Successful Pilgrimage!

"How innocently life ate the days."
- John Updike


And that's what was happening. I was letting life innocently eat my weekends while continually and somewhat willfully putting off the trip to Seoul and the pilgrimage to WHAT THE BOOK? the fine new/used bookstore located in Itaewon.

This went on for a couple of months. Then, one morning last week, I woke up and had a moment of clarity:

"[Bybee]," I told myself. "You are a bookworm. That is your identity. Who would you be if you were not reading, talking about, writing about, hunting for books? Why, you'd be a shell. If you let your fear of traveling in Seoul overshadow what you truly love, you're taking the first step towards becoming that shell."

I can only listen to myself for so long before I get a little funny in the head. I threw the covers back and jumped up.

2 hours later, I was in the train station buying a ticket to Seoul.
3 hours after that, I was telling the taxi driver "Itaewon," and trying to sound poised, as if I had been there millions of times.
15 minutes after that, the taxi driver set me down in Itaewon.

I paid the driver, climbed out of the taxi, and began asking every foreigner I saw where to find WHAT THE BOOK? No one knew for sure. What the hell? Then what were they doing in Itaewon? Surely there was no other reason to be there, was there?????????????????????


Sigh. Although I'd vowed to have this adventure on my own, I needed to call Pablo for directions. (I'd embarked on my quest so swiftly and impulsively that I didn't even bother to stop at the WHAT THE BOOK? website to double-check their location.)

Pablo seemed a little surprised that I'd finally gotten some guts, but he recovered quickly and provided me with impeccable directions. Turned out that I was already right on top of the joint. All I had to do was click my heels together 3 times and say to myself, "there's no place like WHAT THE BOOK?, There's no place like..." Ooops, I mean that all I had to do was turn right at the espresso bar, walk up a slight hill, cross the street, and there it was!

It was beautiful. This is one time I regret that I don't have a digital camera so I could show you this bookstore. Books line the walls all the way to the ceiling, all the way around the room. Then, in the space between these walls are aisles and aisles chock full of books neatly shelved.

Fiction was on the walls. Nonfiction was in the aisles. I was in Heaven, breathing in the mingled scent of new and used books. If they could only bottle that scent, I know what I'd be dabbing behind my ears and on my wrists each and every morning!

I haven't been that happy since I went to Archer City, Texas a few years ago, to Larry McMurtry's bookstore. For a moment, I briefly considered crying with joy, but decided that tears in my eyes would interfere with a close perusal of book titles.

I gave the used fiction a good going-over, except for the M's. Some expat parked his butt on an upholstered ottoman really close to those shelves, and I couldn't get close without getting in his personal space. He's forgiven though, because of course I have to start building my rationale for a return trip in the near future. Also, extra points to WHAT THE BOOK? for having places to sit down and look through books. Not that I sat. Not for a moment. No, I had to keep moving!

The nonfiction didn't get the same scrutiny as the fiction, but that's just another reason that I must return. Actually, it was difficult to check out the nonfiction thoroughly because there were a lot of customers in there, and that's where they seemed to be clustered. It would have been nice to roam the store inimpeded, but I was more than happy just to be among my own kind.

I can't believe I did it, but I walked out with only 11 books, 2 of them gifts for Pablo because he helped me finally get there, both physically and psychologically. Here's what I bought:

1. Devil In The White City - Erik Larsen -- (nonfiction) For Pablo, but of course, I have no shame. While presenting this book as a gift, I was thoroughly looking ahead to the day I'll borrow it from him.

2. The Global Soul - Pico Iyer -- Also for Pablo. See the above comment.

3. My Left Foot -Christy Brown --mistakenly filed in fiction, but who cares?

4. The Hiding Place -Corrie Ten Boom -- also in fiction, again, who cares?

5. Andersonville -MacKinlay Kantor -- YES!!!! BIG SCORE!!!!!! I'd walked in hoping to find this massive novel about a Civil War POW camp.

6. In America - Susan Sontag --Ditto on the big score; I'd been thinking about this book for months. Many critics find her fiction a little uneven, but most agree that she got it right in this novel.

7. The Poet And The Murderer - Simon Worrell. -- I'd never heard of this nonfiction/true crime book before, but if the poet in question is Emily Dickinson, how could it miss?

8. Plainsong - Kent Haruf -- I've been hearing about how great this midwestern author is for about 10 years now. There's a sequel to Plainsong, so I've got to get this & then hunt the sequel (Eventide) & read them consecutively. Strive to always set new goals, isn't that what they say?

