recent reading
Only after posting the poll asking what you all are doing reading this blog did it occur to me that, though that I blather quite a bit about books in the abstract or in relation to teaching, I don't usually post much about what I'm reading For Fun. (Which, I note with amusement, didn't prevent quite a few kind people from saying they read the stuff about books.)
Anyhow. This isn't a complete account of my reading for the past few weeks, but it'll do to go on with.
I should point out that these notes aren't what I would call reviews; I'm no melymbrosia. My commentary here is more about my reading experience than about the books themselves. Thus, they're probably useless from a "should I read this?" perspective. Or, to put a positive spin on it: No spoilers!
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
This one didn't live up to my expectations, but I don't think that's its fault-I'd seen it recommended in such strong terms that the expectations were a bit overblown. That said, I did like the book quite a lot. It's generally charming, frequently funny, occasionally moving, and remarkably sharp about what children and adolescents are like, how generous and mean in quick succession. It's also very smart about how people create and maintain and use illusions to preserve love or merely harmony in families and other relationships, and about how these illusions are often collective, so that one person cannot dismantle them alone.
Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart
I enjoyed this book, but I think I'd actually describe my primary reaction as respect rather than enjoyment. I didn't love it as much as I'd thought I would; I'm pretty sure, though, that the difficulties were mine rather than the book's. I didn't like Portia much, or identify with her, or empathize with her, and since the book turns on her... As I say, a difficulty. I think my problem is that Portia is sensitive without being particularly bright, and I prefer characters who are both, or on the other hand who are bright but insensitive or, as a variation, bright but socially stupid. (I assume no one is puzzled as to why clever people without social skills push all my empathy buttons.)
But I did like the neatly constructed interconnections among characters and plot threads, the careful parcelling out of information. And I liked the writing itself very much, the narrative style, which I suppose I would call aphoristic although it's not so much about individual aphorisms as paragraphs or passages of trenchant observations about behaviors and emotions. This one got several pages in the quote book.
Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords
Another book I enjoyed but didn't love, by which I mean that my considerable connection with it was not primarily emotional. I found it very interesting, and am glad I made time to read it before WisCon; it is indeed very thoughtful about the constructions and conventions of gender. Prose-wise, it's nearly the inverse of Death of the Heart: the narration is serviceable, but the character voices are marvelous. Almost everything that ended up in the quote book is dialogue or bits of Nick's journal.
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
This one provoked odd sensations of familiarity, even though I'm quite sure I haven't read the book before. I have been meaning to read it for... let's see... about two decades now, and am glad that I finally got around to it. I expect I would have adored it twenty years ago; as it is I liked it a great deal, but kept getting distracted by wishing I'd read it when I would have liked it even more.
Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels (the Weetzie Bat books)
Again, would have meant more to me if I'd read the books in middle school or even high school. Urban life, gay characters, casual magic-yeah, these would have knocked me over in the best possible way at 14 or even 16. I did enjoy them: the clever, twisty prose, the sparkling characters, the new ways of talking about familiar feelings, the easy combination of peculiar reality and matter-of-fact magic. I think I'll be recommending this one more than I'll be re-reading it myself. But it's going to make a perfect fourteenth birthday present for my favorite adolescent, who I suspect is going to identify pretty heavily with Witch Baby-not least because her mom's a bit like Weetzie Bat.
