Shakespeare Wrote for Money

It was with great trepidation that I read Nick Hornby's latest collection of columns from The Believer. Not because I didn't want to read it--in fact, I couldn't wait--but because I knew I would have to post something about it. As far as I'm concerned, Hornby is the king of blogging on books--though of course his format is more formal and I would hate to compare what he does to mere blogging.
I've only read one Hornby book that I didn't love ( I hated How to Be Good) so I was really looking forward to Shakespeare Wrote for Money. This is the last collection of Hornby's Stuff I've Been Reading column and I'd say he's probably right to take a break. Everyone should catch his earlier collections, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and The Polysyllabic Spree. I've always gotten suggestions of what to read, as I did here, but he seems a little tired in this collection.
In Shakespeare, Hornby discovers Young Adult literature and like any recent convert, he's a zealot, defending his interest vehemently lest anyone take him less seriously than before. He also makes an attempt at self-deprecation in order to make a point about self-deprecation; he's enthusiastic about everything he reads--perhaps because he's apparently not allowed to trash any books, or to be even vaguely critical of an author; he gives everyone a free pass on having to read the uber-depressing novel by Cormac McCarthy The Road (thank you, thank you!); and it is YA lit. that helps him climb out of the hole he gets into over the future of the earth and humanity.
I will miss his columns, but can only hope this means more novels from Nick Hornby. In the introduction to Shakespeare, Sarah Vowel writes:[Hornby] is quitting Stuff I've Been Reading so as to "spend more time with his family" What--they don't let you read books in rehab?Incidently, her introduction is quite funny and makes me want to read her latest, The Wordy Shipmates, which I've considered and rejected several times since seeing her on The Daily Show. (Well, that sounds really half-hearted, doesn't it?)

There was a passage in Hornby's novel, A Long Way Down that was so funny, I actually did pee my pants. Nothing quite so dramatic in this writing, but I did like this: [Hornby had been refusing to read some book that everyone was nagging him to read] ...The same people who had been telling me to read the posh novel told me to read the posh memoir, and I felt that a further refusal would have indicated some kind of Trotskyite militancy that I really don't feel. It's more a mild distate than a deeply entrenched wordview."

In The Flesh

I had thought this Wexford mystery by Ruth Rendell would be the perfect "holding pattern" book leading up to Christmas (and which point I assumed I would find mounds of books under the tree for me to read), but it turned out merely irritating. I usually like the Wexford mysteries. He's a fine character--and I'm always impressed (?) by Rendell's ability to make him vaguely sexist and so out of touch with "modern" technology. For awhile I suspected those traits were elements of her own personality (which seemed weird) so I finally settled on it being due to good writing.
The two old bodies unearthed promised a nice bit of whodunnit, but then Rendell had to bring in Somali female genital mutilation, which was just a huge distraction. In another book she brought in baby selling in Africa. Okay, so kudos (I guess) for the ripped from the headlines elements (I guess?), but who cares, really? Give me dead, and not gross bodies, and I'm happy to read your book for a few hours, in a warm house, by a crackling fire.

addendum to Ex-Libris (or my life)

So, husband Ben found this image on a blog he reads and sent it because, apparently, he likes to encourage my worst tendencies. Of course I love it, so I'm poaching it (and posting it) for...um...I guess my own amusement. Anne Fadiman can rest assured that there are still many like her out there. (Okay, well, at least two people...unless the second sign was written by committee, which opens up all sorts of possibilities)

To make this post an actual addendum to Ex-Libris, I will add that I have heard from several people that Fadiman's book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is excellent. I probably won't get around to reading it, but someone should.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

When I was in college (and embarrassingly long after that), friends and I made a game of finding "unnecessary quotes" in our environs. In our own short hand, this meant searching for those signs with superfluous quotation marks that many (many, many--it turns out) people use to "punch up" their messages. What started us off, was the hand-lettered sign on a vending machine in the dorm basement that read:

Any further abuse of this machine will result in its removal.

"Think of those" who use it correctly.

Educated, priviliged snots that we were, this game threatened to become our life's calling.

