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.

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 1

My reading concentration has been feeble lately, for one reason and another. I've been flitting from book to book, finishing little or nothing; unable to engage the unfamiliar, re-reading instead; collapsing into essay collections. The congregation on my nightstand is eclectic:

• Orwell: A Biography - a children's volume, shelved in the adult section of the library. I've always had a mild brain crush on this guy.
  
  
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - I always thought this was the one Fitzgerald novel I didn't loathe - I adore his short fiction - but I don't think I'm in the right mood at all for that sort of re-read.
  
  
• Girl Meets God (Lauren Winner) - I love this woman. I love any book that includes observations like, "There are no great movies about Jewish trees."
  
  
• At The Corner of East and Now (Frederica Mathewes-Green) - I love this woman, too. The first chapter includes the stories of her hippie-Hindu wedding and, many years and life turns later, of her husband, now an Orthodox priest, driving to a north Virginia feed store, dressed in his cassock, to buy a horse trough in which to perform immersion baptisms.
  
  
• Edgar Allen Poe: Collected Stories
  
  
• Please Understand Me (Kiersey) - for a review inspired by this conversation, of course.
  
  
• Understanding the Enneagram (Riso and Hudson) - ditto.
  
  
• The Young Learner's Bible Storybook - Something I often give at baby showers. The only Bible storybook I know of that includes the story of Jeremiah in the well. Actually, it's a very cool book - really an educational activity book, using very well told Bible stories as carriers for exercises in counting and colors. But I don't know why there's a copy by my bed.
  
  
• Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) - I finished this last year. I should put it away.
  
  
• The World of Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse) - Is there anything to be said about Wodehouse?
  
  
• In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) - I haven't even started it, but it's been sitting there for a long time.
  
  
• How to Pray (R.A. Torrey) - I promise, I didn't forget how.
  
  
• Collected Stories of Arthur Miller -an impulse purchase. Also a happy shade of yellow.
  
  
• The Curtain - An Essay in Seven Parts (Milan Kundera) - recruited to be carried downtown recently, almost exclusively on the basis of its portability. But Kundera is another brain crush candidate.

More later.

Three by Austen

I'm way, way behind in posting Decades Challenge reviews, though only slightly behind in reading - for a while I was only in the mood for essays, and then I got sidetracked re-reading McCall Smith's von Igelfeld stories (highly recommended). Even with that, I've got plenty of other reviews to catch up on, so I better get started.

The first piece I chose for the Decades Challenge was Austen's Lady Susan, written around 1795, though not published until 1871 (by her nephew, with his memoirs of Austen and several other unpublished pieces). Also published in the same volume are two unfinished works, The Watsons (c. 1804), and Sanditon (c. 1816). Taken together, and with Margaret Drabble's insightful introduction, the three short pieces present a ready comparison of Austen's work at the beginning, middle and end of her career.

Lady Susan. Austen apparently never sought to publish Lady Susan during her lifetime, but clearly liked the piece well enough to finish and edit it. It's an epistolary novella, with a title character who's a bad lady indeed. In fact, the character of Lady Susan is probably what most sets this piece apart from Austen's other work. In her six novels, Austen certainly depicts wicked characters, and describes evil deeds (see George Wickham, John Willoughby, Henry Crawford), but never directly portrays genuine vice; Lady Susan's character, by contrast, is represented quite blatantly in her own correspondence. So the social criticism here is sharp, not subtle, as in Austen's later works - but the effect is so distinct that it reads as a wholly different technique that Austen may consciously have abandoned, rather than an immature version of her later voice.

Had this piece been worked up into a full-length novel, I doubt it would be regarded as Austen's best - the plot is too melodramatic - but certainly it would hold its own against the others.

The Watsons. Of the three pieces, The Watsons most resembles Austen's better-known works. It is generally believed that Austen simply abandoned the work when her father died in 1805, and the condition of the prose is rudimentary, with vague outlines, in places, of action and dialog. But the country-house setting and society, as well as the voicing, pace, characterization, and even some of the plot, are reminiscent of Emma and Mansfield Park.

The story opens with Emma Watson (clearly, Austen didn't encounter a great variety of names in the society of her too-brief life) returning to her family home after being raised by a wealthier relation. She's immediately whisked away to a country ball in the company of beneficent neighbors, and falls in with the party of the local Great Family, among whom are multiple potential suitors of varying moral fiber. Utterly conventional Austen, yes, but we're talking 40 pages of first-draft. The characters show promise, and it would have been interesting to see what she'd done with them.

