Essays: Modern American Culture and the Classics

Although as a single white middle aged female I don't come close to being the target demographic for GQ Magazine,  I may start regularly thumbing through it just to discover if there are any new pieces of "long form journalism" by John Jeremiah Sullivan.  I took his Pulphead: Essays with me on vacation and it, surprisingly, turned out to be one of the most enjoyable of my deck reads. 

I say "surprisingly" because Sullivan writes about things in which I am not remotely interested.  Christian Rock Music festivals.  Axl Rose.  Bunny Wailer.  Reality TV.   I would begin each Essay assuming that after the first few pages I would get bored and move on to the next.  But Sullivan consistently sucked me in and kept me reading to the end.  To say that his style is engaging doesn't really do it justice.

It is hard to say exactly how he does it.  In some ways, his style is very much like the "everyman" style prevalent in many magazine feature articles today.  The Writer sets out to write a feature article on some element of pop culture but due to circumstances beyond his control the Writer ends up writing as much about himself and his quest as about his ostensible subject.  Sullivan may be writing about a Christianized Woodstock-type festival but he manages to build tension by describing the enormous RV he has rented (it was all that was left) and his adventures in parking it.   He goes to Jamaica to interview Bunny Wailer, the last living member of Bob Marley's band, but ends up spending a great part of the essay telling us about hanging out with the ordinary Jamaican guy he hired to be his driver.  

And per usual in this style of writing, along the way the Writer reveals little bits of himself to the reader, usually in a self-deprecatory way.   Sullivan is no different.  We learn about his past experience with a Christian youth group.  In the last essay (the only one that I had previously read) he writes about the experience of allowing his own home to be used by the television production One Tree Hill.

On the other hand, unlike other writers, when Sullivan really does get down to his subject, he is informed, educated and, most of all, respectful. His essay about Michael Jackson, written after Jackson's death, is one of the best meditations on Michael Jackson that I have ever read.

It's fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person.  During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them ... He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different ... It's only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive. 

Sullivan doesn't write about American pop culture purely from a fan boy perspective.  He recognizes the dark side of his subjects.  He addresses the allegations of  Michael Jackson's pedophilia. He talks about Axl Rose biting the leg of a security guard.  He admits his annoyance with the One Tree Hill production team.  But he ultimately approaches his subjects with respect.  I got the impression that Sullivan is a person who is truly interested in other people and what makes them tick. Which is, I think, in the end what kept me reading.

 An entirely different kind of respect permeates Daniel Mendelsohn's book of essays: How Beautiful it is and How Easily it Can be Broken.   Mendelsohn writes critically for the New York Review of Books, also ostensibly about modern culture, and I am far more familiar with his work than I was with Sullivans'.  I say that Mendelsohn writs ostensibly about modern culture, meaning that each of his essays is essentially a review of a play, movie or book. But they are much more.  They are almost a course in the classics of ancient literature.

Unlike Sullivan, Mendelsohn doesn't even pretend to be an "everyman".  If Sullivan is "engaging", there is no word to describe Mendelsohn other than erudite (as Mendelsohn himself  might inform you, from the Latin eruditus, "learned",  and from the past participle of the Latin verb erudite, "to educate").  Mendelsohn is what the British used to call a "classics man" (or, maybe they still do, I don't know) and when it comes to the Greeks he knows his stuff.   I was many pages into his review of the Brad Pitt movie Troy before I realized that it was a movie review.  I thought I was simply reading an engrossing essay on lost Greek epics, the meaning of "epic" and pitfalls in constructing "epics" (poetic and otherwise).

A plot, by contrast, is what the Iliad has.  For all its great length, the poem is precisely about what is proposed, in its famous opening line, as its subject matter:  the wrath of Achilles, its origins, its enactment, its consequences.  (So too the Odyssey, whose concomitant episodes all refract what it, in its equally famous opening line, purports to be about:  the "man of many turnings who wandered wide"; no part of the poem does not illuminate his cleverness, his yearning for home, his humanity.)  To be sure, Achilles' rage, as it plays itself out through the poem's twenty-four books, sheds light on a vast host of issues; the meaning of heroism, the nature of war and of peace, the sweetness and bitterness of human life.  But the Iliad is able to illuminate so much precisely because of its searing focus on one praxis, which is what gives it its awesome weight and grandeur.  Which is to say, what makes it truly big, truly "epic."