Reading Anne Fadiman's series of short essays collected in Ex Libris is both a vaguely embarrassing mirror of my own life and also a window into "there but for the grace of---um, a different calling--go I." I absolutely loved this book, a really accessible, readable book about loving books and words and language.

Fadiman grew up in a hyper-literary family--her parents owned over 7,000 books--in which word games and trivia games were manna. Okay, who hasn't shouted out the answers in front of Jeopardy? But did your family give itself a team name and pound imaginary buzzers embedded in the stuffed chairs?(The Joy of Sesquipedalians). Her upbringing resembles a mash-up of my mother and aunt's recollection of their childhood (Greek as a lunchtime brain snack, for example) and mine in which a quick wit and a ready answer were prized.

To her credit and our gain, Fadiman is fully aware of both how irritating and amusing her life must seem to outsiders so she adopts a wry tone. There is nothing judgemental about her quirky intellect and her passion for books. She gives a glimpse into her past that shows how she became the writer and reader she is, and the present (1998) in which she describes having to sort and arrange books in the home she shares with her husband, an equally obsessed book-hoarder. Fadiman believes in categorizing books--specifically by time period. Her husband feels that disorder is part of the fun. "If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does," Fadiman writes (Marrying Libraries).

When I read that Fadiman has an entire section of her library devoted to Arctic Travel (The Odd Shelf), I realized the kinship was stronger than I'd thought. I was a devotee of books about what husband Ben once called "stupid people in cold places." My shelves creak under stacks of Arctic, Antarctic and Mountaineering books. I've moved on since and I suppose Fadiman may have as well.

Ex Libris was published in 1998 and I am curious what has happened since then to Anne Fadiman. Is she increasingly eccentric or has she mellowed over time? Does she now have her kids eagerly searching restaurant menus for errors, or do her kids prefer math puzzles? I like to think they watch quiz shows with her, their hands hovering over armchair buzzers, while her husband peruses their mile long bookshelf, searching for that one book that was just there...

The Whistling Season

I had always confused Ivan Doig with an early 19th Century writer, though I'm not sure why (or with whom). Perhaps there's a name similarity with someone I once read in school. In any case, his author picture in The Whistling Season does nothing to discourage this belief.

Nonetheless, The Whistling Season was first published in 2006, though it takes place in Montana of 1910 (yes, the year of Halley's Comet and Mark Twain's death). It's an interesting enough portrait of homesteading at the turn of the last century when Model Ts battled muddy roads for dominance, when dry land farming (You'd have to read this book a bit more carefully than I to fully understand that idea) slapped up against giant Government irrigation projects, and one-room school houses were the center of a community (like it or not).

The framing of The Whistling Season is weird and not really necessary, though at least we know everyone grows up well enough because our narrator pops in occasionally as an adult. But that's kind of the boring part.

The interesting part is the arrival of Rose Llewellyn and her intriguing brother Morrie Morgan to be--respectively--housekeeper and teacher. These two colorful characters have CON ARTISTS tattooed all over them, but they seem perfectly pleasant and interesting, intelligent and kind, and--having not read Doig before (stuffy old 18th century guy, right?), I wasn't sure if he was just playing with his reader.

Morrie is the best character in the book. He looks every bit the dandy--alarmingly stylish mustache, perfectly ironed white shirts--and is pleasantly overeducated, though only in a bookish way. As an example of what he lacks in education, his first job as wood cutter for a cranky old lady ends in him stacking three cords of wood with logs precisely four feet long (a cord, it was originally explained to him is "four feet high, four feet long and 8 feet wide"). To his credit, he did think it was an odd size for pieces of wood destined for a cookstove, and he does fix his mistake.Pressed into service, he becomes one of those teachers you dream of--teaching to a higher level of thinking while entertaining his charges.

In the end, lives change, are improved, or not, and some things about the prairie change and some things do not. I'm glad I gave this writer a chance to prove he lives in this century (or writes in it, anyway), though I'm not a convert.

I don't know if this is too cutesy, but I like the image it created. The youngest boy in the family is bursting to tell of the matrimonial escape of their former teacher: "Miss Trent loped!"