9. Culture Shock! Korea -- A handy resource for obvious reasons.

10. The Remains Of The Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -- I haven't seen the movie with Antony Hopkins, but I really enjoy his acting, and know I'll have fun picturing him in my mind's eye as I read the story of Stevens, the "perfect" butler who is looking back on his career.

11. From The Terrace - John O'Hara -- I read O'Hara's 1934 classic novel, Appointment In Samarra earlier this year and was bowled over. I went into WHAT THE BOOK? hunting for more O'Hara and was gratified to find this deliciously huge (900+ pages) novel, first published in the late 1950s.

What I had in my hands and regret leaving behind:
A book of essays and short stories by Terry Southern, and a book of essays about children's literature by Alison Lurie. Maybe they'll be there when I go back. Can I count on people NOT to buy them? My sense of the average expat's reading taste is pretty accurate, but ...things happen. If someone actually did buy "my" books, I'd respect them for their good taste. (I'd hate them, but I'd respect them.)

Anyway, great bookstore. I'll be back soon. The owner tried to encourage me to shop online as well, which I just might do, but there's nothing like direct contact with the books. If you're an expat in South Korea, and you are seriously craving bookstore, go there, or at least visit their webpage: http://whatthebook.com But why choose? Do both!

My Father's Ghost

My father died on April 6th of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, complicated by diabetes. He was 70. I was lucky to find out on April 7th. The woman with whom he lived the last decade-plus of his life (I'll call her Dagmar) leaked the news to only one relative, a distant cousin in her 80s. I didn't know he'd been so ill, so the news came as a shock. Only 24 hours earlier, I had received a short letter from him that made no mention of illness.

Dagmar and I share a mutual antipathy. Who could blame me? I met her back in 1988. The second time I ever saw her, she said to me: "Your mother's terrible. She doesn't deserve your father. I'd dearly love for him to be my companion." It took her until 1991, but she waged a steady campaign and in the fall of that year, my father packed his belongings in his van, and drove to Dagmar's house on the other side of town.

I loved my father so much, and I missed his presence. When we were together, we usually had good conversations, but we didn't really need to talk because it was almost as if we could follow each other's thought patterns without missing a beat. (I've always been disappointed that in my love relationships we could never get to this level of communication. Manfred, Sr. found my expectations frustrating and announced on several occasions that he WAS NOT a mind-reader.)

I missed Dad so much, but I just couldn't bring myself to pretend to be civil to Dagmar. Even if I had pretended, she was always on the lookout for even the slightest whiff of dislike. A vain and shallow woman who thrives on drama and conflict, Dagmar is always at odds with one or another of her own five children. "You're disowned" is a phrase that comes easily to her lips. (In contrast, my mother operates more in the vein of: "Disown, hell! I'll be damned if I'll disown you! I'd much rather keep you around and make your ass suffer!")

Although I thought my father's involvement with Dagmar showed an appalling lack of good judgment as well as good taste, I realized that he loved her. What I hoped was that he and I could continue to have a good relationship and I could avoid Dagmar. I wanted us to spend time together, meeting in neutral places. Well, I underestimated Dagmar. She insisted that my father CHOOSE, and he chose Dagmar. I was upset, but kept writing to him at holidays hoping that we would eventually work through our troubles.

About 9 years after my father moved in with Dagmar, she kicked him out one day. She drove him to a motel and dropped him off. The first person he wanted to contact was me. I could scarcely believe this turn of events. Suddenly, he was back in the family, living nearby, going on trips with my mother and showing up at holiday dinners. I was so happy, but I had the constant sensation of holding my breath, thinking it was all too good to be true.

It was all too good to be true.

Dagmar decided she'd made a mistake, and started working her way back to my father. That time, it took one-and-a-half years. He moved back in with Dagmar in the spring of 2002.

I begged him not to go back:
Me: "She won't let me see you, Dad."
Dad: "This time it'll be different."

It was different, all right. It was worse. From that time, I only saw him when I chanced to meet him out in public. He summoned me over to Dagmar's house once, but I wasn't allowed in the house. Instead, we talked in the garage for a short time. I didn't stay long; it was December, and really cold. We were shivering as we talked, and our breaths came out frosty.

A few months after the garage encounter, I read a memoir by science-fiction and fantasy writer Suzy McKee Charnas called My Father's Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances. Charnas' father, Robin McKee, had left his wife and child when Suzy was very young, to pursue his dream of being a successful artist. This dream was never realized. Years later, when Suzy was middle-aged, she realized that her father couldn't live independently anymore. He was in New York, and she was in New Mexico, and she couldn't afford constant plane trips to check on him, so with some trepidation, she invited Robin to come live in the "mother-in-law" cottage next to her house, and slowly, sometimes frustratingly -- Robin was strong-willed and eccentric -- father and daughter got to know each other again before Robin died a few years later in a nearby nursing home. He went there only after Suzy was completely unable to care for him unassisted anymore. In his last days, he found happiness with a fellow resident of the nursing home, a warm and wonderful woman named Jane.

