Angry At You...And Your Books, Too???

I heard something both intriguing and disturbing this week: An acquaintance of mine (I'll call her 'Reedy'; she's wonderfully, quirkily bookwormy) and I got together. Over coffee, we were having a lively conversation about books we'd recently read, books on our wishlist and books we were looking forward to coming out next year. We were both especially Squeeeeee! about The Mirror and the Light, the final book in the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel.

I told Reedy about finding some sort of orangey-red sauce in my recently library read, Born Round by Frank Bruni, and how I would ordinarily be a little bit eww, but under the circumstances, it seemed forgivable. She asked if I smelled the page to try and figure out what the previous reader had been eating. Uh, no. She said she always does that. Except when she sees Cheeto fingerprints, which is all the evidence you really need.

The conversation flowed on with the coffee, and I mentioned wanting to read City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Body by Bill Bryson (I got the latter for my birthday last week).

Reedy made a disgusted face. "I'm not going to read either one of those. I wouldn't read them if you paid me."

"Why not?"

"My cousin gave them to me. And I'm mad at her."

Well. Relatives can be all over the board, but if they're generous with books, you can overlook a few things! Can't you? I know I could.

"Reedy, you can't be mad at the books. They didn't do anything."

"I don't care. They sat there on the shelves, just glaring out at me and I kept getting more and more repulsed when I looked at them. I couldn't even stand them in the house. I felt like throwing up."

I didn't like the sudden and ominous appearance of past tense verbs. I tried to ignore them: "Bring the books to me. I don't know your cousin."

"I don't have them anymore," said Reedy.

"Oh my God." I was having terrible visions. "Reedy, you didn't throw them away, did you?"

"Of course not. I'm not crazy. I donated them to the Salvation Army. But there are copies in every fucking bookstore around here. I see them everywhere I go. Even Walmart. Ugh."

I thought I was going to cry, or something next-door to it. "I wish you'd brought them to me. I would have even given you some money for them."

"I don't care. I did you a favor. Those books had her nasty mojo all over them."

So, anyway. I'm torn between annoyed at missing out on free new books and genuine fascination at this quirky(?) behavior. I don't understand, and I promise that if I'm ever mad at you, I may be snarling with contempt, but for your books, there'll be nothing but the utmost tenderness in my heart.

What A Strange Reading Week It's Been

This is a potato that came in a bag I bought 3 years ago. I didn't eat it. I showed it to everyone who came over.

I've had a good reading week to start the year, but my list looks strange. 'All over the place' doesn't even begin to describe it:

I started out the year with The Book of Margery Kempe, which is generally considered to be the first autobiography in English. This book has been on my shelves for years, so it was a matter of read & release and also flexing my reading muscles a little by reaching back before the 19th century.  I thought of my old pal Faulker Guy.  When Faulkner Guy's not being FG, he's Medieval Guy or Old English Guy. He's the one that told me something along the lines of 'Middle Ages reading is the pause that refreshes.'  Margery Kempe was anything but refreshing. Mystic or crazy or both? Pages and pages of rather lively conversations with The Holy Family, weeping, crying aloud, trying to fend off her husband (after fourteen children) and other men so that she can take back her chastity, the trip to the Holy Land, people disparaging her and sometimes trying to burn her at the stake...the summarizing is much more fun than the reading. I'm glad I read The Book of Margery Kempe.  I'm just as glad I'll never have to read it again.  For my Book Blackout Bingo, this will cover the PASSION square.  If you're in doubt, consider the part in which God/Jesus gets married to Margery then He tells her that they can get into bed together and she can put the arms of her soul around Him and kiss His hands and feet and do everything she used to do with her husband.

After Margery, I scuttled back to the 21st century as fast as my little bookworm legs would carry me. Lionel Shriver's So Much For That is a novel that I half-expected to give up on, but I couldn't put it down. Shepard Knacker, who is a couple of years short of fifty has scrimped and saved to retire early to East Africa. On the day he quits his job and decides to leave, his wife informs him that she's got cancer and will be needing him to return to work because she will need his health insurance. This book was written a few years ago, but the harsh home truths about the U.S. healthcare system still apply. So Much For That is ranty and occasionally grotesque with loads of black humor, and readers know how it's all going to go down, but then suddenly they don't, and *that's* where I couldn't stop reading. If you bring this book home, unpack your strong stomach.  SMFT was a library book from my beloved BEL, but I checked it out in the waning hours of 2014, so I didn't stray from The TBR Double Dog Dare.

