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Monday, October 26th, 2009
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4:57 pm - Two recent reads: adultery and activism
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We Don’t Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus: This book is composed of three novellas that were originally published in different collections, but that concern the same characters and theme. The characters are two young couples—Jack and Terry, and Hank and Edith—and the theme is adultery, or perhaps marriage (can’t have one without the other, after all). The first novella, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” is the longest and by far the best of the three. This novella is told from Jack’s perspective and focuses on his affair with Edith and the problems in his marriage with Terry. It’s a visceral and violent story, full of fighting and sex and people being terrible to each other. Jack is an asshole and doesn’t (won't?) see the way that Terry’s life hurts and degrades her, yet Dubus (writing from Jack’s perspective, no less) makes the trap that Terry is in so absolutely palpable. Really amazing.
The other two novellas are less successful. “Adultery,” set a few years after “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” tells the story of Edith’s affair with a former priest who discovers that he’s dying after he and Edith become involved. There are some very lovely and tender scenes between Edith and her lover, but the story feels like it doesn’t add up to much in the end. The last novella, “Finding a Girl in America,” was flat-out annoying. Perhaps I was sick of reading about these character by the time I got to this one, but I couldn’t muster even a little bit of sympathy for Hank in this novella, and didn’t really care that he had finally found happiness by having a relationship with one of his nineteen-year-old students. Nevertheless, they were interesting to read, if only to see someone other than Updike take on subject matter that seems so quintessentially Updikean.
Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake: I had a couple of opportunities to spend time with Ann Pancake during her recent visit to Penn State, and I took part in some very interesting conversations with her about writing and activism, and the struggle to reconcile artistic goals with activist goals. Her novel, the story of a poor family in southern West Virginia and the impact that Mountaintop Removal Mining has on their lives, has a clear activist stance that doesn’t always jibe perfectly with her literary ambition. Pancake tells her story from several different perspectives, and while she does a good job at establishing distinct voices for all of these characters, only a couple of them really come to life. The use of multiple characters also seemed to make the book a bit repetitive—every time I read a chapter about Dane, for instance, he seemed to be saying pretty much the same things. Pancake’s biggest strength is in her powerful descriptions of the devastation wrought by Mountaintop Removal, and of the fear and anger of the powerless people who live below these mines. Still, I wanted her to go further; it felt like the novel was building up to some really awful event, but Pancake shied away from giving it to us in the end. Even so, I really enjoyed digging in to this story and watching it unfold, despite its imperfections.
I feel compelled to add that Ann Pancake is an awesome person, and I was very happy to get to meet her and spend time with her while she was here. She gave a lot of her time to us MFA students, and was as sincerely interested in hearing about our writing as she was in talking about her own. Reading the second half of this book after hearing her voice really enhanced my appreciation of her prose. If you have an opportunity to hear her read, I highly suggest you take it. And, though Strange as This Weather Has Been may not meet all of Pancake's artistic goals, its activism succeeds: after I finished the book, I called Ms. E just to make sure that we’re buying our power from PECO Wind, because I wanted nothing at all to do with coal.
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| Saturday, September 26th, 2009
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2:06 pm
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I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.
This is Annie Dillard again, from a paragraph early in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, the book that is, it seems, the harvest of which she writes.
I began reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek at the end of July, and I finished it in late September. That’s a long time to spend with one book, but I could not read this book in bits and idle moments; I had to read it in entire chapters and with full concentration. Even so, I feel that I will need to read this book again, that though I have grasped individual chapters, the wholeness of the book still eludes me.
I use words like wholeness and concentration because they seem intrinsic to Dillard’s project in this book. She chronicles a year of living, walking, and observing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but the book is more than just a record of events. It is also an attempt to come to a spiritual understanding of the natural world, and an exploration of the role of humanity in the world. Dillard wrestles with grandeur, intricacy, fecundity, violence, beauty, and what it is to experience the sublime. She is a very sharp observer—her descriptive writing, while sometimes a bit heavy-handed (she admits in an afterword that while writing this book she thought that a sentence “was not quite done until it was overdone.”) is clever, surprising, and very often beautiful—and she sieves her observations through the staggering amount of natural history and theological thought that she has read.
There were a lot of passages in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek that fascinated me and resonated with me. I was intensely envious of Dillard’s deep local knowledge. She knows her valley and her creek in all seasons and all weathers, in its trees and creatures, in the shape of its geography. That is the kind of knowledge of a place that I want to cultivate. Dillard’s writing about seeing, too, seemed to mesh so perfectly with my own experience that it was like she was putting words to thoughts I hadn’t quite had yet: the slow learning that happens when you decide to try to see the natural world, the strangely half-active, half-passive nature of that process… Well, read Dillard; she describes it much better than I do.
But all through the book there was also the matter of my atheism and Dillard’s Christianity. Dillard’s faith is active and seeking, not at all the kind of religious belief that can be so alienating to me, but I still can’t share it. Nevertheless, I don’t feel the kind of unbridgeable gap between myself and Dillard that I sometimes feel with religious people. Perhaps this is the thing that makes me feel like I need to read this book again someday. I get to thinking or writing about the spiritual elements of the book, and I suddenly lose my ability to articulate; maybe if I read it again this won’t happen on my next pass.
I will end with one more quotation, one in which Dillard herself sums up the book far more gracefully than I have done:
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.
