Since my last blog entry, I moved from the United States to South Korea. / One of the great things about traveling is that you've got tons of wait time in airports. This gave me an opportunity to read SICKENED by Julie Gregory, a memoir about growing up the victim of a mother afflicted with Baron Munchausen's by Proxy. Julie suffered a great deal, all so unnecessarily. I was struck by her generosity towards her parents; she remembers all of the small, good things they did for her, when the whole book could have easily been a "Mommie Dearest" screed and no one would have blamed her a bit. Also surprising was the warlike note on which the book ends. An excellent read.
It's one of those books I've always meant to read, since I was in junior high. I think the book even made that hundred greatest list of English-language novels that came out a few years ago. Now I'm determined to read it. My friend Teeter read it a long time ago, and she recommends it: A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Betty Smith.
Now, this has got to be an example of my contrary thinking: I skip over the best-known novels and go for something more obscure by the same author. Example here: I skipped over A TREE GROWS INBROOKLYN and read JOY IN THE MORNING, which I found engrossing but mildly saccharine.
This is about as bad as Harry's having read ROBINSON CRUSOE and I haven't. (still working on getting the Classics Illustrated version, blush) Teeter is my age, but she's always saying that she's not a reader and she only likes to read once in a while (hard for me to imagine). But she's read A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN and I haven't!!! Something else I found out: She read RICH MAN, POOR MAN by Irwin Shaw right around the time of the miniseries. Dang! I only read it this year. And again, this was only after I read one of his lesser-known novels, LUCYCROWN.
What am I doing, trawling for book ideas on sites like bookcrossing.com? Maybe I should just poll high schoolers and my so-called self-described "nonreading" friends!
OK, I'm over it. I think.
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In other book-related type stuff, I was flipping through old PEOPLE magazines, and I came across a letter to the editor from one Meredith Kornfeld of Larkspur, California. Meredith and I went to camp together. Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute. 1978. We were in the same cabin, sardined in with about 6 other girls. Our discipline was poetry. Meredith wrote one that I remember about a guy who got his parts blown off in World War I & now he was working at a meaningless job: "He only got the job because he was a veteran/A half-veteran." I loved her stuff, found it much more palatable than the nature stuff the other fledgling poets were dredging up daily for those 2 weeks in June.
Meredith was good company, but something that I will always remember her for is that she came to camp with plenty of books to read. (I didn't bring ANYTHING to read! What was wrong with me back in those days?!?) I *think* she broughtTHEWOMEN'S ROOM and I read some of that, but I *know* she brought EAST OFEDEN. I was looking through her books and I recognized Steinbeck's name from English classes in the 10th and 11th grades. "What's this?" I said curiously.
"Read it." said Meredith. "It's really good. You'll like it."
Even though I had known Meredith only a couple of days, I trusted her reading instincts completely. I latched onto EAST OF EDEN and went into one of my more blissful "reading comas". Camp counselors and bunkmates and the Poets-in-residence talked to me and urged me to join in activities, but it all seemed as if their voices were coming from far away. No one could really communicate with me until EAST OF EDEN was finished. Then they could only communicate with me a little because I was going back reading my favorite parts (all the Cathy/Kate chapters, some of which went slightly over my head).
Books are like Proust's madelines for me, bringing back such a rush and a sense of where I was and how I felt while reading whatever I was reading. EAST OF EDEN and Meredith Kornfeld will be forever linked for me, just like THE PERFECT STORM and a hotel room in Las Vegas and my not wanting to leave the room and my reading coma, and my husband snarling: "What the hell's wrong with you? We came to Vegas to have fun!"
Uh huh, honey. Whatever you say. Fun? I'm having fun.
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This seems like my longest blog entry ever, but I have to write about discovering Chuck Palahniuk! Manfred, Jr. rented "Fight Club", and started talking about it to me & I decided to watch it for myself. I really enjoyed it, and was inspired to look for Palahniuk books and learn about the author. I'm finishing up LULLABY, and Manfred, Jr. just gave me a copy of CHOKE. I'm hoping to hunt up a copy of the novel FIGHT CLUB.