Of course Troy is a disappointment to Mendelsohn.  But did any of us  really expect it to be good?  Probably not, but most of us probably can't explain in depth that it fails partly because it jettisons the Homeric codes of behavior, which "makes a hash of much of the characters' actions." 

Unlike Sullivan who approaches his subjects warily, expecting them to be strange or trivial or odd, but ends up embracing them wholeheartedly, Mendelsohn seems to approach each experience with great expectations only to find that the reality doesn't live up to the hype.  By the end of the book I was hoping that he would finally find one experience that left him ecstatic.  This is not because he tired me with constant nitpicking.  On the contrary.  He seems so intellectually stimulated by the subjects he writes about, even when they are flawed, that I simply couldn't imagine to what heights he might soar if he found a "worthy" subject.  But, alas, that was not to be. 

I don't think Mendelsohn is for everyone.  At the risk of sounding snobby, I'd say that you really have to like "to think" to enjoy his style.  It probably helps if you have an interest in the classics.  He is not the everyman that Sullivan is. I can, and did, throw the Sullivan into my beach bag.  I needed a quiet place with few distractions to read Mendelsohn.  But I can imagine re-reading Mendelsohn at some point whereas Sullivan was simply a good read for the summer. 

Summer Reading

It is odd for me, as an American, to read articles in British papers like The Guardian that exclaim on August 3, "At last – at last! – summer has arrived ..." and discuss summer reading lists.  Here in America, summer is almost over.  School starts next week for many and there will be no more time for summer reading for them or their parents.  I needed suggestions for summer reading at the end of May, not at the beginning of August.  But then I remind myself that over the Pond, everyone seems to holiday in August.   Ah, cultural differences.

At the beginning of the summer (our summer) I visited my friendly independent bookseller. She asked me if I was looking for something in particular and I said, "No, I'm just browsing for summer reading."  She then proceeded to bring me piles of books that she was pushing as good summer reading.  Books like A Discovery of Witches (which I blogged about earlier).  This happens every year and every year I try to explain to her that, for me, summer is the time to read longer and/or more difficult fiction.  Everyone else is going for the simple, fun, lightweight beach/pool read but not me.  I save those for the dead of winter for some reason.  In the summer I want to sink my teeth into long stories and so-called "literary" fiction.   And I like to discover a work that unexpectedly captures me and doesn't let me go.

Unfortunately, for me,  although I read many fine novels this summer, none of them really grabbed me.  And these are books that have appealed to many, many people.  So maybe it was just my frame of mind this summer.  Anyway, I doubt I'll blog individually about any of them but I'll probably blog about them in groups. Here's a few.

In past summers, for my "long" read I've worked on (if not finished until Autumn)  Anna Karenina and War and Peace.  This year I worked my way through the first four volumes of  A Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin, also known as the Game of Thrones Series (so called because the first novel is called The Game of Thrones as is the television series based on the novels). I haven't seen the HBO series (I don't have cable) but it has received so many rave reviews that I know I will eventually watch it.  In the meantime, I thought it might be nice to read the novels first.   Martin has, so far, written five novels and I've only read the first four so I'm not yet ready to blog about them (if I ever am).  But I do want to say that I think he has created an enormous cast of characters most of whom are multi-dimensional.  He has also created a world I can believe in.  But I'm finding his plotting a little ... plodding.   He seems to like putting his characters in motion.  They are forever on journeys and these physical journeys also seem to be a metaphor for their psychological and emotional journeys.  Now, I generally like books about journeys.   But with so many characters on so many journeys all at the same time and not together - well, I find it wearying.   And I'm really wondering how they are going to film this in later seasons. 