A couple of years ago, I went through a stage in which I was feverishly reading and collecting "Evil Children" books.  After I finished The Bad Seed and something else I can't remember (Daughter of Darkness, maybe? The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane?), the urge was gone, and Let's Go Play at the Adams' began gathering dust on my TBR shelf. Again, in the spirit of read & release, I began reading this 1974 well-written but unremittingly bleak and evil story based on a real murder case. Even though the book is technically good, the subject matter is so disturbing and nightmarish that I hate to release it. I almost want to throw it away. Author Mendhal Johnson died shortly after Let's Go Play... was published.  I shouldn't wonder.  Book Blackout Bingo: the UNSETTLING square gets covered.

After wallowing in darkness for a few hours, I suddenly remembered that I had Let's Go Play at the Adams' 2 in the cloud on my Kindle. Written by Peter Francis, an ardent fan of Mendhal Johnson's book, Let's Play...2 flashes-forward twenty years from the events detailed in the first novel.  For readers of that first novel, this is more of a 'howdunit' as an FBI agent is called to a crime scene that leads him to another murder with similar hallmarks. Of course he stumbled over every red herring on this long and winding road, and the plot was bogged down by a couple of romantic subplots and the idioms were puzzlingly, inexplicably British, but by the end, the reader has got the catharsis that wasn't there at the end of the original novel. Perhaps that's why Peter Francis was compelled to write a sequel.

Even though death is a major theme in Anne Tyler's The Beginner's Goodbye, it is Anne Tyler, and compared to the harsh, horrifying and crazy stuff I had read so far in 2015, it was like letting the light in. After a tree falls on Aaron Woolcott's wife and kills her, Aaron is haunted by her at intervals, in which he examines the trajectory of their marriage as well as the process of grief and how others play a part in helping and healing.  Aaron seems like a younger brother or cousin of Macon Leary from The Accidental Tourist -- they both go to live with their sisters after tragedy befalls them, they both have a finicky air about them, and they even have similar jobs -- Macon wrote travel guides for an "Accidental Tourist" series while Aaron is the publisher of a series of "Beginner" books, which resemble the Idiot's Guide or Dummies series. And of course, everyone is from Baltimore. What really thrilled me about The Beginner's Goodbye was a couple of glimpses of Luke Tull from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Luke (resembling his Uncle Ezra in every possible way) is a friend of Aaron's and as a way to distract Aaron from his grief, invites him for dinner at the restaurant every week, although the place is just referred to as "the" restaurant.  But it's The Homesick Restaurant!  I know! [Edited to add: Luke Tull also gets the profound summing up about life towards the close of the novel.] Can't wait for Tyler's new book, coming out next month.

Looking at what books came before, anyone would wonder: What next?  Well, I really went off the rails and read a book of Korean poetry, Between Sound and Silence by Chang-Soo Ko. Call it a palate cleanser.  I didn't think I'd like it, but I did, so I want to give full props by giving Between Sound and Silence its own blog post, which will be coming up in a few days. I always feel a little awkward when talking about poetry. Overly pretentious. This may take a while.

Call Me Zelda

I have a confession:  When I was 19, I read Nancy Milford's biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and I wanted so badly to *be* Zelda.  Not mad, broken-down Zelda, but badass, unpredictable, crazy-brilliant Jazz Age Zelda.  I wasn't always successful.  More cringeworthy than captivating, I'm sorry to say. I ended up irritating one boyfriend clean away with my antics but he was no F. Scott Fitzgerald, so no loss.

Even when I was older and knew better, I still had Zelda flashes.  The last one was in 2008, at a party in Seoul.  I had a train ticket to go back, but I was having so much fun and enjoying the company so much that I decided to be madcap and make a flamboyant gesture and burn my train ticket, right there at the table.  I announced my intentions as I set the ticket ablaze.