Sanditon was the manuscript on Austen's desk (figuratively) when she died in 1817, and its rough form is similar to that of The Watsons. It resembles Persuasion primarily in its acknowledgment of a changing world, and the mortality (gasp) even of Regency conventions. Rather than an established town around the ancient estate of a family of long standing, Sanditon is an emerging resort town of the sort the Victorians would come to love. There Austen places an ambitious mix of characters - the progressive, garrulous Parkers, oldblood Lady Denham, new money from West Indian estates, and...tourists. Clearly, Austen, for all her seclusion, narrow society, and distractions of failing health, saw the world changing. I wish she'd been around a bit longer to let us know more clearly what she thought of it all.

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

I made reference to this Michael Dirda quote in my last post, and yesterday I lived it when I finished Bel Canto. If you've read it, you know that the ending, though not a surprise, comes down forcefully. Battered is exactly how I feel, and I can't quite bring myself back to fiction right now, even stuff I've already got in progress.

Synopsis: In a bid to attract industrial investment, a nameless South American country hosts a 53rd birthday party for one Mr. Hosokawa, Japanese opera afficionado and president of a Sony-doppleganger. To persuade him to accept the invitation, they invite his favorite soprano to perform. At the end of her performance, a troupe of terrorists emerges from the HVAC system to kidnap the host country's president. Unfortunately, the president had skipped the party to watch his favorite soap opera, so the terrorists find themselves with a few hundred surprise international hostages of the slightly- to moderately-powerful variety.

Any reader who wasn't born yesterday knows that untenable hostage situations just don't end well. And it's the dread birthed by this knowledge, in constant contrast with the transcendence of beauty that permeates the story, that tears at the soul.

Book by Book - Michael Dirda

Few have lived life more fully in the company of books than longtime critic Michael Dirda. In this book he takes pause and reflects on the lessons learned from a lifetime of reading "to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed and created by the great minds of the past and present."

Dirda looks back into his internal library for insights on learning, work, leisure, love, family and spirit. His ability to connect ideas and draw together themes between widely differing writings and writers is a testament to his breadth of experience and literary intake. The book is full of quotations, allusions, and recommendations.

Dirda is the kind of critic I aspire to be, and often find myself reading his work almost devotionally. I'm struggling to create a synopsis of this one, and want to get my own copy and live with this book a bit more, but here are some excerpts.

xiv - Great fiction, in particular, eschews the reductionist and obviously didactic, instead reveling in the complication, pointing out options, at most revealing the consequences of one course over another. Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it.

24 – An unfulfilled vocation drains the color form a man’s entire existence. – Honore de Balzac

37 – The practice of “reviewing” has nothing to do with the art of criticism. – Henry James.

54 – The poet Ezra Pound, interred at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the insane, once told the critic Hugh Kenner, “Sometimes the guards come to me, for a piece of verse to give their sweethearts.” “And do you write it?” asked Kenner. “Oh, yes,” answered Pound.

117 – (On cheap genre fiction): …the kind of prose only an engineer could love.

120 – As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

127 – The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off.

131 – Originality does not consist in saying what no one else has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. – Leslie Stephen

135 – Philosophy, wrote G.K. Chesterton, “is not the concern of those who pas through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?

98 - To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellencies will ever begin to compensate for the failure of this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity. – C.S. Lewis

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke

It took me a few tries to get through this. I don't ordinarily give a piece of contemporary fiction so many chances, even on audio, and I think I only did so with this one because the blogosphere has been resonant with vague enthrallment over it for the last several years, I'd heard the ending was to die for, and the story was in fact interesting enough. It was still far longer than it needed to be - forgivable once you plow through it, but likely to lose a lot of readers along the way.

How to describe it? Magic, mystery, mysticism, manipulation, madness, secrecy, suspense, surprise, jealousy, power, love, war - all in a tasty candy coating. And I mean that in the best possible way.

The ending was well done. Thought the actual events of the story become increasingly mystical and frenetic, the narrative becomes more and more measured, deliberate, disciplined. The final pages leave you wanting more - which is interesting, when most of the book's significant bulk leaves you wishing for a bit less.

The footnotes are a delight - but moving Brussels to Nebraska was sheer brilliance.

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

The first time I visited Chicago, I indulged my inner engineer by ending my trip with a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry. It's a science museum with a technology, rather than a natural history, focus, housed in a massive building on the south side. It has a German U-boat in a corner of the basement, a Boeing-727 attached to the balcony, and exhibits including a simulated tour of an entire Carrier Battle Group, a three-story sculptural interpretation of the periodic table, a technically sophisticated presentation of environmental science and technology, and, rather incongruously, a doll house.

