January 2011: Book Buying

13 books bought this month. This bookworm in overdrive is starting off with what promises to be a bad trend -- I'm acquiring faster than I'm reading. Gotta slow it down. It could have been worse, though. During a recent visit to What The Book? I saw two Jim Thompson novels I haven't read yet: A Hell of a Woman and The Grifters. Also, I wanted a copy of Stephen King's Carrie and have had no luck finding it, which I find a little odd.

Sorry To Be So Cheerful - Hildegarde Dolson. While I was reading We Shook the Family Tree in December, I became achingly nostalgic for Dolson's 1955 follow-up about her life as a "spinster" living in Greenwich Village, so I ordered a copy from Amazon. I can hardly wait to get reaquainted with Dolson's adventures as a "true drab blonde", her encounter with etiquette queen Emily Post and I'm especially eager to reread the hilarious chapter 'Say Hemlock and Flop' in which Hildegarde, who is suffering through a stubborn bout of insomnia gamely tries out all her friends' sure-fire cures. Paul Galdone's witty illustrations are the icing on the cake.

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Elmer Gantry - Sinclair Lewis. This one is Abebooks' fault; they sent me a coupon for 10% off. I'm not made of stone! I actually bought EG for The Spawn. He saw the 1960 movie, and I told him the book is even better. I even treated him to the Dell Books movie tie-in with Burt Lancaster on the cover. I don't think he will, but if The Spawn rejects this book, I won't have any problem taking it back for a fun reread.

The next seven books...well, that's Alex's fault. He recently moved back to the UK, leaving an Alex-sized hole in my Cracked Spinz book club. (Faulkner Guy had also departed a few days earlier. Ouch.) Right before he left, Alex invited people to his apartment to take what he was leaving behind. This counts as book-buying because I felt guilty about leaving with such a large armload for free that I gave him all the money I had in my pocket, which was approximately $4.00 (USD). Here's what I got:

Grimms' Fairy Tales - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Cute little pocket edition with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux. I've never seen the movies, the play or the musical. You could drive a tank through this gap in my cultural learning.

Democracy In America - Alexis De Tocqueville. This looks daunting.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I haven't yet found a Russian author that I can warm up to, but maybe it'll be Solzhenitsyn. My other reason for picking up this book is that Solzhenitsyn and I share a birthday -- Solzhy and me and Brenda Lee.

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne. I tried this when I was younger, but got bored quickly. Am I still that same reader?

Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho. I know, but it's short. Maybe I can muscle through and rack up some international author points.

The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl. Lit Detectives! This looks like fun.

Then I went to Seoul and you know how that always goes:

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen. This is the pick for Bookleaves' March meeting. I hope I like it better than The Corrections.

Book Lust To Go - Nancy Pearl. America's favorite librarian recommends books based on location. Her chapter titles -- states, cities, countries, continents -- had me bursting into an off-key, lyric-mangling but spirited rendition of I've Been Everywhere. Good stuff. How can I say no to Nancy? Don't answer that.

I Just Can't Help Myself

"Read...Read...Read...Why do I read? I just can't help myself. I read to learn and to grow, to laugh and to be motivated. I read to understand things I've never been exposed to. I read when I'm crabby, when I've just said monumentally dumb things to the people I love. I read for strength to help me when I feel broken, discouraged, and afraid. I read when I'm angry at the whole world I read when everything is going right. I read to find hope. I read because I'm made up not just of skin and bones, of sights, feelings, and a deep need for chocolate, but I'm also made up of words. Words describe my thoughts and what's hidden in my heart. Words are alive—when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive—I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many."

Joan Bauer in Shelf Life: Stories By The Book - Gary Paulsen (ed).

RIP Reynolds Price

I need to be more aggressive about searching out news. Being lazy and relying on Yahoo too much is not a good idea. Their idea of book news is shameful. They'd rather report about how Donald Rumsfeld is reflecting about his recently-written memoirs, and as a result, they dropped the ball about Southern American author Reynolds Price passing away last week on January 20 at the age of 77.

I first became aware of Reynolds Price back when I was all about Anne Tyler in the mid-to-late 1980s. He was her writing professor when she was a student at Duke. That information propelled me to read two of his novels: A Long and Happy Life (1962) and Kate Vaiden (1986). I remember really enjoying the former (his first novel) and feeling so-so about the latter, although I acknowledged that it was extremely well-written. I would gladly read both books again.

