The Obsessive Rereader

The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

2010-03-13T18:58:00.011-05:00

I hadn't heard of this book until I read Maggie Stiefvater's post "Books That Feed Me." You already know how much I admire Maggie's writing, so of course as soon as I read that post I requested from the library both The Giant's House and Bel Canto. I don't think I would've ever picked either of these books on my own, so I'm grateful to Maggie for the recommendation, at least for The Giant's House. (Stay tuned for the verdict on Bel Canto -- that's next on my to-read list.)

The Giant's House is classified as a romance (in fact it says "A Romance" on the cover), which made me a little weary at first, but now that I've read it, I think that little label is misleading. Not that I can really tell you what makes a romance a romance, but this book was not it. Yes, Peggy Cort (the narrator) is in love with a boy 14 years her junior -- James, the giant of the novel's title -- and yes, Peggy's entire account is colored by that love. But I would not call it a love story.

In fact I'm not sure what to call it or how to talk about it. The narrative is linear enough (which is to say it moves more or less chronologically); there is definite escalation, climax, and resolution; the characters are well developed, and so are the relationships between them. But this isn't a book I can describe with the usual "who did what" or "what happened to whom" kind of formula, because the plot development seems secondary, more of a background for the relationship than a driving force for it. And in fact I would argue that even though James is the main character, the story isn't so much about him as it is about Peggy.

In my mind, the average love story has a more clearly defined direction, it moves towards a specific point -- usually upward all the time, towards the moment when the couple begins its "happily ever after." But in The Giant's House, the movement is more like the expansion of concentric circles. It's like when you throw a stone in a lake -- the circles start small, then they swell and expand, and at last they fade and disappear quietly. I guess that in my very clumsy metaphor Peggy's life would be the surface of that lake, and James would be the stone, irreversibly fracturing the stillness of her waters without even realizing it. Does this make any sense at all? Probably not.

One thing I should warn you about is that there is only the barest hint of scandal in the story -- although I suppose that's debatable, so let me amend and say that for me the scandalous aspects of the story were very marginal. All of which is to say, if you're looking for a shocking tale about a love that breaks taboos, this is not it.

I've noticed by now that I seem to talk about this book more in terms of what it isn't rather than what it is. I also realize that I haven't told you anything about what actually happens in the story, and I'm not going to. The power of this book isn't in the events and outcomes. In fact, the plot could have gone in an entirely different direction, and I don't think that would have changed the overall impact of the novel in any way. It's a beautiful, beautiful book, and you should read it not because but regardless of what happens. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, but in a fragile and subtle way, and for me that's what makes it all the more powerful. Maggie quoted two passages in her post, and I'm going to give you four other short ones that I thought were particularly striking. Hopefully they will be enough to redeem what is undoubtedly the world's lest helpful review.

"Before I met James Carlson Sweatt, the library was my best comfort and company. I was a fool for that library. We are fools for who will have us."

"You could believe in God, looking at James. He looked at himself, and decided not to."

"Altogether, [Dr. Calloway's] head looked like [a] miraculous precarious rock formation -- you couldn't imagine how such a thing kept balanced on its spindly neck. You expected one of his cheekbones to break loose and avalanche down to his collar, followed by his nose, then the other cheekbone, and finally by the total dusty collapse of his entire head."

"For years I'd waited for someone to love me: that was the permission I needed to fall in love myself, as though I were a pin sunk deep in a purse, waiting for a magnet to prove me metal."

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

2010-03-05T19:18:00.007-05:00

If you don't have at least a marginal interest in poetry, you probably won't enjoy this book as much as I did. Which is a shame, because it's such a charming little book! It's sweet and touching and educational and amusing and a really fun quick read. You don't need to know much about poetry in order to like it, but you have to at least want to read about poetry. Because, even though it speaks to some fundamental truths about the human predicament, it's ultimately a book about poetry.

Paul Chowder -- the narrator -- is a middle-aged poet whose career has been only marginally successful. He's now past his prime. By his own account, he's written a few decent poems, but not a single great one. He's in the middle of compiling a poetry anthology, but he's having a hard time deciding which poems to include. He is also supposed to write an introduction to the anthology, and that's an even bigger problem. He's been procrastinating for months, and he still has no idea what to say in that introduction. His financial situation is shaky, because he is a full-time poet who isn't producing any new work. His girlfriend, Roz, has finally lost patience with Paul's lack of progress and moved out.

As you can see, Paul doesn't have much going for him. With Roz gone, he spends his days sitting on a plastic chair in the driveway, pretending to clean the barn (which is his office of sorts), reading other poetry anthologies, moving boxes of books around the house, helping his neighbor install new hardwood floors, dragging a presentation easel and some sharpies around the lawn, so he can illustrate the meter of a line. At night he sleeps with piles of poetry books on the bed. He's doing everything but working on the anthology introduction. Roz's disappointment wounds him deeply, but it's not enough for him to get his act together. Neither are the stern impatient emails Paul gets from his editor reminding him of his deadline.

But the book isn't just about Paul's failure to write the introduction. It's about his relationship with Roz, about poetry in general -- its evolution and its meaning, about the legacy of different poets, and about some really wonderfully mundane things like hanging a tablecloth on a clothes line and watching the wind blow it around. I think that's Paul's (by which I suppose I mean Baker's) greatest strength -- the way he talks about the seemingly small choices and events in our lives that add up to, well, life. The narrative is easy and sincere, and jumps around the way our own thoughts do. In one sentence Paul tells you "you have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering." And the next sentences is "I have a mouse in the kitchen."

I don't think I'm doing Paul justice. He's really wonderful! I want him to be my friend on Facebook. He's witty and shy and smart and funny and adorably quirky. I would stalk him and check his page obsessively to see if he has updated his status. He will have some mind-blowing status updates, I just know it. Oh, Paul, why aren't you real?

I won't tell you about Paul's theories on meter in the English language or his expose on the iambic pentameter (spoiler alert: Paul and the iambic pentameter are not best friends), but please don't be discouraged by what sounds like a boring academic subject. It's not. On the contrary, it's very interesting. Paul has a great way of explaining things. He teaches you, for example, that the way to pronounce the old-fashioned "o'er" is to "graze your teeth with your lower lip while thinking V. It's like waving the vermouth bottle over the glass of gin." Another time, while he's walking to the rhythm of a verse to illustrate that the iambic pentameter really has three major beats, he exclaims "I feel like I'm making an exercise video."

And even though I hadn't heard of maybe a third of the poets Paul talks about (and I know very little besides the names of the other two-thirds), I didn't feel excluded. It just made me want to find out more about them and go read their work.

I will definitely read this book again. Hell, I might even buy it! I feel I could read it over and over and get something new out of it every time. It makes some truly insightful observations about poetry and about life. Like this one: "Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing." What better way to say this?

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

2010-02-27T19:37:00.006-05:00

I couldn't bring myself to throw Dan Brown in the same post as Toni Morrison, so Dan gets his own post.

I was actually looking forward to reading The Lost Symbol. I'll readily admit that I've read The Da Vinci Code three or four times and I've read Angels and Demons once or twice (I've told you already that I'm forgetful). I know Dan Brown's books are far from being literary masterpieces, but they are reasonably entertaining, there is good suspense (for the most part), and, perhaps most importantly, I'm a sucker for stories about dark religious secrets, conspiracy theories that center on a biblical prophecy, or some such thing. Umberto Eco, anyone? Or The Last Temptation of Christ? Apologies to both Eco and Kazantzakis for comparing them to Dan Brown, but you get the idea. And, while Eco and Kazantzakis are light years ahead of Dan Brown in terms of literary value and storytelling talent, Dan still has his good moments.