There's a part in Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead, in which the narrator says that his wife was reading a copy of The Trail of The Lonesome Pine, and she was so engrossed she "just melted into the book." That was how I felt; I just melted into My Father's Ghost. For me, it was the sweetest of fairy tales as well as a blueprint for the future. This is how it'll be, I thought. Dagmar will get another wild hair and kick Dad out again, and he can come live with me. Furthermore, our situation would be better than Robin and Suzy's because my father's and my personalities were both easygoing and peace-loving. Finally, if he went to a nursing home, maybe he'd meet a nice woman. Even better, he could hook up with my mother again!

I was confident that we had plenty of time to acheive this scenario. After all, my father's father had lived to be 83! Using that as measurement, it seemed as if my own father was light-years away from death. Sure, he had CLL, but hadn't the oncologist told him that the disease would annoy him for decades rather than kill him? As for me, I had plenty of time to go off to South Korea -- a country in which my father had also lived and absolutely loved -- and teach for a few years.

I was mistaken. Even back when I read Charnas' memoir, we were already running out of time. When I got on the plane to go to Korea almost a year-and-a-half ago, the clock was ticking ominously. I had no idea.

Finally, time ran out, and I didn't even know. Twelve hours after my father died, 4 hours before I got the news, I was standing in line at the post office, holding a postcard addressed to him, and imagining a day far off in the future when we'd be sitting at my kitchen table together, drinking coffee and swapping stories about life in Korea. Talking, and even better, not talking, just keeping company with our thoughts.

I keep thinking of My Father's Ghost. I really loved that book. Would I be able to stand reading it again? The experience could not possibly be the same. Before, I found it reassuring. Now, I think every page would be painful, but perversely, I want to feel pain. I think I fucked up. I was a bad daughter. I want my heart to break.

I'm still holding my breath, waiting for my father to return, and trying to strike a bizarre bargain: If I suffer x amount, can you come back? No, he can't come back. I really need to stop holding my breath once and for all, but if I breathe anytime soon, it's going to hurt too damn much.

WHAT THE BOOK?

I can't believe I haven't made a blog entry for so long! Anyone would think I'd forsaken books! Never happen! In my defense, I must say that making piles and piles and piles takes up time.

I'm studying on a field trip to a bookstore called WHAT THE BOOK? Here's their website: http://whatthebook.com This field trip will be good for me for two reasons:

1. I'll get more books! DUH!

2. I'll overcome my fear of traveling in Seoul alone. Not sure what ails me. Busan presents no problem. I feel comfortable there, but when I think of strolling around in Seoul, my self-confidence is somewhere down around my ankles. Especially when I think of taking the subway from Seoul Station to their store in Itaewon...and having to change lines???

Gulp. But I'll do it all, and more to get to WHAT THE BOOK? I'll be so proud of myself for being independent and brave. I've come to notice lately that generally, it's not worth my time and energy to be independent and brave unless it involves something to read. Bookwormishness has the damnedest by-products at times!

I know intellectually that I'm equal to this adventure, but the craven & cowardly part of me is whining piteously and wishing to find a friend that's middle-aged, female and bookwormy to a fault. Someone who knows Seoul like the back of her hand and will guide me/us to the books.

Snort. My chances of that are as remote as those of waking up tomorrow morning with an autographed first edition of The Great Gatsby under my pillow and Larry McMurtry and Anne Tyler standing over my bed fighting about which of them is going to bring me an Egg McMuffin.

In an attempt to jack up my own morale, I repeatedly remind myself that WHAT THE BOOK? supposedly has around 20,000 titles in stock. And it's not just the new bullshit that *everyone* is reading -- like The DaVinci Code, for example. No, WHAT THE BOOK? also has a nice selection of used books, so many reading treasures await me.

Yo, Bybee! Listen up!

Are you going to let almost twenty thousand books lay around unopened, unread, unsmelled (or worse, bought up by someone with courage!) while you sit around quivering because you might get lost on the subway?!

Happy Book Year!

I made New Year's resolutions, but only one of them pertains to books or reading: I resolve to read more authors from other countries besides the United States, Canada, and England. Going back over my lists of what I've read since 1999, I was shocked that in some years, I read nothing but American authors. Not that that's a bad thing; I plan to read many, many American books this year. I was just under the mistaken impression that I was a well-rounded bookworm.

