Socktober

 

For some reason, I've lost a lot of socks lately. And they all belong to my Disney Princess collection. Of course I only lose one out of a pair, so on any given day, you can find me wearing Jasmine on one foot and Mulan on the other. Or Ariel. Somehow, I've been able to hold on to both Belles. Must be part of my bookworm powers at work, because I also still have both Fuck Off I'm Reading socks.

Speaking of reading, I finished five in October, and I didn't tell anyone to do...that. File under restraint.

1. Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama - Bob Odenkirk. Memoir. Better Call Saul is my new favorite show, so I was eager to read this book. The library has it, but it was checked out, so I got a wild hair and bought it, knowing that it was going to be spectacular. Um...kinda jumped the gun on that one. It's not spectacular. It's not even good. It's like Mr. Odenkirk was mumbling in his sleep and someone sat by his bed and transcribed. At various points in the book, he says himself that it's not very good, and whether or not he was being self-deprecating, he's right.

2. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak. Novel. I read this for book group. Audiobooked it, and it was wonderful. Actually, this was my second reading, but it was so many years ago -- that first year or so that I was in Korea.

3. I'm Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy. Memoir. At first, I didn't want to read this book because of the title, but everyone kept saying how good it was. And they were right! McCurdy is  a great writer and she certainly had enough material to work with. I can't count how many times my jaw dropped. This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read.

4. Daisy Jones and The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid. Novel. I read this back in 2020 (I think) and really liked it. Then Sarah, the coordinator of the book group mentioned that the library had it in audiobook form, and it was one of the best she'd ever listened to. Mental note to myself: When Sarah speaks... All of the voice actors were on point, and Jennifer Beals as Daisy Jones was incredible. Now, thanks to this book, I've got a Fleetwood Mac thing going on.

5. Little Man, What Now? - Hans Fallada. Novel. This German novel was published in 1932, shortly before Hitler came into power. The economy in Germany is dismal, but Johannes (Sonny) gets his girlfriend Emma (Lammchen) pregnant, so they take a deep breath and plunge into matrimony. Sonny struggles with horrible and petty bosses, sketchy housing and infuriating red tape from government agencies. The Nazis are in evidence, but part of the background noise. This part of the book is well-done. There are also several colorful characters Sonny and Lammchen meet along the way, and Fallada gets sidetracked by them the way Richard Llewellyn got sidetracked away from Ernie Mott and his Ma in None But the Lonely Heart. Still, a pretty good read. I felt invested in the two main characters and their challenges, and wish that Fallada had written a sequel so we could see if Sonny and Lammchen's fortunes improved or not. My copy is a British English translation; I'd have preferred American English, but that's a minor quibble.

Right now, I'm heavily into Nonfiction November, and already eager to blog about that!

Welcome To My Reading Week: Aug 1-8, 2021

 What I read:

None But The Lonely Heart - Richard Llewellyn. Novel. Published in 1943, this was Richard Llewellyn's follow up to his smash bestseller How Green was My Valley, one of my all-time favorites. None But The Lonely Heart was just...ok. Set in London and written in stream-of-consciousness except for conversations and making excellent use of Cockney English, the novel follows Ernie Mott who is "nineteen, nigh on twenty" and not sure about what he wants to do with his life. Then there's Ernie's Ma, who runs a furniture shop/pawnbroker business with shady dealings on the side, but she wants Ernie to be a solicitor or something respectable. She even buys him three new suits to better help him fake it till he makes it. Sadly, Ernie is not interested in anything that takes hard work. I liked Ernie and Ernie's Ma, but then Llewellyn dropped a staggering amount of Dickensian characters into the book, and I became lost and confused and finally bored. I could scarcely keep my mince pies (rhyming slang!) open. But I persisted and was satisfied with the end of the novel, because it was back to Ernie and Ma, then finally, Ernie. In spite of input from every possible quarter, he doesn't really learn or grow, but that's just how it is sometimes. I don't need my characters to Grow and Change in order for me to love them.