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| Monday, September 21st, 2009
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9:08 am - Queen Village in September
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I was at home in Philadelphia this weekend, and on Sunday morning I took a walk around my neighborhood with the camera.
Blue windows on S. Orianna St.
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| Monday, September 14th, 2009
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8:44 am
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I watched at the window; I watched at the creek. A new wind lifted the hair on my arms. The cold light was coming and going between oversized, careening clouds; patches of blue, like a ragged flock of protean birds, shifted and stretched, flapping and racing from one end of the sky of the other. Despite the wind, the air was moist; I smelled the rich vapor of loam around my face and wondered again why all that death--all those rotten leaves that one layer down are black sops roped in white webs of mold, all those millions of dead summer insects--didn't smell worse. When the wind quickened, a stranger, more subtle scent leaked from beyond the mountains, a disquieting fragrance of wet bark, salt marsh, and mud flat.
I lay in bed last night and read Annie Dillard on the coming of fall, and it felt profoundly appropriate. Though we still have temperatures that reach the mid-70s, the season has unmistakably changed. My mother gave me apples at Lake Ontario last weekend, and this weekend I baked an apple crisp with cinnamon and pecans. And then, because I had strawberries that were at the end of their life, I baked strawberry muffins. It was lovely to have the oven on and warm smells filling the apartment. And it was lovely to have tea and a strawberry muffin for breakfast this morning. I will have to begin feeding the birds again soon.
I read "The Dead" last week for the first time in several years. It was more wonderful than I had anticipated to return to this story which is so beautiful and familiar in all of its particulars: Freddy Malins turning up screwed at the party; Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia bustling on the stairs; Gabriel being called a West Briton by Molly Ivors; and then Gretta on the stairs, listening to the faint music that reminds her of Michael Furey... I was overcome with emotion reading the end of the story, much more than I had been the first time I read it, and I wondered if this story might actually be Joyce's greatest work. Could it be better than Ulysses? Is that possible?
This weekend I read Katherine Mansfield's novella, "At the Bay." It was a strange work, made of loosely connected sections that felt quite slight individually, but added up to...something. Not a cohesive narrative exactly, but something that felt like an Impressionist portrait of a community. She seems to look at her subjects only sidelong, yet to come away with penetrating insight. I have never read Mansfield before, so I can't say if this is typical of her work.
My goal for my last year of grad school is not to be frantic. To work steadily, every day, and to have that be enough. The previous two years have been characterized by stress and last minute scrambles to finish work, to grade papers, to throw words onto a page, to do what I needed to do to get through the next day. And I don't want to do that anymore.
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| Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
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11:28 am - Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
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My friend Suzannah, who shares my love of a good WWI novel, loaned me Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, and I read it while I was at Stony Lake. Faulks spends most of the book following the actions of Stephen Wraysford, first when he comes to Amiens, France as a young man working for a British textile factory and has an intense affair with a married woman, and later, once war breaks out, in the trenches as a British officer. Stephen's story is occasionally broken by leaps forward into the 1970s, when Stephen's granddaughter decides to conduct research into his war experience.
Wraysford is an intriguing character--even before serving in the trenches, he is somewhat strange, a person who is slightly distant from those around him--but the book as a whole is somewhat uneven. The first section, concerning Stephen's love affair with a married Frenchwoman, is highly dramatic, almost soap-operatic. Some of this is fun and/or gripping, but once the affair ends, we are thrown forward several years and find ourselves in the midst of the war, where the affair is only a distant memory and doesn't seem to have much bearing on Stephen's emotional state. But that's okay, because the war is what Faulks is good at. He's really good at it. It's hard to know how to praise writing when the subject is so horrific; most of the adjectives seem inappropriate. Faulks is excellent at the grinding daily misery of the trenches, especially in the strange scenes that take place in Stephen's officer's dugout at night between Stephen and his friend Michael Weir. These scenes are haunting, but the most powerful piece in the book is Faulks's depiction of the first day of the Somme. It's an amazing piece of writing, powerful and lingering.
Unfortunately, my interest in the Faulks's narrative decreased every time he left the actual field of battle. I cared very little about Stephen's granddaughter and her attempts to find out about the war. I found her ignorance so complete as to be difficult to believe. How could a woman in her late 30s have so little notion of events that are so significant not just to her country but to her own family? I was unsympathetic to her, and found her story line to be little more than a distraction from the parts of the book I would rather have paid attention to.
I appreciated Faulks's book for the way in which it gave me a very full sense of the war, especially the length and scale of the war, but it is nowhere near to approaching the Regeneration trilogy at the top of my list of WWI literature.
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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10:58 am - Empire Falls
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Empire Falls by Richard Russo: As I said in my last post, this book started out boring and remained boring. I considered putting it down after the first 100 or so pages, and I should have done so, but whatever--I persevered instead. The book is about Miles, a man who manages a diner in a small, rundown town. Not a whole lot happens (until late in the book, when a few dramatic developments appear out of left field); Russo focuses on Miles's relationships with his family members and on the town itself. But the relatively quiet plot is not what makes the book boring. It's boring because Russo's prose is absolutely styleless, and because he insists on explaining every last detail of everyone's thoughts and actions--even the thoughts and actions that he has already explained in detail in previous chapters. There's no room for ambiguity and no need for interpretation, so the reading experience becomes totally passive. And therefore boring.