Judith Ivory, Sleeping Beauty
Not up to Ivory's usual standard, I thought, though Ivory-not-at-her-best is still considerably above average as far as I'm concerned. (I should note that I'm more than usually far from well-read when it comes to romances, so take my pronouncements with a grain or more of salt.) I liked the characters, per usual, but the plot and setup of this one felt more generic to me than that of, say, The Proposition or Untie My Heart-though those are so wonderfully unusual as not really to be fair comparisons, and Sleeping Beauty is certainly not as generic as one might expect from the title. I want to say that the prose itself was more generic than it is in her more recent books, but that's just an impression; I didn't get out the more recent titles and start comparing paragraphs. (Though, because I am a big geek, I'm now tempted to do it just because I think it would be interesting.) I did like that the heroine's both older and much more sexually experienced than the hero-I'm a sucker for role reversals. And I liked the book generally, enough to keep it for now, though it's not anywhere near the top of the heap of re-reading prospects.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
This book has a 1992 copyright date, which means that it was published during one of my "book gaps": periods of more than a year between rounds of bookstore employment, in which large quantities of new releases pass me by because, as a rule, I don't know a book is out unless I see it in a store or one of my better-read-than-I-am friends tells me about it. I have never become a regular reader of book reviews, which is an embarrassing state of affairs for someone who claims to like reading, but a pragmatic choice for someone who already tends to spend high percentages of her very limited income on books. I need to use libraries more, but I don't associate libraries with reading for fun; the libraries I grew up with were poorly stocked and badly run, and although in college I learned to love libraries I also learned to associate them with research rather than with pleasure. (The fact that I do not consider research to be a pleasure is more proof, if any were needed, that although I am a sound thinker and a fine teacher, I am at best an indifferent scholar.) And, of course, years of bookstore employment have spoiled me with employee discounts, though I no longer have access to those discounts. ...wait, why am I getting a PhD instead of working my way up at a good local bookstore?
Anyhow. I didn't know about The Secret History until years after its initial publication, when truepenny said "Oh, you should read it, you'll like it."
As usual, she was quite right; I enjoyed it *and* respected it very much and in about equal measure, which is a relatively rare combination for me (as the previous book comments suggest). Clever, well-managed, neatly-structured without being predictable... And it seems effortless, which is a difficult-to-define quality that I adore in books (and pretty much all the arts for that matter), and aspire to with mixed success in most of my own endeavors.
The book reminds me, oddly, of Naylor's Mama Day and Swift's Waterland-partly because they're all written beautifully yet without being distractingly gorgeous in their prose, but also because The Secret History gave me the same sense of wonder and discovery that I experienced with the other two books. I read Mama Day and Waterland during the summer I read or reviewed 150 books (mostly novels, some theory and criticism) in preparation for my preliminary examinations, and those two books in particular surprised me with their richness. I didn't love them as wholly and unreservedly as I love Possession or The Bone People, which I saved for the end of prelims summer because I was so much looking forward to re-reading them; but they provided unexpected jolts of pleasure in their stories, their structures, their prose. The Secret History was like that too. It's the best book I've read in a while.
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I saw the movie based on this book when it first came out, and I liked the movie, but it didn't prepare me for how much I loved this book. Loved it, loved it, can't believe I put off reading it for so long. Hilarious, for one thing. And, okay, I suppose nobody will be surprised to hear that I identified pretty heavily with Rob. This had to do with the compilation-tapes thing, of course, but also with more general attitudes and anxieties.
The publicity blurbs tend to represent the book as an exemplar of the male confessional, to rave about its great insight into guys, and I see where they get that and I suppose it's accurate in a way; but I found it to be especially acute about a type of neurotic, slightly obsessive, kinda messed-up but basically stable personality that manifests in particular ways in guys but that cuts across sex and gender lines.
Or maybe it's just that even more of my personality expressions than I realized were forged by hanging out mostly with guys all through high school. I didn't realize at the time how odd that was, the extent to which I wasn't a part of a group of female friends. Most men continue to feel more familiar to me than most women do, especially in face-to-face interactions. Not necessarily more comfortable (although sometimes), but more familiar, and not just in a women-all-know-how-patriarchy-works kind of way (although it would be naive to say that's not part of it). The ways in which I express certain not-inherently-gendered feelings or impulses have certainly been more shaped, on a first-reaction level, by the range of guys I've hung out with over the years.
Regardless, the book's wonderfully funny, and is also very smart about the way we replay tapes of past events in our head and invest them with significance they shouldn't necessarily have and let them guide our actions in ways that can be, at times, monumentally stupid.
