Which hour was most daunting for you? The middle stretch.
Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? You can't go wrong with the Stephanie Plum books.
Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? No.
What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? The challenges were a lot of fun.
How many books did you read? 4
What were the names of the books you read?Bless The Beasts and Children;Two For TheDough;Marbles;My Mortal Enemy.
Which book did you enjoy most?Two For The Dough.
Which did you enjoy least?My Mortal Enemy. I found it a bitter and brittle little piece that seemed to be straining to imitate Edith Wharton's work. In fact, Wharton could have covered this same ground much better.
If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? No.
How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? Very likely. I might try to read the whole time.
Not sure about squeezing in a fourth book, but with an hour-and-a-half to go, it seems foolish to sit and watch the sands run out of the hourglass. Let's see how far I can get with the Willa Cather novella MyMortal Enemy.
Food: Yeah, I'm going to have to deal with that. Starting to feel shaky. I think I'll go with my garden salad and some Oriental dressing.
I'm enjoying Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me, a graphic memoir by Ellen Forney. I'm nearly 100 pages in, and she's had a manic episode that lasted months and now she's in a depressive state. I love the way she draws herself looking like a cross between a grownup, sexier Nancy and Betty Boop. I'm also reminded of another graphic memoir artist I love, Alison Bechdel.
Marbles will be book #3 for the Readathon, but it's so good that I don't want to finish. I'm lingering on every page.
Snack: Another cup of tea. I'm thinking about dinner. Maybe a stuffed baked potato.
I finally finished Two For The Dough. Great stuff. I'm so glad that Grandma Mazur's role was expanded from the first novel. Thanks to her, I've figured out the kind of senior citizen I want to be. Anyone who can quote Clint Eastwood's "Do you feel lucky?" speech verbatim and under duress is OK in my book.
Almost forgot: Props to Janet Evanovich for bringing back Lula.
After my 5-hour sleep, I continued reading Two For The Dough. Then I started having indigestion. I ate a couple of extra-strength Tums and continued reading (More Ranger, less Morelli!).
After I felt better, I felt sleepy again, and passed out for almost 3 more hours. So not happy!!!
I'm 22% of the way through Two For The Dough. Time for a cup of tea.
I will have a successful Readathon, if I have to claw the success out of myself with my bare hands.
1) How are you doing? Sleepy? Are your eyes tired? No, not sleepy, because I crashed for 5 hours. It's up to me to shine in the second half.
2) What have you finished reading?Bless The Beasts and Children
3) What is your favorite read so far? Same as #2
4) What about your favorite snacks? The nachos were a delight. A revelation. Now I need something more delicate, like fruit.
5) Have you found any new blogs through the readathon? If so, give them some love! Ding! One serving of love coming up! Becca at Lost In Books has a very cool feature on her blog, "Take Me Away Saturday" in which she chooses a country and takes an intense look at it via fiction, nonfiction and children's books.
During this hour, I've been visiting other Readathoners' blogs. As always, everyone's food looks better than mine, and everyone's reading stack makes for a richer reading experience. I'm taking furious notes about what I'm seeing.
Put down the pom-poms: Now I'm ready to start my second book, although my eyes are getting that crunchy feeling. A little dose of Visine, and they'll be back to good in no time. I'll resume my cheering duties in a few hours.
Which book, you ask? Two For The Dough by Janet Evanovich. I recently discovered Stephanie Plum, and I can't help loving her and wanting to see how things work out for her.
The book pictured above, The Cheerleader by Ruth Doan MacDougall is an excellent portrayal of high school life in the mid-1950s. Lots of details -- it's like a time capsule!
Snacks: I'm still sipping on my Coke.
What's new or different? I felt an extreme desire to change into pajamas. Coinciding with this feeling was also the extreme need for it to be bra o'clock right then and there.
Books read: 1
I finished Bless The Beasts and Children. Excellent YA fiction (I didn't realize this was a YA novel!) and Glendon Swarthout was the supplest of writers. Although I know it was necessary to spell out what was happening to the buffalo, and why the boys were compelled to rescue them, I chafed at the obvious author intrusion. Also, the biblical allusions were a little too heavy-handed for me. The way the novel was structured with the flashbacks to the boys' lives and their previous experiences at camp was perfect, though. Glendon Swarthout is a writer whose other novels I'll be actively seeking.