Russo managed to create an interesting setting for his boring book. His depressed Maine town reminded me of some depressed western NY towns that I know, and I'm interested in the questions posed by places like that: What happened to those towns? Why did people choose those particular places to settle or to build factories? Why, now that the factories are closed, do some people stay? What will it take to make them finally leave? I was in Croghan, NY last week and saw for sale signs in front of five houses on three blocks of the main street. Where are they planning to go? That sort of stuff is worth thinking about and Russo has some insights on these topics, but, like most everything is the book, they are explained nigh unto death.
I was made uneasy by Russo's depictions of women in Empire Falls. The three main female characters are Miles's teenaged daughter, his ex-wife, and the rich widow of an industrialist who essentially controls the whole town. The teenage daughter is so undeveloped that she hardly counts--she functions more as a plot device than as an actual character. The rich widow is such a quintessential witch that it's almost funny: she's manipulative, cold, power-hungry, greedy, and even comes equipped with a vicious cat as her familiar. She's pretty awful, but so ridiculous that I could dismiss her pretty easily. Russo's portrayal of the ex-wife struck me as much more insidious. This woman is vapid, immature, stubborn, vain. She leaves Miles because he's such a sad sack, and Russo implies that her unhappiness and her desire for something better stem from selfishness, and her subplot seems designed to punish her for leaving her marriage. Russo is apparently using this character to demonstrate that mild dissatisfaction within marriage is far better than the awful choices that await women who leave their husbands.
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| Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
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2:36 pm
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I finished Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet on Monday night. Although I remained caught up in the plot, I lost much of my affection for the book as it went on. I read it because I was looking for something that would be fun and not terribly taxing, and it met both of those requirements, but I think it's significantly inferior to both Affinity and Fingersmith.
Tipping the Velvet tells the life story of Nancy Astley, who begins as an oyster girl in Kent but soon ends up in London, where she undergoes several dramatic reversals of fortune and experiences much of the seaminess that London had to offer in the 1890s. In my opinion, the strongest part of the book is the section dealing with Nancy's love affair with Kitty Butler, when the two of them work the music halls as a pair of male impersonators. Waters does a wonderful job of depicting the theatrical lifestyle that Nancy and Kitty lived, and of giving life to the community of actors and theatre people among whom they found themselves. Nancy and Kitty achieve a certain degree of fame, and there's a great moment when Nancy describes their fans: young girls, most of whom simply like the act and are amused by the sight of two women in trousers, but, Nancy observes, "for every ten or twenty of such girls, there would be one or two more desperate and more pushing, or more shy and awkward, than the rest; and in them I recognised a certain--something." There was something quite compelling for me in the idea of the secret communication between these women, happening underneath and around and through the broader discourse. Also compelling for me was the way Waters conveyed the strength of Nancy's unconventional gender expression--so significant to her that she must act on it, despite the fact that she has no vocabulary to define it or to consider why it matters to her.
The biggest problem with the book came from the development of Nancy as a character. Or perhaps I should say the non-development. Nancy seems to lack any sense of perception, and to be unwilling to engage at all critically with any of the situations she finds herself in. She relates to the world quite passively, and doesn't seem bothered by this in the slightest. Perhaps it's just because this is quite different from my own outlook, but I found that her attitude--"Things happen to me! Oh my!"--got old quickly. It seems that each new phase of her life erases the previous ones, and within days or weeks of making any particular change, she is molded into an entirely new form and her previous existence is nothing more to her than a passing pleasant or unpleasant memory. In the first part of the book, I wanted to take Nancy under my wing and tell her that it was okay to fall in love with a woman, and okay to prefer wearing men's clothes; as the book went on, I just wanted to shake her.
There are other little inconsistencies too--why, for instance, is it so easy for Nancy to adapt herself to the social expectations of Diana Lethaby's world, but so difficult for her to do the same thing once she moves in with the Banners?--but I chalk most of the book's problems up to the fact that this was Waters's first novel. They seem quite forgivable in that light. Nevertheless, I would suggest that anyone interested in Waters start with Fingersmith instead.
And now I have started reading The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín. I've read The Master twice, but have read nothing else of Tóibín's at all. It is strange to read something else by him, especially something with a contemporary setting and an entirely fictional cast of characters.
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| Monday, May 18th, 2009
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1:24 pm - Light and dark
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| Thursday, March 12th, 2009
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2:58 pm - House sparrow on a headstone, Old Pine Church, Philadelphia
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| Friday, January 2nd, 2009
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12:17 pm - Year-end reading wrap-up
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I found it a bit more difficult than usual to compile my year-end reading list this year. I'm usually very orderly about my reading--one book at a time, from start to finish--but that reading style isn't really compatible with having lots and lots of required reading for school. There were many books that I just skimmed or read in bits and pieces, and my careful record keeping sort of went out the window. So here, as best as I can reconstruct it, is a list of the books that I read in something close to their entirety in 2008:
( The List )
I'm disappointed in how few books I read "for pleasure" this year (some of the assigned reading was pleasurable, of course, but it's somehow not quite the same.) Only nos. 8-14 were my own choices. But it's always been very hard for me to do outside reading when I'm in school, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I am surprised at how little fiction I read--only about one third of the titles on the list are novels, a shocking development when you consider the fact that my reading lists are usually at least 97% fiction. I did read a lot of short fiction that isn't represented here (mostly in The New Yorker, but from a few other places too), but it's still a much smaller amount of fiction than usual. I know that this is because I took two classes that required a lot of reading about pedagogy and one where the reading list was entirely autobiographies, but I'd really like to make sure I get back to reading more novels in 2009.