And, of course, there's stuff about mix tapes and unexpected finds and wanting to be in the liner notes of somebody's CD.
Did I mention that I loved this book? I really did.
Anyhow. This isn't a complete account of my reading for the past few weeks, but it'll do to go on with.
I should point out that these notes aren't what I would call reviews; I'm no melymbrosia. My commentary here is more about my reading experience than about the books themselves. Thus, they're probably useless from a "should I read this?" perspective. Or, to put a positive spin on it: No spoilers!
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
This one didn't live up to my expectations, but I don't think that's its fault-I'd seen it recommended in such strong terms that the expectations were a bit overblown. That said, I did like the book quite a lot. It's generally charming, frequently funny, occasionally moving, and remarkably sharp about what children and adolescents are like, how generous and mean in quick succession. It's also very smart about how people create and maintain and use illusions to preserve love or merely harmony in families and other relationships, and about how these illusions are often collective, so that one person cannot dismantle them alone.
Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart
I enjoyed this book, but I think I'd actually describe my primary reaction as respect rather than enjoyment. I didn't love it as much as I'd thought I would; I'm pretty sure, though, that the difficulties were mine rather than the book's. I didn't like Portia much, or identify with her, or empathize with her, and since the book turns on her... As I say, a difficulty. I think my problem is that Portia is sensitive without being particularly bright, and I prefer characters who are both, or on the other hand who are bright but insensitive or, as a variation, bright but socially stupid. (I assume no one is puzzled as to why clever people without social skills push all my empathy buttons.)
But I did like the neatly constructed interconnections among characters and plot threads, the careful parcelling out of information. And I liked the writing itself very much, the narrative style, which I suppose I would call aphoristic although it's not so much about individual aphorisms as paragraphs or passages of trenchant observations about behaviors and emotions. This one got several pages in the quote book.
Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords
Another book I enjoyed but didn't love, by which I mean that my considerable connection with it was not primarily emotional. I found it very interesting, and am glad I made time to read it before WisCon; it is indeed very thoughtful about the constructions and conventions of gender. Prose-wise, it's nearly the inverse of Death of the Heart: the narration is serviceable, but the character voices are marvelous. Almost everything that ended up in the quote book is dialogue or bits of Nick's journal.
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
This one provoked odd sensations of familiarity, even though I'm quite sure I haven't read the book before. I have been meaning to read it for... let's see... about two decades now, and am glad that I finally got around to it. I expect I would have adored it twenty years ago; as it is I liked it a great deal, but kept getting distracted by wishing I'd read it when I would have liked it even more.
Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels (the Weetzie Bat books)
Again, would have meant more to me if I'd read the books in middle school or even high school. Urban life, gay characters, casual magic-yeah, these would have knocked me over in the best possible way at 14 or even 16. I did enjoy them: the clever, twisty prose, the sparkling characters, the new ways of talking about familiar feelings, the easy combination of peculiar reality and matter-of-fact magic. I think I'll be recommending this one more than I'll be re-reading it myself. But it's going to make a perfect fourteenth birthday present for my favorite adolescent, who I suspect is going to identify pretty heavily with Witch Baby-not least because her mom's a bit like Weetzie Bat.