Last year, I found one of Reynolds Price's memoirs, Clear Pictures, in the hodgepodge that is my university's library. I checked it out, read it and came away with a renewed favorable impression of Price. He excelled at memoir. He wrote about personal matters thoughtfully and intensely, but he wasn't sloppy about it. His writing was both warm and open but also controlled and skillful.

In addition to his writing talent, I also admired Price for triumphing over his health issues. In the early 1980s, he developed a cancerous tumor that was wrapped around his spine. Radiation cured him, but left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It didn't stop him from writing -- quite the contrary. He was always fairly prolific, but the bulk of his writing was done after the cancer. I'm thinking "steel magnolia", but that's used exclusively for gentle but formidable Southern women. I wish there was a male equivalent I could use to pay tribute to Reynolds Price.

Everything Edith

Bookworm Meets Bookworm has a great idea, and I'm in. This read-along starts on February 2 and goes until March 2. The Age of Innocence is the 1921 Pulitzer fiction winner, so this fits neatly into my reading plans.

Suddenly, I've got this longing for Everything Edith. My plan is to warm up for the read-along by reading Wharton's 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country. During the read-along I'll be inexplicably pining away for things that I don't actually want in my real life -- a pompadour, a bustle, an evening gown trimmed with lace and feathers and fur accessories.

At least I can comprehend my gnawing within to be in possession of Wharton's biography by the absolutely brilliant Hermione Lee. Also, who could blame me for my desire to sit here and read? Gorgeous. I love the subtle grouping by color, but that one book leaning irks me a little.

Ready Read-y Me

April 9, 2011 is the date that has been selected for the next Readathon. This will actually be April 10 because of the wretched time difference, but I have to sleep a lot on the ninth to get ready. In short, I'm giving up Real Life for Read Life that weekend. Feel free to join me. It's going to be a steady 24 string of reading, blogging and spying on other 'thoners blogs to see if they're as tough as me and get ideas for new reads.

Naked Without Salad (and Stonecrop)

I'm reading 3 books right now and I'm not terribly thrilled with any of them, so I'll turn my attentions elsewhere -- meaning to food.

My eating habits are really bad. How bad? About 8:30 in the evenings, I develop a nasty taste and a feeling that life is a little sad and ineffably difficult. I begin to wonder why I became an EFL teacher, and wonder just how it is a lesson plan is constructed. Then I look at my TBR and wonder if I'll ever complete another book ever again. I begin to puzzle about how people manage whole novels -- even short ones, like Newbery winners.

Then it hits me: Oh yeah! Sweet roll and coffee for breakfast, coffee for coffee break, coffee for lunch and another coffee for that 3-4 pm slump. Dinner? Forgotten. Upon remembering, I start out with a first course of a whole can of Pringles and a Coke and go from there to anything else readily available for consumption for the rest of the evening, pretty much in the same way the Big Bad Wolf went to each of the Three Little Pigs' houses.

In 2011, I decided that I would not leave myself to my own boneheaded devices. So far, so good. I haven't bought a can of Pringles or even eaten one in over a month. I banished Coke from the house but I'm allowed to drink it off the premises. Water and teas are my only beverages on hand at home. I'm also taking a new look at salad. The really green stuff. Life beyond Iceberg.

I went grocery shopping yesterday, making sure that I hadn't eaten yet so that the nutritious stuff would look yummy beyond compare. At E-Mart, the food section is on the first level of the store. Luckily, right off the "down" escalator is the produce section. In another bit of related luck, for the past year or so, the store brand has started putting the name of the food on the package in English in small letters below the Hangul.

I studied the packaged and (allegedly) pre-washed greens:

Chard. Very green. I've heard it's healthy, but the name always makes me laugh. It's like an alternative nickname if Richard doesn't like being called Rich or Ricky. I passed for safety's sake. What if I started laughing while I was eating?

Leaf lettuce. Very dark green, almost greenish black. Ew. The stems were kind of woody. Ew again. But the 2011 Pringle-shunning side of myself pitched it into the cart. There's vitamins in them there leaves and stems.

Chicory. Paler green, but still green enough and it was sort of pretty. All curly and feathery-looking. Cute name. I couldn't remember anything about it except that in Gone With The Wind, people used chicory root for coffee when they couldn't get the real stuff. Because it was pretty *and* made me think of GWTW, I grabbed a bag.

