Yesterday I focused on the dictionary as the best desert island book part of W.H. Auden’s quote. Today, let’s consider the first part of the quote:

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously ‘truer’ than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

I am fairly confident that we can all agree about a book having a finite number of readings–interpretations, ways of understanding it, arguments. But how in agreement is the book blogosphere on there being a hierarchical order of readings from truer to doubtful to false and absurd? In past meanderings I have come across posts that argue all readings are equally valid. I have also been to book discussions with the same prevailing belief. But such a belief makes it difficult to talk about books, to disagree with a reading, and darn near impossible to learn how to be a better reader.

I do believe that there is a hierarchy, or maybe continuum is a better word, of readings. There is no one right reading of a book, but there are many truer readings to use Auden’s word. A good reading has to be supported by the book itself, one must be able to point to parts of the text as evidence to support one’s opinion. Also, there needs to be an accumulation of evidence. It is not enough to say a book is bad because I didn’t like the protagonist. I must delve into the book and show the protagonist is nothing but a two-dimensional stock character operating on cliches. Likewise, it is not good enough to call a book a masterpiece just because I enjoyed it.

Here is a question, is it the responsibility of readers, especially book bloggers, to help each other become better readers? And if so, how do we go about doing that? If we have not read the book being discussed it is hard to say more than, “wow, this sounds good!” But it is possible to do more than that by asking a question about the book or an observation made by the blogger. I am guilty of taking the lazy way out a lot of the time, but now and then I will ask a question about the book and I must say, even for having not read the book under discussion, I suddenly feel more engaged, more interested, more connected.

Then of course, there are books I have read. Again, I am guilty of being lazy and saying things like, “I loved this book too!” But sometimes I might comment on how I read the book differently and suddenly there is a conversation. I must say I like it when people make respectful comments questioning my reading. My first feeling when I see comments like that is to feel bad or indignant. It is not a comfortable feeling to be questioned. But then I tell myself to not be stupid and I take time to consider the comment and make a response and in the process I find I learn something new about the book. And if the conversation continues for a bit I might even change my opinion because the evidence given in response turns out to point in a different direction than I thought. These are always learning moments and I value them because they help me become a better reader.

Tom at Wuthering Expectations and Teresa at Shelf Love have inspired great conversation about comments and disagreement. And in a way I suppose I am talking about the same thing. But I don’t want to focus on the comments, rather our responsibility as readers to one another.

I don’t think I have ever come across anyone who doesn’t want to be a better reader but it seems the onus is always on the individual to do something about it. And one should. But how? Sure there are books and while they can and do offer good advice it is kind of all in a vacuum. There is also reading professional critics. And while this is really useful it can sometimes feel like an expert telling me what to think. The best way to become a better reader is by talking to other readers and when one is no longer in college this can be tricky. If you are lucky enough to belong to a book group that is more than a social club then you have a great opportunity to learn. Bloggers have a good opportunity too but it relies on the willingness of others to say more than “great post!”

This post has gone where I did not see it going, but I have come to a point where I feel like I need to make a pledge. Not a promise, but a pledge. I can’t promise I won’t ever be lazy in my comments. I can, however, pledge to do my best to reply to comments here and on other blogs in a thoughtful and engaged way. I owe it to myself and to other bloggers/readers to help create the kind of engaged book community that we all long for.

Filed under: Blogging, Books, Musings, Reading

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We’ve all played the intellectual game of what (ever changing finite number) books would you have if you were castaway on a desert island. At least I hope it has remained an intellectual game for everyone and any playing at Robinson Crusoe has only ever been voluntary. We readers thrill to this game don’t we? Our hearts start to beat faster and we feel a little panicked. I can only ever have five books to read for the next twenty years at which point I will surely be rescued by a floating library and then, like a starving person, I will overindulge and that will surely make me ill but I wouldn’t care, it would be totally worth it. And then once recovered I will, to the delight of the crew, entertain them nightly by reciting from memory such gems as the complete works of Jane Austen. And I will perform all the characters too, each one a different voice honed to perfection during my lonely years on the island.

Once returned to civilization I will never leave the ground again. I will become a media sensation to rival Kim Kardashian. An oddity who only ever travels by train. A celebrity who impresses one and all with my prowess at reciting the complete works of William Shakespeare.

That finite number of books haunts us and we try to get around it with huge single volume collected works. So we manage to cheat a little and really have twenty books instead of five, but even twenty books is not enough. The thought makes us just a little bit crazy.

So imagine the gasp I let out over this bit from W.H. Auden:

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously ‘truer’ than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

Forget for today the start of that about good readings and bad readings, we’ll get to that tomorrow. Today, let’s focus on the dictionary. Auden’s desert island book is a dictionary. At first I thought, no way man. But it has possibility. You could read the dictionary every week for twenty years and never read the same book twice. Oh yes, all the words in it are the same, but how you read it keeps things fresh. And theoretically, reading a book of words in random order could one day get you the complete works of William Shakespeare or Jane Austen just like a monkey at a typewriter. Except you’d need more than twenty years on the island but at least you would be prepared if that library ship didn’t show up to rescue you.

It’s tempting, taking a dictionary. I don’t think I’d want it to be my only book, but perhaps I might jettison one book for a really good dictionary. And think what an excellent vocabulary I would have when rescued! Yes, that would be something. I could probably get a job heading up the national spelling bee or hire myself out to students or Fortune 500 executives. Yes, I think I will add a dictionary to my desert island book bag.

Filed under: Books, Musings

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Just as I am over my no good horrible very bad cold, Bookman has decided it looked like such fun he’d give it a try. Only he has discovered it is no fun at all. Whereas it took me a week to progress from feeling mildly under the weather to feeling bad and two days after that to make it to horrible, he is wasting no time. He began at bad for one day and then moved right to horrible the next. While I am sorry he is ill and has a dreadfully sore throat and no voice, I must admit it is refreshing to be able to babble on and not be interrupted. It’s marvelous to be able to babble at all. Bookman is quite the yakker and it is often difficult for me to get a word in. But now, now he can do nothing but listen. Granted, he is zonked out on cold medicine so I might as well be talking to a wall, but since the wall looks remarkably like Bookman, I can delight in being The Voice in the House.

It is also a good thing Bookman hasn’t been very hungry. While this girl can make a production in the kitchen for Solstice, when it comes to every day cooking, she is a fish out of water. Canned soup is a blessing. So is cereal. In two moments of lucidity Bookman did manage to make waffles for breakfast today and pizza for lunch, but I think it was because he was desperate for something besides cereal and soup.

Between his naps this weekend he managed to read Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel. Through gesturing, he assures me it is funny and he laughed a lot even if it wasn’t out loud because his throat hurt too much. He decided to read the book because he needed something light and because he found out it is coming out as movie in November of this year. He has now passed the book over to me and indicated I had to read it as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, I am in the middle of too many other books to start that one at the moment. One of the downsides of having as many books on the go at once as I do is sometimes I find myself in the middle of all of them and nowhere near the end of any of them. While I don’t read in order to check books off a list or tot up the numbers, there is a certain satisfaction in finishing a book. When I find myself stuck in the middle of everything I am reading I get a bit of the doldrums. There is no excitement of starting something new and no pleasure in completion. This doesn’t happen very often, thank goodness, but when it does it is a bit of a downer even when I am enjoying what I am in the middle of. The book I am closest to finishing is The Canon by Natalie Angier and I still have about 150 or so pages until the end. I am liking it very much but hope to have it done by the end of the week or sooner.