The Personal Librarian - Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Novel. Audiobook. It's a hard-driving history lesson! It's a soap opera! I like to learn and I like my soaps, so it's all good, but what really drew me into The Personal Librarian was Belle daCosta Greene's big secret. The historical sections seemed really heavy on exposition, but perhaps that's an ongoing challenge with historical fiction. The writer(s) have to get that in somehow, but it seems so artificial to do it in conversation. If only there were some device with which you could get a perfect blend of historical and fiction without the abrupt shifts in tone. Even though I chafe a bit at this genre, I could not stop listening to The Personal Librarian. Robin Miles is an excellent narrator, and I enjoyed listening to both authors' insights in the afterword. I did like the novel, I'm glad to have experienced it, and I do recommend it to historical fiction fans, lovers of Gilded Age history, readers who are drawn to strong female characters as well as characters with secret lives.

What I'm reading now:

The Andy Warhol Diaries - Pat Hackett, editor. Over a period of eleven years (1976-1987), Andy Warhol kept a diary in a rather unconventional way. Every day or so, usually in the mornings, he would place a phone call to his secretary, Pat Hackett, and dictate the entry over the phone. Hackett would tape and transcribe the calls. She had to edit the entries down when she put a volume together in the interest of having a manageable tome. So far, the entries seem routine -- Where Warhol went (usually to a party) who he saw (a dazzling yet exhausting list of major and minor celebrities from all fields of endeavor) and how much he paid for cab fare or visits to a newsstand. Sometimes he goes to the doctor. Occasionally, he muses about a book he's read (usually a celebrity's tell-all). I'm dipping into the book a few entries at a time. 

What I want to read:

Paths of Glory - Humphrey Cobb. This 1935 novel is based on the 1957 Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name. I saw the movie about 30 years ago while I was in the hospital after a surgery. I remember seeing the movie and having the impression that it was great, but couldn't remember anything but one scene towards the end. I watched it again last week (awake, unmedicated) and yeah, I was right. It's a masterpiece. When I found out it was based on a novel, I set my intrepid library scout, The Spawn to finding it for me. So far, no luck. I'm even more drawn to the book since I recently discovered that when it came out, William Faulkner slammed it. If Faulkner didn't like it,  this is certainly the book for me. Plus, it was written and published in the 1930s, my very favorite time in American literature.

Finally, now that I'm finished with The Personal Librarian, I need a new audiobook for my commute to work. Tomorrow, during my day off, I'm going to wander over to the public library in Warrensburg where they have a tasty array of titles, both fiction and nonfiction. I'll keep you posted.

Mid-August Finds Me

I hated the title of this post, then it struck me that it sounds like one of those novels from the 1910s that end up getting reprinted with great acclaim by something like Virago Press. So there it stands.

Mid-August finds me in the middle of several books again:

1. Burr - Gore Vidal. Novel.
This is my main read right now, and I'm enjoying it more than when I read it back in 2012. I can't help but wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda had a look at Burr as well as the Ron Chernow biography of Hamilton, because I have come upon several passages in which I nearly burst into song. My most recent hum-along is The Room Where It Happens. I'm having a brilliant time!

2. Villette - Charlotte Bronte. Novel.
 I should give up, but I don't. I won't. I can't. I'm 18 chapters in! I predict a mad reading/listening rush to midnight on New Year's Eve. Bronte! Bragging! Rights!

3. Triptych - Joyce Cary. Novel.
Even with the new magnifier, the print in this book is putting me off. I don't know what I'm going to do. Hoping to finish at least the first book in the volume, Herself Surprised, but more and more, I'm just not feeling it.

4. Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow. Biography.
I had to switch to the e-reader edition because I got tired of lugging the physical book around. Also, there were print issues with this one, too. I am so irritated with my eyes for wavering and watering! Stop that, you two! I'll turn this head around, I swear I will!!!

