Bybee's Endless Wishlist: April, 2020

I bought this blank journal back in 2009, thinking that it would be the next volume of What I've Read, but somehow, it became my Wishlist.

 (Somehow = I was going through a lofty, pretentious cycle, and suddenly, nothing would do for recording my reading posterity but a Moleskine journal.)

Wishlist is a great journal. The cover is black pleather, embossed with hieroglyphics.The endpapers resemble the cover. It's comforting just to hold it in my hand and rhythmically trace my fingers across the cover, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I've been holding it in my hand a lot more lately and filling its pages with titles I hope to read one day. Filling and filling and FILLING! Because I didn't buy/check out a single book this month! All that habit, all that longing went into an endless wishlist.

In no particular order, here is the list for April, 2020. Sometimes I made little notes to myself:

Miles Franklin biography. Author: ? (Saw at Seattle Public Library. Standing next to farting woman.)

Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood - Jennifer Traig.

A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe.

Anna Kavan Books:

A Charmed Circle (1929)

Let Me Alone (1930)

The Dark Sisters (1930)

A Stranger Still (1935)

Asylum Piece (1940)

Change the Name ((1941)

I am Lazarus (1945)

Sleep Has His House AKA The House of Sleep (1947)

The Horse's Tale (1949)

A Scarcity of Love (1956)

Eagle's Nest (1957)

A Bright Green Field and Other Stories (1958)

Who Are You? (1963)

Ice (1967)

Julia and the Bazooka (1970) Published posthumously.

A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan - Jeremy Reed. (biography)

Books by Patricia Bosworth:

Montgomery Clift: A Biography

Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story (memoir)

The Men in My Life: Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan (memoir) Oh God...where is my time machine?

Lincoln on the Verge (nonfiction) Ted Widmer.

Redhead By the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler. 

The Plague - Albert Camus

Alex Trebek memoir (July, 2020)

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (novella) Katherine Anne Porter. (Takes place during the 1918 pandemic!)

A Face Like Yours (novel) -Frances Cha- (Takes place in South Korea)

Novels by women published in the 1930s:

Not So Quiet - Helen Zenna Smith. 1930. Novel about WWI female ambulance drivers.

The Shutter of Snow (1930) -Emily Holmes Coleman. (A woman spends time in a mental hospital after the birth of her baby)

Women Against Men (trio of novellas) (1933) -Storm Jameson-

Novel on Yellow Paper - Stevie Smith (1936)

South Riding - Winifred Holtby (1936)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1937) -Winifred Watson-

If It Bleeds -Stephen King

Alice Adams Novels:

Careless Love AKA The Fall of Daisy Duke (1966)

Families and Survivors (1974)

Listening to Billie (1978)

Rich Rewards (1980)

Superior Women (1984)

Second Chances (1988)

Caroline's Daughters (1991)

Almost Perfect (1993)

A Southern Exposure (1995)

Medicine Men (1997)

After the War (2000) (posthumously published)

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (novel) - Cho Nam-Joo

Guts (memoir) - Kristen Johnson (Tammy on Mom)

I'm Your Huckleberry (memoir) -Val Kilmer

Old Lovegood Girls (novel) -Gail Godwin-

My Sister, The Serial Killer -Oyinkan Braithwaite- (novel)

Year of Wonders (novel) - Geraldine Brooks- (Plague Novel. 1688?)

Ecstasy & Me: My Life as a Woman (memoir) - Hedy LaMarr -

The King of Confidence (nonfiction) - Miles Harvey (James Strang, Mormon sect leader 1840s?)

The Betrayal of the Duchess (nonfiction) -Maurice Samuels

Charles Jackson biography by Blake Bailey: Farther and Wilder

Home Work - Julie Andrews (memoir)

My Dark Vanessa (novel) Author ???

Ducks, Newburyport (novel) - Lucy Ellmann (keep an eye on Care's progress reports)

Kopp Sisters series (novels) - Amy Stewart-

LBJ - Caro

 An odd and interesting list. Maybe a little demented. You can see patterns in the old bookworm brain. I sent my spawn the photos and he wrote back: "Is this your Mothers' Day gift list?"

Next post: What I read in April.

Guest Reviewer: Paul at Korea Connection - Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin

I'm really excited about this book and annoyed with myself that I haven't read it yet.  Finally a breakout literary sensation from Korea!  Many thanks to Paul Buzan for letting me reprint his review of Please Look After Mom here.  I found it at his excellent website Korea Connection.


Please Look After Mom: A Review

It’s been one week since Mom went missing.

– “Please Look After Mom”

Five adult children and their elderly father are gathered together at a house in Seoul. They are drafting a missing person flyer for their mother. She has been gone for a week, lost in a moment of carelessness at busy Seoul Station.

As they work on and argue over making the most effective flyer, questions arise: Was Mom born in 1936 or 1938? Why don’t we have a recent picture of her? Why was it no one went to meet her and Father at the train station?