Other things I read this weekend include the novel Testing the Current by William McPherson which is all kinds of good but slow reading. And I read some of How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles. That book too requires slow and careful reading because it’s a thinking sort of book. I also read some good essays and reviews in both the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. On these both I am woefully behind the rate of their arrival. I was all caught up at the beginning of the year but have now slipped so I am two issues behind the current one for them both. I’m feeling like I need a nice long vacation just to catch up on my reading! I have to remember to buy a lottery ticket once it gets up to an obscene jackpot amount. If you recall, one of goals for 2013 is to win the lottery so I can quit my job and read all the time. I am aiming to achieve this in early April for the best birthday present ever. Don’t scoff. It could happen.

Ok, I have to cut the rambling short this evening. I need to go make myself a lunch for tomorrow because I can’t count on Bookman being able to make it for me in the morning. Then I have to set the coffee pot timer and generally get all my ducks in a row so I can get out the door on time sans assistance. After that I should be able to read for a bit before going to sleep.

Filed under: Books, In Progress, Rambling

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This Sky
By Hafiz

This

Sky

Where we live

Is no place to lose your wings

So love, love,

Love.

Filed under: Poetry Tagged: Hafiz

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Even though it is still winter here the days are getting noticeably longer. It is dark when I leave for work in the morning but on my return, instead of standing in the dark at the train station waiting for my bus, I stand watching the sun moving toward sunset. At least I do when it is sunny. February has been a gloomy month.

I am reading Natalie Angier’s book The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science and enjoying it very much. It’s like high school science rushing back at me but in a good way. I loved science in high school but it had to be ruined by the high school part of it all. Not that high school was especially bad, but I know if I could take those science classes now, I would like them even more than I did then.

I was reading the chapter on physics in Angier’s book the other night and she is talking about electromagnetic radiation, more commonly known as light. Nearly all the energy we get here on earth originates in waves of electromagnetic radiation from our lovely sun. Plants are really amazingly awesome things because they turn light into food. Yeah, I know, we all know this. But then Angier quotes Daniel Nocera of MIT:

When you eat a green leafy vegetable, you are eating photons of solar energy. […] You are biting the light of the sun.

I had never thought about it that way. To look out the window at the gray sky while chewing the lettuce in my salad or crunching the sunflower sprouts on my sandwich and know that I am not only biting sunlight but eating it. It feels good. Not to mention sunshine tastes delicious!

If I am lucky spring is a month away. If not, a month and a half to two months. For now though, I can console myself by eating sunshine.

Filed under: Books, Science, Science by Women Project Tagged: Natalie Angier

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I’m in the middle of reading The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 on my Kindle and I just have to say part of the fun of these letters is names. No, not funny names but names I have come across in other settings. Like The Duke of Suffolk and the Howard family, both players in Wolf Hall. Walpole is writing in the late 1730s and early 1740s so Suffolk and the Howards are descendants from Henry VIII’s time. And then imagine my delight as I am reading along and Walpole mentions Lord Grantham! I thought Lord Grantham was made up for Downton Abbey! Guess not. Grantham doesn’t get mentioned very often but when he does I can’t help but giggle. Lord Sackville, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West, appears too.

Walpole also has much criticism for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an aristocrat and writer famous for her letters. Walpole finds her shabby, uncouth and not so witty as her reputation led him to believe. He meets her while staying in Italy and is somewhat distressed that his mother likes her quite a lot so he ends up seeing more of her than he’d like. I wonder though if he disparages her because he feels a bit threatened?

Walpole’s father is Sir Robert Walpole often considered the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. Horace, who enters parliament in 1741, includes lots of information in his letters on the wheelings and dealings of government and what turns out to be the end of his father’s career as Prime Minister. The politics are not quite so brutal as during Henry VIII’s time which is a relief. If you jump across the pond though and watch some fictional politics on the new Netflix TV show House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, it’s remarkably similar if slower moving due to the lack of cell phones and television.

It is all rather amusing how these things echo across history and through fiction and nonfiction. And it is rather delightful that they have happened to serendipitously converge in my reading (and TV viewing) at the moment. I love when this happens!

Filed under: Books, Letters Tagged: Horace Walpole, Wolf Hall

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Beneath every history, another history.

What a marvelous book is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I know a lot of people didn’t like that it is written in the present tense but I found it gave an immediacy to the story it would have otherwise lacked. It is historical fiction and to write of a historical period so well known and in such fine detail in the past tense, I think that would have bogged it down. Also, I liked the interiority that calling Cromwell “he” gave the book. It made it reflective and thoughtful, it made me pay attention.

Things that surprised me. How detailed and slow moving through time the story is. We start with Cromwell as a boy getting knocked down and beaten by his blacksmith father. There is a speedy tour through Cromwell’s youth and then he is an adult working for Cardinal Wolsey. And Wolsey doesn’t die until just over a third of the way through the book. The next huge chunk is taken up with the minute details of Cromwell worming his way into the good graces of Henry and dealing with the problem of his marriage to Katherine and his desire to marry Anne Boleyn. Then the final shorter section after Henry and Anne marry, Anne becomes queen, bears a child that will become Queen Elizabeth I and then miscarries a second child. The book ends with the death of Thomas More.

For best effect, it helps to know at least a general outline of events but it is not necessary to be highly familiar with them. Knowing what is going to happen, where things are leading, creates a certain frisson. The book is dramatic irony at its best.

I did not expect the book to be funny but it was. No, I didn’t laugh my way through, but there are lots of humorous moments like this one in which Anne has sent one of her ladies off to find a Bible:

Mistress Shelton comes careering towards him. ‘My lady wants a Bible!’

‘Master Cromwell can recite the whole New Testament,’ Wyatt says helpfully.

The girl looks agonised. ‘I think she wants it to swear on.’

‘In that case I’m no use to her.’

Heh.

And there is a young man sent to work for Cromwell whom he suspects is there to spy. Cromwell takes it all in stride, he has sent his people to spy on others so it is only natural. The boy is named Wriosthesley and tells them “Call me Risely.” So Cromwell and his son and others in his house start referring to Wriosthesley as “Call Me.” That doesn’t sound so funny when I type it out, but in the book it is a hoot, you’ll have to take my word for it.

I work at a Catholic University though I myself am not Catholic. Thomas More is a saint who died for his religion. There is a statue of him by our practice courtroom. The way he is portrayed in Wolf Hall is far from saintly. A book that a student requested came in the other day about Thomas More. It was written after Wolf Hall and had a chapter in it about how Mantel is very wrong in how she characterizes More. Unfortunately I don’t remember what the title of the book was, but I thought it interesting that a work of nonfiction felt it had to address how More is portrayed in a book of fiction.

