A Meme I Got Somewhere

Happy Friday. This was (and is) a little SciFi-centric, but I edited out the parts that would only apply to die-hard space heads. Play if you want. (Image courtesy the Carol Stream Public Library Reading Club, which I now wish I could join.)

Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror?
Science Fiction, though I don't read all that much. The other two do nothing for me.

Hardback or Trade Paperback or Mass Market Paperback?
Depends. Usually hardback or trade paperback - mass market are often harder to read due to size and don't look as good.

Heinlein or Asimov?
Everything considered together, Asimov is doubtless the better writer, but there are things I personally prefer about Heinlein.

Amazon or Brick and Mortar?
Both? Though often public library book sales and used bookstores.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?
Borders is closer, so I'm there more often. Accordingly, I can't tell whether the advantages I see at B&N are real, or if they're just more evident because I'm so much more used to Borders.

Hitchhiker or Discworld?
Ooh... that's hard. Discworld goes on forever, and it's been ages since I had any. On the other hand, I thought Hitchiker went way downhill after The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Bookmark or Dogear?
Bookmark - the other is for slobs.

Alphabetize by author Alphabetize by title or random?
Alphabetize by author's last name, except where topical organization makes more sense.

Keep, Throw Away or Sell?
Throw away? Keep, Sell, or Give Away, depending on what it is.

Keep dustjacket or toss it?
Keep. People do otherwise?

Read with dustjacket or remove it?
Keep it on - I usually use the flaps for bookmarks, unless the book is remarkably thick.

Short story or novel?
Novels far more often - though like many readers, I have a passive sort of desire to build my taste for the short story.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Potter. I read one of the other, and it was just too frustrating!

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
Often when tired, because I'm tired enough that I'm no longer comprehending. Ideally, though, at chapter breaks.

"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"?
???

Buy or Borrow?
Er, yes?

Buying choice: Book Reviews, Recommendation or Browse?
All of the above! Book blogs, book stores, NPR reviews, print reviews, personal recommendations (though not from everyone...)

Lewis or Tolkien?
Lewis. Love the space trilogy.

Hard SF or Space Opera?
Eh, depends. Though "Space Opera" always makes me think of Scientology.

Collection (short stories by the same author) or Anthology (short stories by different authors)?
More often anthology, I think, though it's not necessarily intentional.

Tidy ending or Cliffhanger?

Depends - is the sequel out yet? (Again, thinking of L. Ron Hubbard...)

Morning reading, Afternoon reading or Nighttime reading?
Ideally, all of the above, but I work in the mornings and afternoons.

Standalone or Series?
Standalone, usually. I think this is a question for people who read a lot of genre stuff - I've certainly read plenty of "series" that are long since completed, but rarely anything ongoing unless you count McCall Smith.

New or used?
Often used - there's more adventure in the acquisition.

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
Tough one - maybe I should go looking for this book. The closest I think I can come is Agatha Christie's They Came to Baghdad.

Top X favorite books read last year? (Where X is 5 or less)

Let's limit this to fiction, in no particular order.

1. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
2. Larry's Party - Carol Shields
3. Possession - A.S. Byatt
4. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
5. Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike
   

Top X favorite books of all time? (Where X is 5 or less)
Fairly impossible to answer with any meaningful degree of accuracy. If you can answer it, have at it.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka (2006)

With its vaguely absurdist title, this caught my eye when it was first published, but I just got around to listening to it on my recent business trip downstate.

Synopsis: Nadia, an English sociology professor of Ukranian descent, is beside herself when she finds out that her 84-year-old immigrant engineer father, Nikolai, is planning to remarry - especially when she discovers that the bride-to-be is the voluptuous and scheming 36-year-old Valentina, freshly arrived from Ukraine. To protect her eccentric father from Valentina's machinations and her maniacal pursuit of western luxuries and a British passport, Nadia must join forces with her estranged, class-conscious older sister, Vera. In the process, Nadia comes to understand better how the experiences of living under Stalin's rule and through World War II - experiences that English-born Nadia, the postwar child, didn't share with her parents and sister - have shaped her family and their relationships. Fortunately, her husband Mike is there to listen to her father, oblivious to the abuse he's receiving at the hands of the hateful Valentina, talk on and on about his latest project, a book about the role of Ukranian engineering in the history of tractor technology.

The book is full of reminders about how much pain can lie under the surface of a life, with the immigrant experience offered up as a case study. It's also painful to the reader, much of the time, to watch Nadia and Vera struggle to protect their father against his transparently trashy new wife. In the end, sympathy turns up in the strangest places.

Tempest-Tost - Robertson Davies (1951)

I honestly derive more pure enjoyment from reading Robertson Davies than almost any other fiction-writer I know, so I've lately adopted a trilogy-per-summer campaign, akin to the Austin-in-January tradition I observed during the years I lived in Massachusetts. 2009, apparently, is time for Salterton.

My superficial reaction to Tempest-Tost is: I'm glad theater isn't my thing; the society would be dreadful.