Or, HAD, I should say. The Lost Symbol was bo-o-oring. And about 200 pages longer than it should have been. And predictable. Everybody is conveniently naive and everybody falls in each other's traps. Everything has a hidden layer. Every solution is discovered only in the 59th second of the last possible minute. Robert Langdon is forgetful about certain things (until push comes to shove, in which case, voila, he suddenly remembers!), but otherwise has photographic memory. Also, despite all the legends that he himself has witnessed become reality in the past, somehow for 10-20 chapters he is oh so skeptical about only this one particular legend. Screw the legend, THAT is what's not believable. And the big crisis that he's supposed to be averting, the National Security Nightmare that is about to destroy the nation -- well, prepare to be underwhelmed. Compared to Jesus having a great-great-granddaughter, it's pretty laughable and anticlimactic.

Also, do we really need to hear over and over how fit and attractive Langdon is? For Christ's sake, he's not Indiana Jones, so don't waste our time with the early morning laps in the Harvard pool.

It's not like I had high expectations for this book. Really, I just wanted a little entertainment, but what I got was mostly frustration. I just wanted it to be over -- not because I was dying to find out what happens at the end, but because I was impatient to start reading something better. The intrigue just wasn't very good, and the antagonist wasn't nearly as terrifying as the albino monk from The Da Vinci Code.

I think one of the reasons Dan Brown took so long to write this book is because he was overwriting it. Is he not aware that his readers are not after masterfully crafted prose (mind you, not that that's what he's delivering, but it sure seems like he tried to) but only after a good mystery? And apparently he took to heart the criticism about the too-short chapters of his previous books, because in this one the chapters are longer (although there were still 132 of them). I guess his editor didn't have the heart to tell him that sometimes less is more.

Dan, I know I'm being hard on you, but you can take comfort in the fact that I'll probably reread The Da Vinci Code again at some point.

Zombies and Others

2010-02-27T17:41:00.004-05:00

I can't really make up for two months of silence, so I won't be doing a separate post for each of the books I've read since my review of Shiver. But I also don't want to leave you wondering about my verdict on those books, so I thought I'd lump them all into one post, just a few words about each.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison -- I enjoyed this book very much, though not nearly as much as Beloved. The writing was still incredibly gorgeous, but the story didn't move me as much. Though let me tell you, Morrison has a tremendous gift for writing about people's darkest, strangest tendencies and desires in a way that makes them sound so natural, even beautiful. I have great admiration for any writer who has such great understanding not just of the good in us, but the vile and the repulsive as well.

Next came Louisa May Alcott's Little Men. Sadly, this one had nothing on Little Women and Good Wives. The plights of ten-year-old boys just didn't do it for me, but I can recognize the fact that I'm not really in the intended audience for that book. I don't think it was as much a question of reading about boys as it was reading about kids that age in general. Still, the book had its good moments.

After that I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It was fun, but frankly I didn't find that the zombies improved the book in any way. I had fun reading it, but only because it had been 6-7 years since the last time I'd read the original, which was enough time for me to forget some of the details. And while I did enjoy the racy innuendos about Mr. Darcy's balls, I also felt that some lovely nuances of the relationships had been lost with the zombie intrusion. Not to mention some zombie scenes that were unnecessarily disgusting and really difficult to get over. In short: don't mess with a good thing. Leave it to Jane.

Next I read Toni Morrison's Sula. This one I liked even less than Song of Solomon, but I'm still glad I read it. Again, excellent writing about the fundamental loneliness of the human condition, and here, too, Morrison raises some big questions: what is right, what is wrong, what is justifiable, what is forgivable. The way she does it, however, is what sets her apart from other writers. She doesn't beat you over the head with moral dilemmas. Instead she lets those questions play in the background. She doesn't address them directly, but she allows you to think about them on your own.

One thing I found curious is that I liked the parts of the book that were about other characters more than the parts about Sula. I'm not sure why this strikes me as unusual -- perhaps I have an inherent expectation to be able to identify and/or sympathize with the main character more than with any of the other characters? Do you have that expectation as well?

And I'll leave you with one of my favorite moments in Sula, which happens very early on, when Shadrack wakes up in the hospital and is confused about why people are calling him "Private":

"'Private' he thought was something secret, and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret."

Ahem, Happy New Year?

2010-02-26T16:40:00.003-05:00

OK, obviously my new year's resolution to blog more often isn't going very well. It's been two months since my last post, which makes me wonder, if I hadn't made this one of my goals for 2010, would I have actually posted more? But Murphy's Law is a poor excuse for my procrastination and lack of time management. It's me, it's not the resolution.

In my defense, I have made some small progresses on some of my other resolutions! Do you want to hear about them? It doesn't matter, I'll tell you anyway.

I am currently enrolled in a computer course. It's a very basic course that explains what's inside a computer, how it works, how the internet works, etc. I'm not taking it for credit, so I have no incentive to do all the homework assignments, but I have already learned a lot! Like, I can now write "bow" in binary code! It's supercool (even if practically useless).

I did some research and chose a few literary journals to submit poems to. So far I've actually submitted poems to only one journal, but I have decided on a few more places that I'll try. Soon, soon!

Also, I'm just finishing the last chapter of Harry Potter et La Coupe de Feu -- I've been listening to the French audiobook on my iPod, so that counts towards my French goal, no? And in the baking category, while I'm not baking nearly as often as I want to, a few weeks ago I made this amazing pear coffee cake, and it was so amazingly delicious (yes, Justin's accompaniment of pears poached in wine spiced with cinnamon and sweetened with fig jam helped a lot) that I am going to go ahead and give myself double credit for it. There. Positive reinforcement.

There is one other goal that I forgot to put on my list in December -- having my cosigner released from my student loan. This one is clearly not entirely under my control, but I mailed my release application yesterday. Keep your fingers crossed! When my dear darling cosigner is finally released of his obligations, it will be a glorious relief for both of us!

And what have you done with your first two months of 2010? Come now, come tell me all your little and big successes! Allow me to be proud of you!

New Year's Resolutions (2010)

2009-12-27T18:32:00.006-05:00

For the first time in my life, I've decided to make some New Year's Resolutions. And since sharing them with the world (read: the six people who might read this post) will make me feel more accountable, here we go.

I read Maggie Stiefvater's post on how to make resolutions (http://maggiestiefvater.blogspot.com/2009/12/i-intend-to-smack-2010-around.html), so I've done my best to keep my goals realistic, but let's face it, I've always been overly ambitious and overly optimistic in my planning. I'd rather aim high and fall short. So, in no particular order:

1. Take a computer course. The publishing industry is turning digital at the speed of light, and I feel that my computer skills are not up to par. I need to learn about XML and HTML and RSS feeds and how to create web sites and about many other things that I don't even know the names of yet!

2. Learn how to drive. Or at least do some serious research on driving school. Yes, I am 28 and I've never been behind the wheel. Don't you dare judge me!

3. Nurture the poet in me more and do the "30 Days 30 Poems" challenge in April. This past April I did a "light" version of that challenge, a poem every other day, but in 2010 I'm gonna up the ante. Join me if you dare!

4. The most cliche one -- lose x pounds to reach my target weight of x pounds. By May. Or by June. Part of this goal is to go to the gym at least twice a week every week.