Before reading Wolf Hall my impression of Cromwell was not a positive one but as I read I quickly came to like Cromwell very much. He is not a man I would want to cross but he takes care of his own and cares deeply about them. He is a brilliant man and an opportunist. I know he meets a dreadful end but I could not help cheering him on, this son of a blacksmith who refuses to buy himself a title and an aristocratic ancestry. Towards the end of the book there is some foreshadowing of his downfall which is years away yet:

Rafe says, passionate, ‘How could I think to keep a secret from you? You see everything, sir.’

‘Ah. Only up to a point.’

And when he misses that thing it will be off with his head.

But that is for another book, Bring Up the Bodies maybe. Though according to Mantel there are three books. Since Cromwell is the star, I imagine his end won’t come until the end of the third book.

I read Wolf Hall along with Litlove and we exchanged a few emails about it. She posted about it last week so be sure to take a gander at her thoughts on the book too.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Hilary Mantel, Historical fiction, Thomas Cromwell

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I was going to write about Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel today but it snowed and I am tired of snow and it is the middle of February which means there is no better thing to do on a day like today than plan the garden.

Bookman and I enjoyed the vegetable garden so much last year that we decided to expand it. But instead of waiting until spring and the very hard work of digging up long established grass, we put down black plastic to kill the grass. Once the snow melts and the ground thaws, it should be a piece of cake to dig it up. In theory. We’ve never tried the black plastic kill your grass method but the get rid of you lawn gardening books tell me that’s the way to go. If it works our neighbors will have the pleasure of seeing black plastic on a few different areas of our yard through the summer. But when we have prairie meadow and other beautiful things growing in those places (eventually) the ugly black plastic stage will be a dim memory.

So I inventoried what seeds we didn’t use from last year’s garden and then Bookman and I sat down with the Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog and started figuring out what we are going to plant in our expanded garden. Last year we grew beets, peas, beans, cantaloupe, pumpkin, radish, tomatoes and bell pepper. Oh and lettuce but we had a sudden heat wave in May following lots of rain so the small lettuces didn’t make it. This year we are going to do everything we did last year plus kale, pac choi, red cabbage, sweet corn, pole beans, summer squash, cucumber, kohlrabi, and mustard greens. Yummy!

In addition, the side of the house where we put up bamboo fencing last year and I attempted to grow a native woodland garden. Didn’t make it. It turned out to be too hot and dry and sunnier for longer in the day than I ever noticed. So this year I am going to try herbs. I haven’t decided on all the herbs yet but there will be basil, chives, lemon grass, borage, bronze fennel, and thyme. Also, there will be some edible flowers like nasturtium and Johnny jump-ups, bachelor buttons and calendula. Pinetree Gardens doesn’t have bachelor button seeds though, anyone have a favorite seed place that sells them?

We’re doing more ornamental annual flowers this year too. I found out nicotiania planted near the vegetable garden will help keep pests away so I’m going to try that. There will also be zinnias, morning glories, and sweet peas. And we always do sunflowers.

I’ve also been looking at the Prairie Moon Nursery catalog for native plants. We’re going to get some varieties of coneflower we don’t have and might try a few other prairie plants from seed too. We are also going to get some wild strawberry plants from Prairie Moon. These are native strawberries that will tolerate shade. We are going to see if they will grow under the apple tree in our front yard.

All that and we haven’t even gotten the catalog for the big local plant sale we go to every May. I do know though that we will be purchasing two blueberry shrubs at the sale. We will be building a raised bed for them because they need acidic soil and my garden soil is too sandy. I have big garden dreams this year!

A large part of the garden dreaming has been driven along by a few books I borrowed from the library. The Edible Front Yard is a practical how-to book garden design tips, and suggestions on how to mix food plants with ornamental plants. Edible Estates is less practical and more inspirational, showing how one can turn a grass-covered front yard into a beautiful edible garden. And the best part is that the majority of the front yards they transform are regular urban and suburban front yards. American Green: the Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn is part social history part horror story. It looks at how the lawn became such a pervasive part of the American landscape and why that perfect lawn is so environmentally dangerous.

I’ve been slowly digging up pieces of my lawn for years so I don’t need to be convinced. What grass I do have left, and there is still quite a lot, only gets mowed never weeded, fertilized or watered. I am trying to kill it with neglect but darn it, it is hardier than I would like. Still, I hope within the next two to three years Bookman and I will be able to mothball the lawnmower for good. It’s about time we make that final push and with the expanded veggie garden, the flower seeds, and the prairie seeds we’ll be making big strides toward that goal.

Filed under: gardening

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There are a few things I found out, discovered, learned recently that I thought I would share with you today.

First, while I was suffering from the worst of my cold, home in bed and miserable, wonderful reader Jule sent me an email to let me know that library I was trying to remember where the books are arranged by association, is the Warburg Library. Aby Warburg was a German art historian and cultural theorist who created a private library of cultural studies in Hamburg. Warburg died in 1929 and the library was rescued from Nazi Germany in 1933 and moved to the University of London. The 350,000 books are housed in their own building that has become known as the Warburg Institute. The collection has been added to over the years but the organization has remained the same.

The library takes up four floors. The categorization is a progression from the visual image to language to orientation to action, a scheme that Warburg saw as the progression of human awareness.

A few years ago, the University of London in an attempt to save money, tried to force the library to surrender its building and disperse the collection into the University’s regular library collections. The New York Review of Books had an essay about it it 2010. I tried to find updated information but I drew a blank. Since the Warburg Institute still exists, I assume the issues have been solved but I don’t have confirmation of that.

Not long ago I was trolling the library catalog looking for books of letters. Does anyone else do this, enter keywords or do subject searches and just browse the catalog? In my browsing I found a book called A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather. What an odd title. It turns out the book is a brief summary of each of Cather’s letters, an index, and a biographical directory. There is no book of actual Willa Cather letters available because Cather put a clause in her will forbidding publication of her letters and other papers. However, her letters and papers will become public domain in 2017 so in four years someone will be able to publish them. Doesn’t that make you really want to know what’s in the letters?

There was a study just published showing that while people say they prefer to read print books for adults over 60 it is actually easier to read on a tablet or ereader. Researchers found that the brains of older adults did not have to work as hard to read on a digital device. The thought is that a digital device provides better text contrast and backlighting which made them easier to read than a print book. Very interesting.

I thought I had more but that appears to be it. That will just have to do for tonight.

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The Paris Review has a post up today about crying while reading. The post author talks about when she read “The Little Match Girl” at the age of seven and found herself crying uncontrollably a few times at school. She was so embarrassed about being sad over a story that she made up excuses when her teachers tried to find out what was the matter. I was struck by her being embarrassed about crying over a book already at the tender age of seven. American culture doesn’t like it when people cry in public for anything other than a funeral or some sort of traumatic event. Crying during a movie is tolerated because you are in the dark and no one can see you, but if you start sobbing loudly I am sure people in your vicinity would not be pleased.

Crying while reading a book is frowned upon if you are anything besides alone. So what is a reader in public to do when the tears begin to flow? Luckily, the Paris Review linked to an article at BookRiot, What to Do When Books Make You Cry on Public Transportation. I’ve been taking public transit to work for the last four years and I must admit that I have had to stifle tears a few times. My technique for hiding my tears varies depending on the time of day. If it is morning, then I go for the fake yawn and start rubbing my eyes. No crying here, these are yawn tears and bed eyes, what do you expect for 6:45 in the morning?

