The Fatal Eggs - Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)

First book for the library book group. I had to smile when I bought this one, since the frog is kind of a personal symbol (for complex reasons I'll have to explain some other time - but seriously, isn't he cute?).

Synopsis: The scene is Moscow, 1928 (the near future, at the time of writing). Stalin is comfortably installed and is even starting to solve those niggling, post-revolutionary annoyances like the urban housing crisis. One Professor Persikov, zoologist, indifferent to politics and all other concerns outside the bounds of biology, is innocently studying his frogs when he inadvertently discovers a powerful new form of light.

The "red ray," as he dubs it, violently accelerates cellular growth - in the light of the ray, organisms grow at lightning speed, to enormous sizes, reproducing to the point of almost instantaneous overcrowding, at which point they turn to devour each other.

I did mention that Bulgakov was an anti-Soviet satirist, yes? Good.

In between interviews with state journalists, spent carefully dissimulating the significance of his discovery, Persikov runs a few rounds of red ray experiments with his frogs, then writes to an American zoologist to order some more interesting specimen - specifically, a selection of eggs from several of the larger species of snake native to North America.

Meanwhile, back on the farm...a poultry plague is ravaging the Russian countryside, killing every chicken within hundreds of square miles in a matter of days. To remedy this, the government sets up a state farm, commandeers a few of Persikov's red ray chambers (over his frenzied objections) and orders a few cases of chicken eggs from the West.

Two shipments of eggs. One Soviet bureaucracy. Care to guess what happens?

Naturally, the reptile eggs go to the state farm, and the hen eggs to the infuriated Persikov. A few shots of the red ray, and little villages across Russia are suddenly being terrorized by forty-foot-long rattlesnakes. Oh, yes.

One thing I'm curious about, that I hope comes up in our discussion, is the actual social position of the research scientist in early Stalin-era Russia. There's never been a place or time when the practice of science hasn't been politicized (usually, though not always, to the chagrin of the scientists themselves), and I'd like to know more about how that played out under the unique circumstances of that era.

Soviet Sci-Fi

I've had a few brief experiences participating in book groups in the past, and since moving to Chicagoland, I've made a few attempts to find a group to join. This is easier said than done, if you're going in blind - it's not as though there's some national internet repository for matching up would-be book groupies (?) to each other - and the few possibilities I've been able to follow up with haven't worked out.

So recently I decided to take advantage of mid-term sign-up for one of the groups sponsored by my local library. This one seems fairly serious, with a focus on hefty-ish fiction and a leader who formerly taught literature in Russia. (I had to draft the grammar of that last phrase several times. Russian former literature professor? Former Russian literature professor? Russian former professor of literature?)

Apparently, they spent last fall on Gogol, but the readings from now though May are all Mikhail Bulgakov. I can't say I previously knew much about Bulgakov (1891-1940) beyond his name. He was born in Kiev to Russian parents. Both his grandfathers were priests, and his father was a theology professor, but Bulgakov himself trained as a doctor and served in a medical capacity in World War I and the Russian Civil War.

Eventually, Bulgakov abandoned medicine to devote himself to literature, but, being a critic of the Soviet regime, found his hands tied by censorship within a decade - this despite having Stalin himself as a particular fan. In fact, rather than granting permission for Bulgakov to emigrate, Stalin found him work as a theatrical satirist. Still, much of his work of lay unpublished in a desk drawer until long after his death, at age 48, from inherited kidney disease.

Our February discussion will cover two shorter works (around 100 pages each) - The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog - both works of science fiction, in its earlier sense; that is, more Jules Verne than Star Trek. I've started on the first, and so far, it's promising.

(Note: The plaque in the photo is installed at the Bulgakov museum in Kiev. I think. Half the site was in Russian.)

The end of 2008

I've been wanting to properly review all of these, but it's not going to happen - but they're all worth a real mention, so here are the last few crumbles from 2008.

1. Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike, 1991

I've occasionally been known to ironically summarize the works of John Updike - all of those I've read, at least - with the single sentence, Everybody spends all their free time committing adultery. The title characters of this novel being the King and Queen of Denmark - yes, of the Prince Hamlet tale - so I suppose it doesn't really break with the theme. Updike tells Gertrude's story from the time of her girlhood betrothal to King Hamlet up to the point where Shakespeare's version picks up. The book is written in three parts: in the first, Updike uses the character names as they appeared in an early account of Danish myth; in the second, as they appeared in a later later adaptation; and in the final section, as Shakespeare presented them. Accordingly, the telling of the story moves starts out with an atmosphere of dark, Nordic, barely post-pagan savagery, and gradually adopts the Renaissance sensibilities that color Shakespeare's telling.

2. Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Pastor's Daughter - Elizabeth Emerson Hancock, 2008.

I had to pick this up the moment I saw it in the library, because it belongs to a genre I've long believed to be under-populated: the preacher's kid memoir. (I don't know if that sentiment is because I'd like to write my own, or because I want help defining the situation.) Hancock gets to the heart of the matter of being Raised Right in a first family, and, given the time, place and circumstances, her parents were amazingly awesome. It's a hoot, all rolled up in a familiar blanket.

3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon, 2007.

This is...strange. Takes place in a parallel universe in which Israel collapsed in 1948 and the United States offered amnesty to the Jews on an island off the Alaska panhandle (something of the sort was in fact proposed, briefly, in the real world). 60+ years later, the territory is set to revert back to the control of the now State of Alaska, and the Sitka Jews are scrambling to relocate to New York, Mexico, Madagascar. Meanwhile, a hard-drinking cop and his half-Tlingit partner try to solve the murder of the messiahesque, chess pro, junkie son of the local Rebbe/mob boss. Oh, and did I mention the Filipinos? Basically, it's a Raymond Chandler novel in a very odd setting.

2008 Tally

The Tally for 2008: 28. 28? Hm. Less than usual, but that's ok. I passed through a couple of seasons this year in which I couldn't seem to finish anything, or nothing held my interest, or my mind and time were overly occupied by one thing or another in real life, or for one reason or another I just couldn't read. At any rate, here's the list

Read in 2008

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon (2007)
• Trespassers Will Be Baptized - Elizabeth Emerson Hancock (2008)
• Larry's Party - Carrol Shields (1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike (2000)
• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (1975)
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (2006)
• Spiritual Formation As If the Church Mattered - James C. Wilhoit (2008)
• The Now Habit - Neil Fiore (1989)
• The Renaissance Soul - Margaret Lobenstine (2006)
• The Third Man - Graham Greene (1950)
• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
• How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton (1997)
• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understaing Philosophy Through Jokes - Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein (2007)
• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2004)
• Possession - A.S. Byatt (1990)
• A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock (2008)
• Miracle at Speedy Motors - Alexander McCall Smith (2008)
• God Is Closer Than You Think - John Ortberg (2005)
• Table for One - Camerin Courtney (2002)
• Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments -Michael Dirda (2000)
• Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances - Alexander McCall Smith (2003)
• Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2001)
• The Careful Use of Compliments - Alexander McCall Smith (2007)
• Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon - Jane Austen (1795, 1804, 1817)
• Book by Book; Notes on Reading and Life - Michael Dirda (2005)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke (2004)
• Devil in the White City - Erik Larson (2004)
• The Know-It-All - A..J. Jacobs (2004)

Babar, the Elephant

Consuming children's entertainment as an adult is a fraught business. It's got its positive side, certainly - you finally get all the really good jokes in the Disney cartoons, for example. But you can also make discoveries that are hazardous to your understanding of the universe.

I don't often feel the urge to re-read books from my childhood, but recently I developed a hankering for Babar, the Francophone elephant king, so I checked out a few volumes from the library.

(Asides: a) There are a lot more of these titles than I realized. b) The children's room is hard to navigate - everything is too low to the ground for my rheumatically compromised joints. )

I hadn't counted on the three little picture books I brought home being so politically loaded. Let me recount Babar's story for you, in case it's been a while (keep in mind, original publication was 1933):

Little Babar lived with the other elephants in the "forest" (that's how it's translated from the French). One day, his mother is brutally murdered by a white poacher, and Babar runs away to Paris (?). He falls into the good graces of a very old, very rich lady, who becomes his benefactress and takes him to get a suit of clothes in a becoming shade of green, including spats and a bowler. Courtesy of a private tutor, Babar also receives a proper European education.

Eventually, Babar returns to the forest (in the old lady's motor car), where it just so happens that the old elephant king has just died (he ate a poisonous mushroom, and turned the same shade of green as Babar's suit). The elephant elders unanimously decide to make Babar the new king, seeing as how he's become a sophisticated, enlightened European and all. (Yep, we're totally going there.) Like any self-respecting European monarch, Babar then marries his cousin.