Judith Ivory, Sleeping Beauty
Not up to Ivory's usual standard, I thought, though Ivory-not-at-her-best is still considerably above average as far as I'm concerned. (I should note that I'm more than usually far from well-read when it comes to romances, so take my pronouncements with a grain or more of salt.) I liked the characters, per usual, but the plot and setup of this one felt more generic to me than that of, say, The Proposition or Untie My Heart-though those are so wonderfully unusual as not really to be fair comparisons, and Sleeping Beauty is certainly not as generic as one might expect from the title. I want to say that the prose itself was more generic than it is in her more recent books, but that's just an impression; I didn't get out the more recent titles and start comparing paragraphs. (Though, because I am a big geek, I'm now tempted to do it just because I think it would be interesting.) I did like that the heroine's both older and much more sexually experienced than the hero-I'm a sucker for role reversals. And I liked the book generally, enough to keep it for now, though it's not anywhere near the top of the heap of re-reading prospects.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
This book has a 1992 copyright date, which means that it was published during one of my "book gaps": periods of more than a year between rounds of bookstore employment, in which large quantities of new releases pass me by because, as a rule, I don't know a book is out unless I see it in a store or one of my better-read-than-I-am friends tells me about it. I have never become a regular reader of book reviews, which is an embarrassing state of affairs for someone who claims to like reading, but a pragmatic choice for someone who already tends to spend high percentages of her very limited income on books. I need to use libraries more, but I don't associate libraries with reading for fun; the libraries I grew up with were poorly stocked and badly run, and although in college I learned to love libraries I also learned to associate them with research rather than with pleasure. (The fact that I do not consider research to be a pleasure is more proof, if any were needed, that although I am a sound thinker and a fine teacher, I am at best an indifferent scholar.) And, of course, years of bookstore employment have spoiled me with employee discounts, though I no longer have access to those discounts. ...wait, why am I getting a PhD instead of working my way up at a good local bookstore?
Anyhow. I didn't know about The Secret History until years after its initial publication, when truepenny said "Oh, you should read it, you'll like it."
As usual, she was quite right; I enjoyed it *and* respected it very much and in about equal measure, which is a relatively rare combination for me (as the previous book comments suggest). Clever, well-managed, neatly-structured without being predictable... And it seems effortless, which is a difficult-to-define quality that I adore in books (and pretty much all the arts for that matter), and aspire to with mixed success in most of my own endeavors.
The book reminds me, oddly, of Naylor's Mama Day and Swift's Waterland-partly because they're all written beautifully yet without being distractingly gorgeous in their prose, but also because The Secret History gave me the same sense of wonder and discovery that I experienced with the other two books. I read Mama Day and Waterland during the summer I read or reviewed 150 books (mostly novels, some theory and criticism) in preparation for my preliminary examinations, and those two books in particular surprised me with their richness. I didn't love them as wholly and unreservedly as I love Possession or The Bone People, which I saved for the end of prelims summer because I was so much looking forward to re-reading them; but they provided unexpected jolts of pleasure in their stories, their structures, their prose. The Secret History was like that too. It's the best book I've read in a while.
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I saw the movie based on this book when it first came out, and I liked the movie, but it didn't prepare me for how much I loved this book. Loved it, loved it, can't believe I put off reading it for so long. Hilarious, for one thing. And, okay, I suppose nobody will be surprised to hear that I identified pretty heavily with Rob. This had to do with the compilation-tapes thing, of course, but also with more general attitudes and anxieties.
The publicity blurbs tend to represent the book as an exemplar of the male confessional, to rave about its great insight into guys, and I see where they get that and I suppose it's accurate in a way; but I found it to be especially acute about a type of neurotic, slightly obsessive, kinda messed-up but basically stable personality that manifests in particular ways in guys but that cuts across sex and gender lines.
Or maybe it's just that even more of my personality expressions than I realized were forged by hanging out mostly with guys all through high school. I didn't realize at the time how odd that was, the extent to which I wasn't a part of a group of female friends. Most men continue to feel more familiar to me than most women do, especially in face-to-face interactions. Not necessarily more comfortable (although sometimes), but more familiar, and not just in a women-all-know-how-patriarchy-works kind of way (although it would be naive to say that's not part of it). The ways in which I express certain not-inherently-gendered feelings or impulses have certainly been more shaped, on a first-reaction level, by the range of guys I've hung out with over the years.
Regardless, the book's wonderfully funny, and is also very smart about the way we replay tapes of past events in our head and invest them with significance they shouldn't necessarily have and let them guide our actions in ways that can be, at times, monumentally stupid.
And, of course, there's stuff about mix tapes and unexpected finds and wanting to be in the liner notes of somebody's CD.
Did I mention that I loved this book? I really did.