reading list

A Question of Power, Bessie Head
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Cahoone
Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
Les Enfantes Terribles, Jean Cocteau
Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
O Taste and See, Denise Levertov
"Seeing," Annie Dillard
Rilke's Book of Hours
Junglee Girl, Ginu Kamani
The Foreign Legion, Clarice Lispector
The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Danilo Kis
Let us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans
Macbeth, Shakespeare
The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Light in August, William Faulkner
All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy
The Metamorphoses, Ovid
The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt
The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

None of these are for classes. I am going to be a very well-read dropout.

the last books of 2006

I ended up finishing four out of the five books I hoped to read before 2007. I could have read them all, but really, I was setting myself up for failure by including Saul Bellow, and I knew it at the time. The Adventures of Augie March? Really, what was I thinking? I will read it someday, but it is exactly the sort of thing I am not hungry for right now. I would have finished it out of sheer disgruntled stubbornness if I hadn't been sidetracked by a reading and rereading of every Faulkner book in our house.

Because I wrote about the other two books, here are a few late-night comments on the last two of the project:

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
--I have read several of Murakami's books (well, two) and I think this one is by far the most successful as a coherent novel. Murakami is good but never excellent because he so often seems incapable of tying his -- admittedly charming and unexpected -- concepts into a large piece. His endings are especially terrible, I think. He is the sort of author who should probably stick to short stories; that medium would at least allow his absurd and lovely ideas to shine like the gems they are, undisrupted by the clutter of attempted overarching plot. Wonderland seems to be an exception. At the same time, I was never once as charmed by anything in this book as I was by several parts of Kafka on the Shore. Still, it was a decent read.

And it prompted the realization that I will probably fall in love with the first decent man who gifts me with a pair of excellent nail clippers during a multi-course meal in an upscale restaurant.

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
--Hmmmm.

I was expecting more. Of course, what I was expecting was based on no actual knowledge of the book itself, but was instead formed from a combination of good reviews and an incorrect assumption of the plot. You see, I thought the book was going to be some sort of macabre postmodern surrealist story about a serial killer. I had no idea it was about mail! I thought that it was probably about 49 murdered prostitutes buried in an abandoned lot or something. All I can say is that I clearly spend too much time watching Law & Order and not enough time reading newspapers.

The book wasn't great but wasn't bad. I would read more Pynchon, but wouldn't buy him. This was the last book of 2006: I read it in one sitting on New Year's Eve.

The first book of 2007 looks to be Absalom, Absalom. I love it, and not just because I have a latent obsession with the American Civil War. I have mixed and turbulent emotions about Faulkner as a person and as an artist, but there is simply no denying his brilliance. I actually started to weep at one point last night just because the wording of one sentence was so perfectly sonorous, so much like music, and I cried at its beauty and at the certain knowledge that I will never be able to construct anything so perfect.

I would post the sentence if I could find it in the book. Oh well. The content wasn't remarkable anyway; I probably wouldn't have realized its glory if I hadn't been mouthing the words as I read them -- something I often do with Faulkner just to keep the structure of his sentences clear in my mind. Full display of the music of language is one convincing argument for books on tape. I suspect that certain parts of The Sound and the Fury would be just magical if read aloud in entirety.

cranky reader

Not fun: cutting clumps of hardened litter from my cat's back toes because I am an awful awful pet owner and have let the boxes go too long without cleaning them.

I could just say that I have been dissatisfied and disappointed by almost every book I've finished recently, but it's more fun to complain in depth, and because I can't sleep, I'll give some cranky and blurry comments.