Babar sets about civilizing the elephant kingdom, and sets up a capital city with paved roads, modern homes, a school, and an opera house. The elephants dress in lovely western clothes and become doctors and cobblers and mechanics. They learn to read and write and play orchestra music. And then...they all live happily ever after.

Just...wow.

Challenging

I started 2008 with the intention to participate in the Decades Challenge, but various turns of life took my reading in other directions (or temporarily stopped it entirely), so I decided to bow out, rather than driving myself crazy over a game.

But I want to expand my book blog reading, so in 2009 I think I'll try to follow through on some challenges. There are enough of them that dovetail with what I'd be reading anyway, and I guess what I need is undemanding networking.

Linked from Bookgirl's Nightstand is this challenge clearinghouse maintained by Wendy, where I found a number of possibilities:

• Read 12 books from your public library.
• Read a selected number of books you own.
• Read 6 books in translation.
• Read books linked thematically by title.
• Read from A to Z (title or author).
• Read a few classics.
• Read those books that Yann Martel keeps sending to Stephen Harper.
• Read Chekhov stories.
• Decades (again)

The first three, especially, should be almost effortless, though I'm quite fond of the Chekov one as well.

Larry's Party - Carrol Shields

Synopsis: twenty years in the life of one Larry Weller, Winnipeg native, younger child and only son of English parents (an upholsterer of custom coach busses and a housewife).

Larry, an angsty Boomer, a florist who becomes North America's leading hedge maze designer.

Larry marries and divorces twice (a car saleswoman-turned-greeting card executive, then a feminist hagiologist), has one child (a future high school track star), insulates his attic, gets a promotion, moves to Chicago, daydreams, starts a business, becomes successful, owns a tuxedo, travels in Europe, has a mid-life crisis, meets other men named Larry, moves to Toronto, dates a scarf-wearing widow, throws a dinner party.

That's everything that happens, yet it spoils nothing. This series of vignettes defies description. The eponymous party makes the whole endeavor worthwhile.

Mohler on Books

Al Mohler isn't a regular on my reading list (to put it mildly), so I'm not quite sure how or where I came across this blog entry on reading a few months back. Apparently, Mohler is a lifelong voracious reader: "I took books to high school athletic events when I played in the band. [Heap coals of scorn and nerdliness here.]" He offers six resonant suggestions for structuring one's reading life, including:

1. Maintain regular reading projects. Mohler describes his own ongoing projects in several categories; I do this, to some extent, and always mean to be more intentional about it. On average, I have something going in some particular subset of "Literature," Theology or Spiritual Practice, and Essays & Criticism.

3. Read all the titles written by some authors. The list of writers deserving of this attention will be exclusive, and not the same for everyone. A few who make the cut for me: Somerset Maugham, C.S. Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robertson Davies, Jane Austen, Eugene Peterson.

5. Allow yourself some fun reading, and learn how to enjoy reading by reading enjoyable books. I can't add an iamb to Dr. Mohler's sentiments:

I like books across the fields of literature, but I really love to read historical biographies and historical works in general. In addition, I really enjoy quality fiction and worthy works of literature. As a boy, I probably discovered my love for reading in these categories of books. I allow some time each day, when possible, to such reading. It doesn't have to be much. Stay in touch with the thrill.

6. Write in your books; mark them up and make them yours. This is a divisive issue among bibliophiles, I haven't yet gained consistency in my own practice. In high school, where we weren't allowed to leave a mark in our Permabind classics, I developed an elaborate but highly effective note-taking system involving post-its and loose leaf paper, the particulars of which I don't clearly recall. Nowadays, Book Darts are my best friends (if you ever want to really confuse the TSA staff, stuff your paperback full of them before getting on a plane). Plenty of marking systems have been proposed by various authors (Steve Leveen of Levenger among them), and I hope to review a few here.

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

"There have been courtier philosophers, lens-grinding philosophers, and even engineer and strategist philosophers; but no philosopher, so far as I know, was a wholesaler." - Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, "Arsenic"

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but there are genre I think I like, that, whenever I actually read them, I remember that I don't (Southern Gothic comes to mind). Likewise, there are genre that I repeatedly forget that I adore. Like scientific memoir.