So begins Kyung-sook Shin’s English language debut, “Please Look After Mom”, a novel that is both a moving portrait of a family in crisis and an allegory of modern Korea’s relationship with its past.


A Man’s World

Kyung-sook Shin is one of Korea’s most popular contemporary writers. The author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, “Please Look After Mom” is her breakout title. The novel has sold more than a million copies here in Korea and has been translated into 19 different languages. I think it’s safe to say “Please Look After Mom” is set to become the most widely read Korean novel of all time.

Structurally the story owes an obvious debt to William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”.

Divided into four parts and an epilogue, each section is narrated by a different member of the family. Each of these voices offers a perspective on Mom — perspectives that are by turns conflicting, complicating, or compatible. It is a delicate story that relies on nuance and subtelty rather than red herrings and big reveals. Giving away too much here might diminish a prospective reading experience — and this is a book you should read.

The plot is simple: Where is Mom? But what matters isn’t simply that Mom is missing. What matters is that she was only marginally present before her disappearance because she was never truly known, never understood by her family. Identity – how we see ourselves, how others see us, where we fit in history – is a key theme running through the novel.

How well do we know the people with whom we are most intimate? This question is well-worn territory in the world of literature and has been treated by innumerable writers. Kyung-sook Shin does as good a job as many in exploring it. When examined through the lens of Realism, “Please Look After Mom” offers an authentic picture of the difficulties faced by many women in post-war Korea.

To paraphrase James Brown: Korea is a man’s man’s man’s world. In 1995 the United Nations Development Progamme began compiling data for a Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM indicates women’s participation in a given country’s politics and business, and the income differential between men and women.

When the initial set of GEM statistics were released in 1995, South Korea ranked 90th out of 116 countries. In the years since then Korea has worked to improve quality of life for its female citizens, steadily climbing to the low-mid tier of GEM rankings. That said, this is still a country that has a long way to go in realizing and respecting the rights of a full half of its citizenry.

What “Please Look After Mom” highlights is the tendency, in no way unique to Korea, to treat women as little more than a commodity. Kyung-sook Shin’s characters are dumbfounded by the notion that Mom would have dreams and aspirations other than serving her family. When Chi-hon, the oldest daughter, asks her younger sister, now a mother herself, if she thought their Mom enjoyed cooking for the family, the younger sibling is at first unable to even register the question. After all, you wouldn’t ask of oxygen if it enjoys being breathed, of food if it enjoys being eaten.

I would be doing a great disservice to this book if I were to suggest it is some kind of feminist rant. It isn’t. It is a far more complicated, nuanced work than mere polemic. But in a country where it is routinely expected of a woman to hang upon a cross for her family, “Please Look After Mom” presents a host of challenging questions.



The Yoknapatawpha Connection

When Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County — the fictional Mississippi county in which the vast majority of his novels are set — he was trying, in part, to make sense of the influence of the past.

The Antebellum South had been gone for sixty years when Faulkner began writing, yet it cast a shadow on every aspect of Faulkner’s life. How was America to understand and navigate its legacy of slavery? At his best, Faulkner alegorized our need to forge new traditions in the absence of old ways. His stories are intensely regional but manage to speak to universal human concerns.

Similarly, I think “Please Look After Mom” can be read as an allegory of Korea’s breakneck pursuit of modernization — with plenty of universal implications.

Sixty years ago Korea was engaged in a fierce, bloody, devastating civil war. Over 1.3 million Koreans died in combat, with millions more dying afterwards from starvation and sickness. The country was divided, a tentative cease fire was reached, and both sides have lived with the threat of war since.

Every day I see people who lived through the war. I work with people who remember fleeing their homes as the front rolled towards them. I know people who have living family members who were tortured by South Korea’s secret police in the 1960′s and 70′s. I have spoken with people who risked their lives in pro-democracy demonstrations. I once lived thirty minutes from Gwangju, Jeollanam-do, a city where, in 1980, as many as 2,000 civilians were gunned down by the government during a pro-democracy event.

Korea in the 20th-century was as volatile and dramatic as any nation in history.

And yet you would hardly know this from visiting Korea today. In the few decades since the Korean War, Korea has transformed from a war-ravaged, poverty ridden, police state, to a high-tech, fully modern, democratic country with one of the biggest economies in the world. It has been a truly remarkable transformation.

But what if you lived through that transformation?

In “Please Look After Mom” Mom is clearly suffering from dementia. The family is in denial and Mom for her part strives to deny or hide her worsening condition. Routine tasks that she has performed throughout her life — making kimchi, tending the garden, going into town for cooking supplies — are suddenly a cause for debilitating confusion. As her mind weakens Mom begins losing memories of a way of life that her children and grandchildren will never experience.

Mom, like many older Koreans, represents a generation that laid the foundation for modern Korea — and who find themselves now living in a foreign country.

