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.

Bridge Book

For the first time since December of 2005 (The Human Stain), I think I'm going to have a 'bridge book' -- a book that I start in one year and finish up in the next.

 It's Taylor Caldwell's fault.  My longtime literary crush on her suddenly burst into ardent flame over the holidays.  After polishing off A Prologue to Love, I found another of her books, The Wide House (1945) on my TBR and was compelled to begin it even though I had to go back to work the day after Christmas and The Wide House qualifies as a Chunkster.

Call it the grumblings of a fussy old bookworm, but bridge books annoy me.  I like to have the decks clear and everything counted up tidily for the old year and the new year ahead of me clean and bare, but shining with possibilities.  I have the same feeling when I have an unfinished book at the end of a readathon.

Although bridge books offend my OCD bookworm, the downside of finishing a book in the late hours of the old year is that the finish might come too early.  Back in 2008, I was aiming for my first triple-digit year.  I hit my dinger (Endurance) somewhere around 6 pm on December 30.  Basking in my triumph, I decided not to start another book until January 1.  Although you could count that time in mere hours, it felt interminable.  By 11 pm on the 31st, my fingernails were all bitten down and I was pacing around my apartment carrying Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  As soon as the midnight fireworks were done, I cracked the cover.

Last year, I finished my book (Stuff) mid-afternoon on the 31st.  I flew from the US to Korea the following day, and by the time I settled in my airplane seat for the long flight, I was ravenous for the printed page.  I ran through The Best of Everything like pigs through the corn.

The beauty part of the bridge book seems to be that since a lot of the heavy lifting has been done in the previous year, a reader can hit the ground running and almost immediately begin posting stats for a new book year.  There's also not that aching withdrawal.  Some year though, I'd like to strike that perfect balance and finish a book just before the clock strikes twelve.

Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle (1994)

I've got such a hopeless crush on Robert Benchley, and I'm still feeling the love since finishing The Benchley Roundup, so I popped in my DVD of Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle (1994) and I've been watching it over and over all week.
.
The story of Dorothy Parker and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, this movie looks beautiful, has a terrific jazzy score, the casting is impeccable -- including a powerhouse performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker and an especially luscious Campbell Scott channeling Robert Benchley to perfection.
.
Did I mention the densely uber-witty dialogue that sparkles finer and brighter than a whole damn jewelry store? When I first watched the movie on IFC, I was struck by how many of Parker's witticisms the writers managed to get into the script. During this latest spate of viewing -- now that I've read more Benchley -- I realized that there were almost as many Benchley quips as well.
.
Sigh. Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle is an English major/bookworm's delight.
.

M Is For Mansfield; M Is For Mailbox

My former co-worker (and favorite Kiwi bookworm!) Willie went to New Zealand for his vacation and brought back this novel about Katherine Mansfield for me. It arrived today, and looks wonderful.
.
Mansfield by C.K. Stead covers 3 significant years in Katherine Mansfield's life: World War I was being fought, her brother was killed, she was in the beginning stages of the disease that would claim her life in 1923 when she was only 34, she was surrounded by most of the legendary literary figures of that time and she was on the precipice of discovering how she really wanted to write short stories. I'm a huge fan of her work, so I can't wait to dig into this novel.

Falling In Lit Love Again

Dearest Nick,

I still love you & when I see your rakish grin and your gorgeous bald head staring up at me from the book jacket or at some website, I still feel that literary thrill. My hands sweat, and the cover of whatever book of yours I'm holding gets all damp and puckery. Some of my most cherished memories include tearing through The Polysyllabic Spree and hunting like crazy for that magnifying glass as I vroomed through Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt. I even changed my soccer -- I mean football team for you! Furthermore, if/when you do a book tour of South Korea -- well, everyone is just damn well gonna have to understand as I chase you from Seoul to Busan and back again, knocking Koreans and foreigners alike out of my way.

What you should know is that I'm a woman who reads too much. My bookish needs are so many and varied that it's kind of embarrassing. I must have my fiction, my nonfiction and my reading challenges! The last one is what has landed me in trouble: Nick, I've fallen in love again. He's Canadian and he's dead, which means he'll never do a book tour here. If he were alive, I'd be so tempted to tear up my American passport at the border and happily live out the rest of my life in Ontario, freezing to death and waiting for that white-bearded visage to show up in public appearances and on the CBC.

Yes, Nick. I love Robertson Davies! We're both bookworms and adults, aren't we? If you've ever read Fifth Business, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking masterful storyteller. I'm talking dry wit, enjoyably dry, like the finest sherry. I'm talking a writing style that is so smooth, your eyes feel as if they are coasting on Optical Cruise Control all the way to Nirvana. I'm so glad he wrote so many books because I'm enraptured enough to ride the golden waves of his prose all the way through The Second Canadian Book Challenge and into eternity...or at least into my fifties.