If it is a summer afternoon I start sniffling like I have a stuffed nose, pretend I am going to sneeze, and then start rubbing my eyes. Allergies people, I have allergies! Winter afternoons are harder. If I can’t contrive to make it seem like I have gotten a blast of arctic cold air in my face that made my eyes water when the train door opened just then I have to resort to looking out the window and making faces or pulling the big hood on my coat over my head as far as it will go to try and hide my face.

Most of the time though when I am reading in public I am trying to not laugh/snort/chuckle/giggle/guffaw out loud. I work in downtown Minneapolis and there are already a large number of not quite sane people wandering around the area and riding the train. There are a number of regulars I see nearly every day who have entire conversations with themselves, laughing and arguing, questioning and scolding. I am worried that if I laugh out loud while reading my book I might get lumped in with the resident crazies.

But why should it matter whether a book makes me laugh or cry in public? Why am I embarrassed? Why do I care what the people around me think? Maybe one of these days I will just say forget it and sob and laugh freely over my books in public. If I did that then maybe all the other readers on the train will be emboldened to do the same. And who knows where that might lead?

Filed under: Books, Reading

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I enjoy Ben Yagoda’s columns in the New York Times now and then. He’s one of the few people who can write an essay about commas and make me laugh. When I was offered a review copy of his newest book How to Not Write Bad I couldn’t say no. I own and have read plenty of books that promise to tell me how to write well. I even own that perennial classic by William Zinsser. But I have never read a book that offered to teach me how to not write bad.

There is a difference, isn’t there, between writing well and not writing bad? Learning how to write well suggests I might be able to rival Strunk and White just by following their rules. Not writing bad says I can feel confident I won’t embarrass myself in public. I don’t really care to write like Strunk and White but I do care about not looking the fool. Yagoda guesses that he has graded somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 pieces of student work in the last twenty years. In How to Not Write Bad he proposes to use his experience to provide us with the fifty most common mistakes he has seen and ways we can avoid them. Simple.

Even simpler is Yagoda’s short answer on how to not write bad: read. Good writers are nearly always good readers who read widely. One can absorb a lot about writing just by reading it. It is also a good idea to read your own work out loud; it won’t fix everything but it will save you from a clunker or two.

No one is going to buy a whole book just to be told to read more and following his short answer Yagoda is kind enough to include the long answer. Those fifty or so pesky and all too common mistakes people make take up the bulk of the book. Starting small with numbers, capitalization and italics, we move swiftly to punctuation then up the food chain to words and grammar. You are probably familiar with many of them, I know I was. Commas and comma splices, semicolons and colons, em dashes and parentheses, their mysteries all laid bare in a short and painless way. Of course there are dangling modifiers to puzzle over and verb tenses to to untangle and prepositions to end sentences with. Yagoda also provides frequent reminders of why we should love our print dictionaries and not trust spell-check.

The final portion of the book focuses on things that aren’t necessarily mistakes but are definitely unforgivably sloppy. Here we have discussions about cliches, qualifiers and intensifiers, long and Latinate versus short and Anglo-Saxon, and ambiguity. The section on ambiguity is a hoot. Examples include headlines from respected newspapers, “British Left Waffles on Falklands” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” and the classic Groucho line, “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.”

Yagoda focuses on the nuts and bolts mainly at the word and sentence level. There is brief discussion on tone and paragraphs that is just enough to be suggestive but not enough to be big picture useful. Throughout the book he encourages us to be mindful writers: stop the multi-tasking, pay attention, figure out what you want to say and then make every word in the sentence serve a purpose. Good advice I too often ignore.

How to Not Write Bad is useful and even fun reading. Yagoda’s light and humorous approach goes much farther than dour finger shaking that makes you feel stupid and ashamed. The book is good for students, bloggers, and anyone who wants to work on not writing bad. This is one I definitely will be keeping at hand on my reference shelf.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, Writing Tagged: Ben Yagoda

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At last I understand Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland:

He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

I loved that ride. It was the best kid’s ride at Disneyland and was so good that adults could even enjoy it. But I didn’t know who Toad was or why he had a wild ride. Until now.

As I mentioned in passing a couple weeks ago, I did not read Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame when I was a kid. We had a picture book called Frog and Toad are Friends but it turns out that Toad has nothing to do with Mr. Toad.

If I had read Wind in the Willows as a child I am sure I would have loved it. I can see why it is so beloved, but reading it for the first time as an adult meant I noticed too many odd things. The animals change sizes from animal size to human size. The animals speak English and talk to people. Toad has hair. And how could anyone mistake a Toad dressed up as a washerwoman for a real human woman? All the animals are also male which is kind of weird. And I found the book a bit disjointed with Toad’s story being interrupted by other stories featuring Ratty and Mole.

I did quite enjoy Ratty and Mole’s friendship. I also really liked the story of Ratty being tempted to run off to try his paws at sea. He’s perfectly happy with his life on the riverside but temporarily is charmed by a passing Sea Rat into to thinking the migrant life is the one to have. The grass is greener syndrome. Who among us is immune to it?

There was also a laugh out loud moment with Toad crashing a car:

Toad found himself flying through the air with the strong upward rush and delicate curve of a swallow. He liked the motion, and was just beginning to wonder whether it would go on until he developed wings and turned into a Toad-bird, when he landed on his back with a thump, in the soft, rich grass of a meadow.

Heh.

Mole and Ratty and Badger and Toad taking back Toad Hall from the Weasels and Stouts was pretty good too.

Wind in the Willows was a pleasant read and I would definitely consider giving it to a child. Not having nostalgia for it though I can’t say it comes anywhere close to entering my personal pantheon of treasured children’s books. I do, however, want to go to Disneyland now and take a whirl on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: children's books, Kenneth Grahame

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A coworker asked me on Friday who I was rooting for to win the Super Bowl Sunday. I looked at her and said, “The Super Bowl is this Sunday?” Yup, that’s how much I care. I didn’t know when the game was and I have no idea who is even in it. Sorry sports fans.

Something I do care very much about is the United States Postal Service. Seriously. I mean, think about what an amazing system it is. I can post a letter to anywhere in the United States, including Hawaii and the-middle-of-a-glacier Alaska, for forty-six cents. Sure, last week it was forty-five cents, but just stop and consider how gosh darn amazing the whole enterprise is.

After you have thought about the awesomeness that is the postal service, take a gander at an in-depth and fascinating article about the mail at Esquire. It delves into the nitty gritty of how the system works as well as the P.O.’s current fiscal problems and the politics surrounding them. And then when you are really angry at Congress for screwing over the post office, go sign a petition demanding it be saved. Don’t wait on signing the petition, over 90,000 signatures are needed on it by February 18th and it hasn’t broken 3,000 yet.

Then to seal your love for the postal service, read Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal and/or watch the movie version (streaming on Netflix) which is almost as hilarious as the book.

I mentioned earlier in January that I am doing Melwyk’s Postal Reading Challenge. I have finished one book so far towards the challenge (about the letters of William and Henry James) and have begun a second (volume one of Horace Walpole’s letters).