SECOND HOUR Book: Bless The Beasts and Children Pages read:
23
Snacks:
The nachos. Living in Korea, it isn't always easy to find proper cheese, so I used Tesco cheese slices. Too late, I remembered that sometimes the liquor section has little blocks of Cheddar next to the wine. Serves me right for not being a lush.
FIRST HOUR Book: Bless The Beasts and Children (1970) by Glendon Swarthout
I'm very yay! and yippee! to be doing Dewey's Readathon again. Although this is my 8th or 9th time to participate, I've only been awake for the whole 24 hours once. The Sandman reminds me of that bully on the beach in the old Charles Atlas advertisements. I guess you know who that makes me.
I'm reading today (and tomorrow, because it's already 9 pm on Saturday here) from the totally excellent city of Busan, South Korea. The book I'm most looking forward to is Marbles by Ellen Forney. It's a graphic novel, and I'm going to try to save it for that delicate space in which I'm tired but not yet hallucinating.
I've gathered some snacks, and I'm most eagerly anticipating a plate of the nacho chips topped with my homemade chili and some cheese. I'll also be visiting other blogs in the guise of a Readathon Cheerleader and providing encouragement (and getting ideas for new stuff to read and eat).
In real life (as opposed to "read life"), I'm an English as a Foreign Language instructor at a university in Busan. The students (mostly Korean with a few Chinese) are great, which means they bring a lot of confidence, goodwill and energy into the classroom with them, which makes my job easier. It's difficult to be strict and hardnosed about "proper" grammar, because I'm dazzled by all the different ways the language can be manipulated and even changed to suit needs and reflect culture.
Back to the business at hand: I changed up my reading strategy for this Readathon. For the past year or so, I was reading children's books, but I lost the heart for that genre. I'm mixing it up this time, and we'll see how it goes. I don't expect to get to all of these:
The two books I've selected from my Kindle are Onions In The Stew by Betty MacDonald and Two ForThe Dough by Janet Evanovich.
Those eggs are hard-boiled. I tried to get a good mixture of savory and sweet.
Anyway, as I was saying in my last post, I was missing that David Shipman book so bad; I was missing it like hell. I woke myself up one night sniffing the air because I imagined I was leafing through the book and smelling the pages. (Kind of a combination grade school paste-and-vanilla odor.) I had it bad. I needed at that moment to read about movie history/criticism.
That's when I thought of Jeanine Basinger.
I first encountered Basinger a couple of years ago when The Spawn and I were watching a DVD of Sergeant York. Basinger was doing the commentary, and we both enjoyed her insights. I actually blurted out in the middle of the movie, "Who is that woman? She's fantastic!" Had she written any books? I checked. She had. I filed the information away for future use.
When my silver screen need sat on my chest and throttled me, my thoughts turned to Jeanine Basinger. I wondered if her books were on Kindle, since I needed them NOW. Joy! Three of them were available in that format: The Star Machine, Silent Stars and I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies. I grabbed 'em all, spending a shocking amount of money and I'm not a bit sorry. I'm not even using my customary rationalization, "Well, I don't smoke or drink..."
If I had bought these books just for the movie stills, they would have been well worth the money. Gorgeous pictures, page after page. (This is also the point at which I learned that my Kindle can zoom in and make images larger.) But there's also Jeanine Basinger, a film history professor at Wesleyan putting everything in historical Hollywood context, and giving it all that extra something that comes from being a lifelong movie addict. She can do the scholarly thing, but she's mostly warm and accessible and she knows and knows and KNOWS about movies. One of the things that amused and delighted me was that since she worked as an usher at her hometown movie theater, she saw movies multiple times and remembers years later what audiences reacted to strongly.
The relationship between the actors and the audience is a theme that Basinger refers to often. Something else I found interesting is her assertion that viewers would build up 'knowledge' about an actor or actress (based on personality and types of roles they've played before) and apply this to the current film. The movie makers knew this and were thus able to rely on a sort of shorthand in telling the story.
And the movies! I had to stop reading and make lists and actually go view a couple of the films (The PowerAnd The Glory (1933) and Dodsworth (1936) which I found on YouTube. I watched those while I was reading I Do and I Don't, her newest book, which was published earlier this year.