One of the teenaged boys with which I work is a reader. He likes science fiction and fantasy (Anne McCaffrey is a favorite of his) which make me cringe, but in this world, we readers gotta stick together. I'll call this reader "Harry" because he's also fond of a certain series featuring a boy wizard.
Harry told me recently that one of his favorite books is ROBINSON CRUSOE, and that he's read it many times. I was embarrassed as hell. I began ROBINSON CRUSOE in the summer of 2001, but I bought a really cheap paperback copy with flyspeck print and pages so thin that the flyspecks bled through. Reading was a chore. I shelved the book. (Still have it. WHY???) Although there was this nibbling guilt that I was calling myself an English major without having completed a Daniel Defoe novel, I thought about it infrequently, especially when "Survivor" was on.
I couldn't confess to Harry that I hadn't finished this classic, so I made up my mind to read it soon. I stumbled upon a plan: Instead of hunting for another equally cheap-ass flyspecked copy, I would prevail upon Manfred, Jr. to find his poor old mother one of those abridged/adapted copies that have an illustration on every other page. I didn't have to wait long; Manfred, Jr. went back to his room and came back 2 minutes later with a copy of the book. (Manfred, Jr. has also read ROBINSON CRUSOE, which only added to my shame.)
Determined to put all shame behind me, I eagerly cracked open the book. Within one paragraph, I was in dismay. The person who adapted ROBINSONCRUSOE for the peanut gallery changed it from first-person to third-person! I'd gotten far enough in the other copy of the book (he'd been shipwrecked for about three years) to really enjoy the character's telling of his own tale. In contrast, the abridged/adapted version reads like a dry summary of events, almost like a laundry list.
Manfred, Jr. just asked me if I'm going to finish the version with which he provided me. I sighed and said, "I'll try." But in my secret heart, what I really want now is to read the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED comic book version. If I'm going to see an illustration on every page, why not see some of that excellent comic book art with the vivid colors? (Actually, I haven't read one of these in years -- the last one was JANE EYRE back in middle school, which I thoroughly enjoyed) I'm pretty sure that with the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED version of ROBINSON CRUSOE, the writers didn't switch to third-person narraration. One way or another, I'm getting this book done. This year.
I just finished SOMETIMES MADNESS IS WISDOM, a biography of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald with emphasis on and sympathy with Zelda. I liked it so much better than ZELDA by Nancy Milford. Milford seems too much a stylist, caught up with her subject, sure, but also she seems like she's in love with the sound of her own writing voice.
The author of SOMETIMES MADNESS IS WISDOM, Dr. Kendall Taylor, seems more straightforward, almost like she's teaching a course. I appreciated the brief tutorials about semi-famous figures that surrounded the Fitzgeralds during the Jazz Age, both in the United States and abroad.
Taylor has an advantage that Milford didn't: The Fitzgeralds' only child, Scottie, died since ZELDA was written, and Scottie's children have been forthcoming about the family where Scottie was fiercely protective and private.
Taylor also had more access to Zelda and Scott's letters and papers, and can more thoroughly trace how Scott appropriated ALL material about his and Zelda's lives, including lifting huge unedited chunks straight out of Zelda's private diaries. If that wasn't bad enough, Scott went ballistic when Zelda attempted to write about her/their experiences from her own viewpoint, saying that she had no right to. When (in spite of Scott) she finally wrote her own novel, SAVEME THE WALTZ (1932), Scott got hold of it during the editing process and cut sections of it ruthlessly, to the point where parts of it are mostly incoherant. The finished product is a piece of crap, which of course, Fitzgerald intended. Taylor shows fully how afraid he was of competition, a situation that was exacerbated by alcohol, which seemed to be weakening his writing powers, and making him little more than a mean drunk.
Kendall Taylor really lets loose on Scott during the sections in which Zelda is going mad, and he's doing everything he can to send her all the way around the bend. Reading her furious prose, the reader gets the feeling that she'd like it very much if Scott were still alive so she could murder him for his role in Zelda's downward spiral.