And now I have taken up a second postal challenge: A Month of Letters. This means that I will attempt to send out twenty-three pieces of mail this month. That’s a letter a day excluding Sundays and one federal holiday, days when there is no mail delivery. I am a pretty good correspondent but even sending that much mail in one month is a stretch. I’m going to try though. At the moment I am behind with two mail days and only one piece of mail sent. But I like to send things out in batches rather than one at a time so I am not worried.

Today I spent some time making envelopes and I have some postcards I made up recently too:

Wouldn’t you just love something in your mailbox? If so, feel free to email me your address or add it to my Postable account. If you go the Postable route, don’t worry, all of your information is private, your address won’t be mined and sold. If you give me your address and I send you mail, you are not obligated to return the favor.

Who doesn’t like a card or letter? It’s only February third, still early enough in the month that you can take up the Month of Letters Challenge too. C’mon, what are you waiting for?

Filed under: Challenges, Letters

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Knocked out by a bad cold! I’m still woozy so if anything I say about Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg doesn’t make sense, it’s the cold and/or one of the many varieties of cold medicine I’m taking.

Dr. Glas is a middle-aged, well-respected doctor in Stockholm. He has no wife or children, the only woman he ever loved and who loved him back died suddenly and unexpectedly after they had one lovely day together. Glas’s female clients like him and bring their troubles to him, asking for an abortion, which he refuses, not because he thinks it wrong but because it is against the law and he doesn’t want to get into trouble. And now Mrs. Gregorious, the beautiful young wife of the Vicar no one seems to like, comes to him asking for help. She is repulsed by her husband and in love with another man. Is there anything Dr. Glas might do to keep her husband from exercising his “rights”?

Dr. Glas falls head-over-heels for Mrs. Gregorious; he only ever falls in love with women who are already in love with someone else. He speaks to Mr. Gregorious, telling him that his wife has a condition that requires her to abstain from sex. This works for a couple weeks until Mr. Gregorious can’t stand it any longer and forces himself on his wife.

The next ploy is to convince Mr. Gregorious that his heart is bad and he needs to go take in the waters. This works for about two months. What else can Dr. Glas do to help? He has a secret drawer in his desk in which he has hidden a few cyanide pills against the day he might decide to take his own life. Could he convince Mr. Gregorious to take one?

Dr. Glas is no Raskolnikov, he is neither mad nor does he have high philosophical theories. He views respect for life as a hypocrisy:

What else can it ever be on the lips of anyone who has ever whiled away an idle hour in thought? Human life, it swarms around us on every hand. And as for the lives of faraway, unseen people, no one has ever cared a fig for them. Everyone shows this by his actions, except perhaps a few more than usually idiotic philanthropists. All governments and parliaments on earth proclaim it.

Yet Dr. Glas is not a bad man nor is he unlikeable. He is very lonely and, as his friend Markel says, lacks a talent for happiness.

The story is told in the form of a diary but as Glas says, it isn’t a confession

To whom should I confess? Nor do I tell the whole truth about myself, only what pleases me to relate, but nothing that isn’t true. Anyway, I can’t exorcise my soul’s wretchedness — if it is wretched — by telling lies

Later he tells us he does not write all his thoughts in his diary, only thoughts that recur to him more than once. He is reliable in what he tells us, but what, if anything, is he not telling us? Glas has such a trustworthy voice and I really felt sorry for him and for Mrs. Gregorious, but I can’t help but wonder if there were thoughts that got left out and what they might be?

Doctor Glas is a most excellent and compact read. It was first published in Swedon in 1905 and caused a bit of a scandal because people saw it as promoting abortion and euthanasia. It doesn’t, not really, but there is much in it to think about and I am sure I will read it again one day when my head is not full of congestion and cold medicine.

This was a Slaves group read. Check out the Slaves blog for other thoughts on the book and feel free to also join in our forum discussion.

Filed under: Books, Reviews, Slaves of Golconda

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After having written about the first part of Ruth Gruber’s Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, I forgot all about writing on the second part of the book. The first part, as you may recall, is memoir about how Gruber came to be the youngest person to receive a Ph.D, wrote her dissertation on Woolf, and actually got to meet her. The second part of the book is the dissertation Gruber wrote.

Written in 1932, the dissertation examines Woolf’s work up to and including The Waves. Gruber’s thesis in a nutshell:

Virginia Woolf is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it. Her will to explore her femininity is bitterly opposed by the critics, who guard the traditions of men, who dictate to her or denounce her feminine reactions to art and life.

The way Gruber sees things Woolf had a choice to write to please the critics and their arbitrary standards, to write in the male novelist tradition, or to create something altogether new and different.

Gruber traces the evolution of Woolf’s style through her novels. While it is a decidedly feminist analysis, it is interesting to note that her idea of femininity squares up with the prevailing notions of the time. She therefore says much about “feminine sensitivity” and discusses Woolf’s “feminine impressionism.”

Gruber makes a really interesting analysis of Orlando as Woolf struggling between a sort of Scilla and Charybdis of critics and male influence in order to find her way into her own style. These days it seems Orlando is talked about mostly as a biography and love letter to Vita Sackville-West. Gruber makes no comment of this and I suspect that at the time, she probably didn’t know the two women had been lovers. Her analysis does prove, however, that there is a lot more going on in the book then we generally account for.

Woolf’s use of painting and music are traced out through her work. Gruber also notes, “It is the mark of Virginia Woolf’s organic concept of life, that she concludes an endlessness in conflicts.”

As long as there is night and day, light and darkness, there will be antithetic stylists, inimical poets and negating critics. The conclusion that there is no absolute truth in either fact or fancy, structural or rhythmic form, enables her to employ both styles without self-consciousness or doubt.

The Waves, Gruber concludes, shows Woolf as having at last achieved the style she had been working towards.

There is much of interest in this dissertation that I haven’t even mentioned. I think much of what Gruber wrote still holds up today. As I was reading, I had to pause in wonder now and then since Gruber wrote it when she was only twenty. Oh, and she wrote it in a year while also taking a full load of classes. She also uses no secondary sources because no one had really done any critical analysis of Woolf at the time. Gruber’s range of knowledge about Woolf’s work and literature in general left me impressed and envious. How did she know all that without the aid of Google or other critical sources? It’s enough to make one feel both lazy and stupid.

I don’t think The Will to Create as a Womann would be of interest to everyone, but if Woolf is one of your favorite authors this is a book that will definitely appeal. And here is an interesting non-related tidbit I gleaned from the acknowledgements: author Dava Sobel is Gruber’s niece.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Virginia Woolf Tagged: Ruth Gruber

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After trolling the notes from Piper’s Book Was There and adding a number of books to my TBR list, I also got ahold of an article, “Falling Asleep over the History of the Book” by Seth Lerer (PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 1, Jan 2006, p 229-234) thinking it was about reading in bed. Reading in bed is mentioned at the very end of the article but nothing especially interesting or important is said about it. The article is really just an introduction to a special issue of PMLA on the history of the book. Talk about disappointing.

There were a couple interesting thoughts/ideas/questions in the piece though like this on the literary canon:

Books are objects, though, and canonization is as much a process of selecting space as of selecting value. How can we fit the range of literature on the shelf? The physical, artifactual nature of the book has made the canonizing of the literary work into an act of space management. I think it is worth pausing over this suggestion to provide another lens for […] thinking about the past and future of the book.