5. Submit some poems for publication. Perhaps one-two journals per month?

6. Read more. Create a real "TO READ" list and set a tangible goal for how much I want to read every month or every week.

7. Blog more, on this blog here, but also work on my other two as-yet-secret blog ideas.

8. Save money to visit Meaghan in Chicago. Meaghan, I miss you!

9. Play the piano more. I want to learn at least three pieces well enough to play in front of other people.

10. Bake more. Maybe try a new recipe every other week?

11. Work on my French more. Ideally, I want to learn how to waste less time at work so that every day I can take the one-hour lunch break that I'm supposed to take, and maybe use it do French grammar exercises or read a French book.

Ok, I think I'm going to stop here for now. Eleven goals as of December 27. I'm sure I'll revisit these later and change some and/or add some more.

What about you guys? What are your resolutions for 2010? Come on, I need a support group!

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

2009-12-27T14:04:00.009-05:00

I read this book twice in the span of four months, and that alone should tell you how much I loved it. I first heard about it in March, from a friend of mine who worked at Scholastic at the time. The author's name wasn't familiar to me, and despite recent evidence to the contrary, YA lit with hints of fantasy is really not my favorite genre, so it's safe to say that without my friend's recommendation I would've never picked up Shiver on my own. So here goes -- thank you, Sylvia!

There are so many things I liked about this book that I don't even know where to begin. I'm also afraid that I can't quite explain why exactly this book moves me so much. There's something about it that I can't put my finger on. But I'll give it a try anyway.

Shiver is the story of seventeen-year-old Grace who was attacked by wolves as a child, and since then she's felt powerfully connected to them. She is obsessed with one wolf in particular -- the one to whom she owes her life, because he was the one who stopped the rest of the pack from tearing her to pieces. He watches her from the edge of the woods, she misses him when he is gone, she calls him "my wolf." A strange fascination, but so far not that far out of the ordinary. However, when a boy from Grace's school, Jack, is attacked by wolves, things start to get complicated. Everyone in town believes that Jack was killed by the animals, but Grace sees a wolf whose eyes look exactly like Jack's eyes, and she becomes convinced that somehow Jack has turned into a wolf. Her suspicions are confirmed when she finds a naked boy on her porch bleeding from a gun shot wound, and she knows immediately that this boy is her wolf. She learns that his name is Sam, and that he's been obsessed with her as much as she's been obsessed with him. She hides him in her bedroom. He picks her up from school. He writes songs for her. They're so head over heels in love with each other that it's unbearably cute. The bad news is that it's the end of autumn, and the cold is what makes Sam turn into a wolf. Sam cannot stay human for much longer, and Grace, even though she was bitten by wolves, has never changed into one, so their happiness is clouded by the knowledge that their time together is limited. And so they search for a cure.

I am oversimplifying it of course, but that's the gist. The story is told from both Sam's and Grace's points of view, and the temperature is given at the start of each chapter, so we know at any given time how close Sam is to changing. And the end... oh, the end. The first time I read it, I bawled my eyes out. I think I've said before that this is one of the criteria for truly great books -- if they can make me cry or laugh out loud. Well, Maggie Stiefvater definitely nailed the crying part. (Which is not to say that she lacks a sense of humor, because she doesn't.) The second time I was ready for it, so I didn't cry at all, but the first time... I can't explain why it was so heart-breaking, but it was. I don't want to spoil the book for you, so I can't tell you what happens, but I'll tell you that Maggie has a way of conveying powerful emotions without being overly sentimental, and that's a very hard thing to do, especially when the story is told in first person. Instead of naming the emotion, which would've been the easy thing to do, she lets you see it for yourself by showing you how it colors every thought and every action and every single moment of every day, and that makes it all the more real and believable.

Another thing I admire is how she wrote the romance. It's cute, but not overly cute, and it's passionate and sexy without being X-rated. It's hard to write a good sex scene when teenagers are your primary audience, but Maggie's done a fantastic job. It's pretty hot!

Since I read Shiver, I've been following Maggie on Twitter (@mstiefvater) and reading her blog (http://maggiestiefvater.blogspot.com). I've learned that she's an artist and a musician, which frankly does not surprise me. There is a certain vulnerability and an artist's understanding of beauty that makes her writing so damn good. It really speaks to the poet in me. I was looking for some examples to give you, but it's hard to pick a scene or a passage, because it's mostly very small things, just a word or two here and there, a fitting metaphor, a touch of abstraction in the right place. I'm not sure if they'd be as powerful when taken out of context, but let's try. This is Sam, describing what it feels like to kiss Grace:

"I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once."

Maggie's other books are definitely going on my to-read list. She's a writer I'll keep an eye on, because I'm eager to see how she evolves. I highly recommend checking out her blog. I especially loved her "How to Write" post. Very good advice, complete with visuals!

And did I mention that Shiver is printed in pretty dark blue ink? I think I hardly need to tell you that I'll read this book again. I hope you'll check it out too.

Writing as Rewriting

2009-12-05T13:59:00.007-05:00

I've been thinking lately about the process of writing. And rewriting. I was a journalism major as an undergrad, and I realized very early on that I am not the kind of writer who can fare well in that profession. I am an incredibly slow writer. You have no idea. Not only that, but I edit as I write. If I'm not happy with my first sentence, I cannot start writing the second sentence. I've always envied people who can write a complete draft of their article/story/report/whatever without being troubled by the fact that it's not perfect, because they know that they'll come back and edit it later. I don't know how to write down something that I know is not good enough. It would bother me too much. I wish I could learn to do that, because it'll make it easier to have a basis, a frame, however imperfect, on which to build on.

I don't do drafts, not really. One time I spent an entire night writing the opening paragraph of a feature article. It was a "place story," about a local restaurant/jazz club, and I had all the facts and I'd done all the interviews and had my good quotes and everything, but I just could not figure out how to begin. I must have written dozens of first sentences until I finally got one that I liked, which allowed me to write the next one, and so on.

You're not likely to ever see "a draft" of something I've written. If I'm ready to show you something I've written, chances are that I consider it the best I can do, and it is very improbable that I'll go back and revise it later. I'm not a big fan of the perpetual work-in-progress.

And herewith my current problem. For the poetry class I'm taking, we're supposed to be turning in revisions of our poems, and I'm having trouble doing that. I don't mean to say that my poems in their original versions were perfect and cannot be improved, but for me they are what they are. They're finished. I tried to capture whatever moment or emotion it was that inspired the poem in the first place, and if I didn't do a great job, too bad. If I start rewriting the poem now, it'll be almost like I'm trying to alter memory. It won't be a poem about the original experience anymore. It'll be something else entirely, and I don't know that the new poem will necessarily be better than the old one...

You writers out there, how do you write? And how do you feel about drafts and revisions?

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

2009-11-29T20:00:00.007-05:00

The best thing I can say about this book is that it was a quick read. It's only about 120 pages, in a small trim, so I don't feel that resentful for wasting two hours on it. I had high expectations -- a French classic (according to the cover copy) with such a great title, it sounded promising. But no. I did not like it one bit. I finished it only because I would've been ashamed to give up on a book that short.

The story is told by seventeen-year-old Cécile -- a spoiled rich girl whose father, Raymond, changes mistresses every three months and is not concerned about his daughter's education because he knows that she will "always have a man to take care of her." His main priority is his own pleasure, and he makes up for his inadequate parenting by allowing his daughter to follow his example and grow up vain and frivolous and without a single serious thought in her head.