"Promethius had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture." - "Cerium"

The Periodic Table (1975) is one of several volumes of memoir Primo Levi wrote, but, where the other works focus on the time during and immediately following his internment at Auschwitz, this one describes his life in vignettes related to his chemistry training and career. The chapters are named for and themed around chemical elements (Iron, Mercury, Sulfur) - thus the title. To the extent that chemistry is addressed as such, there's nothing scientifically academic about the work, and, though a reader with no chemistry background might not fully understand some of the activities described, that shouldn't make it inaccessible, as every Levi pulls every detail to serve the humanity of the story.

Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptable, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptable things. - "Cerium"

Certainly, as a quasi-chemist (a chemical engineer, actually, but I have to pass for a chemist occasionally) with a literary bent, I love to get this view of someone like Levi, but the fascination of this perspective goes deeper than shared education. Levi is the object of any number of descriptors: novelist, essayist, critic, resistance fighter, Holocaust survivior. But, and this is what's so fascinating, what was his main occupation, for most of his work days, for most of his life? The trade he chose in his youth to pursue? Chemist. And not a chemist like Levoisier, or Linus Pauling, or Peter Debye, people who discovered groundbreaking phenomena or won Nobel Prizes or got obscure units of measure named for them. Levi was an industrial chemist - mostly, he solved problems in paint formulations when the product wouldn't dry properly.

Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles... - "Potassium"

I find this incredibly inspiring. Modern popular philosophies of fulfilment suggest that actualized existence can only occur when one aligns the maximum possible number of daily hours with the most rarefied calling to which one can attain. In other words, you can get life to work, if only you demand the freedom to live in unreality. It's good to be reminded that ordinary usefulness doesn't preclude greatness.

Now on my cubicle wall: To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you'll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists' Society. - "Nitrogen"

Additional Quotes

On the trade:

• ...all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted with this abomination. - "Chromium"
  
  
• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. - "Nitrogen"
  
  
• I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of [customer service]: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy. - "Uranium"
  
  
• I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine. - "Silver"
  
  
• I also know that, more often mania prevails over common sense, and alongside five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which nobody dares rescind only out of mental laziness, superstition, or morbid fear of complications. - "Silver"

On the war:

• We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins... - "Gold"
  
  
• Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether "Aryan" or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must or could resist Fascism. - "Potassium"
  
  
• During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly... - "Gold"

On rabbits:

• Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. - "Phosphorus"
  
  
• Those rabbits, by order of the commendatore, lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing any other damages, bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. - "Phosphorus"

On humanity:

• ...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. - "Argon"
  
  
• He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. - "Argon"
  
  
• In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. - "Hydrogen"
  
  
• ...we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one's head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise) - "Iron"
  
  
• That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves... - "Iron"
  
  
• Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page. - "Iron"
  

A Few Fun Items

Caught this Guardian blog about authors and their pet cats. But more notable is this video linked by a commenter. As if I needed more reason to like Alexander McCall Smith...he has a Siamese cat.



This one is lifted straight from Stefanie yesterday, but it's amazingly fun. A little web quiz to help you find your own, personal Dewey Decimal class. After trying various permutations of my real and false names, this was my recurrent result:

Mella DP's Dewey Decimal Section:

801 Philosophy & theory



Class:
800 Literature


Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.



What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Variations included 211 - Concepts of God, 168 - Argument & Persuasion, and 527 - Biochemistry. I guess they all work kinda.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

This book caught my eye when it was first released - with that title, how could it not - but whenever I noticed it come up in discussion (mostly online), it seemed to be getting dipolar reviews. I was still curious, but didn't act to indulge that curiosity until receiving the recommendation of a friend - not a gushing, frenetic recommendation, but a hint that there might be a good deal in this book that I'd personally find entertaining. Entertaining it was, but flawed.

Blue van Meer is a ludicrously precocious high school senior who has spent her life moving around the country as her father, a political science professor with an interest in revolutionaries, bounced from one semester-long gig at a third-rate university to the next. Her father is a good-natured narcissist, affectionate, but with Pygmalionesque tendencies where his daughter is concerned - he spends dinner conversations, car rides, and trips to Wal-Mart grooming his daughter into an intellectual elitist worthy of his beloved Harvard (and ready to blow her academic competition in each new town out of the water).