In May I read Hillary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies, her sequel to Wolf Hall, which unfortunately didn't affect me the way the earlier novel did.  I still think she's one of the best novelists I've ever read, but the magic that existed for me in Wolf Hall just didn't show up for Bring up the Bodies.  But I thought summer might be the time to try some of her earlier work.  I chose A Place of Greater Safety, her long novel about the French Revolution, specifically a novel about Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximillian Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. 

I know only general facts about the French revolution and I remembered the fate of Robespierre but I had never heard of Danton or Desmoulins.  However, I was pretty sure that they were not going to end pretty.   Nobody seemed to in those days.  But I already knew how Thomas Cromwell ended when I began Wolf Hall, and that didn't matter.  She made me care about him in the sense that she made me want to keep reading to find out how what happened to him did happen.  I didn't feel that way about Danton, Robespierre or Desmoulins.  It isn't that I found all three dislikeable (I did) but that I kept thinking  "I don't really care how they come to their ends".   In a way, that wasn't the fault of her characterization as much as my feeling that the Terror had no logic to it and that whether one lived or died depended, in a way, on the whim of the mob from day to day.  I found it hard to get invested in the story because of that.  And at the end, I wasn't very affected by what happened to them. 

 It did make me think, though.  I looked up biographies of the characters to see how true to fact she stayed (pretty close I found out).  At one point I wondered what it would have been like to live through the French Revolution in France but in a place other than Paris.  And I wondered if one of the reasons that the French Revolution devolved into the bloody mess that it did is because all of the leaders were living on top of each other in Paris.  Whereas, in America, after the British were forced out the American revolutionary leadership was spread out along the eastern seaboard and complained mightily about any time they were forced to spend together in Philadelphia, leaving as soon as they possibly could to get back to their homes.    In the end, it  did help me better understand how Napoleon grabbed power.

The other author I've been wanting to read more of is Jane Gardam.  I loved Old Filth and really liked The Man in the Wooden Hat.  Last year I read God on the Rocks.   I, again, loved her style but the story didn't really grab me.  I'm not much on stories that involve religious fanatics.   But I decided to try again and I took Crusoe's Daughter with me on vacation. Gardam has said that this is her personal favorite of all the books she has written.  Once again, loved her style but was somewhat indifferent to the story.  The story begins in 1904 when Polly Flint comes to the "Yellow House" which stands in partial isolation near marshes and ends in the mid 1980's when Polly and the house are stranded, an island, amidst an industrial development.  During this time, World War I and World War II occur and Polly knows happiness and sadness.  Everyone tells me that The Queen of the Tambourine is the novel of hers that I should read.  So, maybe in a few months I'll pick that up.  I don't regret reading Crusoe's Daughter, but I just didn't find the same magic as I did in Old Filth.

That's it for now.   More updates later.

Views from my Vacation Deck and my Office Window

I'm back from vacation and not yet ready to blog about all the books I read.   Here's a view from my vacation deck that I looked at while I read:

Yes, sometimes I find it distracting.  This year the weather was beautiful.  High's in the mid 80's and lows in the 50's and 60's.  We even had rain (!!!) a few nights. 

But now I'm back.  The weather is much better than when I left so it is tempting to get outside during the day - until I actually get outside into the downtown concrete with temps in the mid 90's.  But today I was looking out my window at the office and thought, hmmm.   Here's my view if I look to the right:

 Yep, that's the St. Louis Arch (formally known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) with the Mississippi River in the background and the Old Cathedral in the bottom right hand corner.  And the really ugly highway system in the foreground that separates Downtown from the Arch Grounds.  There are now funds and a plan to fix that problem and connect the Arch grounds to Downtown by putting all the lanes underground but that will take a while. 

Anyway, it doesn't look like it, but there is actually a fair amount of shade on the Arch grounds. And usually nice breezes because of the river.  It has been too hot this summer to really take advantage of it, but today I decided to walk over there and it was delightful  - once I got past all the concrete.  Here's the path I took from the south leg.