5. The Emigrants - Johan Bojer. Novel.
Written in 1924 and translated into English the following year, this Norwegian novel is about a family leaving Norway and pioneering in North Dakota. Although I haven't gotten beyond the first chapter, this book pleases me on several fronts: It's old. It's about the emigrant experience. It's about pioneers. It's obscure.

6. Heroes of the Frontier - Dave Eggers. Novel.
I was captivated by What is the What, Eggers' novel based on the life of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Heroes of the Frontier seems very different so far -- it starts out with a dentist unexpectedly taking/whisking away her two young children on a vacation to Alaska. So far, I'm drawn in and asking the sorts of questions an engaged reader asks.

Mid-August finds me wanting something very much. I can't even say it here. Not now. But I want this particular thing BAD. On alternating days I'm:
1) hopeful
2) resigned
3) despondent
4) actively snarling and looking for rocks to throw at the "thing with feathers"

Some days, I'm all of those things in succession. Today was like that.

Mid-August finds me running out of shelving space in my bedroom. Time to cull the herd.

A Four-Book January

Here are the four books I read in January:

1. Green Dolphin Street - Elizabeth Goudge.  I wrote about my mixed feelings here.

2. Spark Joy - Marie Kondo.  Konvert, that's me. I am working on a fangirlish response to this book. Don't know if I loved it as much as The Life -Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but there are some ardent feelings there. Yes. Excuse me, I must now go fold some shirts. Domo arigato.

3. Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson. This was a reread from...I don't know when. Mid-nineties, I suppose. I'd forgotten what a strange book it is. Madness, the college experience...Sylvia Plath could have read this during her days at Smith. I wonder if she did. Something that struck me afresh was the ickiness of Natalie's father. He's not inappropriate in the conventional way, but the way he breathes his stale breath all over Natalie's life, ugh. There's also Tony, Natalie's friend. Read carefully. I did, and my brain hurts, but in a pleasurable way. This is my second favorite Jackson novel after We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

4. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles. My second faux-Victorian novel in a month! (The other being Green Dolphin Street.) Fowles' book wins for authenticity (Arthur Hugh Clough epigrams!), even though he is so meta. He takes that authorial intrusion and kicks it up a notch. He even puts himself in a railroad carriage with the male protagonist. And the two endings! Meta, meta, meta! I was all squeeeee! and don't let this book end and gotta see the Meryl Streep/Jeremy Irons movie again. Speaking of Meryl, I couldn't get a read on the title character, because although readers hear her voice and see her actions, she's WTF? obscure (Sarah Woodruff makes Sue Bridehead look like Spock) and then further obscured by the author. I'm going to take it that she's some version of the Manic Pixie Girl we always hear tell about.

Reading Got OLD

One of my new year's resolutions was to read more books that were more than 100 years old.  I make this resolution almost every year, but for some reason, this turned out to be quite the year for that sort of thing.  My Inner Book Snob has been stunned into silence; I rocked the 19th century so hard.

1. Les Miserables (1862).  Thanks to the movie, this is what got the ball rolling.  To the barricades!

2. L'Assommoir (1877).  One French writer (Hugo!) called for another (Zola!).  After this book, I was unstoppable.

3. Therese Raquin (1867).  This early Zola novel is like a cool mash-up of Edgar Allen Poe and James M. Cain.

4. Little Women (1868).  This was my nth re-reading of Alcott's novel, and it was the first time I noticed that Marmee was scared shitless that Meg was going to marry wealthy Ned Moffatt.  Mrs. March is the exact opposite of Mrs. Bennett.

5. The Fortune of the Rougons (1871).  This novel kicks off Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle.

6. The Kill (1872).  I had plans to read the R-M cycle in order.

7. The Belly of Paris (1873).  Love food?  Love literature?  Love literature about food?  This one's for you.  Also part of the R-M cycle.

8. The Conquest of Plassans (1874).  R-M cycle.  Ambitious priest rises from obscurity to take over a little country town.

