazines (parent-y or otherwise) this book gives great advice — how to sketch a feature article, how to write a query letter, how to conduct an interview, etc. This becomes highly useful if you’ve been writing morning or mother pages and find you have something you want to revise for publication.
In my earlier post Blogging moms = happier moms, I wrote that I’ve started to see blogging as its own form of writing — not something all that separate from, say, essay writing. If you’re a writer and a mother, writing is no less important than mothering.
Some days are harder than others. Some days my writing has to take a backseat. Or be chucked in the trunk. Or left behind entirely.
Some hours of those hard days I wonder what I was thinking, trying to write through this first year of the twins’ lives. But then I remember the motto that my husband and I came up with when the twins were only a few months old: It can be done!
It can, and these books can help.
***
I’ve been reading Bitter Fame
This is not a very smart thing to do — read anything about or by Sylvia Plath — when you are feeling a bit imbalanced yourself. I remember reading The Bell Jar
… Perversely, I’ve been stalling over unpacking — the one thing that would get me settled and balanced — by reading Bitter Fame. I knew this was rather unwise, but I was still in the early stages of the book, when Plath launches herself first at Smith and then at Cambridge, her suicide attempt at the age of 21 soon eclipsed by her writing successes and her dramatic meeting with Ted Hughes. Of course I knew how the story ended, but I was transfixed by her journal entries, how raw and tumbling they were, how … writerly and poetic. Here is an excerpt about that first meeting with Hughes:
Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: ‘most dear unscratchable diamond’ and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room . . . and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind … And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn’t I, and I stamped and screamed yes . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
Pow.
Now. This is not how I want to live — or write — not now. But in my 20′s? Hot damn, yes.
(Plath and Hughes married within months and, depending on which biography you read, were very happy for quite some time.)
As her story progressed, though, I found myself surprised that she was struggling with the same issues I’ve been struggling with — how to balance writing with small children, even how to settle into a new apartment while balancing writing with small children. Yes, she had wild mood swings, yes she had a damaged and damaging past (including the death of her father when she was only eight) and yes, she had the kind of psychological make-up that pushes for suicide, which, in the end, won out over her bang-smash love of life.
***
… The poems take us through his first meeting with Plath, all the way up until the days after her death. They don’t lay blame or seek exoneration. They are the poems of a man haunted by a woman — once loved, possibly once hated — a woman he can never free himself from, a woman he might not want to free himself from.
Here is an excerpt from one of my favorites, “The Shot.” It, like nearly all the poems in Birthday Letters, is addressed to Plath.
… Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.
In that flash
You saw your whole life.… inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.
Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I had been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me –
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
And I’ll leave it at that.
Sylvia Plath
Ted Hughes
***
If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones you’re only a bit of the way into the larger story. If you’ve been reading the books
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)
I like Game of Thrones because it asks a terrific question: What happens in the years after a rebellion? What happens after your greatest love is kidnapped and raped and dead, your closest friends are strangled and burned and dead, your anger has fueled a war that conquers a kingdom and you yourself are now installed on its throne? What happens over the years, as the children come and your marriage — made for political reasons — sours into something so acrid you practically kill yourself — drinking, hunting, whoring — to escape it? That’s where Game of Thrones begins, with King Robert Baratheon — aging, fat and dissatisfied — living the answers to these questions.
Robert Baratheon
His best friend (and partner in his rebellion) is Ned Stark — also in middle age, but content in life — with his wife, Catelyn, his five children, and his lordship of Winterfell, a castle so far north that it remains largely untroubled by the kingdom’s politics and intrigues … until Robert comes to ask for Ned’s help in ruling: he wants Ned to be the Hand of the King. (One character jokes that the King eats the meal but the Hand takes the shit.)
Ned does not want this job — he does not want to leave Winterfell or his family. But he is honorable and loyal … and that’s what gets him into trouble.