The lack of variety in my list makes it difficult to do my usual awards show format, with different categories and all the rest, so instead I'll just name a few of the best books of the year.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: This book is beautiful and quiet, perfectly suited to the dark and the cold. I suppose it's no wonder that I liked it, since it hits on a couple of my big themes: aging and memory and family history.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I had never read a full-length work by Gertrude Stein before this one, and I was intimidated going into it, but I ended up really liking the book. Stein creates a vivid depiction of her and Alice's life in Paris. I was surprised by how funny the book was, and also by the way it forms a sort of slyly moving portrait of their long life together.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy: I loved McCarthy's voice in her autobiography: erudite, clever, curious, matter-of-fact, and thoughtful. This book also served as my inspiration for an essay on family history and place that I've been working on for a while now.
Cruddy by Lynda Barry: It's difficult to hold a book that I only finished two days ago up against books that have had months to settle in my mind, so perhaps I'll change my mind on this at some point, but I was really into this book. It is a glimpse into a dark, violent, sexualized childhood and its aftermath that was totally engrossing. I kept finding myself in bed at night saying "One more chapter. Okay, now just one more chapter..." I haven't written a proper post about this book, but I'm planning to do it very soon.
The two worst books of the year were The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The Perrotta was absolutely flaccid and boring, and The Mistress of Spices was nothing but cheap exoticism and non-credible romance. To be avoided!
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| Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
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8:31 am - Recent reading
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It's been a very long time since I've written about my reading, and the backlog of books is beginning to pile up. These will, of necessity, be very short reviews but there are some books on this list that I really wish I could give more time to. Ah well.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I will confess that I was intimidated by this book, having read only isolated bits of Stein and having heard much about her difficulty. So I was surprised to find this book so readable, and so downright funny in places. It's an odd sort of memoir, skating along across the surface of Stein's and Toklas's life together and almost never delving into any sort of interiority or emotional depth, but it's full of clever lines and sharp little portraits of all the writers and artists that they knew in Paris before and after WWI, and if you read between the lines even a little, there's this great, subtle sense of the long intimacy between Stein and Toklas. What a project, to adopt someone else's voice like that! While reading it, I sometimes got the sense that it was all just a big shared joke between the two of them, and Gertrude and Alice were still off somewhere chuckling over it all.
Developing Ecological Consciousness by Christopher Uhl: This book walks a very fine line between appropriately earnest and being straight-up cheesy. It's a mix of scientific information, personal anecdotes, and "practices" that are meant to instill a sense of wonder and connectedness to the earth. It's a little unclear what audience Uhl intended for this book--teachers who want to help develop their students' ecological consciousnesses? The students themselves? People outside the educational context who are just interested in the subject?--and this issue becomes a weakness. It's an engaging book overall, even if it does inspire occasional eye-rolling.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: This is Hemingway's take on some of the same Parisian expatriate material covered by Gertrude Stein. Even though Hemingway and Stein are unflattering to each other in these books, I ended up enjoying both of them. My favorite part of this memoir was the first half, with its focus on austerity and hard work, the routines of writing that Hemingway established for himself, the cafes and the cheap good meals... Like the Stein, there was a lot more humor here than I expected to find.
The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald: This is a strange book, a posthumously collected group of autobiographical essays, jottings from Fitzgerald's notebooks, and selections of his correspondence. The essays are the most readable part of the book; there are gems among the notebook writings, but you have to go through a lot of not particularly interesting stuff to find them. The essays were notable to me mainly for their long, elaborately lyrical sentences--quite a change from Stein and Hemingway--and their sense of melancholy nostalgia. Essays like "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and "My Lost City" function as memorials to an age that has passed, but the funny thing about them is that the age that Fitzgerald is memorializing has only been over for three or four years at the time the essay was written. My favorite piece in this book was "Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ----", an account of a few years in the lives of the Fitzgerald's told entirely in the form of memories of various hotels in which they stayed.
Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow: Unfortunately, I have almost nothing to say about this book. Coming as it did on the heels of David Orr's Ecological Literacy and Uhl's Developing Ecological Consciousness, this poor book had very little chance of standing out in my mind. All three of these books have started to run together for me. Perhaps I'll come back to the Thomashow at some point when I can read it for its own sake.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: This is Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband and the ways she was made crazy by grief during that year. Parts of the book are harrowing--on the night that I read the first two chapters, I got in bed and just cried--but other parts are quite beautiful. There are certain words and phrases that ripple through the whole book, coming to the surface again and again, and there are lovely memories of Didion's 40-year partnership with her husband. I was amazed by the clarity of Didion's writing and complex way she structured her narrative.
And that is all for now! It's gotten quite chilly here in the past few days, and I'm really enjoying it.
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| Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
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8:13 am - Journal Update
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When I started this journal, I had a rule against making friends-only posts. My thinking was that if there was something I wasn't comfortable with sharing with the entire world, that thing did not belong on the internet in any form in the first place. I still think there may be some merit to that. But the way I use this journal has changed a lot since then, as I've connected with people here and discovered that I like posting the occasional personal update. Recently, I've been friended by a number of people whom I don't know, who don't comment to tell me who they are, and whose journals are not English so I can't get a sense of them or their journal. I don't know where they're coming from, and the journals often end up disappearing again not long after they add me. Very mysterious.