Can I just say that librarianship has been, and is, all over the space management thing? And not just for literature but for all other disciplines too. Lerer does go on to mention libraries but but not so much in relation to what he said above. He discusses libraries in terms of cataloging and points out the Cambridge University Library organizes books in part by size, the Marzian Library in Venice by date of acquisition, and Robert Cotton, a 17th c book collector organized his books by ancient emperors. Lerer wonders briefly how we arrange our books affects not only the way we see and find them as objects, but the way we read them and view literature in general. It’s a much better thing to wonder about than how shelf space affects canonization.

I read many years ago about a famous library in Europe that was once the personal library of, I believe, an author. He had his shelves and shelves of books organized by association and sometimes how the book was related to its neighbor wasn’t clear until you read the book. The last book on the last shelf supposedly referred back to the first book on the first shelf. How I wish I could remember more about this library because it was really fascinating. Maybe someone out there knows about it?

Anyway, I can see how shelving books like in the unknown library can affect how we see and read each book. But I doubt many people shelve their books like that. Think about the way you shelve your books. Mine are alphabetical more or less and broken out into different categories — fiction and nonfiction, poetry, classic fiction, books about books, reference books, etc. Then the TBR books are pretty much a wild jumble. My system helps me find my books when I want them, most of the time, but how does it affect the way I see literature? It’s a rather conventional system, does that mean I have a conventional idea of reading and literature’s possibilities? Or does it simply reflect that I value being able to easily locate my books over what a more creative arrangement might impart? Or maybe it is all bunk and means absolutely nothing.

I just don’t know. While I acknowledge a creative arrangement might provide extra bookish insight, I don’t want to be relegated to the conventional and uncreative heap because of the way I shelve my books. Therefore I’m leaning toward it not making that much difference how books are organized in my personal library.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Filed under: Books, Library

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Oh, reached into the ol’ thesaurus for that one! Still fighting a cold so let’s be linky today.

According to EarlyWord, sales of Richard Blanco’s poetry books have zoomed up the Amazon ranks. Yesterday Looking for the Gulf Motel went from 1255 to #34. I just checked and it has now slipped to #74. Still, how awesome is that? The number of holds at my public library have also increased from three, when I put in a request for the book a couple weeks ago, to twenty today. Woo! If only things like this were a regular occurrence with poetry titles.

Blanco is forty-four and has been writing since he was a young man. You have to start young, right? Now and then we hear of people past sixty publishing their first book and it somehow seems cute. But seventy-five-year-old Natsuko Kuroda isn’t going to take any guff. She won the Akutagawa Prize for her story “ab Sango.” She is the oldest person to ever win the prize. Upon receiving her award she said, ” ‘Thank you for discovering me while I am still alive.’ ” Using age as an excuse for why I can’t become a writer is no longer valid. I’ll have to try to think up some new and more creative reason.

But then, maybe if I take writing lessons from W.G. Sebald (via) I will zoom onto the bestseller lists. Not likely since I don’t think Sebald was a bestseller. He is highly regarded though (if you have not read him he really is marvelous) and isn’t that what we want more than the money? Who am I kidding, I want the money too! Why does it need to be an either/or proposition?

Maybe it’s because so many children’s books are sexist, portraying females as indoor passive observers that has stinted me. Granted, the study was of Malayasian children’s books but I don’t doubt a similar result would be found in a study of my childhood reading or even current children’s books in the U.S. Then if you are a science fiction or fantasy fan, there are the sexist books covers to contend with. But fantasy writer Jim Hines has started replicating the poses of the sexed up women on book covers to pointed and hilarious effect. Then there is The Hawkeye Initiative which challenges the portrayal of women in comics by swapping male and female characters usually substituting Hawkeye from the Avengers for the female. The idea being that if Hawkeye doesn’t look stupid in the female pose then it probably isn’t sexist. The website will get your blood boiling and make you laugh at the same time.

Ok, that’s should do it for this evening. Hopefully my brain will be up for more coherent thoughts tomorrow. Assuming, that is, my brain had coherent thoughts to begin with.

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I did not intend to take an unannounced break but I was able to fly out to California for my grandma’s funeral. The services were exactly right and though we were all sad, I feel like it was also a celebration of her life. Thank you all once again for the numerous kind thoughts and comments. You are all so very wonderful.

Since it wasn’t a vacation, airplane reading was a bit weird. I wanted to read but nothing really appealed so I ended up reading a London Review of Books on the way out and another on the way home. Which means, for the moment, I am caught up on my LRBs.

Monday was a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and I had the day home from work. I watched President Obama’s inauguration with special anticipation for the poem by Richard Blanco. I liked it! It is a very American poem I think. Some chatter around the interwebs has noted echoes of Walt Whitman. Yes, I can hear those too, the celebration of the common, the everyday and the urgency that pervades the poem and propels it forward. I like how Blanco uses the light, sky, ground and moon to gather together all the individual pieces into one country. There is a definite feeling of e pluribus unum, out of many one, which is what the United States at its best is all about. What do you think of the poem?

I had hoped to be able to read more yesterday but I caught a cold while I was away and felt generally blah. I was able to focus for an hour or so and start reading Doctor Glas. So far I am liking this little book very much. It is written as a diary, a device that when well done I am always a sucker for. Oh, and how could I forget, I also read the introduction to Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad. He made some good jokes, but he always does. He says that there are plenty of books out there to tell you how to write well but not many that tell you how to not write bad(ly). He’s been teaching and grading for years and the book is going to focus on the mistakes he finds people make most often. It is intended for students but he also has non-students in mind he says, like bloggers and people who just want to improve their writing. I look forward to delving into the nitty-gritty shortly.

Last week I finished the third part of Margaret Atwood’s serial e-novel Positron. I liked parts one and two quite a bit but part three felt short and rushed. I suppose that is one of the dangers of serial novels.

In progress on my Kindle at the moment is The Wind in the Willows. I was in the mood for something easy and comforting. Except I never read the book when I was a kid. I had a picture book of a Frog and Toad story but I never read Wind in the Willows. Reading it for the first time as an adult, I am enjoying it, but there are also some weird things about it. Like the animals seem to keep changing size. First they are small like a water rat or mole would be but then they are riding in a coach with Toad being pulled by a horse. Wha??? And I find it rather disturbing that they eat bacon for breakfast and lobster is a dinner option. It is not magical like it would be for a child, but it is fun nonetheless.

Also in progress is Wolf Hall. I am enjoying it very much. I am reading it with Litlove and she is waiting patiently for me to finish since she has run along merrily to the end already. I’m about two-thirds of the way through.

Maybe Wolf Hall would be going along faster if I didn’t have so many other books on the go? Because in addition to all those above, I am also reading Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon (excellent book!), How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles, and Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. At the same time I am reading all of those, I am looking forward to when I can slip in Testing the Current by William McPherson and The Canon by Natalie Angier.

Yesterday I spent the book gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket on The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco and The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. I have no intention of jumping into either of them when they arrive. I must get my in progress books under control. But I am looking forward to reading both of them. I just don’t know when that will be!