And so we find them at the beginning of the story, daughter, father, and the father's mistress du jour -- the pretty redhead Elsa, who is, of course, much too young and gullible and shallow -- about to enjoy a carefree summer on the French riviera. Cécile has flunked her exams but is unconcerned and spends her days lying on the beach or sailing with Cyril, a law student with whom she would soon have her first sexual experience. The sunny idyll is disturbed early in the summer by the arrival of Anne, an old friend of Cécile's deceased mother. Anne is forty, beautiful, smart, sophisticated, and reserved -- in other words, the opposite of Raymond and Cécile and Elsa. Cécile is conflicted, because she greatly admires Anne, but at the same time she resents her because deep down she knows that Anne's disapproval of her superficiality and thoughtlessness is justified. Things get more complicated when Raymond and Anne announce their love and their intention to get married, and Elsa leaves. Cécile oscillates between daughterly love and respect for Anne and anxiety for how boring her life will become when Anne takes control of the household and Cécile's future. And so Cécile comes up with a plan to get rid of Anne, which would allow her and Raymond to continue in their irresponsible ways.

I have no problem with the basic plot line as such. Truth is, I rarely judge a story just by its plot, because for me the writing is what draws me in and keeps me interested. If you're a good writer, I don't care what your story is about. Well, Françoise Sagan is not a good writer. The writing is boring, she overexplains everything, and the story reads like a summary of itself. Which is to say, it reads like a police report or a diary entry -- not very structured, not a lot of dialogue, not a lot of reflection, just the most bare of descriptions. I admit I don't know enough about European literature from that period (the book came out in 1954), so this may well have been the popular style then, but it doesn't work for me. You could say that the style fits the narrator, more or less -- a scatterbrained selfish teenager who doesn't understand her own feelings very well, let alone the feelings of others -- but it's not enough of an excuse. Reading this, all I really wanted to do is grab this girl by the hair and give her a few good slaps. What a brat!

Another thing that annoyed me -- and it's my own fault, because after I finished the book I decided to read the introduction (something I usually don't do, but this time I was curious to see what all the fuss was about) -- was the cliched interpretation of the story. This critic, Diane Johnson, claimed that it was "clear to the reader" that this was the "classic" story of "a young girl, jealous of her father's relationships with older, sexually experienced women, [who] seeks to destroy them at the same time she herself becomes sexually active." Um, no, I don't think so. I do not agree that Cécile was trying to make her father jealous of his own daughter as she enters womanhood. After all, she had no problem with his numerous mistresses before Anne, because she knew that none of them would last very long and none of them would ever have a say in her own future. But she is threatened by Anne, because Anne is so different from her father and the silly girls he usually spends his time with, and because Anne is, in many ways, a much better person -- more self-possessed, smarter, and morally superior. Anne's presence in Cécile's life in a position of authority would mean an end to the superficial hedonism that has been Cécile's life so far. And this she cannot accept.

The relationship between Cécile and Cyril is another problem altogether, but I don't even want to talk about it. I've said enough bad things, so I'll leave you with the one almost passable sentence in the entire book. Cécile and Cyril are making love in Cyril's boat, and she says this: "The sun exploded and fell on me."

NaNoWriMo FAIL, but not completely

2009-11-27T20:55:00.004-05:00

If you thought that I haven't written any new posts because I was busy writing my novel for NaNoWriMo, well, you were wrong. My total word count today is exactly the same as it was on Nov. 3 -- 4,108. That's two and a half scenes, not more, not less.

The bad news: I quit very early, and a small part of me does feel like a failure. I was in way over my head this time, and the miracle I had hoped for did not materialize. Namely, I accepted this challenge without any direction and without having any idea what I'm doing, and it became clear very quickly that I can't get very far that way. So I gave up completely.

The good news? Why, there's lot's of good news!

First of all, I am more certain than ever that I do want to write a book one day. A novel, to be precise. Second, I do think I can do it. But I know now that I need to do some serious planning and come up with a real plot outline before I give it another try. Third, I still think my idea has potential. It just needs a lot of work. And fourth, in the past month, because of NaNoWriMo, I have thought a lot about the process of writing and I've heard/read several published authors describe their writing strategies and experiences, and that's been wonderful and very educational. It will pay off one day.

The bottom line is, NaNoWriMo 2009 may go down in history as a failure, but there's always 2010, or 2011... I gave up on it this year, but I'll come back to it when I'm ready.

Whew. Now that I've gotten this confession off my chest, I can start getting over my shame and moving on. Stay tuned, one of these days I'll tell you about the books I've been reading while I was supposed to be writing!

Countdown to NaNoWriMo: 1 hour 21 minutes

2009-10-31T21:55:00.004-04:00

So I signed up. This morning. The Obsessive Rereader is now an official participant of NaNoWriMo 2009. [Insert applause/derisive laughter here]

Until late in the afternoon I hadn't decided yet if I'd try to follow the official rules and actually attempt to write a novel, or if I'd come up with my own writing challenge that involved poetry and non-fiction. I really wanted to do my own thing, for several reasons. First, it would be much much easier, given my nonexistent fiction-writing experience. Second, right now I really do want to be writing more poetry, so it would've been great if I'd challenged myself to write a poem a day or something like that. Third, if I'd made up my own rules, I wouldn't have had to worry about the terrifying, seemingly unattainable 50,000 words.

But no. I finally decided that if I'm doing this, I wanna be doing it right. If I was writing a poem a day (which, let there be no doubt about this, is not one bit less challenging than writing 1,667 words of fiction a day!), at the end of the month I'd have 10,000 words tops, which means that I still would have lost the NaNoWriMo challenge. And I'm competitive enough that it would bother the hell out of me. So follow the rules I will -- fiction, 50,000 words. And I will save my "A Poem A Day" challenge for April.

NaNoWriMo advises me to tell everyone I know that I'm writing a novel, since apparently in Week Two the only thing keeping me from quitting will be the fear of looking pathetic in front everyone who's had to hear about my novel. "The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse," they tell me :) So there, I've told you. (All five of you who'll read this post!)

For us here in Boston, NaNoWriMo begins in about an hour and a half. I still haven't even chosen names for my main characters. (By the way, any ideas for a good Bulgarian male name that would be hard for an American to butcher? I really like Radoul, Kaloyan, Chavdar, and Momchil, but those are all hard to pronounce... Oh well. It'll come to me.) And no, I don't really know what I'll be writing about, beyond the most vague idea that it'd take me no more than three sentences to summarize. I just have to hope that I'll figure it out as I go along.

I don't know how much time I'll have for blogging after tomorrow, but I'll do my best to drop in occasioinally and let you know how I'm doing. Please wish me luck and send some inspiration my way! And Happy Samhain and Halloween!

To NaNoWriMo or Not to NaNoWriMo

2009-10-25T21:37:00.003-04:00

(Wow, this was one fun post title to type!)

Right now I'm supposed to be writing my poem for next week's class. So naturally I'm NOT doing that. The thing is, I don't have any poetic ideas right now, so I'm hoping that if I distract myself by doing something else, all of a sudden the Muse will walk in... Which kind of sounds like that Douglas Adams episode from I forget which novel, where he's explaining that the only way to learn how to fly is to be so distracted by something else that you'd jump and miss the ground. Doug, man, sorry if I'm misquoting you, you know I mean no disrespect!