The result of all this is that it has made me think once again about the degree of personal information I reveal here, and who I reveal it to. I'm not interested in going to back to my strict ban on friends-only posts; in fact, I'm going to go the other way. Posts that are strictly about books will still be public, but everything else will be locked. I've been locking more and more posts lately anyway--I just figured that maybe it was time to make it official. I'll also begin gradually combing through old posts and locking the ones that need it. Does anybody know of a way to do this more efficiently than clicking through seven years worth of livejournal history, post by individual post?
This announcement mainly exists for the sake of people who are reading this journal and are not on my friends list. If you'd like to continue reading, please say hello. It's likely that I will be more than happy to add you. I will probably be happy to add you even if your journal is not in English--I don't really care about that and I have several friends whose journal are not in English (or not entirely in English). It's really not a language issue; it's much more a question of whether or not I can interact with you and get to know a little bit about you before we become "friends," even in the sometimes limited and misleading way that livejournal uses that word.
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
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4:23 pm
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I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go recently, but I can't quite figure out my feelings about it. It was a quick read (or would have been, if I hadn't gotten interrupted halfway through by Ms. E's getting burned and my suddenly having to become her nursemaid), but I kept feeling like there was some key element missing from the book yet was never able to put my finger on what. Perhaps it was just because my expectations were very high based on my love of The Remains of the Day, and there are few books indeed that can stand up to that one, but I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed in this book.
It's funny, but many of the characteristics that made The Remains of the Day so brilliant are also present in Never Let Me Go--I can't figure out why the same things that came together so perfectly in one book would fall so flat in another. Both books are told through reminiscence, both feature pinpoint control of tone and voice, both are narrated by characters who are careful observers of other people...the list could probably go on. Perhaps the thing that Remains of the Day has that this book lacks is intensity. That's an odd thing to think because Never Let Me Go has much more drama in its plot than a butler going for a drive, but the drama didn't seem to penetrate--it's like the two books are mirror images of each other: Remains of the Day still and quiet on the surface but smoldering below, and Never Let Me Go full of much more intensity on the surface and empty underneath.
But I shouldn't just compare this book to Remains of the Day; I should think about it as its own thing. My favorite character was Tommy--I liked the teenaged Tommy so much that I was disappointed that the adult version of Tommy wasn't developed more fully. I must confess, though, that it was a little strange to read the book because the character Tommy reminded me so strongly of my cat Tommy. And not just because of their names! Like my cat, the character seems developmentally behind his peers, slow to catch on to things, easy to laugh at... The book opens with a storyline about Tommy being mildly bullied at school, and I found it very hard to read because I kept thinking that those mean children were teasing my poor helpless kitty.
Kathy, the narrator, is a strange character. There's something about her that doesn't click, something artificial about her. Several times I found myself responding to her recollections by thinking that people just don't act like that. It reminded me of a friend I had in high school who, I learned, had a very different perspective from mine. Whenever he and I would talk about something that had occurred among our group of friends, our perceptions were so far removed from each other that I would find myself wondering if we were talking about the same people and the same event. Ishiguro does acknowledge this sort of subjectivity in his narrative--Kathy is forever mentioning that one of her friends had a different interpretation of a particular instance, or that someone else remembered a story in a different way than she did--but this acknowledgment doesn't seem to amount to much.
I think the thing that disappointed me most was the ending of the book. The conclusion is a bit foregone--we know the characters can't get the thing they want--but even so it seems to happen rather abruptly, with a great deal of mystery and suspense all dispelled at a stroke. I guess in the end my problem is that I can't seem to figure out why Ishiguro wrote this particular book. The book has some science fiction-ish elements, and some coming of age elements, and a great deal of interpersonal drama elements, but all of these various elements don't seem to gel with each other, and I'm left wondering what exactly he was trying to accomplish.
Sigh. I feel like I might be being a bit too harsh here. It's an engaging enough book, and there were a few moments of nicely managed tension. I don't know. Has anyone else read this one? I would very much like to hear others' thoughts.
In totally unrelated news, I harvested my first zucchini today! And when I say first, I mean that these are the first zucchini I've grown EVER, as in my whole life. Very exciting! Now I've just got to figure out how I'm going to use them.
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| Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
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4:23 pm - Filaments so fine and strange that science has no name for them...
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I finished Sarah Waters's Affinity last night. I ended up liking it quite a bit, but it wasn't at all the book that I expected. I expected it to be more along the lines of Fingersmith, a "lesbo-Victorian romp" as Waters herself once described her work. While Affinity is certainly both lesbo and Victorian, the romp part of the equation seems to be missing. Fingersmith is all fast-paced complexity, shocking plot twists, and suspense, whereas Affinity develops much more slowly and manifests its complexity not in the plot but in the layers of unreliability that cloud the narrative. There is tension in Affinity, certainly, but it takes much longer to develop than the tension in Fingersmith; I dawdled for two weeks through the first 300 pages of the book, and then read the last 60 in a gulp.