The picture doesn't show it but there were a fair amount of people over there today.  Lots of tourists because it was a Cardinals baseball day and lots of downtown workers jogging and walking and eating lunch on the benches. 

More about all the books I read on vacation when I get more organized.

Rory Gilmore's Book List

I loved the television show The Gilmore Girls and miss it.   Someone has compiled a list of all the books that Rory Gilmore mentions reading.  250 books.  See, this is why I loved the show. 

Here's the list.  It will keep readers occupied while I take a vacation break. Book reports expected. :)

1984 by George Orwell
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (TBR)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
The Art of Fiction by Henry James
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Babe by Dick King-Smith
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (TBR)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
The Bhagava Gita
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy
Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman
Christine by Stephen King
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Complete Novels by Dawn Powell
The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas p�re
Cousin Bette by Honor'e de Balzac
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (TBR)
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (TBR)
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Cujo by Stephen King
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Deenie by Judy Blume
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Don Quijote by Cervantes
Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
Eloise by Kay Thompson
Emily the Strange by Roger Reger
Emma by Jane Austen
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Ethics by Spinoza
Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Extravagance by Gary Krist
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore
The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)
Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
Fletch by Gregory McDonald
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (TBR)
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
The Gospel According to Judy Bloom
The Graduate by Charles Webb
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (TBR)
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (TBR)
Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare
Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare
Henry V by William Shakespeare
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr)
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (TBR)
How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland
Howl by Allen Gingsburg
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (TBR)
The Iliad by Homer
I'm with the Band by Pamela des Barres (TBR)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (TBR)
Inferno by Dante
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy
It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront�
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Lady Chatterleys' Lover by D. H. Lawrence
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Love Story by Erich Segal
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Manticore by Robertson Davies
Marathon Man by William Goldman
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (TBR)
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Mencken's Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken
The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin
Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (TBR)
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It's Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh
My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken
My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest
Myra Waldo's Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (TBR)
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Night by Elie Wiesel
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan
Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell
Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Old School by Tobias Wolff
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Othello by Shakespeare
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
Out of Africa by Isac Dineson (TBR)
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Property by Valerie Martin
Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Quattrocento by James Mckean
A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (TBR)
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)
R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
Rita Hayworth by Stephen King
Robert's Rules of Order by Henry Robert
Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition
Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (TBR)
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
Selected Hotels of Europe
Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Several Biographies of Winston Churchill
Sexus by Henry Miller
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Shane by Jack Shaefer
The Shining by Stephen King
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton
Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
Songbook by Nick Hornby
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams
Stuart Little by E. B. White
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett
Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (TBR)
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (TBR)
The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (TBR)
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath (TBR)
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (TBR)
Unless by Carol Shields
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walt Disney's Bambi by Felix Salten
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker
What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles
What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront� (TBR)
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
 
 I thought about going through and marking which ones I've read.  But I'm too lazy.  What I want is another TV show that talks books.

Witches. And Vampires. and Daemons. Oh my.

Just after I finished reading Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches I read an article in The New Yorker by Maria Bustillos in which she quoted George Orwell:

“The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.”

I'm not sure I'd put Witches even in the category of good bad literature.  The writing style is pedestrian and crosses the line into cliche on a regular basis, but every time my eyes would start to hurt from rolling them and I'd think "OK, I'm not sure I can go on with this" she would insert some plot point that would keep me interested and I'd think "Well, maybe a little further ...".  And when I got to the end I knew that I was going to read the sequel.   At some point.

There are people in this world who love to read about witches and vampires.  I am not one of them.

There are people in this world who wouldn't go near a book about witches or vampires with a ten foot pole.  I'm not one of them either. 