Near the end of the book Mom asks a rhetorical question: “Do you think that things happening now are linked to things from the past and things in the future, it’s just that we can’t feel them? I don’t know, could that be true? Sometimes when I look at my grandchildren I think that they were dropped down from somewhere out of the blue, and that they have nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me at all.”

Today, Korea is a far more comfortable place to live than it was a couple of generations ago — food, night life, nice cars, smartphones, videogames, all the bells and whistles of an industrialized nation. But how high is the cost of comfort if it comes at the expense of relationships and a remembrance of things past?

When Mom disappeared her family lost forever something of immeasurable value that they never fully understood or appreciated. No amount of material comfort can compensate for that kind of loss.


“Please Look After Mom”

Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom” is a worthy read. It grabbed me from the first sentence and wouldn’t let go — I read all 235 pages in a single sitting.

I should note that Chi-Young Kim’s translation renders the story in elegant, unpretentious English. An excellent effort.

Hopefully, the novel’s success in America (it was a New York Times bestseller in April 2011) will usher in a wider range of Korean literature in English translation. The book is available in hardcover and in Kindle format.

Do you know someone who might like to read Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom”? If so, would you share this post? It would really mean a lot. Thanks!  And if you've read "Please Look After Mom", what did you think?

That Elusive Number

I wasn't sure about joining another challenge, but I'm past 65 books this year, and feel like I've got a good shot at finally reading 100 books. Wish me luck; I'll need it.

I have a question: I read Ex Libris twice in 2008. When you re-read a book during the same year, do you count it once or twice in your reading totals?

Speaking of Ex Libris, that's what we're reading for the BOOKLEAVES meeting on August 24. On September 7, we'll be discussing Persuasion by Jane Austen followed by a viewing of The Jane Austen Book Club. We've decided to try doing a book/movie theme every now and again and see how that goes. If you just happen to be in Seoul on either of those dates...

The Omnivore's Dilemma has started appearing on shelves in bookstores over here, and 2 of my co-workers each have a copy! Stay tuned as I try out various degrees of pleading and cajoling and see which one I can irritate the quickest or the most.

CanadaBoy is outta here tonight, Gumi in his rearview mirror. To mourn the occasion, I'm reading Canadian, namely Anne Of The Island by L.M. Montgomery. This is book 3 of the series, and Anne is in Nova Scotia, going to college and sharing a house with her school chums with occasional trips home to PEI. I'm really getting attached to these characters.

Wishlist Wednesday: All Things Edith

Last week, I finally saw La Vie En Rose, the biopic of Edith Piaf. I watched it twice, then watched all the special features. The documentary was in French with Korean subtitles, but at that point, I didn't care; I was smitten. It's all about Edith. Even as we speak, I'm playing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien on youtube. Over and over. The version I like best is a color home movie made in 1961. The piano player, Charles Dumont (who also wrote the music) is hot. I love the way he hammers the keys after Edith sings (en Francaise) They're all the same to me... Whoo...makes me want to turn in my American passport at the French border. In addition, Piaf is so tiny (maybe 4 ft. 10?) and compelling and defiant in her black dress and tiny red shoes. Only two years after that home movie, she would die at 47, officially from liver cancer, but probably more because of her long-seated twin addictions to alcohol and heroin.

I hit Kyobo Books after book group last week, but forgot to go downstairs to Hot Tracks and look for the soundtrack to La Vie En Rose, so I was a bit vexed with myself during the bus ride back to Gumi. Obviously, I was in a forgiving mood, because I somehow ended up at amazon the next day and treated myself to A Cry From The Heart: The Biography Of Edith Piaf by Margaret Crosland. When the A&E show, Biography, did a documentary on Piaf, (which I watched with Greek subtitles, courtesy of youtube) they interviewed Crosland extensively, and she was marvelous -- slightly grim and gruff, but loads of sympathy for her subject.

Piaf has cast a spell over me with her voice. No kidding. I want to read about her, watch her on youtube, listen to CDs of her music, have Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien or Milord as my ringtone, buy a black dress, learn French then move to Paris and sit at sidewalk cafes all day long and shabby little nightclubs all night long. Did I mention my longing for French food, beginning with hot, crusty French baguettes and something pungent and semi-soft in a cheese? Bring on the escargot! And wine, of course! Bottles and bottles; bring the whole lot to my small but cozy Paris flat, with its bookshelves crammed to bursting with French authors.

How did this happen? Summer madness? Crazy from the heat? The French probably have a word or phrase for it and Edith Piaf probably had a song about it.

Wishlist Wednesday: Toji (The Land) - Park Kyung-Ni

I've been curious about Korean literature since I moved here, but until now, I haven't met anyone that I could get into an in-depth discussion with about it. Exploring at the bookstores, I've discovered a few short novels and books of short stories that have been both enjoyable and moving, but nothing that seemed to have great scope.