I also like that most of the main characters are older. They’re middle-aged. They’ve been through a lot. They’re not fresh and hot-blooded and ready to ride off to war or fall in love at the least provocation (like Robert must have been all those years ago). And, in the HBO series, they actually look older. They look careworn. They look like they have some life behind them — hardships and triumphs both.
But the series also focuses on those with more life still ahead of them: the Stark children (ranging in age from three to 14), Jon Snow (Ned Stark’s bastard son, also 14), and Danerys Targaryen (the last of the last king’s blood — the king that Robert’s Rebellion deposed). They are all young — and show their youth. Even when they rise to positions of responsibility, they often make mistakes that betray their age — and some of these mistakes are tragically unfixable.
The Stark children
Jon Snow
The story tacks back and forth between the generations, highlighting the differences between innocence and experience.
For a fantasy series — could there be magic? could there be dragons? — it feels awful real.
***
From Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty:
Yesterday I took Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
… Looking through this book helped me get over my fashion prejudices (it’s trivial, it’s frivolous, it’s temporary, it’s consumerist) and see it as a form of astonishing self-expression.
Here — wordlessly — are some of my favorite images from the book:
If the book is just a shadow of the exhibit, then this post is just a shadow of the book.
Alas, the exhibit is long closed … so go get the book! I can’t recommend it enough.
***
… In 2001 Graywolf Press published a Forum on privacy: The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, edited by Molly Peacock.
The first essay, “Privacy and Private States” by Janna Malamud Smith, lists four different kinds of privacy: solitude, anonymity, reserve and intimacy. The first two are self-explanatory — solitude is the most complete form of privacy, anonymity a more tentative one (it can be revoked — instantly — when one is recognized).
Reserve, Smith writes, is “forbearance, tact, restraint … Our state is private simply because we do not choose to reveal the full extent of what we feel, observe, think, or experience.” And intimacy is a private state because “in it people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both … Intimate expressions occur in private because revelation makes people feel vulnerable. Imagine an intimate moment, then imagine it observed, and it changes.”
Pregnancy can remain private in solitude. But it cannot remain concealed by anonymity or reserve. It is a series of intimate moments that can’t help but be observed, and therefore changed.
But perhaps the rest of us can practice reserve (forbearance! tact! restraint!) around those who crave privacy — whether they be pregnant women, any women, any men — anyone.
***
From Escape with Cindy Sherman:
For Mother’s Day my beloved spouse got me the book Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills.
In many ways this is a completely normal gift — I’ve always loved Cindy Sherman (well, except maybe her vomit-scapes, but overall: very much). But in one way it feels odd. Cindy Sherman — for Mother’s Day. It’s not that Cindy Sherman was or wasn’t a mother — it’s that she embodies so many different people.
The bulk of Sherman’s work is self-portraits taken in various “costumes.” I put “costumes” in quotes because what she does feels both simpler and more elaborate than that. Sometimes it’s just make-up. Sometimes it’s a wig, prosthetic parts — the works.
Is she creating? Is she exploring? Is she escaping? And isn’t motherhood — at least the mothering of small children — the same set of contradictions?
I want to help my twins explore and create. They’re exploring and creating their own lives — which rivals any kind of other creative work (writing, photography, etc.). But I also want to escape to my own life and my own writing and see what’s around the bend.
***
From Three fairy tales:
I’m reading a new book — a fairy tale, of sorts — and even though I’m not finished, I feel compelled to write about it: Mr. Fox
The story is about a writer, Mr. Fox, and his muse, Mary Foxe. Miss Foxe is upset that Mr. Fox keeps killing off his heroines and challenges him to join her in stories of her own making. Each chapter tells a different story — “real” or imagined, it’s sometimes difficult to tell. But the individual stories are as fascinating as the frame story. About a third of the way into the book Mr. Fox’s wife Daphne becomes involved. Will he have to choose between the mortal woman he married and the muse who has saved his life? I can’t wait to find out … and yet I keep lingering over each page so that I don’t finish this book too quickly.
Another, older set of fairy tales I greatly admire is The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt.