The van Meers settle in North Carolina for Blue's senior year, and she falls in with a group of friends ring-led by Hannah Schneider, a part-time teacher at their school with a house full of rescued animals, a penchant for worn clothing, and a mysterious past. The first half or more of the book is devoted to developing this group of relationships by means of a series of quirky coming-of-age vignettes. My favorite: when Blue's new friends coach her on underage bar hopping, and giver her the identity of a college sophomore studying Chemical Engineering, and the advice, "Always say you're seriously into engineering. People don't know what it is, and they won't ask, because it sounds mind-numbing."

The novel changes abruptly with a turn of plot that's foretold in the first pages - Hannah takes the students on a spring camping trip and is found dead the first night. Blue spends the remaining chapters recovering from the trauma and trying to solve the mystery of Hannah's death - including what her father might know about it.

The one thing that can definitely be said for this book is that Blue has an original voice. "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated," Blue's father instructed her, and throughout her narrative, Blue clings devotedly to this rule (see Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl, 2006, p. 4). Like that. So the novel is copiously annotated with references real and invented. I listened to the book on audio, and didn't find these constant interruptions troublesome, but I suspect it would have been distracting on the page, since there were so many that some pages must have had a dozen notes. I know some have read this as a pretentious display, and I can understand that impression, but I couldn't help but imagine that it must have been fun doing the research. Still, the technique was probably indulged beyond the reader's comfort. Ditto the use of simile - one can only take so much of a single literary device.

More problematic is the lack of cohesiveness. It's not just the plot that twists with Hannah's death, it's the entire narrative. If the mystery was meant to be the tension point of the book, it's weakly resolved, and the first section was overdone - the scene could have been set with far less bulk and lost little of its character. And the second half I can only describe as unnecessarily weird. If I encountered such an extreme change in texture in an older book, I'd be researching the author to find out whether he'd undergone a change in neurological condition in the middle of writing the first draft. That's not to say the second half is bad, or even worse than the first, but it's strange to feel disoriented in the middle of something that's so unusual to begin with.

Special Topics is absolutely filled with fun, quirky (if a little self-indulgent) elements that I enjoyed, but the structure of the novel as a whole was confused. I found myself easily imagining Pessl's style working in a short format - a short story version of Catcher in the Rye meets Sophie's World meets Men and Cartoons. The issues with this book shouldn't be excused for being the work of a young novelist, but, in my view, they aren't enough to make it uninteresting.

Sounds Intriguing #2

Lately noted:

Via The Millions: The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbary. Crabby female concierge is a closet autodidact. Translated from the French.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England - Brock Clarke. Apparently the arson was an accident...?

Spotted in the Library's New Books section: Sacramental Life - Spiritual Formation through the Book of Common Prayer - David A. DeSilva. Liturgical sympathies are (and have been) on the rise in unexpected circles, which fascinates me.

Via Sam: The works of Katherine Anne Porter.

Via Lots of Places: All The Sad Young Literary Men - Keith Gessen. Allegedly sympathetic but not maudlin account of the post-undergrad intellectual deflation.

Found in a several-months old email to myself; I clearly cut-and-pasted it from somewhere, but I've no idea where or why:
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A Great Idea at the Time - Alex Beam. A comic critical expose' of the mid-century Great Books movement and its eminent champion, Mortimer Adler.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

A long-time favorite that I wanted to re-read before seeing the film version recently released in somewhat narrow circulation. I'd forgotten quite how dismal the ending is, and afterward found myself too drained to consume narrative in any form for two days.

The movie was well done and enjoyable, incidentally. Emma Thomson as the mother was SCARY. The thing about adapting this particular story - Waugh wrote these characters with highly nuanced motivations, which would have required unusual genius - or a very, very long film - to portray on screen, so there were some plot shortcuts, the upside of which is that I now know exactly how many different sorts of human subtlety can be substituted by a love triangle (eleven, by my count). I also suspect it caught by surprise any number of the audience who had read the book without realizing how much of it was about homosexuality (don't laugh, you know it happens). All said, though, it still gets two thumbs up. And at least half a thumb is all for Patrick Malahide as the elder Mr. Ryder.