Endive. It looked fine. Very healthy and approachable, but the name annoyed me. I didn't know if it was pronounced "N-Dive" or "on-deev". How could I brag about my sudden good habits if I couldn't pronounce what I was putting in my mouth? I didn't buy it; but I had good intentions of consulting dictionary.com which pronounces the word as many times as you'd like. (I made a mental note to look and listen up "chard" while at that site.) After I'd scratched my linguistic itch, I'd pick endive up next time.

Stonecrop. This was really cute, like a plump and friendly little weed. I'd seen it somewhere before. Of course. At the Korean vegetarian restaurant down the road. I almost didn't recognize it because when I had it at the restaurant, it was smothered in red pepper paste. There was something familiar about it, I remembered thinking. I remembered liking the texture coupled with the spicy sauce. I liked the name. All good. I added it to the cart.

So much for the greens. I added some little pinkish-red radishes to my pile. They're very hard to find and terribly expensive. I don't even want to tell you what I spent on a total of five little radishes, but I will -- approximately $1.30 (USD). I didn't care; I'd been missing radishes like hell. They started me thinking about Gone With The Wind again, (Scarlett gets sick after she eats a radish on an empty stomach) but I shook it off and went for a couple of carrots and cucumbers, a bag of cherry tomatoes and some button mushrooms to round out my salad.

Back at the apartment, I grabbed my biggest bowl and started washing, slicing, chopping and cutting. I'd almost forgotten how it was fun, in a sort of Zen way, to mess around with preparing food. I doused my salad with a few squirts of Wishbone Italian salad dressing, which assured me brightly on its back label that not only would it make my salad taste delicious, it would actually assist in helping me absorb more of the nutrients in the salad. Whatever. It had me at taste. I tossed the ingredients around for a couple of minutes then shoved the bowl in the refrigerator and pulled it out again 2 hours later for dinner.

Result: Nice. Maybe there was something to healthy eating after all. The only thing I didn't really care for was the greenish-black leaf lettuce. Bitter stuff. If I were one of those people who have that extra taste bud that makes ordinary vegetables taste soapy, this would have been intolerable. What I think I'll do with the remainder of the leaves is drown them in red pepper paste and sprinkle the mixture with some toasted sesame seeds.

I was enchanted with the interesting texture the stonecrop gave to the salad. At first bite, it seemed like it would be bitter, but then it turned some kind of gustatory corner and came across as slightly sour and peppery, not at all unpleasant. I tried a sprig of it entirely devoid of salad dressing to verify this.

What other ways were there of preparing it? Googling, I found out that stonecrop is also known as sedum, and that it's usually used as ground cover. So that's where else I'd seen it! Recipes? I didn't find any, and I even visited those vegan VEGAN sites. The ones where the participants might beat the crap out of you if they saw you even glancing at an egg or a sliver of cheese.

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One of the many gardening sites said that gardeners didn't particularly have to worry about animals or children eating the attractive ground cover -- it wasn't poisonous and it didn't taste too great, either. Finally, Sturtevant's Notes on Edible Plants (1919) -- courtesy of the Oregon State Food Resource page -- tersely allowed that "sedum" is a plant of Europe and North Asia (hey!) and "the leaves serve as a salad". (hey again!)

Naturally, I feel very smarty and pleased with myself and very cutting-edge. I have brief fantasies about M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child asking/begging me to share my ideas with them and hazy, pleasant daydreams about the Food Network. Even though I know I'm in no way a vegetable vanguard, I'm going to have so much fun doing different things to stonecrop. Stay tuned.

RIP Jay Lewis: I Don't Know Any Other Way To Say Goodbye

I wrote this post back in the spring of 2005. Yesterday, I learned that the subject of this piece was killed in a car accident. Although I haven't seen him since shortly after high school, I've thought of him often over the years and hoped that I'd have a chance to see him again one day.

Jay Lewis (and Eugene O'Neill)

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There have been many times when I've been able to take my wild and unmanagable emotions and turn them into book lust. One of the earliest and most memorable examples of this happened when I was a high school senior.