On the whole I find stories about vampires and witches silly, my love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter notwithstanding.  And this book is fairly silly.  There wasn't a hint of the vampires and witches being metaphors for a bigger world problem - except maybe, I suppose, racial problems.  But I think that's stretching it.  It's a fairly standard romance novel with a lead character who happens to be a witch and a dark, brooding romantic lead who just happens to be a vampire.  (Seriously, why are Vampires always brooding?  I think that's why Spike was popular - he didn't have the patience to brood long.)  At least Harkness doesn't make the vampires all cuddly.  Having a vampire in your life is, it seems, like choosing to make a wolf your pet.  Maybe you can pull it off but you'll never be completely comfortable around it.

I picked up this book because (1) my friendly neighborhood independent bookseller raved about it to me as a "perfect summer read" and (2) another friend who has similar taste as mine in books said she thought I'd really like it.  And after all the death of Regeneration and its sequels I wanted something light. Of course where there are vampires there is death ...

Deborah Harkness is an historian who has written scholarly works on Elizabethan England.  She says that the idea for this book struck her in 2008 when she wondered:  “if there really are vampires, what do they do for a living?”  I'd put good money on it that in 2008 she looked at the best seller Twilight and thought "For god's sake, even I could write something as good as that."  And then thought "heyyy,  why don't I try?".   And then she wondered what vampires did for a living.  

And good on her for actually coming up with the idea and getting it done.

The plot is decent for a standard romance novel plot and, as I said, it kept me reading.  The characters have potential but are stymied by cliche.  And, to reiterate, the writing style is pedestrian. 

One of the reasons I want to read the sequel is because I kept sensing potential in this novel that didn't quite flower.  I had the sense that many of the cliches were in the novel because she (or her editor) thought "well, I'd better throw this in because it will help the book sell".   In the sections that weren't so cliche ridden (the section where the characters are in the Occitan castle, for instance), her style was better.  Perhaps now that she has a bestseller behind her she'll feel comfortable letting some of the cliches go and get down to writing what she wants to write.  And since the sequel will be set in Tudor England she should be able to throw in a lot of historically accurate details. 

Speaking of detail, I love detail in novels.  This may be because I'm not a very visual reader, I need a lot of help to visualize what I'm supposed to be seeing.  Harkness throws in a lot of detail.  A LOT of detail.  Hopefully in her second novel she'll learn to scatter the detail throughout the scene instead of throwing in pages and pages of description at one time.  I finally just started skimming the food and wine description scenes.

My biggest gripe about this novel is that while it is clear that she wants to create a modern heroine who isn't a damsel in distress - she created a character who is regularly a damsel in distress.  I think that this mostly occurs because Harkness felt she needed to write a "saleable" vampire and so she (cliche alert) writes him as having a very old fashioned possessive streak.  After all, he is 1500 years old and was brought up in a time when men were men and women belonged to them.  It's probably hard to come up with creative ways to show this character trait in a positive way and it's relatively easy to rely on the old standby of putting the heroine in distress and letting the hero take care of her.  Of course to do this you need the heroine to be genuinely in distress and in need of help because otherwise any sane modern woman would just be creeped out by all that possessiveness. 

But once the distress is over, Harkness attempts to make the heroine re-assert her independence. Again and again.  It all ended up a little disjointed.  Maybe by the next novel she'll feel more comfortable with how she writes Vampire Matthew.  It strikes me that a 1500 year old vampire who is a top scholar studying DNA in a very modern medical research facility, who flies in a private jet, is glued to his laptop and is constantly on his cell phone, probably has the ability to evolve his understanding of how to treat women in the same way that he slowly but surely moved from horses to combustion engines to flying machines.  We'll see.   

Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy

Pat Barker's novel Regeneration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but it was the third novel in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize the year it was published.  Sometimes this can smell like a consolation prize for not winning earlier but in this case I think the right novel won. If, of course, only one novel was going to win.  All three are wonderful works. But, in my opinion, The Ghost Road packed more of an emotional wallop than the other two and I believe Barker was able to create that wallop because she created a fictional character.

That may sound odd because novels are, by their very nature fictional.  But historical novels, in particular, often have real life characters in them.  I find that I tend to like historical novels where the real life characters are peripheral to the main action.  And the Regeneration Trilogy has many real life characters. 