So far in 2006, I've read 1 book by an American and one by an English author. The books are The Human Stain by Philip (I'm-like-Henry-James-but-horny) Roth, and The Two of Us: My Life With John Thaw by Sheila Hancock.

I'm not sure about the third book --A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. He was English, but moved to Australia about 10-15 years before he died, allegedly disillusioned with his home country. Do I count him as English or Australian? I'm tempted to go with the latter, just because it would make me look good regarding my New Year's resolution, but I have no wish to cheat.

Thanks to Pablo and some of my other co-workers, last year's reading was a little more varied. I read a nonfiction book by a Russian author, a novel from Viet Nam, and a memoir by a Cambodian woman. There was also a French novel by Colette. Speaking of the French, I'd like to try some Balzac this year. I read somewhere that he can be counted as part of the school of naturalism. Did I also read that about Zola, or did I dream it?

I found out today that a person from bookcrossing.com is sending me a couple of boxes of books! Yee-Haw!!! Promptly getting nosy, I looked at her 'reserved' list to see what she's sending me. (Don't try this at home; it's a lot like spoiling your Christmas by rummaging around looking for presents.) Anyway, this kind and generous bookcrosser is helping me stick to my international reading resolve by including a memoir written by a journalist who is from Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano.

Also, I recently purchased a book called Korea Unmasked by a Korean author/artist named Won-Bok Rhie. Rhie's book is a graphic not-novel (what I mean is that it's graphic and nonfiction; I don't know the proper term) detailing the history and culture of Korea. I've read quite a bit of it, but haven't finished it yet. Korea Unmasked is *extremely* entertaining, and has helped fill in many of my information gaps and lessened my head-scratching when encountering certain aspects of Korean culture (....ooooh, that's why....).

I know that at least 1 other person besides myself reads this blog, so if you have any ideas about books/authors/countries for me to try, please leave me a comment.

Time Travel

For some reason, when I first heard of The Time Traveler's Wife, I didn't want to read it. I wouldn't even pick it up in the bookstore. For some reason, I was having vague images of some bad movie I saw. I think Charlize Theron was in it. I'm not sure why these images were attaching themselves to Niffenegger's book, but that's what was going on.

After a while, I was a little curious (there has been a lot of hype, and a movie will be made next year based on the novel) so I read the back cover blurbs. Then I began my usual circling for months and months and months. I found the copies published in the UK and read the Brit blurbs. Finally, on December 11, I celebrated my second consecutive "bookstore birthday" by adding The Time Traveler's Wife to the pile of books I would take home that day.

(I finally finished that Patrick White biography. I read that book for so long, I felt as if I was living his life right along with him in real time. By the time he died in 1989, at the end of the biography, I felt as if I, too, were seventy-something years old! I am eager to get some Patrick White novels and start reading them. I hope to read Voss or The Tree of Man or A Fringe of Leaves sometime in 2006.)

Anyway...I began reading The Time Traveler's Wife. At first, I had a slight headache at the shifts in viewpoint, and trying to track the times Henry and Clare meet and who knew who when, but then I realized that the author was just doing her job, making the reader feel their disorientation.

I'm halfway through the book now, and enjoying it except for a couple of minor gripes: Niffenegger describes a whole game of billards. This never works for me. Even when Don Robertson, who I revere, described an entire Cleveland Indians game in The Sum and Total of Now, I didn't care for it much. Also, there's a scene in which Clare and her sister are talking while watching It's A Wonderful Life, and Niffenegger continually references what's going on frame by frame. Yes, Audrey, I saw the movie, and I know you saw it, too. One or two references bookending the scene would've been okay, but the rest just seemed like so much filler.

These are just piddling complaints. I enjoy the inventive way the story is told, and continue to be intrigued with Henry's struggles as a man out of time, and the things he must do to survive the abrupt shifts that ambush him with hardly any warning.

Even though Henry's travels through time are usually sickening and often dangerous, I'm still inspired to dream about what I would do if I had Chrono-Displacement Disorder. I fantasize that I might land in the late 1920s, in a bookshop. I'd pick up a couple of freshly printed, spanking-new first editions of The Great Gatsby. I'd bring them to the present and sell one of them, and give the other to Manfred, Jr. to do as he liked. Then I'd pop up to 1936 and buy a nice copy of Gone With The Wind.