Notable quotes:

Charles's Father: I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you. (p. 25)

Cousin Jasper: Beware of the Anglo-Catholics - they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. (p. 26)

Father Phipps, on hair cutting: Nuns do it. (p. 37)

...that unmistakable English church-going pace, which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering. (p. 59)

Cordelia: Is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good? (p. 92)

Sebastian: It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war. (p. 101)

Lady Marchmain: Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. ... but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. (p. 126)

Lady Marchmain: It's very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. (p. 127)

...the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. "There's something chemical between them" was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in new form. (p. 129)

Charles, on Sebastian: He's ashamed of being unhappy. (p. 136)

Julia, on Sebastian: I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd behave like anybody else. (p.161)

Charles: D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem like quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense. (p. 164)

To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life. (p. 181)

Cordelia: She was saintly, but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. (p. 221)

I regarded men as something less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

Anthony: Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. (p. 273)

Charles: Why is it that love makes me hate the world? (p. 276)

Julia: Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful. (p. 287)

Cara: His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word. (p. 318)

Julia: ...the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. (p. 340)

Possession - A.S. Byatt

One line review: That must have been a lot of work.

Notable Quotes:

We are a Faustian generation, my dear - we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know. (p. 234)

The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality - Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. Sometimes I wish I had embarked on geology myself. (p. 242)

And then, really, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness. ... Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things. (p. 276)

At some point in their history their self-value changed into - what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. (p. 277)

So the human imagination mixes and adapts its current preoccupations may ingredients into new wholes. (p. 278)

At my life, the way it is - what I really want is to - to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. (p. 290)

More Abiblia

I've been too quiet here. Too quiet for my own satisfaction. I want to be here - but for some reason I'm blank on putting thoughts on paper (er, silicon?).

I'm in the midst of another season of "I just can't finish ANYTHING I start reading." I suspect there's some more broadly-based discontent at work; whatever it is it's agitating.

And what I do finish I'm finding it hard to write about, despite the fact that that’s the entire point of bothering to blog. It depends on what I’m reading. What more is there to say about a classic like Three Men in a Boat (let alone, The Great Gatsby)? Or about a highly regarded and broadly exposed contemporary bestseller like The Time Traveler’s Wife (let alone, Possession)? And it isn’t only a prideful resistance to exposing my own banal reflections to scrutiny that keeps me quiet. It’s also my natural gravitation to the universal, the contextual, the 30,000-foot perspective, rather than the personal, the specific, the immediate. And the place of The Great Gatsby in the universe seems like well-covered ground, even if it were a topic I were better qualified to meaningfully discuss.

Then there are the times when I can't seem to muster the energy to mold my thoughts into cohesive prose - though another reason for being here is to force myself to do exactly that.

Though I know these reservations have merit, they hold me back from doing what I’ve set out to do. Excess noise might be the path to value. I just have to find a more inspiring track to ride for a while. I've got a few ideas.

Page 69

Recently found on the blog of the Guardian book section, this post about the suggestion that you can tell whether or not you'll like a novel by whether or not you like page 69. I pulled five titles off my shelf to try it out.

1. The Moon And Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham

Page 69 starts in the middle of a conversation, and the two speakers are not named. But the first line of dialog is, “Do you mean to say you didn’t leave your wife for another woman?” Well, well. The gist of the rest of it is that no, he didn’t leave her for another woman, he left her because he wanted to become a painter in his middle age. Apparently, he’s been taking art classes in the evening, and telling his wife he was out playing cards. This is all highly intriguing. All sorts of questions present themselves, not least of which, why does he have to leave his wife in order to paint? Page 69 is a winner.

2. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

I really need to reread this, because I don’t remember this scene at all. It seems to be a description of the beginning of a dinner party hosted by the narrator’s father; he’s speaking to one of his guests about the scandal of having relatives in business. All in all, the effect is less beguiling than in the Maugham.

3. Coming Up for Air – George Orwell

A long paragraph reminiscing about school days. It would come across as hopelessly conventional if one didn’t know that it couldn’t be, on the basis of being Orwell.

4. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz

Reads the way you expect Graeco-Roman historical narrative to read. The scene depicted, as best I can tell, is a chariot-equivalent of a drive by shooting, with a kidnapping of a pretty girl as bonus. There’s an implication that some of the people involved are Christians, but I can’t tell which ones.

5. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Raskolnikov is in a tavern and overhears two young men talking about whether or not they want to kill the hateful old woman that he himself has been considering doing away with. Then he goes home and sits in the dark. A compelling hook, if one doesn’t know the plot.

Conclusion: I guess page 69 is as good as any other...