For a while, this made sense. South Korea seems like the least likely place to breed novelists, because the pace of life is frenetic. Bali-bali (hurry! hurry!) seems to be their theme song, and not only are Koreans going as fast as they can, they pride themselves on how many activities they can cram into a single 24-hour period. Anyway, not a reflective sort of environment. I reasoned that any literary attempts would have to be short.

Still, I thought there had to be some literature, because their recent history has been so dramatic and often sad. Where was Korea's War and Peace? For the billionth time, I cursed at my lack of proximity to a decent university library here in Korea...or at least one where the damn Dewey Decimal System didn't stop at 799! Those books were somewhere, hiding! Enough with the trips to temples, mask festivals and kimchi museums...show me the literature!

Finally, I found my answer in The Korea Herald, when I read about a novelist that died just this past May. Park Kyung-Ni (pictured above) wrote the classic Korean novel, the one that kids have to read at least excerpts of in school: Toji. Did I want reflective? Did I want epic? Toji (which is Korean for "The Land") took 25 years for Park to write, and no wonder -- it's thousands of pages long, spanning 16 volumes. The time and setting is late 19th century Korea and early 20th century, covering the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and the division of the Korean peninsula in the early 1950s. It's been made into a movie, a miniseries and an opera.

As luck would have it, I've been doing teacher training for Korean English teachers these past 2 weeks. Many of them have literature backgrounds, and their level of fluency is quite high, so I was able to ask them about Toji. They gave me a brief synopsis of one of the plot lines, and one teacher said that she thought that Park had been on the Nobel Prize for Literature shortlist one year. I expressed interest in reading it, and asked if it had been translated into English. They knew that it had been translated into German, but weren't sure about English. They warned me more than once about the length.

The teachers also knew quite a bit about Park Kyung-Ni's life, (1926-2008) which was an unhappy one. She was the oldest daughter in a middle-class family, and her father ran out on her mother when she was a baby. During the Korean war, she lost her husband and three-year old son. She was left with her mother and daughter (I think the daughter was handicapped, but this might be my misinterpretation, because somehow Pearl Buck got into the conversation) to take care of. Park once remarked in an interview that if she'd had a happy life, she would never have thought of becoming a novelist.

When the session let out for the day, I hopped on the computer and headed for Amazon. Yes! Toji has been published in English! No! There was only one copy of volume 1 (a hefty 500+ pages), priced at $110.00! Further research revealed that only volumes 1 and 2 are available in English. A website in the UK set the price at 65 pounds. Each. Aigo-oo!

It's a good thing that I enjoy a challenge, especially one that involves hunting down objects of my bookwormy desire. My next step will be to contact the Korea Herald reporter who wrote about Park Kyung-Ni; she published her email address at the end of the piece. She is Korean, but maybe she can point me in the right direction for affordable English copies.

Wishlist Wednesday: Not Buying It - Judith Levine

I've had shopping and how to avoid shopping and saving money and budgeting and frugality buzzing in my brain for about six weeks now, so when I saw Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping over at Eva's blog, my interest was piqued.

From the reviews I've read, I gathered that Judith Levine is not a frugal zealot like Amy Dacyczyn. Like most Americans, she just got too far into debt and decided to attack it by reining in her consumerism. It's not a how-to book. It's one woman's journey. Levine kept a weekly diary, interviewed or read several secondary sources, and learned a lot about herself in relation to spending during this time. Apparently, most of it was enlightening but some of it required self-re-evaluation.

Not a surprise. Shopping and emotions seem to be closely, almost frighteningly linked. I had no idea how closely until a couple of weeks ago: I wanted to go to Seoul for the weekend, but knew I should stay home and save money. As a compromise, I vowed to travel on a shoestring. I had been skimming The Complete Tightwad Gazette again, so I was fired up, excited and looking forward to the challenge.

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All that week, a close relative, X, had a grievance with me, and repeatedly sent me curt messages on Facebook. Then the day I left, X really got some spleen going, making H.L. Mencken and Voltaire look like mealymouthed candy-asses in comparison.

I didn't respond, although I was simmering. I held my anger in, and -- you guessed it. I got to Seoul and immediately unleased my inner spendthrift hounds. I had a delicious lunch and drinks with Mitzi at the Wolfhound, bought several books at What The Book? , spent more than $20 on a tube of L'Oreal [their company's slogan "because I'm worth it" drummed incessantly in my brain] mascara, ate a hearty supper at Quizno's instead of contenting myself with the modest snack I'd planned, and stayed the night at a 3-star hotel instead of the $30 yeogwan I'd been thinking about all week.