The Crooked Way We Come To Books

In the middle of PATRICK WHITE: A LIFE, I got waylaid by a novel called HONKYTONK MAN, by an Oklahoma native named Clancy Carlile. Even though I lived in Oklahoma many, many years, I had never heard of Carlile. What a pleasant find! It's strange that I had to come all the way to South Korea and find the novel which had languished in an Australian used bookshop before Pablo's friend bought it and gave it to him a couple of years ago. It languished on Pablo's bookshelf for those 2 years, then one day last week, he gave it away to me.

Readers who are also moviegoers will recognize HONKYTONK MAN as the title of a Clint Eastwood movie. This copy of the book was a movie tie-in, with Eastwood's picture on the cover. I was leery of the book at first, thinking it was a dreadful movie novelization, but no, HONKYTONK MAN was a novel first (1980) then a movie (1982).

HONKYTONK MAN is the story of country-and-western musician Red Stovall, who is loosely based on Jimmie Rodgers, "The Father Of Country Music". It's the mid-1930s, and the Dust Bowl days in Oklahoma are at their cruellest peak. Red Stovall shows up at his sister's home there broke, drunk, and sick. He's come from California and is trying to get to get to Nashville to audition for The Grand Ole Opry. He enlists the aid of his 14-year-old nephew, Whit, and soon they're off an a picaresque adventure with Whit's grandfather also in tow. One of the original participants in the 1889 Land Run, the grandfather has decided to return to Tennessee to die there.

I enjoyed this book much in the same way that I enjoyed ADDIE PRAY, a.k.a. PAPER MOON, another Depression-era road-trip/coming-of-age novel. Carlile didn't really accomplish anything new or groundbreaking with this novel. In fact, one scene between Whit and his grandfather is stagey and overwritten. But HONKYTONK MAN is a magical book for me because it's worked that strange alchemy that certain books work on me: It acted as a springboard to interest in other books.

After I finished HONKYTONK MAN, I was curious to learn more about Jimmie Rodgers, the real-life model for Red Stovall, so I went to amazon.com and found a book about Rodgers called JIMMIE RODGERS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AMERICA'S BLUE YODELER. I was able to preview some of the first chapter, and judging by casual references (e.g. driving down the road and Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue is playing on the car radio), it looked as if the book was written sometime in the late 1970s.

Further investigation revealed that it was written awhile back, [1979] but it was reprinted by a university press about 12 years ago, which means that it's probably no slouch when it comes to well-done research. Even better, the writing is fine and lively, not the usual dry and deadly stuff one associates with academia.

You guessed it: I really want this book!

But it doesn't stop there: The author of the Jimmie Rodgers book is Nolan Porterfield. The name rings a distant bell in my memory, but I'm damned if I could tell you why. Anyway, Porterfield is also a novelist, and he wrote a novel called A WAY OF KNOWING. Of this novel, written in 1971, a reviewer at amazon fervently wrote that Porterfield's novel would definitely fill the bill for those who like Larry McMurtry, and that in some ways, it was even better than McMurtry's stuff.

Well, I'm a big McMurtry fan, so that alone would be enough to pique my interest, but there's also the knowledge that Porterfield is a country music scholar! Furthermore, he, like McMurtry is from Texas. How could I go wrong??? I'm just downright jonesing for this book as well! It's time for a Lost Weekend that takes place at abe.books.com

Some of my fellow bookcrossers at bookcrossing.com have tidy, prescribed lists of what they'll read for the coming year. I can't do that. For one thing, it smacks of that tight-assed regimentation that is the hallmark of formal schooling. In addition, it doesn't seem to allow enough room for the almost mystical way you can find books...or books can find you. The most I can do is make up a rough list of my reading interests for the coming year, then wait with pleasure to see how and where and why I get waylaid.

Reading A Mystery

CanadaBoy's mother is so nice! She sent a box of books to CanadaBoy, and she included one for me. It's called Blow Fly. The author is Patricia Cornwell.

Slight problem: I really don't like mysteries very much. They're too plot-driven. When I'm reading fiction, I like it to be more character-driven. But I've heard great things about Patricia Cornwall and her creation, forensic scientist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. My interest is piqued. I'd like to give this mystery a try.

I'm worried that I'll have it at the back of my mind all the time that I'm reading ewww! a mystery, so I'm making plans to protect my enjoyment of the book against the twisted workings of my bookwormy mind. Since I really enjoy true crime (like Ann Rule's books for example) and other nonfiction, I'm going to go into Blow Fly with the idea that Dr. Kay Scarpetta is a real person, and that the case in this book is a real one.

This is a new and untested reading strategy for me, but it should work. Wish me luck! I'll report back when I've completed Blow Fly.