In the first novel,  Regeneration, Barker used real life World War I poet, Siegfried Sassoon, as one of the central characters.  Sassoon is an interesting person.   He was a decorated hero who grew to believe that the War was wrong.  When he spoke out he was placed in a mental institution where men suffering from shell shock were treated - he was put there mostly for PR purposes because it was easier for the authorities to claim that he was out of his mind than to take action against a decorated officer for speaking out against the War.  His friend, the poet Robert Graves (of I Claudius fame), was instrumental in convincing him to go along with the institutional route. But, in the end, Sassoon chose to go back to the front and he survived the War.  The tension between his feelings about the War and his sense of duty to his men and the others who were still there fighting is one of the stronger parts of the novel. 

But ultimately Sassoon's story, interesting though it is, is bounded by the facts of his real life.  And there are other real life characters.  While in the mental hospital Sassoon formed a close relationship with his treating physician, Dr. Rivers, whose job it is to rehabilitate men so that they can go back but who knows there is nothing really wrong with Sassoon.  Rivers is a principal character in all three novels and he, too, was a real life person.  Sassoon also became a mentor to young Wilfred Owen who would ultimately become perhaps the most famous World War I poet and who would not survive the War.  Too much knowledge about the fate of the characters can detract a bit from the usual dramatic tension of a novel where the reader wants to know what happens.  If the reader knows the fate of Sassoon and Owen right from the beginning, the author needs to find some other hook

In Regeneration Barker ultimately makes the Sassoon story a novel of the mind in which the varying perceptions of the War are debated.  Sassoon is against the War but is not a pacifist.   He ultimately returns to the War on his own volition but not because he has changed his mind, ultimately, about the War.  This tension in his character is what Barker explores and, while it is fascinating, I'm not sure she really explained it to me.  The anti-war sentiment of Sassoon is easy to understand when you understand the slaughter that was going on in Europe.  I had a harder time understanding why his anti-war feelings seemed to be based on the ultimate purpose of the war.  He believed that the British people were being lied to.

And probably they were being lied to in many cases.  ]Most wars are fought for monied interests and not the altruistic reasons that are given to the public.  Propaganda is a part of every War and it is good to try to spot it.  But in the case of World War I, notwithstanding the propaganda there was an actual invading force to fight.  Did Sassoon really think that the people of Belgium, France and, perhaps ultimately, Britain should live under German domination?  He thought that peace should be made but Barker gives no evidence that anyone really thought it was possible at that particular point in the War to make peace without simply caving into German will.  That is what makes the debate particularly interesting but ultimately unsatisfying as a core component of a novel.

It seemed to me that the War was a travesty on the Allied side not particularly because of its purpose but because the people running the War were either inept and/or unable to match tactics to modern weaponry. To refuse to condone the War for that reason seems reasonable to me.  I remember reading that at one point the French soldiers refused to advance because they were simply being slaughtered.  On the other hand, they didn't walk off the field - they didn't want to allow the Germans into France they just didn't want to move an inch forward.   The cost of advance was too high but the cost of defense was still supportable. If Sassoon were a fictional character Barker might have been able to have brought some of that into his reason for opposing the War.  But since he was a real person who wrote an actual manifesto against the War she was stuck with using what he actually stated were his reasons for opposition.  And those reasons didn't seem particularly coherent to me.   And the reasons he went back weren't particularly coherent to me.

Barker also created a few fictional characters in Regeneration who I thought were in some ways more successful than Sassoon as characters. One of them was Billy Prior who was rendered mute by what he had experienced at the front.  Dr. Rivers eventually helped him get his speech back.  Prior wanted to go back to the front but Rivers discovered that he had asthma and the medical board denied his request to return the front, assigning him to home duties.