As if a fever had broken, the next day I was back to good, riding home on the very cheapest train and I've been rational ever since with my spending decisions. I've gone over budget some days, but it wasn't emotionally fueled. After my wild spending spree, I was asking myself the age-old question "WTF?", but I was also impressed that I'd learned just how quickly I could spin out of control. In the future, I should tell offending parties to get stuffed. Then -- erring in the opposite direction -- I'll feel badly about losing my temper, and won't spend money thinking that I'm such an evil harpy and don't deserve anything. LOL.

I'm doing a double-pronged approach this summer: Teach additional classes for extra money and severely curtail spending. I don't really need someone to tell me how to do the latter -- I just want to read or hear about similar experiences and be able to nod and say "Oh yeah, me too." Therefore, I'm adding Not Buying It to the wishlist. Keeping in the spirit of my thrifty summer, I hope to find this one on Bookmooch!

Wishlist Wednesday: The Man With The Golden Arm - Nelson Algren

"I feel gritty, oh so gritty..."

How long has this been on my wishlist?
Surprisingly, only since last Saturday night. It all started when Mr. Bybee wanted to find a copy of Shane. We finally located it as part of a 2-for-1 package...the other movie being The Man With The Golden Arm. After watching and enjoying Shane on Friday night, I lobbied for watching The Man With The Golden Arm the following evening.
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Mr. Bybee was pretty sure there weren't any cowboys in this feature, but I pressed on, arguing that he'd liked Frank Sinatra in Von Ryan's Express, and pointing out that this movie came out the same year he did, 1955. Finally, Mr. Bybee capitulated and pressed "play".
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The Man With The Golden Arm wasn't the best movie I've ever seen -- it's a little stagy -- but the cast was good. Sinatra as drug addict Frankie Machine didn't disgrace himself, Eleanor Parker stole the show as his neurotic wife, and Darrin McGavin in an early role was solid as Louie the drug dealer. I was captivated by the jaded and hopeless atmosphere of the seamy side of post- WWII Chicago. An inveterate credits reader, I noticed that the movie was based on a novel. Hmm...
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Oops, I did it again: I've chosen yet another title that's not on the current bestseller list. Where am I going to look for this book?
I guess I'm putting the word out here, if anyone should spot it at a library sale or a secondhand book store and feels flush enough to pay postage to South Korea. (If you do, I'll swap you something to show my gratitude.) Meanwhile, I'm headed to Seoul on the weekend for the book swap at the Wolfhound, so I'll check What The Book? I must convince Charlotte to go with me; although she's not a bibliomaniac, she has a definite genius for spotting literary treasures. I'm going to try not to go to Amazon and press One-Click, but it'll be difficult because what I really want is the 50th anniversary edition, published in 1999. This copy contains an essay by Nelson Algren about the writing of the novel and there's also scholarly criticism by some lit jockeys. (UPDATE: I found the edition I wanted on Bookmooch, and the person offering it is going to send that one and also The Bad Seed. I'm pretty happy.).
Yeah, I watched the movie based on the book, but I've been watching a lot of movies based on books lately. Why did this one scream "Wishlist!" so loudly?
I'm a sucker for 20th century American literature, especially if it was published before 1950. I am also strangely attracted to dark, depressing stuff in which all or most of the characters' lives are in the crapper to begin with and everything turns out badly. (Reading stuff like Jan Karon's Mitford novels drives me nuts.) Doing a little research, I read that Algren's 1949 novel is unrelentingly bleak and much grittier and darker than the movie. No surprise; I'd already sniffed out the stench of an attempt at a happy Hollywood ending. What capped the deal for me was the discovery that The Man With The Golden Arm was the first National Book Award winner in 1950.
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I've always had a tendency to be a little dreary-eyed when it comes to my entertainment. When I was 8 or 9 years old, there was a Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton song called Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark in which a little girl is afraid of the dark and she begs her folks not to bury her if she dies. Sure enough, the next verse is a grim spoken recitation by Porter who tells the listener that Jeannie died ("I think we always knew that we'd never see Jeannie grown") and the grieving parents put "an eternal flame" on her grave. I absolutely loved this song, and wanted my mother and father to play the record over and over. I renamed one of my dolls Jeannie and burned out the AAA batteries in my little pen light. Finally, my parents sent me to my room for being "morbid". Good thing that this was in the days before music videos.
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Who in the blogging community do I think will also be intrigued by this choice for Wishlist Wednesday?
Practically no one. It's not exactly Jane Austen. But if some bloggers have read it, and whether they loved it or hated it, I wish they'd leave a comment.

Wishlist Wednesday: Home Cooking AND More Home Cooking - Laurie Colwin

I am a big fan of Laurie Colwin's (1944-1992) novels. No one wrote about domesticity better, but at the same time, she had quirky characters who led sometimes clumsy lives and spoke a language that seemed both fluid and hastily cobbled together. For me, she was like a cross between Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Jane Austen: Witty and brittle with toughness but also warmth.