I was taking a speech class called Oral Interpretation. We would perform scenes from plays or do dramatic readings of short stories. There was a guy in my class named Jay Lewis. He, too, was a senior, and a pretty damn good actor. He was also easy on the eyes, but not so perfectly handsome that he didn't seem accessible. He had a slight quality of ruggedness, even at 18 years old. He had just excited my admiration by playing Starbuck in our high school's production of The Rainmaker. I saw every performance.

One spring day, maybe in the third quarter of the year, several people in the class were taking turns performing scenes from plays. I think a speech contest was coming up later that month. Jay Lewis chose to do a monologue from A Long Day's Journey Into Night. He was Edmund, the younger tubercular son in a wildly dysfunctional family. This Eugene O'Neill play is extremely intense and autobiographical, and Jay played it to the hilt. He even coughed convincingly, looking flushed and bright-eyed.

When he was finished, we all clapped for him. I was sitting there, sweating. I couldn't take my eyes off of Jay, even when he sat back down. I had talked to him easily all year, but now I felt intimidated. I was in a fever. I felt so strange that I had to do *something* to alleviate my symptoms. People couldn't go around feeling like THIS all the time, could they?

I did the only thing I could do to cool myself off: I waited until after class then asked the teacher innocently what the name of that play was that Jay Lewis had done the scene from? (Of course I knew the name of the play! It was burned on my brain!)

She replied, "A Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill."

I was very clever. The woman was a bitch (it was her first year of teaching, and she had every right. A student broke her toe the year before when she was the 'nice sub'. It was an accident, but still...) and there was no way that I was going to let her know that my request had anything to do with my sudden feelings about Jay Lewis. Besides, she was too old (23) to understand such grand passion!

I furrowed my brow and asked if that play would count as "literature or something?" She said that it would count. Her stern visage brightened slightly. I furrowed my brow a little more and said that I'd like to borrow a copy of the play because since I was going to college next year, I thought I needed to read more literature.

She checked out a copy of the play to me, and I began reading it behind my math book that afternoon in math class. I went into a Reading Coma, staying up late that night, then reading on the bus the next day. After that, my fever still burned, so I did the only thing I could do: I went to the school library to hunt up more O'Neill plays. The trip there was fruitless, so I went to the local library and found a copy of O'Neill's collected plays. After 8 plays or so, I finally calmed down. I was in the middle of reading The Hairy Ape when my fever finally broke.

I finished the play, took the book back to the library, and when I next saw Jay Lewis in class, I found that I could breathe more normally. Most of the time. When I thought of him as Starbuck, my throat still got a little tight. I was able to speak to him again, which was a relief.

I don't know what Jay Lewis did after we graduated. I went on to be an English major, and about three years later in Shakespeare class, when we were reading the historical plays, I saw Jay Lewis as Hotspur. I heard Jay Lewis' voice in my mind's ear, reading Hotspur's lines. I went a little crazy with the yellow marker, highlighting every time in the play that Hotspur opened his mouth.

A few years later, I saw the movie version of The Rainmaker with Burt Lancaster.
I pitied Burt.
He just couldn't compare to Jay Lewis.

A Few More Stray Reviews

This wraps up everything I read in 2010. Whew.

We Shook The Family Tree - Hildegarde Dolson.

I wrote about this humorous memoir, published in 1946 here but I got parts of it confused with parts of Dolson's 1955 follow-up, (which I actually like a little bit better) Sorry To Be So Cheerful. Guess what I did soon after that?

Composed - Rosanne Cash.
I have been a huge Rosanne Cash fan since that summer day in 1981 when I went to Peaches, a record store in Tulsa and bought her 1979 album, Right or Wrong, then went back to my then-boyfriend's parents' home and laid it on their turntable. Composed is a surprisingly literary memoir. Sometimes, it seems extremely introspective as if Cash were writing to herself rather than to an audience of readers, but I admire her tastefulness, her intellect and her dazzling ability to see connections in practically everything.