While I enjoyed the performer profiles in SilentStars immensely, when I tried watching clips of some of Basinger's recommendations, I fidgeted when I had to watch for more than a few minutes at a time. Although I've tried to fight the feeling, I find silent movies very hard going, except for a handful like Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Sunrise, Greed, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lon Chaney movies. I remember digging my nails into my palms at an Oklahoma State University filmathon and forcing myself to sit through all of Birth of a Nation.
The Star Machine, which was published in 2007, is a fascinating examination of the Hollywood Star System of the 30s-50s. All the actors and actresses were put through this 'machine' with a variety of success. Many of them thrived. Some were destroyed, and a few got a bellyful of it and walked away without a backward glance. One of the funniest parts of The Star Machine was reading highly critical studio notes about a young actor in the early 1950s that was being groomed for stardom, but was found wanting. His horseback riding skills were appraised as needing more work, among other things. Finally, he was released from his contract because he just wasn't showing promise. It was Clint Eastwood.
I could blather for days about Jeanine Basinger's awesomeness, but this clip of her speaking about I Do andI Don't will serve you so much better.
Since I moved next door to a cinema almost three months ago, I've had movies on the brain. Old movies, new movies -- it doesn't matter. I started missing this book, which is safely (?) in my U.S. collection:
The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years (1970) is a big, heavy hardcover film encyclopedia crammed with mini movie bios of stars that made it big before 1945. There are also beautiful black-and-white movie stills on every page. The copy I have in the United States is actually my second copy, which I found at Larry McMurtry's bookstore in Archer City, Texas.
My first copy was bought at a Stars & Stripes bookstore in Germany. I was 12 years old, and for some reason, I was in there with both my parents and my brother. I think we were killing time before going to a movie. Anyway, I took one look at this book and thought -- no, knew -- that I would love it. I had just seen a re-release of Gone With The Wind and was attracted to the picture of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as Rhett and Scarlett on the dust jacket. Problem: it cost 12 dollars! I can't remember how I convinced my parents to buy it for me. Perhaps it was close to my birthday or Christmas because I went home with it, and read it over and over again.* It was mesmerizing. I carried it to school and showed it to my uninterested friends. Well, one girl said that she liked Ingrid Bergman's dress in the Saratoga Trunk still. Otherwise, it was a boring book.
The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years helped me define how I would educate myself about movies. From late middle school and all through high school, I went through TV Guide and circled the movies I wanted to watch the following week. I had two rules:
1. No movies newer than 1945.
2. If the movie was newer than 1945, it had to be in black-and-white.
When I was in 9th grade, we had an assembly and the principal announced that we were going to watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As he droned on about appropriate behavior while the first reel was being loaded onto the projector, I cast my mind back to Shipman. Let's see. There were two versions of this movie. One came out in the 1920s and was silent and the other one came out in the 1930s and started Charles Laughton. (It would be years before I realized that his name was pronounced "Law-ton" rather than "Laff-ton".) Older was better, but either of these versions would be acceptable. I leaned forward expectantly.
The movie started. The credits came up. Lon Chaney! That meant we had the silent version! Excellent! (I had seen Chaney in the 1930 movie The Unholy Three the year before at another school, and admired his work.) The teachers and students caught on a few minutes later when they didn't hear any talking and there were title cards. The students started rumbling and the teachers and the principal got into a huddle with Oh, fuck! looks on their faces. I think I was the only one in the auditorium that was happy.
That happiness was short-lived, because the movie stopped and the principal returned to the podium. There was a mistake; they'd gotten the "wrong" movie, and we all had to go back to class. Everyone looked disgruntled. I was late getting back to class because I stopped off in the girls' restroom to cry. Why was a silent movie anathema? Didn't they realize that this movie was like...history? I couldn't believe that I was being thwarted. Never mind. I blew my nose on a long strip of toilet paper and flailed around for some icy dignity. I had David Shipman and TVGuide. I would educate myself.
A few weeks later, we 9th graders were herded back into the auditorium* to watch House of Usher with Vincent Price. Since it came out in 1960 and was in color, both of my rules were broken, but I watched it anyway.
*The book stood up to my constant handling for a while, then the binding gave way and the volume broke into sections. At some point, I lost track of it.
**This determination to foist a film based on a classic upon the 9th graders must have been a way of meeting a district/state curriculum requirement.