Affinity is a very dark book--Waters is not a writer who is afraid of the Gothic! The story is set mainly inside Millbank, a huge and grim prison on the banks of the Thames, and is woven throughout with themes of class, sex, desire, and betrayal. Spiritualism plays a major role in this book, and we are given glimpses into strange, sexualized séances in which the medium is bound to her chair with velvet restraints and spirits appear for the sole purpose of breathing on the necks of pretty girls. The darkness of the book is not all fun and sexy, however. Suicide, isolation, mental illness, and desperate loneliness all come into play as well.
I was most interested and impressed by the uncertain elements of the narration, and the way Waters allows that uncertainty to build slowly throughout the novel. First we wonder how much to trust Selina Dawes--does she truly believe what she says about spirits? How much of her work as a medium was a hoax? Margaret Prior, on the other hand, seems trustworthy: she seems sad and intelligent, sympathetic, terribly misunderstood by a world that can't comprehend that a woman might rather be a scholar than mistress of a house. And she is sad and intelligent and all the rest of these things, but as the novel goes on and we read more and more of her journal, we begin to wonder whether her perceptions match up with reality, or whether her mind has been so influenced by laudanum and her own desperation that she no longer sees things as they are. This is brought home by a lovely subtle moment when Margaret and Helen both look at the same painting and see very different things...
The biggest flaw of Affinity is the fact that Waters sometimes seems to let her research show a bit too much. She devotes long passages to the workings of the prison, describing in detail everything from the laundry room to the infirmary to the kitchens. This stuff is interesting, but bears no real relation to the story and I couldn't help but think that Waters just included it because she had read all about it herself and didn't want that to go to waste. On the plus side, there is some really beautiful writing in the book. I'm thinking particularly of an evocative passage describing the prison in winter--surprisingly lovely for such a bleak subject.
I don't know quite what to make of the ending of Affinity. I don't mind the fact that it's not a happy ending, but there's something about it that's unsatisfying entirely separate from the question of whether it's happy or not. I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps too much mystery is dispelled by the ending, and things that had seemed powerful and strange are shown to be ordinary. Or perhaps it's that I was able to piece things together just the tiniest bit ahead of reading them--not far enough ahead to call the ending predictable, but enough so that none of it truly shocked me.
So, Affinity was different than the rollicking good time I thought it might be, and the ending was just a little bit off, but it was still a very good book. Atmospheric, sensual, subtle, and then wonderfully tense near the end. I definitely intend to read more Waters. I have Night Watch sitting on the shelf upstairs, but Ms. E read that last summer and said it wasn't very good... Perhaps I will have to seek out Tipping the Velvet instead.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to make a dent in my to-read shelf. I think I'm going to read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go next.
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| Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
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8:05 pm
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I. A picture of flowers
I went out to the deck to water my garden yesterday, and found that the red and white verbena had burst into bloom. I cut a few blossoms for the kitchen, and they were so cute that I had to take a picture. Perhaps tomorrow, once these have faded, I'll cut some of the purplish-white petunias that are also blooming right now.
II. A book about spirits
I'm currently reading Affinity by Sarah Waters. Waters's Fingersmith was one of the most fun books I read last summer, so I thought I would attempt to recapture that with another of her novels. Affinity is less suspenseful (thus far, at least) than Fingersmith but more nuanced--there are fascinating layers of unreliability at work here, and some very lovely writing. It took me 50 pages or so to really get into it, but now that I have I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
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| Monday, May 19th, 2008
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7:42 pm
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It feels like it's been a very long time since I've posted a proper book review. Perhaps that's because it has been a long time. A quick look back at my journal reveals that it's been over two months since I've even posted one of those little improper book reviews that I was writing during the semester!
I had my top two wisdom teeth out on Friday, which meant that I spent a large portion of the weekend lying on the couch, which in turn meant that I had plenty of time to finish reading Moab is my Washpot, the autobiography of Stephen Fry. The same qualities--wit, charm, candor, and a highly engaging voice--that made Moab is my Washpot ideal post-semester reading also made it ideal reading while recovering from oral surgery, and I enjoyed it a lot.
The book tells only the story of Fry's first twenty years, but there is more than enough drama in those years to fill up 350 pages. I found it easy to identify with Fry's portrait of his younger self: a child with high verbal intelligence, but one who is also withdrawn and sometimes painfully ill at ease in the world. Fry is quite open about the unpleasant aspects of his youthful persona, and he freely admits his penchant for stealing and his ugly willingness to manipulate friends for his own ends. Fry seems to have ready access to the emotions of his early life, and he's able to bring to life the strange mixture of pride and shame that his behavior inspired in him, as well as the inexplicable compulsion that drove him to repeat these behaviors again and again. It sounds rather dark, summarized in this way, but Fry tells it with such humor and sparkling language that it doesn't seem heavy. There's some very nice material mixed in as well--for example, an instance when a teacher intervenes at just the right time and in just the right way to save Fry from cruelty and ostracism at the hands of his schoolmates. This event is rendered so lovingly, with such carefully recalled detail and obvious gratitude--it's a glowing moment, and I couldn't help grinning when I read it.