The Long, Gone Lonesome History of Country Music - Bret Bertholf
This book is juvenile nonfiction and it's also a picture book. Right out of the gate it suffers from an identity crisis. It doesn't really succeed as a picture book because the color palette is too dark and muddy. As far as the nonfiction goes, there's a lot of names and expertly-done caricatures of country stars from the past, but many of them are just presented as names and faces and that's all. Only the keenest and most interested young reader would be motivated to Google for more in-depth information. Also, the book has the dual disadvantage of being out of date and being about a genre that is maniacal in its drive to always produce the newest flavor of the month, (even if that flavor tastes increasingly of cheap plastic) and very young country fans have no bridge to tie yesterday to today. I can only see this book appealing to someone like myself or Sam from Book Chase because both of us enjoy and appreciate the history of country music and we're old enough to get most of the references. One final complaint: There's no bibliography, which is inexcusable. Even if the people reading the book are only waist-high and seriously believe that Hannah Montana is a real person and that french fries with ranch dressing and bacon bits is a balanced meal, they have a right to a list of original sources.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things - Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. Stuff starts out with the cautionary tale of the Collyer brothers, whose hoarding in their New York City brownstone led them to a horrific end in 1947. Frost and Steketee present other cases for our consideration, from those who mindfully struggle with parting with even the smallest, most insignificant objects to those who are living in such extreme filth but still believe it's not their problem, but rather the problem of friends, family or the authorities who find their lifestyle alarming. Animal hoarders are profiled, and also very young children with hoarding tendencies who have been brought to Frost and Steketee by concerned parents. There's a brief overview of how philosophers throughout history have viewed owning possessions and a look at how and why an increasing number of Americans have hoarding issues of different degrees. Frost and Steketee aren't judgmental or know-it-all about this disorder. Their willingness to discuss the contradictory theories and raise the questions that still puzzle them is refreshing.

A Few Stray Reviews

Here are some of my reads during December:

In The Woods - Tana French.
This novel was the December BOOKLEAVES selection. I really didn't expect to like it at all because I'm not a big mystery fan, but I ended up liking it very much. Rob, a police detective based near Dublin and his partner, Cassie are put on a murder case that happened in the country near an archaeological dig. It also happens to be the same place where, 20 years before, Rob (then called Adam) and 2 of his best friends went missing. The friends were never found and Rob/Adam was found safe a couple of days later, clinging to a tree with no memory of what happened. The more seasoned mystery readers in the group were able to spot the murderer almost immediately and guessed at another character's involvement. I got really caught up in the intricately choreographed way Rob and Cassie would interrogate suspects -- it was my favorite aspect of the novel. Some readers groused that one of the mysteries was never solved, but I didn't mind -- it seemed more realistic. I'm looking forward to reading more of Tana French's work.


Holidays on Ice - David Sedaris.

I read this one because my co-worker Brian saw that I was at 97 books and he wanted to nudge me closer to triple digits. We swapped Sedaris -- I gave him Me Talk Pretty One Day. Holidays on Ice seems a little uneven, but the first offering in the collection, "The Santaland Diaries", which is about his sojourn as a department store elf, is definitely worth your time. I was reading it while eating lunch alone at Lotteria (Korea's version of a fast food burger chain) and I laughed suddenly and loudly. The three ajummas at the table next to me jumped and stared.


Dream Story - Arthur Schnitzler.
Although I've never seen the movie Eyes Wide Shut, I was definitely interested in this 1926 Austrian novel, the source material. Too soon, I found myself borstrated with the draggy, semi-surreal plot. Dream Story is less than a hundred pages, so I was able to tough it out, but I won't be turning it into a Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge. Thanks anyway to my book buddy Paul (who's got all those great Jim Thompson novels!) for the loan.

The Rule of Saint Benedict - St. Benedict. Faulkner Guy passed this slim volume to me several months ago, and I finally read it, making it book #100 for the year. (Not only is Faulkner Guy Faulkner Guy, he is Medieval Guy.) In 73 short chapters, Benedict of Nursia lays out a constitution and laws for living in a religious community and he touches on almost every detail of daily life including the election of an abbot, obedience, daily labor, the twelve degrees of humility, prayer, diet, reading scripture at mealtimes, punishment and how to dress and behave while traveling away from the monastery. Although there are rules for everything except breathing, they seem thoughtful and moderate, and there is a degree of democracy present. This book was written around 530, but Benedict's vigorous and clear writing has aged well.
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Ride The River - Louis L'Amour. This novel is part of the Sackett series, and the only one featuring a female Sackett, 16-year-old Echo. After spending her whole life in the mountains of Tennessee, Echo journeys to Philadelphia to collect an inheritance. The lawyer with the money advertised as minimally as he could, in hopes that no one would ever come forth, but Echo saw the notice by chance. Now he intends to cheat her, but Echo's smart and ready to kick ass if needed. L'Amour made some of the clumsiest style choices in 20th century fiction. There's too much exposition and the book could spawn several rounds of drinking games since Echo repeats herself so much, but if you like a snappy plot and the reassurance that the Sacketts always come out all right, you might enjoy seeing this hillbilly Katniss in action.
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The Quiet Little Woman - Louisa May Alcott. I read this during Christmas week for the All About Alcott Challenge. Back in the 1870s, three sisters were huge fans of Little Women and decided to pay homage to the March sisters and Alcott by creating their own literary magazine. Alcott heard about this and kindly contributed to their effort the three stories in this volume, all with a Christmas theme. There's nothing of Jo March here, the character that gives Little Women its fire and energy. On the contrary, these anemic, sentimental tales seem more like they could have been authored by Beth from her sickbed. The Quiet Little Women is nice as a stocking stuffer for a grade school girl or for devotees of Louisa May Alcott who would like to get their hands on absolutely everything she ever wrote, but the latter group should be advised that they will need a good strong dose of A.M. Barnard afterwards.