It's almost Pulitzer time again, and I hope things don't go the way they did last year. If they do, it might just break my reading mainspring forever. I can see myself on the subway, staring vacantly ahead, a bit of drool gathering...but no. No. Things won't go that way again. We will have a new Pulitzer for fiction.
Which book will I be adding to my collection? As always, I can't just sit still in my fancy dress clothes, my hands neatly folded in my lap, waiting for the announcement. No, I must predict; the compulsion is too strong.
I'm going with Canada by Richard Ford. It's true that Ford won back in 1996 for Independence Day, but in the past, the Pulitzer committee has honored authors more than once. Ford is solid. Canada was one of my favorite reads in 2012.
If Canada doesn't win, I won't be unhappy if The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson gets the award instead. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard nothing but good things, and it's got my endorsement because of the Korea connection. If it's on their shortlist, I hope the committee wouldn't get all cringe-y and self-conscious about choosing a book that takes place in a country that's all over the news these days and decide to pass it up.
The awards will be announced at 3 pm on Monday, April 15, which is 5 am on Tuesday, April 16 for me because of the time difference. I hope I can sleep. I'll be excited and worried until I hear that a book has been chosen.
I see this lovely sight every evening while I'm waiting for the subway to come and take me from Hadan back to Beomnaegol:
The one on the right needs no introduction. The one on the left is a book vending machine.
All of these books cost approximately 2 or 3 dollars. Since all the titles are in Korean, I can't tell you what is featured here.* I'm assuming some light reading like chick lit and perhaps some self-improvement. BOA is a Korean pop star, so maybe that's her biography/memoir.
I never see anyone putting money in the machine and buying a book. That's disappointing, because I worry that these machines might go away if no one uses them. While I can't appreciate them firsthand, due to the language barrier, I appreciate them for being there for my fellow commuters on the Busan Metro.
Maybe I should buy one anyway. So what if I can't read it? I've got plenty of students who would be willing to give me the gist. Then I could hunt through it, looking for words I recognize and the Koreans on the train would see me "reading" and they would be all wow and wow.
While it's true that book vending machines are in bus terminals and subway stations all around Korea, standing next to *my* machine every evening as I wait for my train is one of the things that delights me about my everyday life and makes me happy to be here.
*Edited to add: After another long, laborious look, I made out that the third book on the top row is called "Ramen". The fifth book in that same row with the red question mark is titled "Why".
My subway stop. I've got the Kindle out and ready to go as soon as I see the steps.
Only 8 books for March. I started a new job, and you know how that can throw a reader out of whack. I am loving the hour of subway travel Monday-Friday which has helped carry me farther into the 19th century than I've been since 1986, when I took both "The Novels of Jane Austen" and "The American Renaissance" classes during the summer semester. That was painful and almost unmade me as a reader, but this has been great, because I'm always briskly happy when I start a new reading project and manage to maneuver into an end seat on the subway.
Here's how it all went down:
1. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott. I love Little Women. Primally, permanently. For some reason though, it got on my nerves a bit during this reading. My hackles rose at Jo's family acting all sniffy about her scandal sheet writing. She was only doing it to bring in money so Marmee could take sickly Beth to the seashore in the summer! They spent her money then told her she should direct her energies towards something more wholesome. It's funny how I have different reactions to the book each time. When I read it in 2005, I was dazzled by the Marches' frugality.
2. The Fortune of the Rougons - Emile Zola. This novel is the first one in the 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series. Zola thought it should be subtitled "The Origin" since readers first come to see how the highly ambitious Pierre Rougon splits with his widowed mother and his younger brother and sister who are the products of his mother's love affair with a smuggler. Zola is also interested in heredity and assiduously notes how Pierre's mother's mental problems manifest themselves in her children and grandchildren. The Fortune ofthe Rougons is also a political story, detailing the 1851 coup d'etat that marked the beginning of The Second Empire. The greedy, grasping Rougons are waiting and watching, determined to come down on the right side, be it with the republicans or the royalists.
3. Quiet: The Power of Introversion in a World That Can't Stop Talking - Susan Cain. With every page I read of Quiet, I felt more and more fascinated and also very relieved. Here's a clip of the awesomely-steeped-in-awesomeness author Cain, giving some of the highlights of her book. She has also done a wonderful TED talk.