But to come back to the subject. Two friends of mine have just signed up for NaNoWriMo and they're trying to rope me into it too. And trust me, I want to! I'm a sucker for challenges/contests/dares/etc. I like assignments and deadlines and support groups, because I am too undisciplined and would never get any writing done otherwise. I know how great it would feel to have that sense of belonging to a community of writers (or writers and their unsuspecting family members and friends who've been threatened and/or guilt-tripped into joining). And if by some miracle I do actually manage to pull 50,000 words out of thin air, imagine the pride, the joy, the amounts of wine that will be needed to celebrate that momentous event! Ah, I almost wish it were November 30th already!

There are many other PROs. Like, teaching myself discipline. Learning to write faster, even if most of it ends up being crap. The minute minuscule microscopic possibility that I'll actually end up with something potentially usable (and by that I mean -- dare I say it? -- publishable, after years of rethinking and rewriting, of course), even if it's just an idea or a plot line or a character or a single breathtaking scene.

But the thing is, I don't do fiction. I've never even written a short story in my life. Poetry and memoir is all I've ever done, and if I were to write 50,000 words of poetry, many Novembers would come and go before that happened. I don't have any novelistic ideas, and even if I come up with something, I have no clue how to do things like character sketches or plot outlines or any of that stuff. I can just picture myself spending hours and hours staring into a blank Word document... And I've already done enough of that, I don't really need a whole month of it to reinforce the sensations :)

Not to mention things like personal life... which I guess I'd have to put on hold for 30 days, if I'm to have any hope of completing this challenge. I feel like I should ask my husband to sign a permission slip for me to do this :)

And there you have it. The dilemma. I think I'd be disappointed if I don't try to do it, and I'll be jealous of my friends who're doing it, but what if I sign up and can't finish it and just end up wasting my time? What if the only thing I accomplish is proving to myself how out of my league this whole thing is? I'm not even sure why I'm obsessing about this so much, it's not like my life depends on it one way or the other... It really shouldn't be THAT hard to make up my mind, yet somehow it is.

But don't worry, I'll keep you posted.

Revolutionary Road

2009-10-25T12:12:00.006-04:00

I am considering renaming this blog "The Obsessive Procrastinator." It will be more truthful, don't you think? Anyway, I won't bore you with my flimsy excuses about why I was MIA for two months. I'm just going to tell you about what I'm reading right now, and this is my new strategy -- I'm not going to wait until I finish the book, because who knows what's going to happen then.

I am reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I bought the book at Heathrow International Airport in London, after I found out my plane was delayed for four hours (that on top of the two-and-a-half hours scheduled layover). The reading material I had simply wasn't going to cut it, so I spent one of my 6.5 hours trying to decide what book to buy. It was a hard decision, since I so rarely buy books that I haven't read. It was between Revolutionary Road and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and The Notebook and a couple of other things that I don't remember now. I decided on Revolutionary Road partly because Michael Chabon had blurbed it, and if you don't know that about me already, let me tell you, I worship the man.

Michael Chabon had called it a "devastating novel." I am about three-quarters into it and can tell you he's right. I don't know how it's going to end, but I know it won't be good. It will be sobering and depressing and heart-wrenching. But I will forgive him, because the entire book has been like that.

One thing that I can't quite explain to myself is how can I like the book so much when its two main characters are neither of them very likable. Usually as a reader I can identify with at least one character, at least on some level, and that makes me feel more invested in the story itself. Frank and April Wheeler are both kind of hateful, and I can't honestly root for either of them, and yet I do feel very invested in their story. It must be because the story itself is so banal and human, and thus very sincere and believable. It's about dreaming big dreams and seeing them crushed by the realities and responsibilities of adult life, and that anyone can relate to.

And it's also because the writing itself is just incredibly gorgeous. Un-believable.

I am taking a poetry workshop this semester and our last assignment was to bring in "found poetry" -- basically, take some chunk of text from a newspaper, letter, catalog, etc., re-lineate it, and call it poetry. I brought in a passage from Revolutionary Road. I took out a couple of words here and there, but for the most part it's straight out of the book. Now you tell me that's not poetry!

To Be There with April Wheeler

He could feel
the wide-awake tension of her
lying there beside him;
he could hear the light rasp of her breathing,
with its little telltale quiver
near the crest of each inhalation.

And he knew
that if he so much as touched her,
if he so much as turned to her
and let her know he was awake,
she would be in his arms and sobbing,
getting the whole thing
out of her system, into his neck,
while he stroked her back and whispered,
“What’s the matter, baby? Huh?
What’s the matter? Tell Daddy.”

And he couldn’t.
He didn’t want her tears
soaking his pajama top;
he didn’t want her warm, shuddering spine
in the palm of his hand.

Paris! The very sound of it
had gone straight to the tender root of everything,
had taken him back to a time
when the weight of the world
rode as light and clean
as the proud invisible bird
whose talons seemed always to grip the place
where the lieutenant’s bar lay pinned
on the shoulder of his uniform.

Oh, he remembered the avenues of Paris,
and the trees, and the miraculous
ease of conquest in the evenings.

And the mornings,
the lost blue-and-yellow mornings
with their hot little cups of coffee,
their fresh rolls, their promise
of everlasting life.

But oh God, to be there with April Wheeler.
To have the light husky ripple of her laugh
and her voice up there;
to have the lemon-skin smell of her
and the long, clean feel of her
when he --
when she --
oh Jesus.

Oh Jesus God,
to be there with April Wheeler.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

2009-08-29T18:57:00.005-04:00

Тhe first Ray Bradbury book I read was Death Is a Lonely Business, exactly ten years ago. It was a very old and very dirty paperback I'd borrowed from the public library -- miserable-looking and heavy with that moldy smell old library books always seem to have. Oh how I loved that book! Well, no, love isn't even the right word -- it left me in a state of speechless awe. It was almost a religious experience. The things Bradbury does with words... I have yet to find another writer who can use abstract language to create such sharp and palpable imagery. He strings words and metaphors together that you'd never say belong in the same sentence, and yet you read it and realize it all fits perfectly, beautifully. I wish I could do that too...

After Death Is a Lonely Business (which to this day is one of my favorite favorite books), I read Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, I Sing the Body Electric, The Illustrated Man... Everything I could get my hands on. He is unbelievable, I tell you. And I have no idea how come I hadn't read Something Wicked until now.

But I wish I had read it differently. I read the first half of the book 5-10 pages at a time, on the bus to work, and that just doesn't do it for Bradbury. The prose is pretty involved, and oftentimes you don't quite know where he's taking you, so you just have to be patient and take it in one word at a time. And that's just the thing, if you get distracted, you're missing out, because with him it's often about the journey, not so much about the destination, and every word is important. If you're going to read it (and you should!), I recommend you never open it unless you have at least an hour to devote to it.

And the story? The story is simple and could've been told in 10 pages, but who wants that! Two fourteen-year-old boys sneak out of their homes one night to welcome a carnival into town. Only this carnival is evil incarnate and caters to everyone's darkest dreams and desires. It's the "careful what you wish for, because we'll make it come true" kind of carnival.

It's primarily a story about self-knowledge and friendship, but a lot more than that too. It's about fear and what we allow it to do to us, about death and what we allow it to mean, about age and identity and the things we see when we look in the mirror.

There were two sentences in it that really capture its essence: "Idiot thing to want: everything." And "Evil has only the power that we give it."

Got that? Don't wish for everything, and don't give Evil nothing!

And, in what seems to have become my habit lately, I'll also share one of the many sentences that I thought were just too beautiful to be forgotten. This one (or at least the idea of it) I'm actually trying to work into a poem:

"He stood in the music as one stands in the rain."