I could go nattering on all night but Waldo is giving me the look that says I have been at my computer too long already and I had better stop now before he takes matters into his own paws. So off I go to make a cup of tea to soothe my sore throat and I should probably read something too.

Filed under: Books, In Progress

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Hello, hello! Just checking in. Plans had to change because along with Auntie M came Bookman’s mom. Auntie is off to Duluth this morning, mom is staying through Sunday afternoon. We visited Mill City Museum yesterday afternoon. Bookman and I had never been but had heard good things about it. We were both pleased with what a wonderful place this is. Worth every penny of the price of admission. Plus we learned some new things about our adopted city. Much of Minneapolis grew up around the flour mill which was at one time the largest mill in the world. It was really fascinating stuff. If you ever come to visit Minneapolis, you must put this museum on your agenda!

We made a trip to the Mall of America in the evening. People from out of town are always eager to go to this monstrosity. People who live here tend to be rather indifferent to it. I suppose it isn’t such a bad place though since it provides lots of jobs and someplace to take people from out of town.

Today will be a low-key day. Bookman and his mom are on their own and I have to work. I do have a couple of bookish links you might find interesting:

• Because I read Ann K recently Is Anna Karenina a Love Story? was an especially interesting article. It talks about the movie, the book, and whether Tolstoy meant for Anna’s to be viewed as a tragic love story.
• With Philip Hensher’s book, The Missing Ink, getting buzz lately, Some States Buck the trend and preserve penmanship caught my eye. California, the state in which I grew up, is one of the few states that still require students to learn cursive in school. It’s still taught in 3rd grade, just like when I was a kid. Ah memories.
• Not really news to us, but a recent study shows that reading, writing and playing games helps aging brains stay healthy. “Reading the newspaper, writing letters, visiting a library, attending a play or playing games, such as chess or checkers, are all simple activities that can contribute to a healthier brain.” I am so glad they didn’t say crossword puzzles or sudoku. I am not a fan. More power and puzzles to you if you are.

Off to work now. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Filed under: Links, Personal

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Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. I was a junior in high school that year and I wish I could say I was with it enough to know about the book but I didn’t even know who Margaret Atwood was back then. Not until I got to college and took a literature by women class did I learn about her. We did not read Handmaid’s Tale in that class. Instead, we read Surfacing and Cat’s Eye. Surfacing is tied for first with Alias Grace as my favorite Atwood book. Over the years I have managed to read Atwood’s poetry, a good many of her essays, and all but two of her novels, The Robber Bride and The Handmaid’s Tale.

I don’t know why I waited so long to read Handmaid’s Tale especially since I went to the dark side in college and became a feminist. Maybe it is because the book became so very popular and for awhile, especially when the movie came out (I did see that) everyone was reading the book. I am not generally accused of hopping onto bandwagons, so I stood aside and watched it drive on by. And after that it just became one of those books I needed to get to.

Well, I finally got to it. I was kind of disappointed. I liked the book and everything, don’t get me wrong. I found it intense and frightening, a story that is still all too possibly real. The writing is good, the story moves along and I found myself fearing for the safety of Offred. I hated the ending. That might be a big part of my disappointment. When I closed the book I had a “that’s all?” sort of feeling. I was expecting more, something bigger, something more damning of the way women are treated. But the style of the book, while not a diary, is diary-like and sort of documentary in a way. And even though I had feared for Offred, I didn’t get an emotional payoff at the end. Having the final chapter be a conference in the future on the history of what happened during the time of the book featuring a discussion on the provenance of the “tale” I had just read is such a bland way to wrap things up. The end needed punch, something like Orwell’s 1984 where Winston ends up loving Big Brother. Not that I want Offred to end loving the totalitarian state of Gilead, but something with a bit of oomph would have been more satisfactory.

Ending aside, Atwood does a fantastic job of creating Gilead and of explaining how it all came about. What resonated most for me was this simple bit:

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

Isn’t that how a good many horrors happen? These lines made me think of WWII and the people living practically next door to concentration camps who said they had no idea what was going on. I like to think I would notice something like a concentration camp or even the small changes towards a totalitarian society but when I read books like Handmaid’s Tale there is a small part of me that worries I wouldn’t notice, that I would ignore. I don’t know what I fear more, the possibility of being a person who ignores or living in a society like Gilead.

The book isn’t all doom and gloom, well it is, but there are moments of wry Atwood humor:

The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen.

“Pen Is Envy” Ha!

The Handmaid’s Tale has made its way onto high school and college reading lists. I am very glad for that because it seems a good book to foster discussion about women, religion, and politics. The book is jam-packed with juicy discussable things from the big and obvious to the small and subtle. I will leave you with one of my favorite subtle bits, one that gives me a chill every time I read it:

Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Now I suppose I should get around to reading Robber Bride so I can be all caught up on Atwood novels. Perhaps a book to put on my 2013 reading goals list.

Filed under: Books, Feminism, Margaret Atwood, Reviews

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Few things can lift the spirits like books in the mail. After waiting for what seemed like a very long time, the first NYRB Classics subscription book and my bonus book arrived.

January’s book is Testing the Current by William McPherson. The book’s description reveals that it is a coming-of-age story of sorts that takes place in a small upper Midwestern town in the 1930s. I would dive in and start reading it right away but first I must get to Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg for the Slaves discussion at the end of the month. It is only 150 pages however, so I might also be able to start the McPherson. We’ll see. Speaking of the Slaves though, if anyone out there is interested in reading along and joining in the discussion, there is still plenty of time. Short book!

The bonus NYRB book I received for subscribing is The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. The book is compared to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. To my mind those are two very different stories. Maybe Morel will be an adventure story with ghosts? He was good friends with Borges so I can probably expect it to be a bit, er, unusual.

One more book arrived for me in the mail. This one is a review copy of How to Not Write Bad by Ben Yagoda. I find his columns in the NY Times to be humorous so hopefully this book will prove to be entertaining and educational as well. It looks like it is a basic kind of style manual covering punctuation and word choice, sentences, that sort of thing. It’s always nice to have a refresher now and then even after all these years of writing mostly decent sentences most of the time. Plus, it might be fun to learn about all the rules I break regularly and maybe there will be some new ones I can start breaking! It is sure to be good times for me but maybe not so much for you trying to read what I might write.

I have a Barnes and Noble gift card that is burning a hole in my pocket yet somehow I have managed to hold onto it for about two weeks now. Don’t be hasty, I told myself, think about what you really want first and then go shopping. Only I keep changing my mind about what I want. I got a 15% off one item coupon in my email inbox today that is good through Monday so at some point this weekend I will cease to waffle and make my order and then probably remember the title of a book I really really wanted and had forgotten about but it will be too late. So it goes.

Filed under: Books, New Acquisitions

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In the print versus digital divide Book Was There by Andrew Piper is the voice of reason. He is interested in examining the relationship between books and screens, in identifying the fundamental differences as well as their similarities. Piper asks us

to remember the diversity that surrounds reading and the manifold, and sometimes strange, tools upon which is has historically been based. The question is not one of ‘versus,’ of two single antagonists squaring off in a ring; rather, the question is far more ecological in nature. How will these two very different species and their many varieties coexist within the greater ecosystem known as reading?