Still Life by A.S. Byatt -- Very well written and intelligent, but also completely unfulfilling. The large event at the end is alluded to in the prologue, and so is no surprise and had little emotional impact on me. I hated the main character, Frederica, and do not know if I will continue with the quartet based on this alone. She isn't even unlikeable in an interesting, villainousness, deeply psychological way. No, she is just self-absorbed and emotionally shallow beneath all of her intellectual posturing. I realize that this is probably intended -- a friend of mine commented that Byatt is hardest on Frederica because her life is meant to parallel Byatt's own -- but I dislike her in the kind of way that makes it difficult for me to read the book and care about its plot. Not that there was much plot to this one. I really liked two of the minor characters, and interest in them kept me going with momentum despite my disgust with Frederica, but there was almost no resolution for any of them. I realize that it is very much a piece of a larger saga, but that's no excuse. Just imagine how frustrating it would be to read this book when it was first published! I would probably absolutely hate it if I'd read it then; right now I am just left with disappointment and the desire to reread Possession.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by someone whose name I can't remember and am too lazy to look up -- Started out promisingly. I was riveted from the first chapter, maybe even the first page. It had all the makings of a great murder mystery that would also teach me some novel, easily packaged facts about snow and ice and Greenland. I got seriously bogged down in the middle, though, when the plot seemed to stray vastly from the investigation into a small boy's mysterious death to some huge international conspiracy spanning generations. Again, disappointing.

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan -- I liked, but didn't love, McEwan's Atonement, and so when I read a synopsis about this book I was looking forward to read it. I almost wish that I hadn't asked my mother to procure it for me because I hated it so very much. The story is basically a clumsy marriage of Lord of the Flies and Les Enfants Terribles, all about four orphans who descend into rotten decadence after they encase their mother's corpse in a block of cement to conceal her death from authorities. I will admit that I knew from the start that it would be twisted and rather terrible in this way; that's actually why I read it in the first place. At some point last fall I was half-decided that I would write my undergraduate thesis on incest in literature. Now, I know this sounds weird, but really it was a veiled excuse to write about Dorothy and William Wordsworth without overtly writing about them. In general, theoretically, I don't have a problem with incest in literature, but it has to be written gorgeously or handled thoughtfully or portrayed truthfully for it to work, and even though Atonement wasn't particularly linguistically stunning, I had hoped that McEwan might at least present an interesting and worthwhile examination of the issue. I was so wrong. The book was obvious and heavy-handed, but not even in a moral sense, which might be a good thing for the believability of the narrator, but which left me feeling disgusted and bitter about the day I spent reading the book.

The Art Spirit by Robert Henri -- I suspect that I would have been massively impacted by this book if I'd read it five years ago, but now I have read other, better, discussions of the meaning of writing and the philosophy of aesthetics. I yawned and skimmed more than I should have, but I did read the whole thing through. Must decide on what to say to the uncle who gifted it to me.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters -- This book was probably the most satisfying of all that I read, which is a little sad because it is fluffy lesbian historical fiction. Once I got used to the frequent and needless use of semi-colons I was engrossed. I found it as delightful a romp as the first time I read it, though I do still like Affinity better.

Right now I'm reading The Book Thief and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am -- surprise, surprise -- not thrilled with either of them. Contemporary fiction is failing me, but I'm not sure what I do want. Something meaty and old and difficult? Or something lighter but still with an arresting plot? Both, probably: contemporary and fluffy for night and classic for daytimes. I am thinking of rereading a few of my favourite books from my science fiction and fantasy phase, but I'm afraid that I might hate them and feel disillusioned and sad.

I am officially taking book recommendations.

28? another poem that isn't mine

To the Reader
Denise Levertov
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

---

Almost done with Byatt's Still Life. I'll finish it tonight. I also bought a copy of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters for a friend and decided to reread that before I give it to her. One of the cover blurbs calls it "deliciously brazen," which is a perfect way of describing it. I am quite enthralled by Still Life right now, but ten pages of Fingersmith had me forgetting all about the romances of Frederica Potter. I have set it down regretfully, and will let myself tear through it as soon as I am done with Byatt.

18: books read and unread

Two things of great excitement: clearing out my "currently reading" list and figuring out how to add chunks of text to my sidebar. This is a fabulous way for me to look at quotes and poetry that I really like. (Related-but-not-really: does anyone know something that can write on mirrors but also washes off really well after some time has passed? I want to write poems on my bedroom and bathroom mirrors to aid in memorization. And because it's the next best thing to writing them on my walls.)

This week hasn't been all doctor visits and days in bed! Okay, well, it sort of has, but somehow I've also managed to finish a load of books and get halfway through two new ones. I didn't even a chance to add the books on William Carlos Williams and H.D. that I read before finishing them. They were for school, kind of, and I don't know anyone who wants to hear reviews of literary criticism, so I won't bother with that.