I have a list of books floating around in my bookwormy little brain that I want to read. It's a nice list, but if I don't put it down now, it'll change over the next few days or weeks, and I'll forget something:
1. That Larry McMurtry quartet (?) about those English people who settle in the West.
2. SICKENED by Julie Gregory. It's a memoir of a woman whose mother had Baron Munchhausen's-by-proxy. The book came out in 2003, but I've been stubbornly waiting for it to come out in paperback. I think that will be in September, but haven't seen it yet, though I've haunted the local bookstore with great frequency.
3. AMISH SOCIETY. Nonfiction, written by a professor who grew up Amish. Very scholarly looking, sociological. Lots of photos!
4. SLACKJAW. I bought this book months ago. It's about a guy who has all kinds of degenerative brain problems plus he's going blind & how he manages to keep his sense of humor.
5. A MILLION LITTLE PIECES by James Frey. It's out in paperback now. I love that cover!
6. PARADISE FALLS, VOLS. I and II. Just purchased these on eBay. It's by Don Robertson; how can I go wrong?
7. VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray. A book I've been meaning to read for years. There's a copy at the library.
8. TEACHING IN ACTION. Real life scenarios of problems/solutions encountered in ESL classrooms around the world. I've only sampled this book; it was required in graduate school. It might come in handy in the future.
One of my dirty little pleasures that I don't tell people about (until now!) is reading a book and before I finish the book, logging onto Amazon and reading reviews from other readers. I did this recently with THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt. I was moving through the novel amiably enough and liking it better than I remember liking her first novel THE SECRETHISTORY.
When I got to the review section, it was like I was at a wailing wall! Readers were castigating Tartt left and right for her "non-ending". Reader after reader whined that she didn't answer the main question in the novel, which was about the main character's brother. (I don't want to be too explicit because if anyone actually reads this blog and might want to read THE LITTLEFRIEND, I might spoil the ending.) Also, one reader contended that he or she didn't know who THE LITTLE FRIEND was and accused Tartt of leaving out the title character completely. There was another reader who timidly suggested that the reason Tartt left everything up in the air was because there might be a sequel! There were a few people who wrote that they enjoyed the novel, but mostly it was a torrent of abuse and complaints about time and money wasted.
I finally came to the end of the novel. As to the amazon reviewers: What a bunch of big babies! What is this childish need to have every single loose thread cut and tied neatly? Some of the reviewers obviously have some education because their complaints are well-worded, but obviously, their reading sophistication is waaaay down there in third grade.
Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh to the reviewers. Since we are living in uneasy and uncertain times, perhaps they can't help demanding that their reading material be neat and tidy. Personally, I hate too much predictability and neatness. I don't need every dot connected; that's the main reason I stay away from genre fiction like mysteries. On the face of it, THE LITTLEFRIEND seems to resemble a mystery, but that's not what Tartt set out to accomplish.
Although I hesitate to use the term because it seems too easy with the novel being set in Mississippi, THE LITTLE FRIEND seems quite Faulkerian. The ending is work, but pleasurable labor for a serious reader because there are many layers and realizations and ironies to sift through and ponder. These reviewers were left to do their own detective work, but of a different sort, and perhaps it was just too much heavy lifting.
I admire Tartt for not pandering to her readers. She assumes that we might be able to draw our own conclusions, and if they differ from another's conclusions, then oh well -- that's literature, folks.
I've been playing a lot of internet Scrabble lately, and it shows. Scrabble playing goes up, reading goes down and blogging about reading goes WAY down.
There are two books that play in my head constantly right now: NICKEL AND DIMED and FAST FOOD NATION. Unfortunately, they play while I'm at work, working my current job at a popular fast food chain restaurant. I shouldn't say unfortunately. I'd rather have them in my head than just being there alone with nothing to occupy me but the work and the %$#& customers.
I have a To-Be-Read mountain of books, but I'm thinking of rereading WORD FREAK by Stephen Fatsis, which is about Scrabble tournament players, and how the author goes from a living room champ to a Scrabble tournament champ in about a year.