My favorite of these is “The Story of the Eldest Princess.” The Eldest Princess sets off on a Quest to find out why the sky has slowly turned from blue to green. She sets off on a Road and has been advised never to step off it into the Forest. But she does. And then one of many possible stories begins.
This is a fairy tale that is conscious of fairy tales. The Eldest Princess is well-read, and she knows the perils of leaving her prescribed path but also the penalties for not helping other along the way — even if those others are scorpions and cockroaches and toads. This is a story knows the importance of stories. And, in fact, we get two more at the end: “The brief story of the second Princess” and “The brief story of the third Princess.” I especially love the latter, but I won’t give it away here.
Another set of tales I admire is The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
I used to teach a course on literary adaptations and had my students read two stories from this collection: two very different versions of Beauty and the Beast. The first, rather tame, version is “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon.” Here the classic story is modernized — there are cars and telephones but there is also magic. And the climactic transformation isn’t all Disney lights-shooting-out-of-fingertips (mercifully!) but all the more powerful for being downplayed.
The wild tale is “The Tiger’s Bride.” Dangerous, feral, sensual, animalistic. I don’t want to say too much and give anything about this story away — it needs to be read and pondered and even puzzled over.
***
From In praise of essays:
Yesterday afternoon the twins were napping, rain was just starting to prattle through the leaves outside my window, and I was curled up with a cup of vanilla tea and The Best American Essays 2011.
This is when I realized: Something happens when I read essays — something that doesn’t happen when I read novels or short stories or even memoirs. I feel … enlarged.
The essay in this collection that brought my attention to this feeling was “After the Ice” by Paul Crenshaw. I won’t write much about the content of the essay — I’d rather you read it yourself and let it unfold for you — but here is a passage that starts to show what I’m talking about:
After the funeral, while my family gathered in the living room of my grandmother’s house and some of the men stood on the front porch and talked of violence, I walked through the woods on my grandmother’s land. It was stifling inside the house, and loud with the sounds that accompany death, but outside it was cold and still. The air hovered right around freezing, and the light mist that fell could not decide whether it wanted to be snow or rain. Late in the afternoon, the dark came early, and by the time I turned around to walk back only the porch light was visible. The rain had finally made a decision, and the only sound around me was ice on frozen leaves.
Nothing really happens in this passage. But something does. A boy leaves a crowded house and walks in the woods. Something elusive but meaningful shifts during this walk, even though we never learn exactly what: the passage ends with a section break, and on the other side of that white space a new line of thought begins. But the moment is captured. A dilated moment of meaning.
… And maybe that’s what essays do: they call attention to moments — real, lived moments — and that’s all that is needed. Attention. Attending. We notice and we wait and we serve the silent shift that marks the internal change from “then” to “now and forever after.”
A moment in the woods. In the dark backyard. On the couch with a hard spring rain falling outside. Sometimes that’s all it takes to know that our course has been subtly shifted — to whatever our new future holds.
***
From Graphic memoirs (?):
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel.
A memoir about her father’s death, his secret homosexuality, her own overt homosexuality and the family funeral home. But it’s about so much more than that — it’s about aesthetics and control and literature and discovery and affection and metaphor. I can’t wait to read her next book, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
- The Silence of Our Friends
by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos and Nate Powell.
… The Silence of Our Friends is a semi-fictionalized, semi-autobiographical account of a sit-in gone terribly wrong in Texas in 1967. But it’s also about two families, one white and one black, who cross the color line and gain a new understanding of each other. The panels that show the children of these families rockin’ out to “Soul Man” are some of my favorite.
- Kiss & Tell
by MariNaomi.