One of the reasons I love you so much is that you're both a writer and a reader. I embrace both parts of you. Most of your fans would tell you to get your ass to the PC and hurry up with another book, but they don't understand you like I do, Nick -- after a good day of writing, I want you to get your ass to the bookstore (or bookshop, as you'd put it in the UK) and buy up all the Robertson Davies you can find. Read it, read him. I promise, he's to modern literature what Marah is to modern music. Although we're on totally separate continents, can't we read Robertson Davies together, darling?

And Nick -- I must be stern with you for a moment -- don't just buy Robertson's books and let them just sit forever-and-ever in your "Books Bought This Month" pile. I have friends that read your column faithfully and they'll tell me. I won't be happy. A disappointed Bybee is a grim sight. How grim? By comparison, Mrs. Danvers would look like Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm.

Don't worry; I will NOT forget you. Fever Pitch and Slam still have a prominent spot on my TBR, and you'll always have a special spot in the book stacks of my heart. Meanwhile, my Tough & Cool Inner Bookworm hears another's voice, and he's got a fine Canadian accent.

Love, Kisses and Happy Reading, eh?

Bybee

Gimme Nick!

I finished The Polysyllabic Spree so quickly! While I am pissed off at Nick Hornby for writing such a short book, I DID love it, and yes, he IS my newest literary crush. Roll over, George Orwell, and tell Steinbeck the news.

Crap, I'm besotted! I managed to get through the first chapter of All Families Are Pyschotic, but like Hornby, when he saw Marah in concert, I didn't want to pay attention to anyone/anything else. If this were literary Fantasy Boxing, Hornby would be wiping the canvas with Coupland.

What did I like? Everything! Well, almost everything. I just can't wrap my mind around Hornby's need to go and read Dickens periodically. (Now I've got guilt spikes again about Dickens. Where is the novel that will make me at least like if not love him? Hint: It's NOT David Copperfield!)

Never mind Dickens for now. I'm all about Nick Hornby. Let me count the ways: He's funny; he's self-deprecating in that lovable English way; he's got lists and lists of books that he buys and/or reads; he's brutally honest about his reading moods and reasons why he did and didn't finish books; and best of all, he's wonderfully intelligent without having a huge stick up his butt about it. (Put that it in your pipe and smoke it, Richard Schickel! I'm still pissed off at you for your rude comments about book bloggers last year!)

`

It's true that my new beloved did call all Amazon reviewers bastards, but even though I've written 33 reviews at their website, I can overlook the epithet. (I've never been called a bastard before, except for the time Mr. Bybee blurted it out when I bingoed on him twice in a row during a game of Scrabble.)

All I can say is read The Polysyllabic Spree. Please. If you haven't already read it, that is. And if you have -- there's worse ways to spend your time! I read it over again today and chuckled at the funny parts and made thorough notes for my wishlist. After that, I did some laundry and painted my fingernails blue. Then, feeling bereft, I headed over to Amazon and ordered Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. There was nothing else to do. Now I'm thinking about making Arsenal my favorite football team. CanadaBoy would be pleased, but that's beside the point. Gimme Nick.

Nancy Pearl: You Go, Girl!

I've decided that I'm in love.
It's a little peculiar for me, but not totally unexpected.
I love Nancy Pearl!

What booklover in his or her right mind WOULDN'T love Nancy Pearl? She's a librarian! She loves books! She writes books about reading & loving books!

The Seattle-based librarian does talk radio shows in which she recommends books; she has great ideas like getting the whole city to read the same novel. If that weren't enough, she was the inspiration for an action figure -- a librarian that comes complete with the shushing noise.

I only just heard of her a few hours ago, but my love began that instant. I want to read her books: Book Lust, More Book Lust, and Now Read This.

Anyway, I love Nancy Pearl.
I want to BE Nancy Pearl!
I can't tell where the first desire ends and the second one begins!

Have Nancy Pearl's and my paths crossed? In the 1980s, Pearl was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Manfred, Sr. and I lived there for about 14 months. Nancy Pearl was working at an independent bookstore and for the Tulsa public library system and also did book reviews for The Tulsa Tribune. Manfred, Sr. was also working at The Tulsa Tribune as a reporter, and both of us bookworms to the core, plus young with lots of energy, made it our (worthwhile, of course!) quest to discover every bookstore in Tulsa. We also had well-worn library cards, used at the main library downtown as well as at the branch that's close to Woodland Hills Mall.

I just finished reading transcripts of Nancy Pearl's talk radio show, which seems to go back to January, 1999. My eyes are hurting, and I filled several pages of my book journal with her recommendations, so I have some writer's cramp as well. Love hurts.