The building itself is the last standing remnant of one of the most spectacular events of Chicago's past, the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition - the World's Fair - an event designed to assert America's place in the world, and Chicago's place in America.

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City builds his story of "the fair that changed America," on the thesis that only Gilded-Age Chicago had the combination of gumption, civic pride and business acumen to create the glittering, six-month-long festival which would attract Americans from east to west and European royalty alike, introduce the world to everything from the Ferris wheel to the incandescent light bulb to shredded wheat, and inspire lands of fantasy from Baum's Oz to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom.

Larson's story centers on Daniel Burnham, the fair's director. Burnham's influence as an architect is evident in Chicago's distinctive aesthetic to the present day, but in 1893 and preceding years, his life consisted of the near-impossible task of imagining, designing, and constructing, and overseeing the fair. The stakes were high - unless the fair easily outshone the 1878 Paris Expo, it would be considered a failure, and an embarrassment to the city and the country. Among Burnham's challenges: the bureaucracies of Chicago's business and political communities; a years-too-short construction schedule; budget constraints, exacerbated by a national recession; brutal Chicago winters; the burgeoning labor movement; and the egos of more than a dozen of America's greatest architects and designers, each with a hand in the fair's execution.

Burnham's fair covered 600 acres on the shore of Lake Michigan with an idealized city - the White City of Larson's title - of promenades, lagoons, gardens, fountains, and 200 Beaux arts buildings housing exhibits of culture and technology from around the world. Larson's talents of description are considerable, as the reader's most lasting impressions by far are of the opulence and immensity of the display. It's sometimes surprising how evocative prose of such precision can be. This passage imagines one visitor's first steps inside the massive Manufacturers and Liberal Arts building, the fair's main exhibit space:

A blue haze of human breath and dust blurred the intricate bracing of the ceiling 246 feet above. Halfway to the ceiling, seemingly in midair, were five gigantic electric chandeliers, the largest ever built, each seventy-five feet in diameter and generating 828,000 candlepower. Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of "gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions," according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World's Columbian Exposition. At the center stood a clock tower, the tallest of the interior structures, rising to a height of 120 feet. Its self-winding clock told the time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, from a face seven feet in diameter. As tall as the tower was, the ceiling was yet another 126 feet above. (p. 266)

Yet, Larson is sensible to the fact that the glories of the White City stood in contrast to the desperation of the "black city," the oppressive, industrial gloom that was the factories, stockyards, and tenements of surrounding Chicago. Interlaced with the story of Burnham's quest and triumph is the story of H. H. Holmes (the "Devil"), a psychopathic serial killer for whom industrial-era Chicago, with its constant influx of friendless farm girls seeking work, provided an endless supply of victims who would never be missed.

The pleasure of this book lies in its intricate detail and deliberate pacing, both direct testimonies to Larson's impressive and extensive research, and his talent for reconstructing a story. I was truly fascinated.

Much more information about the book, the Fair, Burnham, Holmes and Larson is available on the publisher's website. Additional information and images are available from the Illinois Institute of Technology Digital History Collection. Definitely check out the photos of the Fair - there's nothing like it.

The Know-It-All - A.J. Jacobs

This was a piece of fun I'd been putting off for a long time. In case you missed it, A.J. Jacobs, worried that the frivolity and pop culture-focus of his New York life (and of his job at Esquire) had placed him on a path of ever-increasing stupidity, spent 2002 reading cover-to-cover through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half-almanac, half-confessional memoir, this book records Jacobs's education and epiphanies, interlaced with his year's worth of office antics, family gatherings, and seemingly fruitless attempts to conceive a child with his wife, Julie. Along the way, he also mingles at a Mensa conference, interviews Alex Trebek, takes a speed-reading seminar, and wonders whether any of this was a good idea in the first place. Predictably, his daily hours of reading begin to color the rest of his life:

Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as "the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from." Huh. That's a strange concept, I think to myself. I've never even heard of it.

The reason I've never heard of Dundatree is that...I dreamed it. I read so much that it's invaded my sleep. I can't escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I'm making up my own facts, which I'm worried I'll confuse with actual facts. (p. 66)

Although it took me a few years to get around to reading this, the concept appealed to me the first time I heard about it. Reading the encyclopedia is the sort of thing I would do. I haven't done it, naturally, but as a child I could spend a few hours at a time perusing a volume or two of the (1987?) World Book. Another thing I had in common with Jacobs - I'm sure I spent a good portion of my childhood with an over-inflated concept of my own intelligence. (Actually, it didn't start out that way. For the longest time, I thought that breezing through school with perfect marks without cracking a book was supposed to be the norm, and that I just had the unusual luck of being surrounded by imbeciles. Then I figured it out. And relished it. A lot.) Still, a good part of me would like nothing better than actually to be smarter than I ever imagined myself to be.