… thank you Letters in the Mail for introducing me to MariNaomi. Letters in the Mail is a program? subscription? (ugh — trouble with nouns today) where you sign up to receive three or four letters each month in the mail (yes, the actual mail) from an artist or writer. MariNaomi’s was the first letter I got, and I was immediately smitten. Then I read her interview with Alison Bechdel (yes, the writer of Fun Home) and fell even more deeply for her humor, intellect and honesty (if you read the interview, be sure to read the epilogue — that’s what really got me). I just started Kiss & Tell
***
From 50 shades of meh:
I’m behind the trend in reading Fifty Shades of Grey but I’ve been reading other stuff (see the “Books I love” box to the right) and doing other things (like raising a pair of wild 16-month-old twins). But there was some chat about Fifty Shades among my Facebook friends recently, which prompted me to write this post. In this case, one woman’s trash is definitely another woman’s treasure — and another woman’s “whatever.”
At first I didn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey because I didn’t know about it, and then I didn’t have time (see “wild 16-month-twins” above), and then I didn’t want to read it because it was so trendy (which is a dumb reaction I have to most trends, but sometimes I’m proved wrong and love the trendy thing, which is why I’ve decided this prejudice is dumb) and then I read Roxane Gay’s excellent review of the trilogy (yes, there’s three of them! 150 Shades of Grey!), “The Trouble with Prince Charming Who Trespassed against Us,” which you can find at The Rumpus.
Gay unravels the fantasy of Fifty Shades, pulls out some of the worst bits of writing to relish, admits that “[c]hances are you will be turned on by something in these books,” and then considers the dangers of women being drawn in by a fantasy about a controlling man and his need to be saved by a devoted woman. She ends her review with a bang:
Fifty Shades of Grey is a fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman, and an obstacle that eventually they are able to overcome. There is a happily ever after, but the price exacted is terribly high. It is frightening to consider how many women might be willing to pay that price.
Bang!
But what made me decide to read the books was that, as Gay says, they “have been labeled with the condescending term ‘mommy porn,’ because the trilogy has found a great deal of success with a certain demographic.” Mommy porn. I’m a mommy. Is this … my porn?
Hm.
So, in the privacy of my own home, with only Amazon’s meticulous record-keeping software as a witness, I ordered the first book on my Kindle.
Huh. So that‘s what all the fuss is about?
I had read the Twilight books earlier, and knew that Fifty Shades began as fan fiction, and I could easily see the parallels between Ana and Bella.
There was some hot stuff, but it was hardly as transgressive as I had expected. And then I wondered, how is this mommy porn? I find Ana’s experience completely unrelateable. We have absolutely nothing in common — OK, we’re both brunettes — but she’s all of 21 years old, just graduated from college for God’s sake and is embarking on her very first relationship (with a mid-20′s dominant billionaire no less!). Is it “mommy porn” because we’re supposed to look back at this sort of thing with some kind of … nostalgia?
I finished the book within a couple of days and returned it (which you can do on a Kindle — nice). The next day a friend of mine said that a woman had practically accosted her at the gym, demanding if she had read Fifty Shades. No, my friend had said. “Oh!” the woman gushed. “It changed my life!” Really? Yikes. Maybe I was missing something. Or maybe I already had it and didn’t need to find it in a book about a fledgling BDSM relationship.
I took the second book, Fifty Shades Darker, out of my local library …
This book I read in a day. I was over the sex scenes and was reading for plot (I always contend that human beings are suckers for narrative, and I’m no exception). But the one excellent-terrible piece of writing that leapt out at me was this adjective, which was used during a potentially darkly sexual moment and made me laugh instead of, as Ana would, clench: “panty-combusting.” Panty- combusting! Awesome. I returned the book to the library’s drop box after the library had closed.
I don’t have much of an interest in reading the last book, Fifty Shades Freed, although I’m mildly curious, based on the cover image, if someone actually goes to jail or if this is more “kinky fuckery” (my other favorite phrase from the first two books). Maybe when the fuss dies down I’ll see it on the library shelf and read it over a weekend. Maybe not.
Overall I’m left rather flat by this series. I don’t think it’s trash (trashy, yes, but not straight-out trash) but it’s no treasure either. My panties are not in a twist about it (one way or the other), except when I think about the way other women, younger women, might read these books.