Prior is the one of the main characters of the second and third novels.  In The Eye in the Window he is working for the War Department and in The Ghost Road he finally convinces them to send him back to the Front.  Sassoon makes another appearance in The Ghost Road as does Wilfred Owen.  And Dr. Rivers is in every novel, moving from the suburbs of Edinburgh down to a London hospital where he continues to treat men suffering from shell shock.   The main intent of his treatments is to be able to send them back to fight and what is surprising in the novel is how many of them do want to go back to the Front.

Billy Prior isn't always a particularly likeable character but he seems much more coherent to me as a character than Sassoon or even Rivers.  I think that is because Barker created him and could make of him what he needed to be for the novel.  Although hindsight is 20/20, when writing an historical novel it seems useful to use that hindsight to good purpose.  The real characters like Sassoon and Owen must do whatever they actually did and think whatever the historical records indicates they thought.  Billy Prior can do and think things that possibly no one could actually verbalize at the time - only with 20/20 hindsight can certain things be said.  That is useful.

There was so much in these novels that made me think that the world just hasn't changed much.  The men back from the Front, especially Billy Prior, find it incredibly difficult to be around civilians whom they find particularly out of touch.  But of course civilians "at home" are always out of touch - it isn't really possible to understand war unless you've been there.  And for the men who do come home, they find a world far removed from the world they left.  Things have moved on without them.  In World War I, especially, there were great social upheavals - women going to work in factories and doing urban jobs that, previously, only men did was a huge social change. 

Billy Prior says:

'You know if you were writing about ... oh, I don't know, enclosures, or the coming of the railways, you wouldn't have people standing round saying ... ' He put a theatrical hand to his brow.  '"Oh dear me, we are living through a period of terribly rapid social change, aren't we?"  Because nobody'd believe people would be so ... aware.  But here we are, living through just such a period, and everybody's bloody well aware of it. I've heard nothing else since I came home. Not the words, of course, but the awareness. And I just wondered whether there aren't periods when people do become aware of what's happening, and they look back at their previous unconscious selves and it seems like decades ago. Another life.'

Of course people can look back over a five or ten or fifty year period and marvel how much life has changed.  My Grandma would occasionally do that.  But when you are living through an upheaval like World War I, perhaps you are aware of it minute by minute.  Wondering where your old life went.  Not sure you necessarily like the new life.  In some ways I think 2001 through about 2005 was a time of hyper awareness here in the States but it was nothing compared to what WWI would have been like.

It is hard to know if the words that come of Barker's characters mouths are representative of what someone would have said or felt at that time or if they are more representative of the times we live in.  Or maybe things just don't change.  As an anti-war character says, talking about her anti-war mother who also would help women who wanted to terminate pregnancies:

You know, killing a baby when it's mother's two month's gone, that's a terrible crime.  But wait twenty years and blow the same kid's head off, that's all right. 

That could be said then.  That could be said now.

In the end I liked The Ghost Road the best because, while it was just as much an "intellectual" book as Regeneration, it was also more personal and brought the cost of the War much more into focus. The novel ends at the beginning of November, just days before what we know will be Armistice Day and the end of the War.  It ends with an insignificant battle over a canal that, in the end, will be irrelevant.  Insignificant, that is, for everyone except the men who die in it.  And their families and loved ones who will live with those deaths.  With 20/20 hindsight we can say that it was insignificant to the course of the War because we know what happened a few days later.   All I kept thinking was ... what a waste.  What a terrible waste.

I'm not sure this series ultimately sated me on WWI novels.  I wouldn't mind reading more.  But I also feel ready to move into other universes too. 

Wow! It's July Already?

I can't believe how long it has been since I posted anything here.  Life ...

Well, let's just pretend that all this time hasn't gone by and plow right in to what I've been reading. Mysteries. Lots and lots of mysteries.

Last summer I read one of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs novels and swore I was going to go back and read all of them from the beginning. I did. Then I moved on to Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge novels which in turn led me to Charles Todd's Bess Crawford novels. And those led me to Anne Perry's Joseph Reavely novels. Finally, I just finished The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller.  The common theme? The First World War.