Initially, I became acquainted with Colwin's writing in Playboy. My first husband had a subscription, given to him by (strangely enough) my mother. In those early days of being a mother-in-law, she didn't know -- or really care to know -- how to relate to a son-in-law. When it came time to buy him a birthday present, she thought she'd be a smartass and get him a subscription to Playboy. She made sure she was front and center when he opened his birthday card. She could barely contain her malicious glee; she was already imagining telling her friends at work how she'd dumbfounded and embarrassed "Ol' Sonny Boy". His reaction surprised her; he was delighted and gave her a warm hug. For years afterwards, until he was remarried to someone who had definite problems with stacks of Playboy around the house, he never let the subscription lapse.

Playboy was OK with me. I actually looked forward to its arrival each month. I bypassed the pneumatic nudes and enjoyed things like looking for the bunny logo hidden in the cover, the Playboy interview, Cynthia Heimel's column, the book and movie reviews and the fiction.

I loved the fiction; it remains some of the best I've ever read. One day -- maybe the mid-80s? -- there was a story called "My Mistress" by Laurie Colwin about a man who is married to an impossibly cultured wife that is tenderhearted and solicitious while his mistress is slightly cranky and an unrepentant slob.

It was a case of lit-love at first sight. Who was Laurie Colwin? Probably a guy, I mused. Guys could be named Laurie although I'd only ever heard of Laurie from Little Women. Sure, it was a guy. The story was published in Playboy, after all. The main character was a guy, told from his POV. It didn't take long to hunt down Colwin's novels at the library and learn that she was actually female. I was surprised and extremely pleased.

Towards the end of her life, Colwin had turned her attention more towards food and cooking and was doing a column for Gourmet magazine. These columns were collection in a 1988 book called Home Cooking. More Home Cooking was published posthumously in 1993.

I miss Laurie Colwin's writing. I'd sit right down and re-read Happy All The Time if it suddenly appeared before me -- students and Business English interviews and finals be damned. I also miss food, the kind of food that's so difficult to find here, the kind of food that Laurie Colwin writes about so eloquently that you can smell it wafting from the page. Home Cooking and More Home Cooking have been on my wishlist for a couple of years now; I'm more than ready to dig in.

Wishlist Wednesday, (but more like Thursday or Friday): Shutting Out The Sun - Michael Zielenziger

On Wednesday, Pablo loaned CanadaBoy a copy of Shutting Out The Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. My bookish reflexes must have been out of whack that day or I would've pounced on it first. Ever since reading in Party Of One about the hikikomori, the young Japanese people who completely withdraw from all aspects of social life, I've been interested in learning more about them.

In writing Shutting Out The Sun, author Michael Zielenziger, a journalist who has lived in Japan for several years interviewed several hikikomori and their families and also discussed how the weak economic climate and the rigidity of the older generation's tradition-bound way of doing things have caused millions of young people in Japan to just throw up their hands and say in effect, "What the hell; what's the use?"

As far as being bound to the Confucian way of thinking, and the insane pressure put on young people from their earliest years to study and succeed, Korea and Japan are very much alike. I would almost be willing to wager that the hikikomori syndrome exists to some extent in Korea as well. These young people are considered mentally ill by the general public, but on some levels, hikikomori seems an inevitable and almost reasonable response to a society that is reluctant to change, even when it would benefit the younger generation.

I hope to wrest Shutting Out The Sun from CanadaBoy's grip sometime soon and learn more about this phenomenon. I also hope that as a westerner, Zielenziger is able to provide a balanced and unbiased view of Japanese society and its problems.

Wishlist Wednesday: In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck

I finished reading Oil! by Upton Sinclair. We read it for the May 5th meeting of BOOKLEAVES. While I might not love it so much that I want to marry it and have its ink-stained babies, as Kookiejar does, I was really impressed and certainly would not be adverse to first tenderly, then excitedly running my fingers through its pages once again.

The main thing I admired about Oil! is that Sinclair explains so lucidly how business and government work for and against each other, usually without much thought to the workers. Sinclair's sympathies are undisguisedly with the workers and their struggle for better working conditions and pay, but he's willing and able to let the readers see all sides of the argument, thanks to his protagonist, Bunny, the young "oil prince" who loves his capitalist father dearly but was born with a noble consciousness that pesters him unmercifully. He wants to be a noble Socialist hero like his boyhood idol, Paul Watkins, but Bunny also loves the association with power and influence, which he often uses to get his Socialist friends out of scrapes like prison and deportation.

Except for Paul, readers of Oil! don't really get an extended view of the workers, so when Matt from my book group asked me if I'd read In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, he thoroughly captured my attention. If you'll remember, I'm a gigantic Steinbeck fan, and it's one of my life goals to read his entire canon.

According to Matt, In Dubious Battle was published a little bit before The Grapes Of Wrath and also while Steinbeck was working very strongly on his journalism. It's the story of the organization of a strike among migrant fruit workers, with the emphasis on the tension the workers feel being caught between the union and the business owners. Matt also added that one of the strike organizers, Mac, seems a lot like Satan in Paradise Lost. He said that the novel was pretty intense.