2011: Bookish Resolve

Although we are several days into 2011, I don't feel I'm too late to make my book resolutions. I didn't always feel this way. I figured if you didn't get it done on January 1, (hangovers were no excuse) you missed the boat for that year and had to go through the next 12 months grubby and unresolved.

Then I moved to Asia and discovered Seollal, which is how Koreans refer to the lunar new year, which sometimes doesn't show up until mid-February. This year it's February 3. Thanks to getting a second shot at a new year, I have time for seventeen hangovers if I wish and then I can sprawl all over January, doing a year-end update here, taking a nap, getting a snack, looking for the back scratcher, watching TV, languidly making a resolution or two there...you get the idea.

So, I've gotten all my resolutions together rather early in this little crevice of time between the two new years, and I'm feeling like I'm the queen of time management. Mentally, I'm feeling pretty damn tidy. You could eat off of my cerebellum. Here's my list:

1. Read for charity. I'll go a penny a page again.

2. Read for challenges:

100+ Challenge

The Pulitzer Challenge

The Newbery Challenge

The Canadian Challenge - 4 down, 9 to go before July 1.

The Support Your Local Library Challenge - I'll try for 20 this year.

Mad Men Challenge - books from the late 50s and early 60s.

The TBR Dare

Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge - I've had a lot of fun with this one.

The Western Challenge - starts in May

3. Read internationally.

4. Participate in both the April and October 24-hour Readathons.

5. Read more books written before 1900.

6. Read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The unsanitized version.

7. Curtail book spending - this is going to hurt...

8. Don't hesitate to DNF. Give it till page 49 then Zzzzzt! The Russian front!

Dreaming In Literature: Faulkner in Pajamas

I dreamed that I was sleeping in what seemed to be the most comfortable bed in the world. I was warm and cozy, then I felt someone shaking my shoulder and nudging me to wake up. "You said you'd read him, but you haven't," said my husband in a reproachful tone.

What the hell? I thought. I don't have any husbands right now.

I rolled over and pulled the covers off of my face. Sure enough, it was no husband I'd ever had -- it was William Faulkner. We seemed to be in some kind of swanky hotel room and he was wearing blue-and-white striped pajamas and slippers. He was holding a glass with a toothbrush in it and he was shaking it at me.

"I've read Faulkner, I mean, I've read you," I said. I ran through the list in my head: As I Lay Dying. Light In August. Go Down, Moses. "A Rose For Emily". "That Evening Sun". What else? "I balked on The Reivers," I told him. "I'm sorry, I don't know why."

"Not me." Faulkner shook the toothbrush and the glass at me again. "Charles Henri Ford. You haven't read him."

"I have so! I like the Andre Breton poem. His collage poems are kind of cool. Can I go back to sleep?"

Secretly, I thought Faulkner was kind of hot in those pajamas with his silvery hair all messed up from sleep, but the prospect of bow-chika-bow-wow with him worried me a little. Plus, that damn toothbrush and glass routine was putting me off.

Faulkner's mind wasn't running in the same direction at all. "I've got every one of Charles Henri Ford's chapbooks in my suitcase out in the car. You need to go downstairs, get them and read them today."

"Today?"

"You're burning daylight," Faulkner said.

"Okay. Where are we?"

"New York City."