A few more telling (and bookish) excerpts:

• "The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long." (p. 26)
  
  
• "Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes." (p. 55)
  
  
• "I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as a snack." (p. 89)
  
  
• "I like the story of how Marie de Gournay - a French intellectual at the time - fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book." (p. 210)
  
  
• "I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere." (p. 334)
  

2007 Wrap-Up

Final Count for 2007: 54

• The Good Husband of Zebra Drive - Alexander McCall Smith
• Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Church in the Marketplace - George Carey
• I Like You - Hospitality Under the Influence - Amy Sedaris
• Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff
• Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
• First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde
• The View From Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg
• The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers - Lilian Jackson Braun
• Men and Cartoons - Jonathan Lethem
• Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
• Portrait in Sepia - Isabel Allende
• Summerland - Michael Chabon
• A Bell for Adano - John Hersey
• Matilda - Roald Dahl
• Wicked - Gregory Maguire
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Howard's End - E.M. Forster
• On Beauty - Zadie Smith
• The Top Ten - ed. J. Peder Zane
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville
• The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket
• Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson
• The Labors of Hercules - Agatha Christie
• The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
• Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
• The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
• Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera
• The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
• Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
• Funny In Farsi - Firoozeh Dumas
• Remarkable Reads; 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading - J. Peder Zane, ed.
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman
• The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
• Carry On, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Fourth Bear - Jasper Fforde
• Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
• The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life - Steve Leveen
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
• Selected Early Stories - John Updike
• Death of a Snob - M.C. Beaton
• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days - Chris Baty
• Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipman
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman
• The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde
• Eldest - Christopher Paolini
• Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
• The Last Gentleman - Walker Percy

Decades Challenge

My whole reason for being here is to boost my reading life with some added structure, and to that end, I've decided to participate in some reading challenges this year. 3M's Decades Challenge was a natural first choice. You can read all about it at the challenge site, but here's my proposed list (subject to change):

• 1991: Possession - A.S. Byatt
• 1989: A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
• 1975: A Month of Sundays - John Updike
• 1964: In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
• 1955: A Gift from the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• 1947: Galileo (American Version) - Bertolt Brecht
• 1938: Our Town - Thornton Wilder
• 1925: The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
• 1915: Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
• 1906: The Man of Property - John Galsworthy
• 1891: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
• 1881: Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
  
• 1875: The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
  
• 1866: Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 1859: A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• 1842: Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
• 1839: The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
• 1827: Vivian Grey - Benjamin Disraeli
  
• 1818: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley
• 1795: Lady Susan - Jane Austen
• Others TBD
  

Can the fishes see it's snowing?

I'm fairly certain that I was never a child. I feel more convinced of that when I read A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wonder, magic - they seem foreign to me, rather than nostalgic. I don't regret it - I don't pine for the youth I didn't live - but I do feel the gap in my own experience, as though I lack a great chunk of the vocabulary of human life.

My mother says I sprung from the womb aged 40. That would imply that I'm still growing into my soul. That's an odd thought.

I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tram car.
- Dylan Thomas, on Christmas Afternoon

I'm collecting favorite Christmas stories, essays, and texts. My list is short so far, but in addition to Wales it includes

• "Xmas and Christmas - A Lost Chapter from Herodotus" by C.S. Lewis. Published in God in the Dock, though I'm not certain of the original source. A classical anthropological expose on the 50-day Exmas Rush.
• "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris, in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. A cleaner, more joyous, alternative to the (nonetheless hillarious) Santaland Diaries. Listening to the author's reading of this is one of my own personal holiday traditions.
  

Always open to more suggestions to add to the collection.

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

"I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate, she said to herself. Not at my stage of life. I just cannot."

Penance

Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned.

I have been curing too much, and reading too little.

I'm working on a resolution to this conflict. In the meantime, my penance: identify and share ten new (possibly) literary quotations.

1. I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves. - Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947
   
   
2. Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein
   
   
3. By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. - G.K. Chesterton
   
   
4. I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. - H.L. Mencken
   
   
5. All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   
   
6. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
   
   
7. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann
   
   
8. Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer. - Brian May
   
   
9. One cannot review a bad book without showing off. - W. H. Auden
   
   
10. All movements go too far. - Bertrand Russell