I didn't need any more convincing. Matt had me at "John Steinbeck", but a strike from the workers' point of view conveyed in the rough, honest yet lyrical language used by Steinbeck and a character that's both evil and attractive sealed the deal. In Dubious Battle seems like the perfect companion piece for Oil! Onto the wishlist it goes. I'm going to look for a copy this weekend. Thanks, Matt.

Wishlist Wednesday: Finn by Jon Clinch

I've had my eye on this 2007 novel which explores life from Huckleberry Finn's drunkard father's point of view. The alleged dark tone of Clinch's novel fits in with my own idea of "Pap". For years -- since elementary school -- I had a frightened fascination with this character.

I knew about Huck Finn from reading The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer at school. I first became aware of Pap in 1970 when I saw a 10th anniversary re-issue of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1960). This movie is the best of all the filmed versions of Mark Twain's novel. It boasts an excellent cast, including a performance by Tony Randall as the scoundrel "The King of France" played with his customary wit and crispness.

Pap was menacingly played by a raspy-voiced character actor named Neville Brand (1920-1992). Although he was only onscreen for a few moments, he completely scared the crap out of me. As far as villains go, he and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty dominated my childhood nightmares.

As anyone who had read The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn knows, Pap met his end in a manner as dark, twisting and mysterious as the river upon which his body was discovered. It's difficult to imagine that his life was any less dark, dirty and full of evil circumstance. I'm interested in seeing if Clinch was able to interpret Pap as having even the slightest glimmer of anything resembling good or light. I'm wondering if my childhood terror of this character will be reawakened by reading a novel about him.

Wishlist Wednesday: The Worst Hard Time - Timothy Egan

The complete title of this book is: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story Of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl. In this 2005 award-winning book, Timothy Egan explains how hundreds of million of acres of prairie farm land (and the people who lived upon them) in the United States and Canada were disastrously affected by a combination of dust storms, drought, and mistakes in farming practices.

For those who enjoy John Steinbeck's novels, especially his Pulitzer-prizewinning The Grapes Of Wrath, this seems like it would be an excellent companion piece, with a Woody Guthrie CD as musical accompaniment. I'm fascinated with all aspects of this period of history, and I'm lucky to be old enough to have had teachers and relatives and friends who have given me firsthand accounts of encounters with the "black blizzards."

I saw this at What The Book a couple of months ago, but I was being cheap with myself that day and promised that I'd get it "next time". You guessed it: Someone else with great reading taste grabbed it. Here's hoping that it won't have to linger on my wishlist for long.

Wishlist Wednesday: The Compleat Pulitzer

"Yo, I'll tell you what I want what I really really want..."

The newest Pulitzer For Fiction is slated to be announced in a few days, so that's what I've got on my mind. What I want doesn't exist: I want some publishing company to re-issue every single novel and short story collection that has won this prize since it began in the late 1910s. Would that be so impossible? Pie-in-the-sky? Oh, probably, but the vision is fixed in my mind and won't go away...beautiful trade paperbacks with tastefully beautiful covers that are unique but also have some thematic design going on, so that their spines look tasty on my shelves. Of course I'd have to have all of them. My Inner Completist Bookworm couldn't rest otherwise.

In this drab reality where there is no such set, when I see one of the winners, I grab it up for future reading. Last year, I added Andersonville (1956) and The Good Earth (1932) to my list of 31 read. What I've got in reserve on TBR Mountain will keep me busy for a while, but eventually, I'll be wanting to track down some of those hard-to-find, kind of obscure ones like His Family (1918) and Scarlet Sister Mary (1929), for example. If there was a Compleat Pulitzer, I'd be ready when the time came.

Why is this list my shiny object? What is it about this particular group of prize winners that mesmerizes me so? If you showed me a Man Booker or a Newbery list, I'd be cold as a stone. Well, maybe not cold as a stone, but...

I really should join The Pulitzer Reading Challenge. I'll be making it 32 read in a couple of weeks, anyway. BOOKLEAVES has The Known World (2004) scheduled for the mid-April meeting. [No, I didn't choose it, but I'm happy with whoever did...Liz?]

Maybe one of these years I'll just whoop it up and have an all-Pulitzer year! The old bookworm adrenalin would certainly be jacked up for thrill of the hunt for winners like The Store (1933) and Early Autumn (1927). Maybe I should wait until I return to the US. Inter-library loan might be helpful with a project like this. On the other hand, amassing all 80+ books...!

Hmmm...mouth-watering as a lovely matched set would be, I have to admit that a DIY sounds like geeky bookworm fun.