I enjoyed all of them but I would rate the Inspector Rutledge novels as my favorites. Charles Todd is the pen name for an American mother-son writing team who set their mysteries in the English countryside in the years immediately following World War I. Ian Rutledge is a detective inspector with Scotland Yard who has returned from World War I a damaged man, suffering from what was then called shell shock. As an officer, he was required to execute one of his sergeants for refusing to obey an order to go into battle. Rutledge is now haunted by the memory of the man, Hamish McLeod, and hears his voice as though Hamish is standing just behind him.

The cases that Rutledge is sent to solve are fairly standard mystery fare. What I really like in these books is the portrayal of Rutledge himself. His recovery from the war is very slow. Each novel takes place over a short period of only a few weeks and the next novel always seems to pick up almost immediately after the previous story ended. After 14 novels we have moved less than two years in time. I like this slow pace. The struggles that Rutledge goes through, his aversion to sleeping anywhere that might allow others to hear his screams in the night, his hesitation to get involved with any woman, all ring true to me. Todd creates, for me, a very believable universe that I can envision and relate to and yet still is clearly of another time and another place.

Todd uses the same universe for a second series of mysteries: The Bess Crawford mysteries. The universe is clearly the same because a minor character in the Rutledge books is distantly related to Bess Crawford, although so far Bess Crawford has not met Ian Rutledge. Bess 's stories are set a few years before Rutledge's stories, during the course of World War I where Bess is a nurse in France.

Although there are things I like about the novels, they have too much of a Nancy Drew feel to them for me to take them very seriously. Where Rutledge is a Scotland Yard professional, Bess is an amateur sleuth who is thrown into situations where mysteries need solving. Like Nancy Drew, Bess has a well connected father (in this case a retired army officer who is involved in some way with British intelligence) and there is even a Ned Nickerson-like character - a handsome escort who is always there for her but never gets in the way emotionally or otherwise. If the story were at all realistic he would be her gay best friend. But these aren't particularly realistic stories.

Although Bess is a nurse in France much of the stories take place in England where Bess always seems to end up. Don't get me wrong, they are enjoyable books but seem more like fluff than the Rutledge books.

The Maisie Dobbs books take place in the 20's, after the war. Maisie is still dealing with the after affects of the war in which she was a nurse. Now she has opened her own investigation agency and is trying to move on with her life. Although born to humble parents, Maisie was fortunate to find a sponsor in a wealthy woman who paid for her schooling and helped set her up in life. I didn't really have too much of a problem with this fairy godmother but I do find the storyline where Maisie falls in love with the wealthy heir to be a bit much. Fortunately this isn't a large part of the story, so far.

What is interesting is that I don't find Maisie herself particularly likeable. I constantly think she is too uptight and needs to lighten up. And I regularly think to myself that I wouldn't like her in real life. But I don't find her so annoying that I don't want to read the next book.

The Anne Perry books are different because there are only five of them and they attempt to encompass one long mystery that runs the length of the war itself. The first novel begins with the summer that the war starts and the series runs through the war, taking place partly in France where one character is a military chaplain and partly in London where another character works in military intelligence. I thought Perry did a better job than Todd of depicting the actual war, especially the smells of the trenches. But I found that I had little interest in the over-arching mystery and didn't really care when they finally solved it.   But I did like the characters that she created and I did think that she made the war and the trenches seem very real.

I finished The Return of Captain John Emmett a few days ago.  I don't think this is intended to be a series as the main character isn't a detective.  Perhaps because I have glutted myself on World War I stories, this one didn't hold any surprises for me.  The actual mystery was tied up in a way that seemed a little unbelievable to me, but not so much as to spoil the whole book. The characters were realistic enough.  But at this point I just can't be surprised by stories of the British shooting their own men and strong, healthy men coming home in vegetable states.

Someone recommended to me that I should read Pat Barker's Regeneration, which is a fictionalized account of the time spent by the WWI poet, Siegfried Sassoon, in a mental hospital during the war.  So I've picked it up and we'll see how it goes.