Beloved by Toni Morrison

2009-08-22T23:55:00.006-04:00

I finished Beloved a week ago. What a book! Part of the reason I didn't write about it sooner is because nothing I say can really do it justice. But I can't NOT write about it, because I just HAVE to tell you how much it moved me.

It is a hard book to read. But so worth it.

First of all, it's hard because the story is hard. It's the story of a black woman named Sethe who escapes from slavery with her four children and settles down with her mother-in-law in Cincinnati. The "now" of the story is shortly after the end of the civil war, and Sethe and her youngest daughter, Denver, live by themselves in the house haunted by the ghost of a baby girl -- Sethe's older daughter, whose name we never learn. Her two sons have run away, the grandmother is dead, and there has been no news of her husband. It is a story of the unspeakable horrors of slavery and of a mother being driven to a point where choosing death for her own children means choosing the lesser of two evils. And having to live for the rest of her life with the consequences of that choice. It's the kind of thing that makes your hair stand on end.

It's also hard because there is a lot to keep up with. The story goes back and forth in time, retelling the tales of the past from different points of view, reliving, remembering, tying all the different story lines together. It's not a book you want to read on the bus with your mind on your dinner (trust me, I tried). It demands that you pay attention.

And you will want to pay attention, because you won't want to miss a single word. This book contains some of the best language I've ever read. I read it slowly, savoring every word and every image. And I will read it again. It's the kind of thing that makes you go "wow!" There are writers who can do such magical things with language that I would read them no matter what their stories are about, and Toni Morrison is now one of them. It's such a rare treat to find somebody who can do both -- not only tell a great story, but tell it beautifully, in a way that shakes you.

Here are some of my favorite passages. I know it's hard to read them and relate to them out of context, but still. They are images that I will definitely carry in me outside of the story and will revisit for inspiration. This is more poetry than some poetry.

"She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable, and cold."

"This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began."

"Song murder and the aspen. He stayed alive to sing songs that murdered life, and watched an aspen that confirmed it."

"On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it."

"She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."

This last one just undoes me. So simple, so sharp and to the point. She really has this gift of getting to the very heart of things and driving a nail right into it. I've been told that Beloved is her best work, but I can't wait to read more of her stuff. I'm just very sorry that I didn't discover her earlier.

More slam poetry

2009-08-22T23:35:00.003-04:00

This is my friend Chase at the semifinals of Brave New Voices 2009 in Chicago. I am absolutely in love with this poem. I love the structure of it, the language, the idea of the poet as a dream catcher, everything. Love it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fjyXmYosCU

Open Mic / Slam Poetry

2009-08-20T20:10:00.006-04:00

I promise you that very soon I will write a post on Beloved, which I finished a couple of days ago (and LOVED!). But in the meantime, let's talk about poetry.

I went to the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge last night, for their poetry night. They start off with open mic, then they have a feature poet who reads for 20 minutes or so, and then they have a poetry slam. I went there last week for the first time and only stayed for the open mic, but last night I stayed for the whole thing.

The open mic was OK. I get the impression that there's a crowd of regulars who read every Wednesday, and some are pretty amazing, but some are really not that great at all. I was a bit disappointed, because I don't care to listen to somebody's too corny confessions, but I was also secretly encouraged. A number of times I thought to myself, "Hell, I'm a better poet than this person!" :) Not that I see myself having the guts to read in public any time soon, but still, it's good to know that I can write better than some of those people who constitute "the poetry scene" in Cambridge :)

The Cantab crowd seems to like humor, and that bothers me. Not that I have anything against humor, but if I wanted to be falling off my chair laughing, I'd go see a stand-up comedian or an improv show. When I go to listen to poetry, I want to hear something strong and beautiful and more lasting than a chuckle.

Which is why I was not happy with the poet who won the slam competition. She was on stage four times, and three of her four poems were too loud and exaggeratedly humorous. Sure, being funny is not easy by any count, and it takes talent to write something funny AND to be able to deliver it in a funny way, and in another setting I would've given her two thumbs up. But, again, it's just not what I'm looking for in poetry. The other finalist was so much better! It was frustrating to watch the judges giving him such low scores!

But the featured poet -- JeFF Stumpo -- was amazing! Not only was his writing really really good, but he also had a great presence on the stage -- including sound effects and sign language! One of the poems he read was called "Love after Marriage," and there was a part in it that talked about how you don't marry someone for their poetry, you marry them for the white spaces around it and so that you can learn together that it's OK not to fill them up... Damn, I so wish I wrote it down, it was truly beautiful. (And I hope JeFF doesn't ever read this, because I'm not doing it justice with my amnesiac paraphrasing :))

That's all I've got. I'll probably be back there next Wednesday. If you know me at all, you know how unlikely it is that I'll ever go on the stage myself... but stranger things have been known to happen, right? :) Like, I just signed up for a poetry workshop today. Expect the sky to fall any moment now.

Did you miss me?

2009-08-01T20:48:00.004-04:00

I am back, she said.

This feels like a good time to share one of my favorite quotes. It was part of a poem I read once on Writing.com, where I used to have an account for a while. I wish I could give proper credit to the author, but I don't remember her name, nor anything from the rest of the poem, but this is what stuck with me:

"we all have those days, weeks, months, years,
when life gets in the way of living."

And that's precisely what's happened to me lately. Freelance projects, looking for a new apartment, worrying sick about losing my job, packing, cleaning, moving, French conversation class, softball season -- you get the picture. But I'd like to hope that things are slowing down now, and that I'll get to post more regularly in the weeks to come. Amen.

My little sidebar says that I'm currently reading The Collected Works of T. S. Spivet, but that's a dirty lie. I started that book two months ago, but haven't gotten past page 50. Too much of a drag. It's written from the point of view of a 12-year-old boy who draws "maps" of everything -- the river, his dad drinking whiskey, shucking corn, Moby Dick -- and the "maps" appear as illustrations in the margins. They're interesting enough to look at, but I found them very distracting, because most of them come with commentary, so you have to stop reading the main story and read a two-three-paragraph tangential story, and by the time you're done, you've forgotten where you were in the first place. Not to mention that neither the place you started from nor the place the side note took you were all that interesting.

Another thing that bothered me -- and I do realize that this is just professional deformation and incredibly minor, but I can't help it -- were the double spaces after periods. It's a pet peeve of mine. Seriously, people -- it's 2009. Use a single space.

The Collected Works is a thick book and for all I know it gets better later on, but where I left off, not much had happened, and the uber-sophisticated thoughts of this particular nerdy kid were really not all that engrossing, I'm sorry to say.

I did acquire a few Toni Morrison books from my mother-in-law's bookstore friends, so I think that's what I'll try next. Let's hope Beloved has nothing to do with maps.

The Book Thief

2009-05-31T12:01:00.006-04:00

In the past couple of years, The Book Thief had made it onto several of my TO READ lists, but what finally sealed the deal was a conversation with a friend of mine about authors whose language we simply love. I was telling her about Michael Chabon, whom I adore. His prose is graceful and colorful and witty and surprising and tender and sharp all at the same time. I said that I love reading Chabon no matter what he writes about, that's how good I think he is with words, and my friend said something like "I think you'll love The Book Thief then." She told me her copy of the book was heavily decorated with post-its and she remembered flagging one particularly grand metaphor or description or some such thing. I still don't know which passage she was referring to, but here's my personal favorite:

"He was the crazy one who painted himself black and defeated the world. She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain."