Wishlist Wednesday: Esther Waters by George Moore

I became interested in this 1894 novel awhile back when Harvey Pekar did a comic strip about it in one of the issues of American Splendor. Esther Waters is a maid that becomes pregnant. The father, (a footman in the same household) abandons her, so she becomes a single mother. Pekar writes that George Moore, an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright and critic (1852-1933) was influenced the naturalism of Zola and Hardy. Unlike Hardy with Tess and Zola with Nana, Moore doesn't deal out a tragic end for his heroine. Esther and her baby simply get on with their lives.

Although realistic novels were gaining in popularity at this time, this "woman-goes-unpunished" treatment would've been quite controversial, but apparently, George Moore wasn't shy about tackling subjects like this and others including prostitution and lesbianism. Even later in his career, he was still in the thick of it with his 1916 novel The Brook Kerith, which dealt with, according to Wikipedia, "a non-divine Jesus that didn't die on the cross and was instead nursed back to health and went on to India in search of wisdom."

Allegedly, (again, according to Pekar) Moore had some influence on James Joyce, but he's not well-remembered or widely studied because he had a gift for pissing off friends and influential people alike, especially when he published his memoirs in 1914. Also, he had a habit of going around incessantly saying that he was the greatest, which seems to have backfired as a PR tactic.

Like Harvey Pekar, I really like Naturalism/realism. Also, I want to learn more about Irish literature. Even if he was a bit of an asshole, George Moore was a colorful character in his own right, definitely worthy of attention. (He already gets high marks from me for bucking literary tradition and not killing off his heroine because she had sex on the "wrong" side of the marriage ceremony!) As a result, Esther Waters seems tailor-made for a solid spot on my wishlist.

Wishlist Wednesday: Mr. Bybee's Bookstack

My boyfriend's back and he brought more books. Some of them look pretty damn good, so after nosing through the pile, I chatted him up about his most recent purchases:

1. The Real Deadwood - John Ames. "It compares the actual town and its characters to the HBO series. What was truth and what was fiction. According to this book, the show was about half-right."

2. Abraham Lincoln: A Photographic Story Of A Life -Tonya Lee Stone. "Maybe it's for kids, but it's got a lot of good information and pictures. It's an easy read. I like the way it's put together. And it wasn't expensive -- only about five bucks."

3. The Everything Pirates Book - Barb Karg and Arjean Spaite. "I had a couple of other pirate books, and this one looked better than those. Lots of good illustrations."

4. 882 1/2 Amazing Answers To Your Questions About The Titanic -Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter. "I have a lot of books about the Titanic, but I figured that with this many questions and answers, I'd run across some information about it that I'd never seen before."

5. The Most Notorious Crimes In American History - Time-Life Books. "I've always liked to read about these bad characters. This book has a lot of the more recent crimes in it. I like the way it's put together. Each crime is given a concise two or three-page section."

Wishlist Wednesday: The Ideal, Genuine Man by Don Robertson

This has been on my wishlist for several years now, and no need to wonder why. Don Robertson, my all-time lit hero wrote it. I'm not even sure what the storyline of The Ideal, Genuine Man is about. All I know is that it was published by Stephen King's Philtrum Press, King wrote the foreword and the two of them, Robertson and King, went on a U.S. book tour together. Published in 1987, this was Robertson's third-to-last book. I expect it has its share of darkness and grim humor. I'm up for that!

Speaking of Don Robertson, there is finally a cover picture up at Amazon for The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. It's beautifully done. I was worried it wouldn't be good.

Wishlist Wednesday

"All the streetlights on Main Street know my shadow
All the stars up in the sky know all my wishes..."

There are so many books I want to buy/borrow and read! My reading journal has several pages full of wishlists, I have a wishlist up at amazon, and on my desk in my office is a notebook with book reviews torn out of magazines and glued or taped onto the pages. Oh yeah, and I started a wishlist at gurulib. All of this gets added to almost daily.

The dam of my bookworm heart just can't contain all of this longing, so every Wednesday from here on out, I'm going to choose a book from one of these wishlists and discuss it.

Angry Young Spaceman - Jim Munroe. This is the only science fiction book on my wishlist, so it's a good place to start: The year is 2959. Sam Breen just graduated from college, and he's looking for a job. He leaves Earth and ends up teaching EFL at an underwater planet called Octavia, where everyone has 8 tentacles and a fierce, burning desire to learn English.

Sounds pretty hokey, right? Ordinarily, I wouldn't give this kind of stuff a second glance, but those who have already gobbled up this 2001 novel have learned that the fun is in the details. Octavia is actually a portrait of modern-day Korea, thinly disguised. Really thinly disguised. For example, the national dish on Octavia is a spicy pickled vegetable known as chikim.

Although the inside joke has been spoiled for me (and now I'm spoiling it for others), I'm eager to read this novel and see what other aspects of Korean society Munroe selected to give Octavia that especial otherworldly feel. I'm always up for reading anything with a Korea connection, and from what I've heard, Jim Munroe nailed it with creativity and wit.