4. The Kill - Emile Zola. The Rougon-Macquart connection in this novel is Aristide Rougon, who has renamed himself "Saccard". Aristide is the youngest son of Pierre Rougon. In the first novel, he was an inept young journalist, working for an equally unimpressive newspaper, The Independant (sic). A few years have passed and he's sharpened up a little and made a fortune in real estate. To keep up appearances, he lives in wasteful luxury with his young second wife, Renee and his son from his first marriage, the debauched Maxime. The two young people have an affair that kicks off in the family hothouse. Zola almost makes it seem like the flowers made them do it. The Kill was made into a movie in 1966, directed by Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda. The title is The Game is Over. Annoyingly, Vadim made the decision to update modern-day Paris.
5. The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola. Zola gets all foodie and the results are divine. There are two R-M connections in this novel: Lisa Macquart, who is the daughter of Antoine Macquart, Pierre Rougon's half-brother and Claude Lantier, a painter who is Lisa's nephew. (Claude's mother is Gervaise, the main character in L'Assommoir.) Lisa is married to Quenu and they run a charcuterie in Les Halles, the huge food market in Paris. The plot involves Quenu's brother, Florent who was a prisoner on Devil's Island. Although he has served his time, he still has revolutionary dreams despite the firmly bourgeois Lisa's attempts to get him settled. Sometimes Zola gets a little weighted down with too many characters and endless pages of description, but it all works to his advantage here.
6. Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates. Oates' subject for this novel, Marilyn Monroe, and her glass-shards-in-your-skin writing seem fitted for each other. Oates dispassionately relates her version of events based on Norma Jeane's life and inexorably shows how everyone around her was mesmerized by her beauty, but since it was a curvaceous and sexual kind of beauty, it was only a matter of time before they (photographers, Hollywood brass) figured out a way to make it into a product for consumption. Meanwhile, inside there's a smart girl, but she's too trusting and too nice, and the abuses pile up. Unsurprisingly, the character that comes off the best is "The Playwright", based on Arthur Miller, Monroe's third husband.
7. The Conquest of Plassans - Emile Zola. A poorly dressed priest with a dubious past suddenly blows into Plassans, the Rougon-Macquart hometown one day with his devoted mother. The pair rent a room on the upper floor in the house of Francois and Marthe Mouret, who are cousins and both related to the R-Ms. (Pierre's mother is their mutual grandmother.) Although the priest is an object of mockery at first, slowly everyone in town falls under his spell. It's fascinating to watch Zola do crazy, but this novel had too many minor characters and too much small-town politics for my taste. I almost packed it in, but Zola came through with a delightfully savage ending and did Naturalist literature proud.
8. Abbe Mouret's Transgression - Emile Zola. I wish I could read French because I have a feeling that Zola's first translator, E.A. Vizetelly, bowdlerized the text unmercifully. There's a dank, soap-opera feel to the whole thing. The title character, Serge Mouret is a priest and the younger son of Francois and Marthe Mouret. Zola gives the impression that the streak of craziness that runs through the family coupled with a life of chastity seem to be responsible for Serge's high-strung temperament. When Serge cracks up, the cage match between religion and nature is on. In this book, the bulk of Zola's descriptive powers go towards an impossibly fecund garden that is supposed to remind readers of Eden. The cast of characters is much smaller and it's a fascinating group peopled with grotesques. Serge's uncle, Doctor Pascal (the only sane person in the whole bunch) makes an appearance, torn between trying to help and standing gobsmacked, watching the nuts fall out of the family tree.
My plans for April include making more progress with Zola, including tracking down a biography of him. I've also discovered a series of a different kind -- Stephanie Plum. If the Rougons and Macquarts start getting to me, Stephanie will be my palate cleanser. Plum sherbet.
I like the colors in this picture, but my favorite shots of Zola are the ones in which he's wearing the pince-nez and his hair is all rumpled.
I've spent the last month diligently working my way through the 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series. So far, I've read 7 out of the 20. I'm going in publication order.
Even though Zola is my new literary crush, I was starting to feel a little too much of a muchness, so I'm glad about this challenge. It will get me back on track toute suite. Meanwhile, I'll try to assemble my jumbled feelings and impressions into a manageable post sometime in the near future.