Liesel is our heroine -- at the start of the story she's nine, dirty, and illiterate, but tough and proud as only a child can be. She steals her first book (The Grave Digger's Handbook) the day her brother dies, when she's on her way to start a new life with her mismatched foster parents -- a soft-eyed accordionist-cum-painter and a foul-mouthed, "wardrobe-shaped" laundress. "He" is Ruddy, the boy next door who, before he becomes Liesel's partner in crime, is already famous for one memorable incident which involved a lot of coal dust, a race track, and Jesse Owens. Throw into the mix a Jew hiding in the basement, a few stolen books, some stolen apples, a few nightmares (of both the real and the dream variety), a lot German cursing, and Death as our omniscient and compassionate narrator, and you have The Book Thief.

For me, it all took a little getting used to. First of all, there is the style. The line between "clever and original" and "trying too hard" is thin and slippery, and every now and then Zusak landed on the wrong side. There are a lot of sentence fragments, bizarre metaphors, and abstractions -- all things that I heartily endorse in theory, but if you're going to go down that road, you'd better know what you're doing, or else you come off sounding stilted, fake, or just plain silly. Luckily most of Zusak's verbal plays were successful, and after the first few chapters I grew accustomed to "Death's voice."

There are also the side comments that come every few pages, and those bothered me a lot more. Not only were they a jarring interruption visually -- centered on the page and in bold -- but they were unnecessarily prefaced by labels like "a small but noteworthy note," "some facts about Stalingrad," or "the contents of Mama's voice." Pure overkill. Those annoyed me till the very end.

But, for all its flaws, I still loved the book. There's a little bit of everything in it: war, death, family, friendship, books, childhood, first love. And the bottom line is, Zusak IS a great writer, no two ways about it. There were so many terrific images and so many sentences that I wish I had written... I think I'll go back through the book and pick some of my favorite ones to post here (or is that infringement of copyright?). And I definitely plan on checking out some of his other books. I hope they are worth it.

The Twilight Saga

2009-05-24T18:43:00.003-04:00

Some of you are already rolling your eyes. Believe me, I understand. I won't be offended if you decide you can't bear to read another word about Twilight. I won't try to convert you. I won't tell you that these books are masterpieces of fiction and that you'll love them, because they aren't, and you probably won't. I just want to try to explain (to you but also to myself) how is it that a reasonably mature 28-year-old woman who's normally very picky about the books she reads came to be so obsessed with a 17-year-old fictional vampire named Edward Cullen.

My plan is to write a separate post for each of the four books, and they'll probably end up being a mix between book reviews and more personal ramblings. Make of them what you will. In the meantime, here's how the story goes.

I don't remember when I first heard about the Twilight Saga. I'm sure it must have been in my peripheral vision for months, popping up in publishing news and on various bestseller lists, but, as I'm generally not interested in Young Adult fiction, I'd been ignoring it. It wasn't until the end of last summer that I became curious enough to want to read it myself, and so a friend of mine lent me the first book.

I started reading it on the bus on my way home from work. By page 60 I was already mentally swooning over Edward. I think my husband may have tried to have a conversation with me that evening, but I couldn't divert my attention from the book for anything more than monosyllabic responses. By 11 o'clock that night I'd already changed my Facebook status to "Adriana is 352 pages in love with Edward Cullen." I finished the first book the next day, and could barely wait to get my hands on books 2 and 3. I think less than ten days later I'd finished all four.

Now, about nine months later, here's where I stand. I've read Twilight about ten times, including once in French. I've read New Moon about four times. I've read Eclipse five or six times. I've read Breaking Dawn about five times. I've read the Midnight Sun partial draft (Twilight, but from Edward's point of view) four or five times. I've seen the movie six times so far, once with the director's commentary on. I have a giant poster of Edward (Robert Pattinson) in my office. And I can't even begin to tell you the number of Edward-related dreams I've had.

What is it about these books that I can't let go of? Let's face it, Stephenie Meyer is a bad writer, no way around it. There isn't one sentence in her four hefty tomes that I wish I had written. The woman is no J. K. Rowling. So much so that while I will never be embarrassed to say that I'm a Harry Potter fan and that I've read each Harry Potter book about eight times, some of them in three languages, the same is not true for Twilight. While I did read the books in public, I was self-conscious all the time and imagined that people are throwing disparaging glances in my direction. And when I'd stumble upon any discussion of Twilight, I'd try to avoid giving an opinion and I'd only reluctantly admit to having read and reread the books. I always feel that I have to defend myself for doing so.

I can't honestly say that I love the Twilight Saga. It would be inaccurate. I don't love the books, but I'm obsessed with them. And not so much with the books per se, but with Edward Cullen. Because for me, Twilight is all about Edward. He's the alpha and the omega and everything in between. It's as if he's the genie that Stephenie Meyer inadvertently let out of the bottle, and he became a world of his own, outside of her and the books. As a friend of mine put it, "Edward seems to exist on his own, no repetitive adjectives could diminish him."

And that's just it -- Meyer's created this perfect character for every girl to fall in love with, even though her limited skill with words could never do him justice. No worries, Steph -- we get it. You're just as dazzled and swept off your feet as the rest of us. So who can blame you if all you can babble about is Edward's "crooked smile" and his "glorious eyes"? Not me. I'm too busy hyperventilating and imagining myself as Bella.

Time to reread Jane Eyre

2009-05-24T15:36:00.003-04:00

This is very embarrassing, but I'm going to admit it anyway. I just realized the other day that the "novel" I was remembering -- heroine + minister brother/prospective husband + minister's two sisters -- is not quite a novel after all. It's really a part of another novel, and a very famous one at that: Jane Eyre. It's the part after Jane leaves Mr. Rochester and lives for a while with the Riverses. St. John Rivers is the one who makes the marriage proposal, even though he's in love with another woman. Jane says yes, but then she hears Mr. Rochester calling for her, she returns to him, and they live happily ever after.

In my defense, it's been more than ten years since I last read the book. And I've only read it two-three times total, so, given my poor memory, it's no surprise that I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. At least I was right about one thing -- it IS by one of the Bronte sisters!

When you don't know what you're looking for

2009-05-20T13:40:00.008-04:00

One of my favorite quotes about books comes from a charming little novel I read four and a half years ago while I was working at the Paper-Source in D.C. I haven't reread the book since then (but I will, oh I will!), so I can't recall the exact wording, but the gist of it is "I don't buy books I haven't read." Well, I don't do that either, which is perhaps why this statement stayed with me long after I forgot the title of the book and the name of the author.

A few weeks ago, I finally decided it was time to try to find this book and add it to my TO READ (or REREAD) list. Here's what I knew for sure: it was a book about a bookstore; it was written as a series of letters; the title was an address (a number and a street name); it had been made into a movie at some point.

I started by checking the Paper-Source Web site, because it was a book that they used to sell in the store. No luck. Then I did a Google search for "epistolary novels." That landed me a few short lists of titles, of which I recognized only two: Daddy Long Legs and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society -- both wonderful, wonderful books, but not what I was looking for. Next I searched the catalog of the Boston Public Library for any title that contains the word "Street." Too many to display. Same with IMDB. Next I tried to sort alphabetically, so that titles that begin with a number would come first. Again, way too many. I went back to Google and searched for variations on "letter format" + "novel" + "bookstore" + "street" + "epistolary." Two hours later, I finally stumbled upon another list of epistolary novels, and this time -- Bingo!

84, Charring Cross Road by Helene Hanff

You should read it.