Some notes on books finished and reading:

• For the sake of honesty, I feel like I should note that I didn't actually finish Midnight's Children or An Unquiet Mind. I will finish the Rushdie another time -- I love him, but I think he's one of those authors for me that I can only read at wide-spaced intervals to appreciate, and apparently three of his books in seven months is not giving enough time in between -- but I am done with An Unquiet Mind. It's a self-described "memoir of madness" (I'll talk another time about the problematic semantics of using the word "madness" to describe mental illness), which means that it is exactly like the other dozen autobiographies of mental illness that I've read. Because Kay Jamison has a PhD in psychology and specializes in bipolar disorder, I had hoped that it would be more insightful, but it followed the exact same formula as all of the others: idyllic childhood full of promise or, more rarely, hellish family life and abuse; stirrings of problems in mid to late adolescence; descent into illness that might include drugs, promiscuity, very stupid life decisions, financial ruin, estrangement from friends and family, or refusal to work with doctors; eventual culmination in suicide attempts which, in turn, lead to realization that life is beautiful and worth living, something that inevitably occurs while struggling in the death-grip of the drugs (because they are always drugs for women); and a conclusion that involves fervent commitment to drugs and therapy and the promise that everything is going to be all right even if it's still tough right now. I didn't need to read the last section of the book to know that the ending would be just like this, except probably with a bit of preaching about how people who suffer from bipolar disorder are more creative and brilliant than mere mortals.
• So far I am really enjoying both The Tin Drum and Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, though I'm worried that I'm starting to stall on both of them.
• I will probably be reading The Fall of Berlin until Christmas or some other comparably distant point in the future. I'm not enjoying it: it's brutal and confusing, and I feel like I need to have a huge military map of East Germany and Russia just to be able to understand all of the movement of troops and the battles. But I'm not reading it for fun. It's research, and it's important, so I'll keep at it, even if I can only read about fifteen pages at a time before having to stop and try to figure out which Field Marshall is which, and why does Stalin like this guy so much anyway when he hates everyone else?

I am a compulsive book buyer, but I am also a devotee of libraries, so even though I read a lot, I own a shameful amount of unread books. So when I saw the From the Stacks Reading Challenge, of course I had to join. The challenge is to read five books that you already own before the new year. Here are my five, with short comments on each:

1. The Art Spirit, Robert Henri -- My favourite uncle gave this to me after listening patiently to my ecstatic descriptions of The Dehumanization of Art by Ortega y Gasset. I want to read this one as soon as possible, since it is so rude to leave gifts languishing on shelves.
2. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami -- I got this book from a friend exactly a year ago. I gave her Lolita in return. She took my Nabokov with her to Europe and read it in cafes in Paris, but I still haven't read her Murakami. This must be remedied! (Though I did at least read Kafka on the Shore, so at least we got to have some conversation about his style.) She's in Israel now, and I need to read this book so I'll at least have something to write about in my next letter.
3. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon -- I haven't had this one for very long. I just really want to read it.
4. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow -- This is a beautiful hardcover that I bought at a used book sale for a dollar. I predict that out of all these books, it is most likely to be the downfall of this challenge. It looks like a stab at the Great American Novel. And I am really not interested in the Great American Novel right now. Also, it's really long, and I can clearly foresee my reading-blocked mind floundering and stagnating once I hit the 300 page mark. But he won a Nobel, and I've been trying to read at least one book by all of the Nobel laureates. I should probably read Humbolt's Gift instead, since it also won the Pulitzer I think, but this is the one I have.
5. Still Life, A. S. Byatt -- Out of all the books on this list, I've had this one on my shelf for the longest. I bought it just after I read Possession, which was, um, almost six years ago. I loved Possession, and I can't remember why I haven't read any of Byatt's other books. Also, I realize now that the main character is a Wordsworth scholar, which just thrills me. Wordsworth is one of my ex dead poet boyfriends. (These days he's been replaced by Rilke, but I still love him anyway.)
   

If this challenge works I will probably try to do something like it every month. The more books I read, the more I can justify buying!