In the comment section, after her essay, Roxane Gay responded to someone who asked if she enjoyed the Fifty Shades books. She replied:
I absolutely got pleasure from reading FSOG because I had the critical awareness of the ways in which the books are a hot mess and downright irresponsible. I am a big believer in reading for pleasure. I read all kinds of stuff including mass market paperbacks and romance novels and the like. When it comes to books for children, though, I do think we have to consider both pleasure and the kinds of messages children are consuming. Like, I can read Twilight and laugh but what does a young girl take away? That’s something to think through.
Indeed it is. And if you want to read something with a different combination of message and pleasure, click on this link: Which Books Should You Read This Summer? to get an colorful decision-making flowchart that will help you on your way.
Meanwhile, although the responses to Fifty Shades tend to be black or white, mine is — forgive me — rather gray.
***
Please click here to read my review of
- Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
- The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos; illustrated by Nate Powell
- We Others by Steven Millhauser
- The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont and
- Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life by Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
in “What Are You Reading (Offline, That Is)?” at The Equals Record!
***
From Rereading Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
I hadn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover since … high school? I didn’t have many fond memories of it, that’s for sure.
… this one (quite understandably) caught my eye:
It’s the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose cover is illustrated by Chester Brown (of Paying for It fame). The front shows D.H. Lawrence philosophizing in bed; the back is a 35-panel mini-biography of Lawrence. The inside back flap is a list of people D.H. Lawrence had “fucked or is alleged to have fucked.” (I’m not 100% sure about that quote, but I’m 100% sure about the verbs!) The paper was thick and creamy, the font simple and clean. All in all it was a physically beautiful book.
I sat in the store and started reading … and was pleasantly surprised. I only got about 30 pages in (and another 20 back home) so I haven’t hit the really naughty bits yet (if they still feel naughty in 2012) … and some of Lawrence’s writing was clumsy and repetitive … and there were long-winded conversations about sex (in the abstract) and class and Socrates and Bolshevism. But there were also surprisingly insightful passages — and surprisingly funny ones.
Here are some of my favorites:
- Connie had adapted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
- “She’s not the pilchard sort of slip of a girl, she’s a bonny Scotch trout.” [says Connie's father] “Without the spots, of course!” said Clifford [her husband].
Pilchard. AKA sardine. (From forestandbird.org.nz.)
Scotch trout. Bonny? Hm. (From content.lib.washington.edu.)
- Time went on as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven.
- “I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say “shit” in front of a lady.”
- “You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist …”
!!!
I’m glad I gave this book another chance. Now, am I ready to give Thomas Hardy another shot? Maybe not just yet …
What were your least favorite books in high school? Have you reread any of them recently, and has your opinion changed?
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From Gone girls: a book review:
Three books came out in the last year that feature, each in its own way, the disappearance of a woman: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
If you remember the basics of English history or if you’ve caught The Tudors on Showtime, you know how the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn ends. But Bring Up the Bodies tells the larger story of Henry VIII’s court from the viewpoint of his secretary, Thomas Cromwell. I have studied this era of history and enjoyed The Tudors (despite its rather flattering casting and occasional historical inaccuracy) but I had always seen Thomas Cromwell as simply a tool of Henry’s — never as an actual person. Mantel brings Cromwell to life, fills in his back-story, shows him as a family man and reveals his (imagined) feelings about what he does in the name of king and country.
And no, Anne Boleyn does not fare well. Having managed to marry the king after his church-splitting divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn cannot hold him. What was once fascinating becomes irritating, and — worst of all — she cannot provide him with a son and heir. Her enemies at court start plotting and the king himself only wants her to disappear. And that is arranged, through accusations of adultery, treason and witchcraft, largely through the efforts of Thomas Cromwell. One quick stroke across the neck and the troublesome Queen of England is gone.
(Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in a planned trilogy; you can read my thoughts on the first book, Wolf Hall, by clicking here.)
Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is not a novel but a memoir. Those of you who have read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit will enjoy seeing the differences between that semi-autobiographical novel and this work of nonfiction.