The central event of the book (and of Fry's emotional life, it seems) is his experience of falling in love at the age of fourteen with a boy at his school. This event gets rather a lot of buildup in the book, but then doesn't deliver quite the emotional punch I was expecting. There's emotion there, make no mistake--Fry is lovely when he describes his devotion to and idealization of Matthew--but the whole thing lacks the tension I need to really feel it. This lack of feeling cropped up at a few other points in the book as well. Fry seems very willing to share his emotions with his readers, but less willing to probe or interrogate them. The book favors narration entirely over introspection; Fry covers some unpleasant territory in the book (particularly a self-destructive downward spiral in his late teens) and I can't blame him for not wanting to delve deeply into those parts of his history, but it does leave the reader with odd gaps in understanding...
Stylistically, Fry seems to be trying to keep his prose as close as possible to the tone of his speaking voice, and the result is usually quite readable. There are sentences that seem to get away from him, instances when he injects so many modifiers and qualifiers that the whole thing crashes into the guardrail and becomes a massive adjectival pileup. But those sentences are outnumbered by the ones that are witty or trenchant or self-deprecating or otherwise spot-on. The book is conversational not merely at the sentence level, but also in structure. It's a VERY digressive read. For the most part the digressions were fun, and gave insight into other sides of Fry, but every so often they got in the way of the narrative or interrupted a story that would have been better left uninterrupted.
I feel like I've just pointed out a lot of flaws about the book, but I really did enjoy it. I think a large part of my enjoyment of the book stemmed from my enjoyment of Stephen Fry as the narrator of his own life story. I was absolutely charmed by him. I reacted to this book in a way that was quite common for me when I was younger, but has become quite rare as I've gotten older: I wanted to be friends with him. Seriously, if would be so cool if we could hang out. There would be so much we could talk about! From the frustrations of being a music lover who lacks all musical ability to the experience of searching, as teenaged queers, for the deeply coded hints of homosexuality in Forster and John Knowles... At several points in the book, I found myself thinking that Stephen Fry is exactly who I would be if only I had been born male, British, and 25 years earlier than I was.
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2008
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5:07 pm
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Why on earth would I want to grade my students' papers when there's a book meme that I could be doing instead? You guys have seen this one, I'm sure. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.
Now everyone will see some of the gaping holes in my reading, and you all can tell which of these books I ought to go and read right now, and which ones I can allow to pass me by without a second thought.
Bold the ones you've read,
underline the ones you read for school,
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend.
The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay***
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners* [Okay, it's true that I haven't read the whole thing. But I've read several of the stories, and I certainly plan to read the rest. It deserves the asterisk for "The Dead" alone.]
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things******
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences****
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner [Bah]
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita*********************
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King******
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [On the list for this summer]
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses [How can I call myself a Rushdie fan? I know, I know...]
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury**************
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses******************************
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*********
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights [This one makes me wish there was some way to indicate books you've ready but absolutely despised...]
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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| Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
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4:43 pm
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I. Recent reading
June Jordan's Poetry for the People edited by Laura Muller and the Blueprint Collective: I don't really know what to make of this book, or even how to describe it. The book grew out of the famous poetry class that June Jordan taught at Berkeley for many years, and it's something of a hodge podge. The book is essentially a compilation of materials for and by the class: student writings (both poetry and personal reflections), a sample syllabus, lists of classroom ground rules, tips for staging readings, etc. The book came out in the early nineties, and often feels a bit dated in some of its earnest political correctness and focus on identity politics. But June Jordan was an incredibly impressive poet and activist, and the book is definitely imbued with her sense of poetry as a real tool for change. It's an interesting book, I'm just not sure how useful it is unless you happen to be trying to initiate your own version of the Poetry for the People course.
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta: Oh my god, this book is so bad. Everything about it is bad. Perrotta's prose has no style whatsoever, I didn't care about the characters, there are preposterous holes in the plot...I could go on. Perhaps the worst thing about this book is the fact that every time something is done or said, Perrotta is right there, explaining it to us--there's no room for interpretation, imagination, or even involvement on the part of the reader. The other worst thing about it (too many bad things to pick just one!) is the way it gestures towards big topical issues (the power given to right-wing Christian fundamentalists, abstinence-only education, gay marriage) but refuses to take any kind of stance on those issues. They just sit in the book taking up space while Perrotta tiptoes around them trying not to offend anybody. Bah. My workshop professor perhaps described the book best: "It's like oatmeal. Or milquetoast... Oatmeal with milquetoast on top."
I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope: Every teacher and every writer who's reading this should go out and get this book. It's great. It occasionally veers a little into the sentimental, but it's still great. The book tells the story of how Sam Swope, a children's book author, spent three years teaching fiction and poetry to a class of elementary school kids in Queens. He followed the same class through third, fourth, and fifth grade, so he got to develop relationships with the kids over a long period of time and watch the changes in them as they grew up, worked with different teachers, etc. There is quite a bit of the students' writing reproduced in the book, and I was amazed not only by how good it is but also by how easily these kids are able to access their imaginations. This is also a super-quick read--I got through the whole thing in a day, and I'm no speed reader.
II. Birds!
I love my bird feeder. It's so much fun, and it allows me to indulge my interest in wild birds even when I don't have time to go hiking and look for them. I'm amazed at the variety of birds that I get, too! I regularly see juncos, chickadees, titmice, a mated pair of cardinals, nuthatches, and white-throated sparrows, but I've also seen house finches, blue jays, and today I even thought I saw a fox sparrow! (Fox sparrows are rather uncommon, and I wasn't able to be quite certain of my id before he flew away.)