Sounds Intriguing #1

I'm experimenting with better ways of keeping track of my to-read list - or, more accurately, my list of new (or not-so-new) titles that have lately come to my attention (or found a new reason to intrigue me). So I think I'll try periodically recording them here.

• Via NPR: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out - Mo Yan
• Via NPR and Sam of BookChase: Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway - Joyce Carol Oates
• Via NYT Sunday Book Review: Personal Days - Ed Park
• And the thematically related: Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
• Also via NYT: Dear American Airlines - Jonathan Miles
• Via Stefanie of So Many Books: Goldberg: Variations - Gabriel Josipovici
• Also: The Secret of Lost Things - Sheridan Hay
• Also (one that I forgot about the first time around): The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
  
• Also (because Stefanie recommends so compellingly): Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
• Via I don't know: How I Became Stupid - Martin Page

Housekeeping and the Literary Art

A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock

Confession: I'm quite bad at cleaning. If you read my other blog, you may have gathered as much. If I were to pursue a career in the arts and needed to support myself with a day job, I'd do much better as, say, a pet sitter, or a high school calculus tutor.

Not so novelist Nancy Peacock, who, even after publication of two books continued her work as independent cleaning lady to make ends meet. In this quirky memoir, Peacock reflects on the intersection of life as housekeeper and author. I came away with great respect for her tenacity - in addition to the frustrations inherent to any service job (please, flush the toilet before the cleaning lady comes) and the uncertainties of a writing career (how many rejection letters can I collect this week?), she fought the discouragement of her literary peers' discomfort with her circumstances and lack of formal education, and the feedback of elderly clients who enthusiastically informed her that her books weren't nearly as good as Bridget Jones' Diary.

Still, she points out the advantages of her situation. A writer benefits from time alone, but away from the page; manual distraction is healthy for the narrative; you can learn a lot of useful stuff in other people's houses. Between the anecdotes and reflections contained in the book's essays and the interviews and advice from the author at the end, I imagine this book could be an encouragement to the aspiring writer who's willing to face reality - Peacock is honest about the struggles and disappointments of her literary career thus far without descending into languid cynicism. And it's that last part that I most respect these days, cynic though I am myself.

Incidentally, I've never read either of Peacock's novels, and after finishing this book checked for them at my local bookstores (I won't suggest this was the aim, since I just finished praising lack of cynicism), but didn't find them anywhere. I'm not sure they sound like quite my thing, but I'm curious, and I'll keep an eye out.

Do you hate it? I hate it.

Sam at Book Chase pointed out this Times (of London) article in which various critics reveal the targets of their personal literary loathing - and the occasional leatherbound Waterloo. Predictably, there are a few common offenders: Crime and Punishment, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses; various works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand.

It's a fun subject to discuss with friends. I know that Kit, my college roommate, did grave battle with Moby Dick; My Sister the Blond Artist once greatly objected to my recommendation to The Inn at Lake Divine.

In some respects, "What's the worst book?" is a more easily digested question than, "What's the best book?" because, in context and among similarly-minded people, it's readily understood to be shorthand for, "What book gave you the worst reading experience?" and for some reason that's a fairly comfortable flavor of subjectivity to indulge. Though I haven't encountered a great abundance of books that I truly hate, there are a few I can place on the spectrum from ambivalence to repulsion.

• Though I don't hate it - I actually quite like the story itself - The Lord of the Rings struggled weakly to maintain my interest, as do most works in the same general class of fantasy. This would probably surprise most of the people close to me - My Sister the Blond Artist is a particular Tolkien fan, and my parents like fantasy generally, as do most of my closest friends (you can't help but keep questionable company in engineering school - though my parents are a librarian and minister, so it's not just the geek factor). The genre leaves me cold. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, gives an evocative account of being romanced by "the north," as he classed all the Norse-inspired imagery that frames up his own and Tolkien's fantasy. It's not an experience I've shared. The earthiness, the jaggedness, the savagery implied, all abraid, rather than excite, my own sensitivities.
  
  
• Steinbeck is a turnoff, and after writing the above, I think the reason for this is similar to my response to fantasy. Which sounds terribly odd, since I know few authors less fantastic. But it's the horrible bleakness, in combination with the Western and Country factors with which I find it hard to make a connection. It's not that I only like books in which pleasant things happen to happy people, as described by refined and delicate narrators - far, far from it. It's just that there's a certain type of terrestrialism that causes me so much anxiety, at a fundamental level, that it becomes to hard to appreciate the art that carries it, because it's too difficult to consume a novel-sized serving. If I'm honest with myself, this is probably also why I've never taken to Southern Gothic as much as I would like. Sometimes, I think I must be the reincarnation of a supporting character from a better Edith Wharton novel.
  