But this book may not be for everyone. Winterson often interrupts her story to reflect on the origin of words, to quote passages of T.S. Eliot or Engles, or to deliver a brief history lesson about the first recorded poem in English. For example, when she considers her happiness as a child she pauses to parse the etymology of the word:
… earlier meanings [of the word happiness] build in the hap — in Middle English, that is “happ,” in Old English, “gehapp” — the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play.
How you meet your “hap” will determine whether or not you can be “happy”.
What the Americans, in their constitution, call “the right to the pursuit of happiness” (please note, not “the right to happiness”), is the right to swim upstream, salmon-wise.
And swim upstream she does. As a baby Winterson is adopted into a Pentacostal household where she defies restrictions on eating candy, reading books, asking questions and having sex. She is frequently locked in a coal bin or locked out of the house entirely. When Winterson falls in love with a girl, the church attempts an exorcism. When the exorcism fails, Winterson is kicked out. She is 16.
She may be gone from her home but Winterson is determinted to go to Oxford and become a writer. We already know the end to those determinations, but reading the journey makes it all the more remarkable.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl does not reveal its ending until the very end. There are no real-life counterparts to these characters — no one in history or already published on the bookstore shelves to give us a clue to the fate of Amy Elliot Dunne who goes missing on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary. I do not want to give away even a hint of a spoiler about this book, but I will quote the line that hooked me, which occurs early on, on page 37.
Nick Dunne has woken that morning at exactly 6:00. He has braced himself to go downstairs to his wife. Then there is a space break. Then he narrates that he was very late getting to work. What happened in that space break? We’re not sure. But a neighbor calls him at work to say that Nick’s front door is wide open and his cat has gotten out. Nick drives home to find his wife missing and a couch overturned and a coffee table smashed. The police arrive and question him. He answers their questions, sometimes shrugging, sometimes blurting and sometimes with a lurching stomach. The last two sentences that end the chapter are:
That was my fifth lie to the police. I was just getting started.
Pow.
The lies stack up and the plot twists do too. In a way I feel like this book was a dare to its writer: can you pull of this twist? How about this one? And THIS one?
I’m not sure how you’ll react to the ending, but you’ll be chasing Amy Elliot Dunne all the way through.
***
From Pam Houston’s “Contents May Have Shifted”:
I stopped reading this book as a novel and started reading it as a memoir (fair or not) when the character Pam started to interact with other writers, writers I know through graduate school or conferences or readings, and Fenton became real-life Fenton Johnson to me, and Joy became real-life poet Joy Harjo and Barry became real-life Barry Lopez. (Of course, I could be completely wrong about these associations, but that’s what they became for me.)
The story is told through many short vignettes — 144 of them. I lost track of how many settings there are, but they include Pam’s Colorado ranch; Zaafrane, Tunisia; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Tsedang, Tibet and Trenton, New Jersey. It takes a while to get comfortable with the peripatetic nature of this narrative (in the first few pages we jump from Great Exuma to California to Texas to Alaska) but I feel like that might be part of the point. Sometimes a thread of story will pick up again a few sections later. Sometimes it backtracks. But I never had trouble following it.
As a writer, I am intrigued by this way of story telling. It’s almost like a mosaic, and isn’t that more reflective of how our lives are actually lived? I thought about trying this style — jumping right into the heart of a scene and filling in some key details and then winding down with an observation and then — at the very end — a complementary observation that might not at first seem relevant but, with reflection, seals the deal.
As a new mother of twins, I am deeply interested in Pam’s almost comet-like path traced between her independent adventures and the family she is slowly building with her boyfriend Rick and his daughter Madison. I am a comet of another sort, with a much more tightly constricted orbit — I hook around the twins on one end and writing on the other. Instead of ranging from Colorado to New Zealand, I range from the twins’ room (affectionately dubbed the Twin Kingdom) to my desk (about 20 yards away) or, on weekends, to a cafe down the street.
Halley’s Comet. From Wikipedia.