"New York City!? Oh my God. Can I brush my teeth first?"

Faulkner held the glass and toothbrush out to me. "Here, use mine."

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I was caught between Oh yuck and He's one of the giants of American literature when I woke up.

Tough & Cool Inner Bookworm: Sizing up Bybee's Feeble Attempts at Reading Resolutions

Bybee has gone off to work after a morning of lallygagging. Exactly how many applications of shampoo does she really need for those few short thin strands on her head? But never mind that. I've got plenty of other things on my mind.

Another year down the reading drain! Poor Bybee; she has these flashes of brilliance then long stretches of murkiness. Her intentions are good, but her follow-through...do you think she's got a touch of adult ADD? Examining her faults and foibles always gives me a headache like someone whopped me upside the head with a volume of the OED, but I shall not flinch from the task set before me.

1. Read for charity. This resolution is still a little half-baked. For every book I read, I'm going to award myself 1,000 won, roughly the equivalent of 1.00 USD.

Bybee ended up tweaking this goal a little bit -- she changed it to a penny a page instead of 1.00 for each book. Good move. As a result, approximately $270-something dollars is going to an orphanage in Siem Reap. If she'd taken my advice and read some lovely Victorian chunksters, the Cambodians would be getting so much more.

2. Read 100+ books.

She read 106 books. Hmf. The Plump Pig, indeed.

3. Complete all my challenges:

100+ Books Challenge

See above comment.

Support Your Local Library Challenge (50 books this time)

She clumsily scratched her way to 17 books, then went a-wandering off God-knows-where.

2010 Canadian Book Challenge

Fail. 5 books out of 13. Bad Bybee! No poutine for you!

Read The Book, See The Movie Challenge.

So many wonderful pre-1900 novels have been made into movies. I'm just saying.

The Pulitzer Project.

She read another 4 this year. Like I care. The Pulitzers didn't come along until well into the 20th century. Yawn.

4. Read more books published before 1900. You see, Tuffi? I care.

"Tuffi" indeed! 7 books out of 106? I have to admit though that when she read The Rule of St. Benedict (published in 530) I felt a little funny in the head with hope and joy. Alas, in no time at all, she was back bumbling around in the modern...stuff.

5. Read internationally.

Only 32% of her reading was international this year. I wish I knew a number of different languages. How would "Susan, you suck" sound in Tagalog or Ukrainian?

6. Get caught up on my book reviews.

She got caught up all right, but she's straggling again with December's reviews.

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So there you have it. How does she get herself dressed in the mornings? I wish I could quit her and find myself a true bookworm that shares my genteel sensibilities, but I'm yoked to Bybee. She is what she is and she is my fate. I'm bound to be sitting on my little pincushion of despair for yet another year, but you'll never hear me complain. Ouch.

Shall I Tell You What I Liked, What I Really Really Liked?

I must be on the road to Curmudgeonville. When I did my stats for 2010, I talked about the books I didn't finish and the books that annoyed me to no end until their ends, but never once did I give a hearty shout out to the reads that made me smile, made me think, made me miss my subway stop, made me growl at people to piss off, I'm busy reading and just all around made me happy I'm a bookworm. Let me fix that now.

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1. Wild Swans - Jung Chang. This memoir of one family's life under Mao Zedung's rule both educated and horrified me.

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2. Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition - Owen Beattie & John Geiger. At least once a year, a book engrosses me so much that I miss my subway stop. This was the book and I had to backtrack 3 stops.

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3. Virginia Woolf: A Biography - Hermione Lee. Woolf finally got a biographer who was perfectly attuned to her sensibilities. The chapter about her reading life is the showstopper.

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4. Flashman and Royal Flash- George MacDonald Fraser. The cowardly, unrepentant bastard has stolen my heart and left me laughing while all the while giving me a good dose of history.

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5. The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway - Jim Thompson. This is the noir I've been waiting for. This is bleakness worth embracing.

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6. You Gotta Have Wa - Robert Whiting. Change Japan to Korea and professional baseball to teaching English and you've pretty well got the story of my life --and my coworkers' -- right now.

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7. The Giver - Lois Lowry. I love how the dystopian society is revealed slowly, layer by layer.

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8. The Lost City of Z - David Grann. The life and disappearance of explorer Percy Fawcett is skillfully written and illustrated with dozens of excellent photos. And the ending? Nothing but net.