Through seven chapters Piper examines various aspects of reading books in print and on a screen. He looks at the physical nature of the book and how we respond to it. And he discuses how digital books are trickier because we don’t ever see the book. We only see the device and the words appear on a screen. Where the book opens and invites us in, the screen keeps us out.

Another chapter examines the act of looking. When we read a book we see the words on the page but we are looking beyond the words and through the book. Screens, on the other hand, encourage us to look on as voyeurs. Instead of being a window we look through, a screen often becomes a “metalabyrinth of mutual regard.” Still another chapter is about the page and what the page of a book does and how it affects the way we read in contrast to a “page” on a screen.

There is also a chapter on making notes and annotations and here Piper provides the best explanation about why handwriting is important that I have ever come across. Writing and reading are intimately connected. When we write with our hands we are also learning to draw and when we learn to draw we are also learning to “think more complexly with words.” Research finds that children who learn how to draw before they write tend to produce more complex words and sentences. Drawing helps pull together all sorts of information in the brain, it is a way to think and analyze. Drawing and writing together add a whole new way of being able to think. Not to mention that the physical act of writing something by hand, say copying a passage from a book, helps us internalize and remember what we have written better than if we had just typed it.

Piper also has a chapter on sharing, one on reading and our relationship to the spaces we read in, and one on the connection between reading and mathematics.

There are lots of interesting ideas in Book Was There, some I agreed with and some I did not. Sometimes I found myself wondering what the point was Piper was trying to make and other times I wanted to shout, “yes! that’s exactly right!” I am tempted to go through each chapter and mark out his arguments for you so we can “talk” about them all but then we would be here forever and some of the arguments are too detailed and complex to do justice to here.

Piper clearly loves books but he also finds the digital has much to offer. He isn’t entirely sure that some of our digital text encounters can really be called reading any longer but he believes we should not be bothered by that. He thinks we should put down our books now and then and do some digital exploring. But he also warns against computers becoming the new book. We need both, he says, because they each foster different ways of thinking and seeing the world and the more ways we have to think, communicate and explore, the better. That’s something I think most of us can agree with.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Reading, Reviews Tagged: Andrew Piper

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I have learned a lesson. Never trust a book excerpt posted on the internet. After reading and posting about the excerpt at Slate of Andrew Piper’s book Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, I completely disagreed with Piper and thought his argument choppy and lame. But, I thought, this is an excerpt and maybe the book is better. So I requested it from the library and my turn came up at the end of last week. I am so glad I trusted my intuition because the book has turned out to be nothing like what I was expecting and it’s pretty good too. The excerpt at Slate is taken from the first chapter, totally skewed and edited to provoke. Why am I surprised by that?

I’m not going to write about the whole book at the moment, today I am only going to give you a little tease.

Piper has a chapter in the book in which he discusses the relationship between books and trees and space. Did you know that the English word “book” came from the German “Buch” and that “Buch” was derived from the word for beech tree? In India, the word for book is derived from the word for a birch tree. The Latin word “codex” comes from the word for the trunk of a tree. No wonder we talk about the “leaves” of books!

But wait, there’s more!

The Greek, “biblion” gives us “Bible” and “bibliography” and a whole bunch of other “biblio” words. It comes from the name of the Phoenician town of Byblus which was a major exporter of papyrus in the day.

Aren’t word origins great fun?

More about Book Was There tomorrow.

On a side note, thank you all for your kind words and condolences about my grandma. I am touched and blessed.

Filed under: Books, Reading, Words

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Sorry no bookish cheer today. My Grandma died this morning. She fell at home and broke her hip the evening of December 21st. Despite a few setbacks, she had been in good cheer and even though she was 98-years-old, it seemed like she would be able to get well again. But my mom called me today to give me the news. Grandma’s heart gave out this morning.

There is a lot I will miss, but what I will miss most is her letters. We’ve been writing letters to each other since I went off to college in 1986. Her last letter to me was just before Christmas. I’ve saved every one of them.

Grandma — Evelyn — grew up on a Minnesota farm and married a farmer. And even though she moved to California a very long time ago now, that practical farming sensibility remained with her always. She would worry but never panic. She was generous and kind. Even after my grandpa died in the mid 90s she still signed her name “Mrs. Harold Hollmichel.” She loved flowers and gardening and though she hasn’t been able to garden for years, she loved for me tell her about my garden in our letters.

She loved beautiful things but was of the generation where you put them away to keep and only brought them out on special occasions. She had a hummingbird feeder hanging outside her kitchen window above the sink and she liked to wash dishes and watch the hummingbirds come to the feeder. One year I sent her a beautiful glass feeder as a present and she wrapped it back up and put it away. When my mom asked why she didn’t hang it up, she said it was too pretty and didn’t want it spoiled. It took some work on my mom’s part to convince her that she should hang it up. What got her to do it was asking her how I would feel if I came to visit and found out the feeder was in the closet instead of hanging out where she could enjoy it.

Grandma had a strong faith in God and while I myself don’t believe, if it turns out there is a heaven, she’s definitely there. And if that’s the case, I hope she’s sitting in the shade surrounded by the sweet smell of flowers and watching the hummingbirds.

Filed under: Personal

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I was so excited to learn that President Obama will have an inaugural poem. The poem will be written and read by Richard Blanco on January 21st at the ceremonial swearing in.

Blanco, of whom I had never heard, turns out to be someone I want to get to know. He is 44, gay, was conceived in Cuba, born in Spain, and grew up in Miami. He studied engineering in college and worked for a few years helping to design bridges, road improvements and other engineering things in Miami. Then in his mid-20s he decided to get a master’s degree in fine arts. He published his first book of poems in 1998. His most recent book, Looking for the Gulf Motel, was published in 2012.

Sadly, the university where I work doesn’t have any of his books. Thankfully, my public library has his second and third. However, other readers beat me to it. There are two copies of each one and they are all checked out with two hold requests for each title. No, not a lot when you compare it to the 188 holds for 273 circulating copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. But we are talking poetry here. Any hold queue is something to marvel at! I got in line for his second book, Direction to the Beach of the Dead.

But neither you nor I are out of luck because Blanco has a few poems available to read and listen to on his website. I have not read all of them, but so far from what I have read, I am very excited, they are great. Take, for instance, the poem “Somewhere to Paris.” The “I” of the poem is on a train from Italy to Paris and doesn’t know where along the way he is:

        In this space between cities,
between the dreamed and the dreaming, there is
no map–no legend, no ancient street names
or arrows to follow, no red dot assuring me:
you are here–and no place else. If I don’t know
where I am, then I am only these heartbeats,
my breaths, the mountains rising and falling
like a wave scrolling across the train’s window.

I like how he used being he doesn’t know where as a way to become something more essential instead of turning into something that is lost.

Also, don’t miss “Maybe

.” It begins:

Maybe it was the billboards promising
paradise, maybe those fifty-nine miles
with your hand in mine, maybe my sexy
roadster, the top down, maybe the wind
fingering your hair, sun on your thighs
and bare chest, maybe it was just the ride
over the sea split in two by the highway
to Key Largo, or the idea of Key Largo.

So many maybes in the poem, so many possibilities.

So while Blanco is working hard to write a poem for the inaugural, I will look forward to hearing it.

Filed under: Poetry Tagged: Richard Blanco

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