I read Pam’s adventures with envy but also with self-knowledge — I may want to experience isolated Alaska but I do not want to be that close to an adolescent grizzly bear, I may want to “blackwater” raft but I do not want to try to breathe in a cave where the water level rises to the ceiling, and while I love the idea of wilderness adventures in general I am much more comfortable lying on a couch — preferably with a cup of tea — reading about someone else having them.
Still, reading this book reminds me that every life choice is a trade-off. You can’t have it all and you’re not supposed to. But sometimes you can have two contrasting things at the same time, and that feels like genius.
***
From Life of Pi:
The book Life of Pi has been out since 2001, but it’s taken me this long to finally read it. I remember it being quite popular and perhaps that was the reason (eleven less-mature years ago) that I resisted it. But I’ve started to become interested in shipwrecks, and I’m reading all kinds of books about them, and Life of Pi was on the list.
I fear that the hype around the book (from its early popularity to the forthcoming film version to its flap copy) has hurt my enjoyment of it. The flap copy reads:
A boy
A tiger
And the vast Pacific Ocean
If it had stopped there, I’d be keenly interested. But it continues:
This is a novel of such rare and wondrous storytelling that it may, as one character claims, make you believe in God.
Can a reader reasonably ask for anything more?
That’s quite a question — and quite a claim! So I started reading feeling challenged — would this book affect my belief in God? Hm. I had picked it up to read about shipwrecks. We’ll see …
The first part of the book is largely about Pi and his name, Pi and his father’s zoo, Pi and his religious explorations. Since the book is, after all, called Life of Pi, I suppose this can be forgiven. But I kept thinking, Bring on the tiger! Bring on the shipwreck! And when both arrive (perhaps a quarter to a third of the way through) I was not disappointed.
There are plot points that strain credulity (a meeting at sea) and others that claim to strain but didn’t (an island with a secret). And then there’s the ending. Yes, there is a twist.
I won’t reveal the ending (of course not!) but it surprised me — and not in a good way. I was almost angry with it. I started to dismiss the whole book, pick on all its negative qualities, scoff at its lofty flap copy claims.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And that’s the mark of a strong story, even one that may be slow out of the gate, even one that seems to enjoy — a little too much, perhaps — playing with its readers’ expectations.
Will I see the film? Probably not. I’d rather imagine Richard Parker in all his feline glory and the Pacific Ocean in all its moods, and little Pi trying to navigate both.
But I will be interested to see what the film’s trailer claims. A film to make you believe in God? We’ll see what the critics say …
***
From Jamrach’s Menagerie:
So if you, like some of the readers of my last post, were left unsatisfied by the book Life of Pi, you might want to try Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch.
Unlike Pi’s lengthy opening back-story, Jamrach’s Menagerie starts with a bang — and an encounter with a tiger — within the first few pages. Jaffy Brown, then eight years old, is running errands on the streets of London when he is swept up into the jaws of a tiger, an escaped resident of Jamrach’s menagerie. Jamrach is so impressed by Jaffy’s daring (he reaches up to stroke the oncoming tiger’s nose) and his survival (his only injuries are some scraped toes), he concludes that Jaffy has a way with animals and hires Jaffy to work for his exotic animal import/export business.
Years later Jaffy is sent on a quest to find and capture a rumored dragon — the ultimate animal for the menagerie. As in Life of Pi, there is a sea voyage, a boat with a dangerous animal aboard, a shipwreck and a catastrophic outcome. But my belief in this story never faltered (as it did with Pi), my patience was never tested, and its ending was surprising in quite a different way.
Jamrach’s Menagerie well earns its “Man Booker Finalist” mention — especially since it was keeping company with Hilary Mantel’s excellent Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (two other books I strongly recommend).
But for now I’m going to keep reading about animals and shipwrecks, this time Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, which, I fear, may very well try my patience again (despite its gorgeous cover).
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My book review, “Books to read if …” is up at The Equals Record!
If you’re looking for books to read or give this holiday season (or any time!), click here to read more …
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