 Fail again.  Everyone just thought I was stupid.  "You could have refunded that ticket for another train," one woman explained.  She made her words insultingly slow.

"It's a gesture!"  I insisted.  "A large, stupid drunken gesture -- haven't you ever done anything like that?"

Silence at the table.  "You didn't need to burn your ticket," the same woman insisted.  She would be throwing up in and around a squat toilet in a few short hours; nothing dashing or madcap about that.

I looked down at the ashes of my ticket.  "I think I'm allowed one stupid drunken gesture a year," I finally said in a small voice.

Damn!  I could understand how my annoying boyfriend of long ago had missed the point, but these people were expats, and they didn't get the hilarity of it all.  In one fell swoop, I realized that I could never pull off Zelda and expats were nothing magical anymore.  Had they ever been?   I wanted my train ticket back.

***

Fast-forward a few years.  My attraction to Zelda has stayed intact, and that led me to Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck, published late in 2013.  This novel is set in  the years after the Fitzgeralds made the 20s roar both in the United States and abroad.  Zelda started showing signs of mental illness.  A (fictional) nurse, Anna Howard, with her own troubled past, is hired to care for Zelda and becomes her friend and confidante.

Anna sees Zelda's brilliance and resents Scott's efforts to curtail it and appropriate the best parts of her life for himself.  Anna's view of Scott reminded me of a Zelda biography I read almost ten years ago called Sometimes Madness is Wisdom.

Call Me Zelda is like an English major's best fever dream.  What litgirl (or litboy, for that matter) worth his or her salt hasn't dreamed of fully appreciating and ultimately rescuing their lost literary legend?

Because of Robuck's excellent research, the novel crackles with brilliance whenever Zelda and/or Scott (and Scottie, too!) are present.  Anna's own story was heartbreaking, but I didn't feel as fully drawn in, although I did wonder while reading if she was a real person or a creation.

One thing that kept distracting me was that when Anna and her family talk together, their speech has an early 21st century cadence to it.  The second part of the novel involves a quest Anna is determined to fulfill for Zelda.  It was difficult for me to suspend my disbelief in some places, but at the same time, the plot appealed strongly to my English-major-as-literary-savior fantasies.

Erika Robuck has either got my number, or we have identical literary longings.  Her next novel is about Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I immediately got a poetry earworm:  Love is not all:  It is not meat nor drink/Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain...

I never wanted to be Millay, but I can hardly wait.

Harry Potter

Yeah, of course I was in the bookstore on July 16th, but I couldn't do it. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to buy the new Harry Potter book.

Let me correct myself: I was in two different bookstores. HP was in both stores, but I wasn't even tempted.

Why? Sometimes I don't understand the dark workings of my bookwormy little brain, so this is the place where I go to brood.

I read the other five HP books last year and enjoyed them mightily. I was pleased as punch in December when J.K. Rowling posted the happy news that she'd finished HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. I admire J.K. Rowling. She, too, was an EFL teacher once upon a time. I've been following the frenzy on TV. I've gotten irritated when people have posted spoilers. So why didn't I just buy the book?

Shanghai was in the bookstore at the same time I was. She was carrying two copies of the book: One for herself, and one for a friend.

This is what did tempt me: I saw the shipping boxes that the book came in. They were white and green, labeled with the title of the book and the instructions not to open the box until July 16th. When I saw those boxes piled in a corner at the back of the bookstore, I wanted one immediately. They looked like excellent collector's items. In the end, I walked out with something really different: A biography of Howard Hughes. WTF???????????

Because practically everyone else in the whole frickin' English-speaking world wanted that book on that particular day, it made me not want it.

All the madness and hoopla over the publication and selling of a book gladdens my heart, but I just can't bring myself to queue up with everyone else.

So, at the bottom of it all, if I feel cold about purchasing this book, does this mean that I'm not the truly-madly-deeply booklover that I thought I was? Does the misanthrope within me trump the book hound? Am I exhibiting bizarre book snob behavior, bristling at being "told" that I must run, not walk to the store immediately and buy this book?

What made Saturday any different than any other day? Why didn't I go into my "Lost Weekend" mode and fall on the damned thing the moment I saw it on display?