9. Abbe Mouret's Transgression (1875).  R-M cycle.  Zola makes his feelings about religion known.  Meanwhile, the reader gets a crash course in botany.  I had to take a short break from Zola after this one.

10. The Game (1905).  A short novel by Jack London about a boxer and his girl and the boxer's last fight.

11. Germinal (1885).  The R-M cycle is pretty uneven.  This novel about a miner's strike is one of the high points.  Brilliant and unsparing.

12. What Maisie Knew (1897).  I get it, Henry James.  I'm supposed to admire your technique.  Your shading and your nuance.  I can be that kind of reader, but I don't always feel like it.

13. Nana (1880).  Zola's novels usually have a theme.  This is his sex novel, but he referred to it in a letter to a friend by a much cruder term.  Whatever it is, this book is another high point in the R-M cycle, and thanks to the up-to-date translation I read, it's startlingly modern.  I read this last summer.  When Miley Cyrus did her twerking thing a couple of months later, Nana flashed through my mind.

14. Bobbie, General Manager (1913). I'm counting this "women's novel" by Olive Higgins Prouty because she was probably writing it in 1912, thus making it more than 100 years old.

15. The Ladies' Paradise (1883).  R-M cycle, and Zola's theme this time is retail, and a department store's owner/manager's exhaustive attempts to lure women shoppers.  Some of his practices are still very much in use today.

16. The Beast Within (1890).  R-M cycle.  The theme is trains, and how they changed people's lives -- how they were suddenly able to travel farther and faster in a shorter amount of time.  They also influenced baser activities such as adultery and murder.  This novel was so monstrous and compelling that I knew any other Zola novel I read next couldn't compete, so I've taken another break from the R-M cycle.

17. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).  I didn't need the rousing and ringing endorsements from abolitionist contemporaries of Douglass's, which were at the front of the edition I read, to compel me to weep  and rage and cheer him on.  A remarkable account.

18. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1892).  Stephen Crane does dialect and not much else.  It's probably best just to think of this as his warm-up for The Red Badge of Courage.

19. Twelve Years A Slave (1853).  Solomon Northup's account of being a free black man kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into the deep South sheds even more harsh light on the horrible institution of slavery.  Like Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Northup's story is told in a clear and straightforward manner.  He minces no words about how those cotton plantations in Louisiana were run.

So there you have it.  19 older books.  More than I usually read in a year, but that odd number pains me.  Too bad I didn't make it to 20, or 25, which was my goal.

I hate to admit it, but even though I've got a B.A. in English and an advanced degree, and a few dozen pre-1900 books behind me, I still feel some trepidation when I approach an older book.  There's always this panicked moment in which I believe that I won't be able to understand what's going on -- that I won't be able to decipher ornate language, and if I do decipher, I won't understand the context and I'll be hopelessly at sea.   I also have a fear that I'll have to give up, and that would have to be chalked up as a failure.  Ridiculous.  When I quit a more modern book, I do it with impunity.  Why should a few decades make any difference?

 Once I'm in, it's fun, though.  My brain is working hard at all of the above and loving the challenge.  I'm like a puppy tearing into a large, reinforced slipper.  Most of the terrain is unfamiliar, but then a character will do or say something that reminds me of someone I know.  Discovering humor is always a surprise and a relief.  I can't go fast -- older novels were built for a less distracted time -- but I definitely can go, and most of the time, I see the work all the way through.  As Chumbawumba famously said, I get knocked down, but I get up again.  You hear that, Theodore Dreiser?

I don't know if I'll get another oldie read before 2013 is over, but I do have plans:  In no particular order, I want to read North and South and Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft; Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac; The Innocents Abroad and Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain; I rejected Nathaniel Hawthone's The Blithedale Romance so soundly that I want to say sorry by giving it another chance; I want to complete my Bronte sisters reading with Villette and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Zola's The Downfall, The Earth, and Dr. Pascal are also on my list; and finally, I want to find more examples of vivid and searing memoirs like I found in Douglass and Northup.  This list is far from complete.  As always, I'm taking suggestions.