"Did she." Father's eyebrows lifed commensurately. "That must have been a memorable change from her usual gait."

Supreme Courtship

Ah, nothing like an ice storm/power outage to get some reading done, although the light gets pretty dim around 4:00. I ripped right through Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship. It was a light and fairly zippy read and, really, I had little else to do while curled up in a sleeping bag in a house that registered somewhere around 34 degrees.

This book reminded me of some of Tom Wolfe's books, though obviously not as long and sweeping. I enjoyed the freakishly prescient Sarah Palin similarities, though it turned out there were only two (thank goodness), right in the beginning. The unpopular president gives up on finding a Supreme Court nominee that the angry Congress will accept and gleefully offers a Court TV judge they can't refuse.

Here's where Sarah Palin comes in (sort of). When Pepper Cartwright pronounces "You Betcha!" I thought Buckley to be some sort of psychic. After all, the book was published in September). When he then mentions that there's a spike in sales of cherry red pickup trucks because of this nominee, all I could think of was the wide-spread mania over Palin's rimless glasses. But then, I suppose not all pop culture should be attributed to the former Republican VP nominee. Eventually she will go away, recede from my mind, and I'll then fail to find her lurking in everything I read. I hope.

I felt like Buckley created in President Donald Vanderdamp the sort of president he thought Bush could have been. Never mind idealogy. Vanderdamp is genial, a lover of bowling who'd rather be back home in some unpronounceable small town in Ohio (since it is unpronounceable and starts with a W, I thought of Palin's hometown. That woman is everywhere!) And instead has to run the country. You kind of want to hate him at first, but he's a good enough guy.

I liked the characters--the prickly, pesky, uber-intelligent Justices, the president, Pepper herself, the suicidal Chief Justice, the grasping, nakedly ambitious Senator, and especially Graydon Clenndennynn. Who wouldn't want a wise, Boston Brahmin type getting you out of trouble with his calm wisdom, his intelligence, and his perfect martinis served with cheese amuse-gueules?

Obviously, I didn't like Pepper's husband--the stupidly named Buddy, the TV producer who is responsible for her rise to TV fame (though almost responsible for her failure to the Supreme Court). He's not likeable, of course, but it's more that Buckley never bothers to explain how on earth those two ended up together and I didn't buy it.

Pepper's attempts to rule--or at least judge-from the highest bench in America are amusing and a little bittersweet. It all seems so much easier and more fun on Judge Judy. In general this book made me never, ever, ever want to be a lawyer (or be married to one), but it was pretty entertaining.

Nice bit of advice: "Short of nuclear warheads that have already been launched, there is no situation that cannot be met head-on with inaction."

And this image, about a dog: Dwight lifted his head off the pillow next to the President's and cocked an ear in hopes of discerning syllabic similarity between the words being spoken and "biscuit."

I rather think those two quotes go well together, now that I see them juxtaposed.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

As soon as I began reading this book in letters by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows, it reminded me of a book I'd bought and read in 1987. So the end found me rummaging through stacks of boxes packed up during home renovations to find Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys. Of course I found the book sitting innocently on a bookshelf downstairs. Henrietta's War is subtitled "News from the Home Front 1939-1942" and takes place in roughly the same time period as Potato Peel and is also written in letters. I remember loving it (sigh, part of my British phase). Skimming through it this time around reminded me of what was fun about it.

Now, writing an epistolary novel is hard. The author is really demanding a lot from his reader and there are some who obviously get a bit carried away with the format. Samuel Richardson, famously, has his heroine Clarissa writing to her dear friend as she's being, uh, deflowered (or just about). Of course, the other problem is the time lapse in letter writing. Fine, In the 18th Century, people wrote often and throughout the day, but in later years the regular post office was, really, a bit slower.

And things move pretty fast in Potato Peel. How quickly can you fall in love (by mostly letter, I mean)? Letter writing is certainly an art, but I even reread Dawsey's first letter to Juliet and there's not much there. Okay, yeah, a love of Charles Lamb. and okay, a certain "country folk" appeal, but really, I wasn't even sure it was a man writing it, the first time around. The whole book takes place in less than a year and when even the heroine admits that being engaged for one day is a bit rushed, it feels more like the authors just wanted to "git her done." (the book, I mean. Nothing vulgar here). Yes, I know they meet, but we only have his and her letters to glean anything romantic.