9: drying my salty braid

After checking my email, which is invariably the first thing I do upon waking, I told myself quite sternly that I could not do anything at all until I finished something. I allowed myself a cup of coffee before attacking Europe Central with determination.

And I finished it.

This is the part of the post that should, by rule and format, have a review of some kind, but I don't know what to say or how to say it, or maybe I just can't find the words to begin. It's an astounding book, half fact and half fiction. I had to read it slowly because it is so incredibly brutal. The San Francisco Chronicle said that it has the power to "put a few readers towards madness," and that's exactly how I felt when reading it. It's the most devastating book about World War 2 and Soviet Russia that I have ever read.

Especially interesting to me is its examination of the impact of war on artists. Characters include Kathe Kowitz, Dmitri Shostakovitch, and my own Anna Akhmatova. This gives me an excuse to post a poem rather than continue talking about books or war or myself, so here's an early poem by Anna Akhmatova, written long before Stalin destroyed her life.

I.

Bays cut into the low-lying shore,
All the sails were fleeing out to sea,
And I was drying my salty braid
On a flat rock a mile from land.
A green fish swam up to me,
A white gull flew up to me,
And I was daring, vexed and merry,
And completely unaware that this -- was happiness.
I buried my yellow dress in the sand
So the wind, or a tramp, wouldn't steal it away
And I swam far out to sea;
On the warm, dark waves I lay.
"At the Edge of the Sea," Anna Akhmatova 1914

8: only slightly more pleasant whinge

My four (or five) AM whinge post is too depressing and exhibitionist. Boundaries, feather, boundaries! I'm trying again, but I am unable to think of anything in my life right now that doesn't make me feel sorry for myself. There are two things that torture me particularly:

1. I can't finish this fucking toe up sock. It's my sixth sock (it would be my fifth, but I ripped one because I decided too late that the yarn wasn't good for the pattern I used) and my first toe up. When I left for Europe, it was complete except for the bind-off, and I purposefully didn't finish it off, assuming foolishly that the zippy few minute finishing job would give me a nice feeling of crafty accomplishment and provide a good door back into knitting. How wrong I was! I have tried, at this moment, four different bind-offs -- and that's not counting the fiddling with needle size that I've done with each one. I feel a little nightmarishly fairy tale: too tight, too loose, not elastic enough, too ugly ... I'm going to try and rip it again today and give it one more chance. I want this sock, and I refuse to give up.

2. I haven't finished a book since returning home. I was reading two books in Europe -- Europe Central and Midnight's Children -- and I had an amazing amount of velocity going on each of them. I should have finished them in the first few days that I returned! It's not like I have anything better to do. All of the books that I'm reading are good, I think about them frequently with fondness and curiosity for what happens next. I just can't finish anything.

There must be a perfect word for this. Ennui? Apathy? ADD? I don't know.

4.2: guilty admission

So, yesterday I went to Utah to see a theater production of Pride and Prejudice. I did not enjoy it much: the humour was ridiculously amplified and obscured any wit that might have been found. The actor who played Darcy was shorter than Elizabeth and had awful dishwater-blond hair. And worst of all, there were more shrieking and jumping up and down than there should ever be in one theater production, much less one based on a Jane Austen novel.

I probably shouldn't have gone, and I wouldn't have if the ticket hadn't been given to me for free by a former professor. The experience has reminded me of a dark secret, a fatal character flaw that I am finally learning to accept after years of denial: I do not care for Jane Austen.

Yes, that's right. I'm a female literature student who does not like Austen. I am aware of the sacrilege of this, and I apologize. I've tried! I've read the books, I've seen the movies and spin-offs, I've listened studiously to the adoring raves of friends and teachers, I've even spent several years seriously pretending to be a fan. But I can't. I recognize her importance in the literary canon, but the books themselves fail to move me. I think it has to do with their very similar plots. I read an article at Salon a long time ago that discussed "chick lit" like Bridget Jones, calling it "marriage porn," and this is the perfect term for Austen's books: they seem to fulfill this gaping cultural obsession and need for weddings. Not so much the marriage that comes after the weddings; many of the married couples in Austen's books are impressively unhappy -- I am reminded in particular of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. It is the marriage that matters, the ecstatic union of two people who are just right for each other, and this is something that doesn't move me particularly on its own. Maybe this is because I don't particularly desire or expect a happy marriage for myself; maybe it's because I am too cynical. Or maybe it's the characters.* I do like plenty of other "ends in marriage" books.