A few weeks ago Ms. E came to visit and brought her camera, which allowed me to take some bird feeder photos. They're slightly dark because of being taken through the window, but a few of them came out pretty well.
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| Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
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5:24 pm - Recent reading
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I checked, and the last time I posted about my reading was well over a month ago. Sheesh! Last semester I read tons and tons of novels, but this semester my reading has been more diverse: essays, articles, single chapters in larger works... That makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of it all. Nevertheless, I will attempt to catch up.
Writing in the Asylum by Jennifer McCormick: The asylum in the title is not the foreboding madhouse that the word evokes, but is rather McCormick's word for the troubled urban high school where she spent some time tutoring and teaching poetry. The book describes her experiences and advocates for poetry as a means of addressing some of the social issues, psychological challenges, and disempowerment facing the students who are educated in these kinds of schools. It was originally written as McCormick's dissertation, and it's a strange mix of personal stories and highly academic writing. McCormick also makes no attempt to hide the fact that she has an agenda. It's an interesting enough book, but Sapphire's Push deals with the same issues in a much more visceral way.
The Circuit Writer by Margot Fortunato Galt: Another take on teaching poetry in schools, this time in rural Minnesota. This book could not be culturally farther away from Writing in the Asylum, but there's an underlying similarity in their messages. I appreciated the fact that Galt stayed closer to the concrete than McCormick, but I had some disagreements with some of her pedagogy. I have been reading a lot this semester about the teaching of writing outside of academia, and it's very interesting to be able to take these different readings and consider them in light of each other.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: I really liked this novel. This book is a double narrative, concerning events that happened to the narrator, Trond, the summer of 1948 and in the present. I wished that Petterson had spent more time in the present--I liked Trond as an old man, living in an isolated house by a Norwegian lake and trying to decide how to spend the end of his life--but the flashback story had its compelling moments as well. It's very beautifully written (and translated), with a wonderful sense of narrative voice.
On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt: This book made a bit of splash when it came out a few years ago, mostly because a Harvard professor had written a book with a bad word in the title. Having now read it, I can say that the most noteworthy thing about this book is that a Harvard professor wrote a book with a bad word in the title. It's an inoffensive bit of fluff-philosophy that doesn't actually seem to have much to say. Parts of it are mildly amusing, and it only takes about an hour to read, so at least I can't blame it for wasting much of my life.
That's all I have time for right now, but I really do hope to begin posting more regularly again!
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| Friday, January 11th, 2008
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4:29 pm - graphic novels!
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So long ago that I don't even remember when it was, I asked for recommendations of graphic novels to check out. I have now finally followed up on some of those recommendations. In the days between Christmas and my birthday, I read both Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry (I have a vague recollection that these two books were recommended by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) slowlyawake and glazed_glitter, but I could be wrong...) This now brings the total of graphic novels that I've read up to three, and while I'm nowhere near an expert on the form, it's obviously an area where some really cool work is happening. Oddly, all three of the graphic "novels" I've read have actually been graphic memoir--it's sort of funny that there's no distinction in terminology to distinguish between the fictional and non in this form.
Anyhow, the first of the two books that I read was One Hundred Demons. Lynda Barry calls her book "a work of autobifictionalography," thereby perhaps resolving the terminology question mentioned above. The book is a series of short stories, each relating to a demons like "My First Job," "Girlness," and "Dancing," demons that haunted Barry in her childhood and into her adulthood. There's a lot of text to these stories, the art often squeezed into just the bottom third of the panels. But Barry manages to pack a lot into that bottom third--the paintings are colorful and vivid, with an energetic, outsider-ish quality that I find really appealing. Also appealing is Barry's conviction that anyone can make this art. The book has an intro and an outro, both of which encourage readers to pick up a brush and start painting their own demons--I love that.
As much as I enjoyed One Hundred Demons, I think I did the book a disservice by reading it all in one day. The stories are somewhat similar in tone, and reading them all back to back allowed a sameness to creep in. I was also a little disappointed by the way the stories sometimes seemed to wrap up a bit too neatly and easily. I don't think I would have even noticed this as a flaw if it weren't for the fact that at other times Barry digs so fearlessly into the real and painful stuff of her childhood. Next to that, the occasional dollops of wisdom and perspective from Barry's adult self are bound to pale in comparison. Still, there's a lot of really great stuff in this book. My favorite story was dancing, which seems to strike a perfect balance between the personal and the universal, between poignancy and humor--great.
Persepolis could not be more different from One Hundred Demons in terms of art. Where Barry's illustrations nearly pop off the page with energy and life, Satrapi's are restrained, stylized, and black and white. Reading the two books in a row made Persepolis seem very stark at first, but the style grew on me as I read. There are certain images from this book that have lingered with me in the weeks since I read it, like the drawing of the rows of veiled schoolgirls in Tehran forced to line up in their classroom and beat their breasts in mourning for the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war, the girls' round white faces staring out from the black of the background and the black of their veils. Like the art, the story also grew on me as I read. At first I wished for a bit more structure to the narrative, but by the end I was fully immersed in Satrapi's story. And the end of the story is absolutely heartbreaking. I wish that everybody who was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran for a glimpse of life in Iran during the troubled '70s and '80s would read this instead. It's such a compelling portrait of the ways people find to survive their circumstances.
So thank you to Nora and Cynthia, or to whomever else it was that suggested these titles to me--both were excellent and very worth reading.
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