  
• I've also managed to source endless ambiguous dissatisfaction from the works of Dickens. Taken with the above, confessing this does nothing to improve my sympathetic image. But: corn should be sold by production volume. Fiction, like software, should not.
  
  
• The Catcher in the Rye is an easy target. As a favorite book, Catcher ranks right between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road on the "refuse a second date, and no goodnight kiss, either" scale. Unfortunately, it's also a durable member of the secondary education canon, at least in the U.S. I moved a lot growing up, so with changing schools and differences in local curricula, I actually had to complete coursework on Catcher several times. I haven't totally forgiven the universe for that. For an assignment in the eleventh grade, I did write a rather amazing satire of it that earned me loads of unsolicited extra credit. I'm still insanely proud of that. But it doesn't change the fact that Holden is a phony.
  
  
• Tender is the Night has plenty of devotees. Hemingway. Faulkner. Doppleganger. It drives me crazy. Yes, the plot is disturbing - a psychiatrist marries a madwoman in order to catalyze their mutual self-destruction. But my problem was that I didn't understand the book, in a very particular sense of the phrase. I recall re-reading the same paragraphs, over and over again, trying desperately to figure out what the component sentences had to do with one another. I believe myself to be a person of at least average intelligence, so I don't know what to think about that. But I don't like it. I love Gatsby; I fanatically adore every piece of Fitzgerald's short fiction I've ever read; I enjoyed his other novels in a nondescript way. But Tender does something unpleasant to my universe.
  
  
• There is exactly one book that I hate so extremely, so viscerally, so passionately, that I feel an immediate physiological change in myself whenever I see the cover. My remarks about it will be brief, since my reaction to the very thought of it is so overwhelming and involuntary that I absolutely cannot discuss it rationally. In melodramatic moments, I want to retire early and dedicate my life to destroying every copy in print with my bare hands. It's Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. If you're not familiar, the entire volume consists of a self-indulgent jeremiad delivered by the title character, who is both an ecoterrorist and a talking gorilla. Yes. Don't ask me how this happened, but I once found myself stuck on a transcontinental flight with this book as my only reading material. Never before or since have I been tempted to pray for an act of international terrorism to be performed in my presence. One word: Blech!
  

So, I want to know: who's on your list of published enemies?

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 2

My devotion to the audiobook is well documented here. Without them, I doubt I ever would have managed to clean my last apartment, and I'm sure my previous commute would have driven me to insanity years earlier. The selection available in public libraries, particularly offerings on CD (versus cassette), has exploded in the last five or six years. Another brilliant advance is that many public libraries now have audiobooks available for internet download, generally through contract with a third party. Usage rights vary, but this is a really, really great thing.

I've been leaning heavily on the audiobook front lately, since I've been working on two very tedious projects - that is, work projects that involve tedious busy-type work but which are too technically involved to delegate to anyone cheaper. Through trial and error, I've discovered that boring-but-brainy work is most compatible with genre mysteries and children's fiction - amusing and undemanding fare. The former often come in series, of course, so it's not hard to find something acceptable; I have a standing list of recommendations for the latter from my mother, the children's librarian. Here's some of the selection that's been getting me through spreadsheet purgatory this month:

Because of Winn Dixie (Kate DiCamillo): From now on, I'm referring to my dad as "the Preacher." And I'll name my next dog Safeway.

Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry): Poor kid. I wouldn't have liked it if my parents had had another kid when I was ten, either.

Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (E.L. Konigsburg): Not that memorable. It involved a nursing home, a professional organizer, an expensive home theater system, and a ten-year-old with a far-fetched grasp of contemporary philosophy.

Wedding Planner's Daughter (Colleen Paratore): set on Cape Cod, so kind of nostalgic.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (Lawrence Block): not too terribly forgettable. I don't think I've read very many other books actually set in the 1970's. At least, I can't remember any.

Death of a Charming Man (M.C. Beaton): Part of a very redundant series set in the Scottish highlands.

The Jackal's Head (Elizabeth Peters): I need to learn not to bother with Peters books that aren't the Amelia Peabody series.