Charring Cross Road has been on my mind because on Monday I found myself in a similar situation. I was once again trying to find a book whose title and author I couldn't remember. This was a book that I had read for a graduate class on the literary essay a few years ago. What I knew this time: it was a collection of personal essays; the author was a Canadian woman; one of the essays was about the famous pilgrimage to Compostella in Spain. After many futile searches on "pilgrimage," "famous Canadian authors," "Compostella," "Canadian essays," and so on, I had to give up. I was very disappointed that my quest had failed, but later that night I dug out the reading list for that class. It felt a little like cheating, like I was taking the easy way out, but I was still glad to know the name of the book:

Plainwater by Anne Carson

I remember it as being very quiet, very contemplative. It was sad and beautiful and soothing all at the same time. Perhaps I'll have to reread that one too.

Next on my list of unknowns: a novel I read more than ten years ago about a poor girl who ends up on the doorstep of these three siblings -- two sisters and a brother -- who take her in and sort of adopt her. The two sisters teach her German, and the brother, who's a minister, eventually asks her to marry him and go do missionary work with him. He doesn't love her, but he thinks she'll be a convenient partner. I think she says yes initially, against her better judgment, but in the end she leaves him for her true love. I thought it was a novel by one of the Bronte sisters, but Wikipedia did not confirm that. I checked the plot of every Bronte novel, and none of them seemed to resemble my muddled memory. But if it's not by a Bronte, at least I'm pretty sure it's from the same period. Ring any bells, anyone?

A room of free fiction

2009-05-19T09:08:00.003-04:00

My mother-in-law, Amy, called me this weekend to tell me that her local bookstore is closing. She’s friends with the owners, and they told her she can pick whatever she wants from the stacks of ARCs (that’s advance reading copies for the uninitiated) that they’ve accumulated over the past few years. She wanted to ask me if there were any particular books or authors Justin and I want her to search for.

Naturally, when she put me on the spot like that, I couldn’t come up with anything other than Michael Chabon. (Though if they have anything of his, it’ll probably be The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I already own.) So yesterday I spent my lunch break reading over random “Best Books of the Year” lists, from NYT to PW to Amazon to NPR. So far this is what I’ve come up with:

-- Philip Roth
-- Toni Morrison
-- Annie Dillard
-- Jim Shepard
-- Dave Eggers

Except for a couple of short stories by Shepard, I haven’t read anything by any of these guys, and I feel that I should have. Roth especially -- I keep hearing how he’s the best contemporary American novelist. I have my doubts, but I still want to check him out.

Any suggestions for what else I should ask for? Amy said it’s all fiction, and probably from the past five years. Holler if you think of someone amazing I shouldn’t miss!

I so wish I could just go there any look through the shelves myself! Imagine -- an entire room of free fiction -- that’s pretty close to my personal heaven! Though in my “real” heaven (oxymoron, anyone?) I’d probably want the actual published books, not the uncorrected gallies :)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2009-05-17T18:15:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I first heard about this book about two months ago from my friend Sylvia. She was telling me how it had been on the bestsellers lists in Europe and now it was becoming big in the U.S. as well. I wasn't particularly interested, but then the book group at work (which I'm only nominally a member of -- I've graced them with my presence only once!) chose to read it, so I thought why not! And since it's a paperback, I decided to actually buy the book instead of taking it from the library. That's very atypical behavior for me -- normally I only buy books that I've already read and I know I'm going to want to reread at some point. Otherwise the risk of disappointment is too great, and I can't afford to waste money on disappointment. But in this particular case, I was lucky! The book turned out to be reasonably good.

The premise is this: we have a 50-something-year-old concierge, Renee, who is very intelligent, extremely well read, and has sophisticated tastes, but she's pretending to be dumb and trying to look and act like the most unflattering stereotype of a concierge. She plays her role well, and the very rich and snobish inhabitants of her building don't notice her unless they need something from her, and of course even then they're condescending and disrespectful. There is also Paloma, a super-smart 12-year-old who's so dusgusted with the rich class in general and her rich family in particular that she's decided to commit suicide and burn down the house before she turns 13. The book alternates between Paloma's and Renee's diaries. The story becomes more complicated (and more interesting) when a Japanese gentleman moves into the building, befriends Paloma, and quickly discovers that the concierge is someone very different from the person she pretends to be.

I enjoyed how the two stories complemented each other. Renee's anecdotes were amusing for the most part, but I didn't like her philosophizing. Yes, we get it, she's read every philosophy book ever published and has a perfect grasp on all of them, but personally I could've done with less "what is the purpose of art" and "how is this table different from the idea of a table." Paloma's "Profound Thoughs," on the other hand (she is determined to have as many profound thought as possible before she dies), were much more interesting to me. And I loved how bitter she was -- OK, maybe not entirely believable for a 12-year-old, but still delicious.

The more I read, the more invested I became, and toward the end I could hardly wait to see what happens. But the ending itself was a big letdown. It's not that I always need a happy ending, but Barbery's solution felt a little bit like the easy way out. She didn't know how to resolve the story without being cheesy, so she decided to kill one of the main characters. I hated it. Especially because it all happens so fast and out of the blue -- it was as if she reached this point in the story where she hit a wall, and so she just wrapped things up in four pages and was done with it. However, Paloma's last Profound Thought was excellent and almost made up for the lack of closure.

Despite the disappointing ending, the book still left me with a very good feeling. There were some really beautiful moments in it (very tender and sweet), some clever imagery, and plenty of witty remarks, so overall it scored pretty high. I'd probably give it a 4.0-4.5. There's this fascinating rant by Paloma on the importance of grammar ("grammar is a way to attain beauty"), which, for a grammar fanatic like me, really hit the right spot. There is also the recurring image of camelias and their symbolic significance ("because a camelia can change fate"), which I really enjoyed, because it fits nicely in my "it's the small things in life" philosophy. Come to think of it, a big part of this book is about learning how to find beauty in the small things. That sounds a bit corny when I say it like this, but it really isn't.

And a few other pluses for this book: it features a big fat cat named Leo (for Leo Tolstoy); there is lots of talk of truly mouthwatering pastries and similarly mouthwatering sushi; and it made me want to reread Anna Karenina again. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

According to the back flap, Barbery's new book will be coming out this September. I do plan to read it.

It all started with banana-oatmeal-pecan cookies

2009-05-17T17:29:00.005-04:00

One of my unofficial New Year's resolutions (I say unofficial because the list is in my head only) was to start a blog about books. I'm a very undisciplined writer and I've been looking for ways to make myself write more, plus I've always been interested in the book review (and its many incarnations) as a sub-genre of nonfiction, so a book blog seemed like the perfect solution. I thought that if there were at least a couple of people out there reading my blog, this would be enough of an incentive for me to write regularly.

Well, it's the middle of May now (clearly I excel at procrastination), but better late than never, right? It's Sunday, it's cloudy outside and I'm too lazy to go for a run, my husband is at work, and I have no homework to do because Summer School hasn't started yet, so today is the day!

I don't want to limit myself by saying that I will write "book reviews" only. Rather, I will write about books. And probably many other things (I thought about naming the blog "On books and other miracles"). Honestly, I have no idea where this is going to go, but I've never been overly concerned with labeling and categorizing things. I like letting this happen as they will.

As for the banana-oatmeal-pecan cookies -- I had some over-ripe bananas that I wanted to get rid of, and rather than making banana bread, I decided to try a banana cookie recipe. Frankly, I wasn't impressed.