I don't feel too bad, though. I've got Mark Twain in my corner:

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."**

*I actually like Northanger Abbey. I relate very strongly to Catherine, who has lost hold on reality after reading too many Gothic novels.

**I do not hate her quite this much.

4: disclaimer

Dear potential anonymous internet readers,

I swear I'm not showing off in my reading sidebar. I really do read geeky books that are completely useless from a practical viewpoint. Like, um, The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic. And Noam Chomsky.

And I don't generally count poetry books on my reading lists because who sits down and reads a whole book of poetry? Well, I do, apparently, but only when I'm trying to write about the poet. It's unnatural! Poetry books should be kept in your pocket and read in bits and pieces throughout a day or week or month or year! I'm not in school this semester, but when I was in Europe I became even geekier than I was to begin with: I realized how sincerely fun it can be to write interpretive essays on poetry.

I think the solitude went to my head. I memorized poems. And then I planned out the analytic deconstructions I would write about them. I never actually wrote them down because I was too tortured by my lack of resources. Seriously. I sacrificed countless midnight hours lamenting the absence of lexus nexus in my daily life.

So when I claim to be reading ridiculously obscure and intellectual things, I'm not making it up. I can't help it, it's a sickness! Or, more likely, a madness.

1: stupid obligatory First Post

One of the things that has effectively kept me from starting a Real Blog (as opposed to a livejournal, which I have maintained sporadically for years) for so long is the stress of the obligatory First Post. One chance to make a good impression, to display my cleverness and my panache! One post to capture and display every facet of my personality! Such pressure, such anxiety. I've joined M Kennedy's NaBloPoMo in an effort to get over my daunting blog phobia. I have decided that it doesn't matter how I appear; I'm doing this for myself anyway. Who else will read this but me? NaBloPoMo, the bloggeryNaNoWriMo, is a good way to fill my long and empty November days.

Because this is for me and not for any anonymous audience, I am not going to introduce myself in the first post. Instead, I'm going to copy and paste the entry for tatterdemallion from the OED:

tatterdemalion, -demallion
[f. TATTER n.1, or more prob. TATTERED a., with a factitious element suggesting an ethnic or descriptive derivative. The earlier pronunciation rimes with battalion, Italian, stallion, as shown by the frequent doubling of l.]
A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin.

And from dictionary.com, justifying my spelling of the word in the URL and its deviancy from the modern one L spelling:

[Origin: 1600–10; first written tatter-de-malliani> and rhymed with Italian; sepan>e TATTER; -de-malliani> < ?]

I first came across the word tatterdemalion in Micheline Aharonian Marcom's brilliant and heartbreaking chronicle of the Armenian genocide, Three Apples Fell From Heaven. I was in the hospital when I read the book, far away from my beloved Oxford English Dictionary, but who needs a dictionary for a word like this? It sounds like what it means, it breathes personality, it dances on the tongue. And Marcom uses it in the absolute best way possible:

Rumor tells stories, this is the story she writes. Don't believe her, she's a liar of the first order. A mendacious tatterdemalion. A middle of the night whisperer. She follows you and circles your head like stinging bees in late summer. she is disjointed, disorderly, malapropos. She begins in the middle, she stops and starts; she is a wanderer. When you look for her you cannot see her. Rumor says: Noah is my father and Japeth is my father and Haik walked down the slopes of Mount Ararat and squatted under the cypress to build a fire with still green leaves. In 1915. Or in 520 B.C., an inscription in stone of Darius I at Behistun. With breath there is always a beginning. A neonate lies on the sand, she is the founder of the nation. Rumor says, I am the founder of this nation. And so, and so
Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Pg 1

The book haunts me on every level possible even now, half a year after I read it, and that phrase has become one of my favourites. Mendacious tatterdemalion! Beautiful beautiful beautiful.