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9. True Grit - Charles Portis. Beautiful use of antiquated language coupled with a rawboned adventurous plot. As Donna Tartt pointed out in her fabulous afterword to this novel, Mattie Ross is no Huck or Scout. She's more like Captain Ahab's little sister.

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10. The Women - T.C. Boyle. Famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his series of mistresses and wives are an endless source of fascination to a shocked and scandal-hungry American public. Their stories are told in a florid, blustery style remininscent of Wright himself, coupled with a series of hilarious passive-agressive footnotes by an older Japanese architect who, in his youth, was one of "Writeo-San's" minions.

Paring this list down to 10 was difficult, because it was such a great reading year for me.

Buy Buy 2010

After a year of tracking my book purchases, this is what my lunacy looks like:

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During 11 of the 12 months, I ranged between 3-8 books a month. In July, though, I went a little mad: 33 books. The good news is that I'm reading faster than I'm acquiring. Also, the majority of the books were used.

Looking back, I was surprised about how many books were bought for work or for other people. For example, I bought 7 in December, and three of those were gifts:

A Fable - William Faulkner. For the Pulitzer pile.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth - Jeff Kinney. I bought it for myself, but also with an eye towards the children's literature class next semester.

The Lost City of Z - David Grann. Christmas gift.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women - Harriet Reisen. I'm always up for anything Alcott: Stories? Sure. Bio? You bet! Trip to Concord? Let me pack a few things.

The Best of Everything - Rona Jaffe. I bought it to fill that Mad Men-shaped hole in my heart.

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock. Christmas gift.

Leonard Maltin's 2011 Movie Guide - Leonard Maltin. Christmas gift.

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Although I've exposed myself as the bookmadwoman that I am, I still find that this was a useful exercise and I'll continue monitoring my book purchases in 2011.

The Whole Enchilada: Book and Reading Stats for 2010

Total number of books: 106

Pages read: 27,745

Average # of pages per book: 262

Library books: 17 (a little short of my goal of 50)

Fiction: 69

Nonfiction: 35

Poetry: 2

Audiobooks: 1

Graphic Novels: 5

Book/Movie Experiences: 11

Shortest Book: Nurse Nancy - 24 pages

Longest Book: Virginia Woolf: A Biography - 893 pages

Newest Book: Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (2010)

Oldest Book: The Rule of St. Benedict (530)

Hit Me Again (books I reread): 7

Chunky Monkeys (books with more than 500 pages) : 7

Skinny Minnies (books with fewer than 100 pages) : 11

Funniest Book: Holidays on Ice

Saddest Book: Wild Swans

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New Miserable Experience (books I finished but didn't really care for) :

Wicked - Gregory Maguire

The Foreign Student - Susan Choi

Riders of the Purple Sage - Zane Grey

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson

Dream Story - Arthur Schnitzler

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey Goodbye (The DNF Files)

Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 - Nancy Lusignan Schultz

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Edgar Allan Poe

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Author Nationality:

Austria 1

Australia 1

Canada 5

China 1

England 13

Germany 1

Hungary 1

India 1

Iran 1

Ireland 1

Italy 1

Japan 1

Korea 2

New Zealand 1

Nigeria 1

Scotland 1

USA 72

Male authors: 64

Female authors: 34

Co-authors: 8

Books written before 1800: 2

Books written 1800-1899: 5

Books written 1900-1950: 15

Books written 1951-1999: 48

Books written 2000-2010: 36

Pulitzer prizewinners: 4

Happy discoveries: Flashman!

2010 Challenges completed:

The 1930s Challenge

All Things Alcott Challenge

100+ Books Challenge

Happy Book Year -- Time for some reading resolutions!

2010 -- 106 Books

It's been so long since I've blogged that I may have forgotten how. Somehow, in the past couple of months, there haven't been that many moments of silence in which I could sit down and write. To do so, I seem to need more and more that kind of silence with edges on it. Scalloped edges.

Last year, I read 106 books. That's an all-time personal best and two more than last year. I should be finished with the complete statistical breakdown sometime this week. I'm not going to kid anyone though -- there were several short books in that total, because I count anything between two covers.

Speaking of covers, everytime I go to E-Mart, I visit the bedding section and feel so compelled to buy this:

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Happy New Year. I missed you. Back soon with stats and resolutions!