I must admit, if it weren't a book club selection, I would not have finished this book. There were too many things that irritated me (the letters format was the least of it because I knew about that). Things just seemed too cutesy, too much as though the writers had read a few quick books about LIFE DURING THE OCCUPATION (WWII) and then had tried to drop a whole bunch of 'period markers' to guide the reader. This is a particular pet peeve of mine.

BUT, I am trying to be more open-minded about books (sort of) and I perservered. The book definitely picks up. There is still a great deal that annoyed me, but I ended up liking a lot of those very markers that had bugged me to begin with. I was quite moved by the letter writer who lists exactly what he received in his first Red Cross package after several years of inadequate food on Guernsey. Somehow, listing things in ounces (one ounce of salt, ten ounces of raisins...) was terribly poignant

Other details, such as the description of the German soldiers treating their arrival like a holiday, away from the "real war" was interesting and felt fresh to me. I also liked the guy who would read only Seneca for his Society meetings; the other man who read a difficult book just to spite a friend (or repair a friendship).

I even liked the seemingly random discovery of letters from Oscar Wilde. Sure! Why not?

I did not, however, for one minute, buy the romance that blossomed by the end of the book, but I suppose, we all have a little Jane Austen in us and so need things to tidy up neatly and make families of everyone.

I hesitated a long time before writing this because I have heard mostly LOVE for this book, and I didn't want to disagree with friend Liz (though she knows we don't always agree on books). As my sister-in-law said first, "I didn't love it." BUT, I didn't end up hating it either, which I would have done had I quit. Instead, I savored some of the scenes and descriptions and let go of any cheese I found.
This is an easy book to suggest to most people because it's a lite little book that also makes you feel like you're learning something about the Terrible Times that were WWII. So, go ahead and read it (and argue with me, if you want)

my faves of 2008

I keep track of my "best reads" of the year in a somewhat useless way--by making a small dot next to the title in a notebook. This is an improvement over the old method--that of depending on my memory. The old method usually left me announcing to friends and casual acquaintances, "Oh, I loved that book!" whenever they mentioned something I'd read. Later, I'd realize that all I meant was that the title was familiar.
And so, the dots.
This was a bad year for me, bookwise. Usually, I look back and find at least 10 dots, but not this year. In any case, here is a list of the books I enjoyed most in 2008, followed by a few honorable mentions to round out the list. It's conceivable that I'll love another book before the year is out, but this is a start.

(The list is more chronological than it is from best to worst).

Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips.
Some critics found this story of Greek Gods living in London a tired (or tiring) gimmick, but I found it really funny. The whole "sun going out" bit was a little long, but Apollo as talk show host was funny.

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen.
I was really late to the table on this one, partly scared off by the circus theme, but it was fantastic.

The House on Fortune Street, Margot Livesey
Not my favorite Livesey (that would be Eva Moves the Furniture), but I like her writing and I'm a sucker for multiple POV stories.

Lush Life, Richard Price
He captures a kind of life that I will never know, but it rings so true. I probably love best the throw-away scenes that just establish the neighborhood.

The Anglo Files, Sarah Lyall
A late entry, but I already blogged this so I won't go into how much I loved it. Though, I will add that it actually got me to purchase an out-of-print book that Lyall mentions, and tuck away for the future another book at the library.

Okay, a few others include

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney
Frontier Canada--trappers, Native Canadians, and European religious sects. Also, a good mystery.

Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden
This is from friend Liz's list from 2007. Canadian Indians in WWI trenches. Fascinating, though of course, sadish.

The Ghost, Robert Harris.
Not a great book, about the ghost writer for a thinly disguised Tony Blair, but Harris does something brilliant with the identity of his main character that takes about 70 pages to catch, (though my husband never noticed). Kind of a fun read.

If You are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
always fun

When will there be good news, Kate Atkinson
Just because I waited so long for this, and she is a very good writer