But, of course, the delight of Davies is the cast. Here we have:

• Mr. Webster, wealthy estate owner who's grudgingly lent his garden to the Salterton Little Theater for their pastoral production of The Tempest.
  
  
• Freddy, his 14-year-old daughter, who's an aspiring oenologist going through a high Anglican phase.
  
  
• Griselda, his 18-year-old daughter, who's more beautiful and less stupid than her little sister suspects, and who has snagged the role of Ariel.
  
  
• Hector Mackilwraith, 40ish math teacher (with a secret passion for Griselda) who's turning out to be a simply dreadful Gonzalo.
  
  
• Roger, a cad whose attentions to Griselda make Hector heartsick.
  
  
• Solly Bridgewater, who would also be after Griselda, if only he could get out from under the thumb of his overbearing invalid mother.
  
  
• Tom, the Welsh gardner, who's resigned himself to spending most of July undoing the violence that the thespians are committing against the lawn.
  
  
• Nellie Forrester, the officious social climber sitting in in state over the Little Theater.
  
  
• Professor Vambrace, Nellie's chief enabler and co-tyrant.
  
  
• Valentine Rich, Salterton's native daughter who's found professional success in New York's theater scene, and has somehow gotten roped into directing this motley crew.

Mix these folks up in rehearsals, cast parties, and the occasional bit of personal intrigue, and it's simply delightful.

Book Art

This week's Booking Through Thursday references Nina Katchadourian's brilliant Sorted Books project, with the challenge to create our own. I've loved these ever since I first saw them, so here are a few of mine.

Niche

This week's Booking Through Thursday meme asks:

There are certain types of books that I more or less assume all readers read. (Novels, for example.)

But then there are books that only YOU read. Instructional manuals for fly-fishing. How-to books for spinning yarn. How to cook the perfect souffle. Rebuilding car engines in three easy steps. Dog training for dummies. Rewiring your house without electrocuting yourself. Tips on how to build a NASCAR course in your backyard. Stuff like that.

What niche books do YOU read?

This may come as a surprise revelation, but I love to read antiquated etiquette books and have a small collection, seen below.

The Amy Vanderbilt is from the early 1950s; the Emily Post is a 1940 edition of the 1922 book; the Lillian Eichler Watson, at the top, is 1948, and when I bought it, the clerk at the used book store called over the rest of the staff to show them that somebody was actually buying it. Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior hails from the late 70s, making it the most interesting of the three in certain ways (it's surprising, at this date, the kind of knots people tied themselves into to avoid the political baggage perceived to be carried by the perfectly functional title "Ms."). Judith Martin is unquestionably a humorist before all else - it's just delightful.

Etiquette books are wonderful for skimming. With a few flips of the page you can discover the proper attire for groomsmen and chambermaids, how to word an invitiation to a dinner party without dancing, when the roof is an introduction (and when it is not), and whose bouquet you should be holding when you receive the guests at your debutante ball (often, those given to you by the closest male relative who sent a small enough bunch to comfortably hold in one arm while you shake hands).

They also have a charming cast of characters used in the case studies. Mr. Worldly and Mrs. Wellbred and Miss Stranger, and whatnot. Eventually you get attached to them, and feel sympathy when Mr. and Mrs. Oldblood have to announce the postponement of their daughter's wedding to Mr. Bachelor.

People - the sort of people who boast about always speaking their mind and not knowing which fork to use - dismiss the body of formal etiquette as the behavioral equivalent of so much Victorian silverware, rules invented for no reason but to broaden the social gap. But you can't get there from any proper reading of the source material, which holds aloft the guiding principles of decency and good sense. I wish we still had that, rather than the senseless quabbling over when to hold the dollar dance at your wedding reception (hint: never).

Fifteen Sticky Books

Booking Through Thursday offered an interesting prompt today: “Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

These are the first fifteen that came to mind - and I was surprised by how near to 15 minutes it took - with a bit of commentary. I did notice that, in many cases, my connection or ongoing response to the book did have a lot to do with the circumstances under which I initially (or subsequently) encountered it. I'm not sure what that means, other than perhaps serving as a corollary the "no two people read the same book," principle.

1. Animal Farm - George Orwell One of the first really rapturous reading experiences that I recall - I read it through twice in one sitting one summer in high school.
   
   
2. 1984 -George Orwell I should clarify that I'm not an Orwellian socialist (nor a socialist of any other flavor), merely a high admirer of his style. At the same time, I've never been tolerant of youthful idealism (this was even more true when I was high school- and college-aged) so I always found the back story compelling - I love the fact that disenchantment can be so powerful as to yield that much vitriol and that much beauty at the same time. Incidentally, in real life Orwell and I share a surname, and if I ever have a male pet, he will be named Eric.
   
   
3. Girl Meets God - Lauren Winner This is one place I frequently turn to when I feel most isolated in the world of faith, and is probably one that I read at exactly the right time. I love this gal.
   
   
4. The Chosen - Chaim Potok I seriously doubt that Potok intended his themes to lend clarity to Christian eccumenical-cultural issues, but they help, enormously, nonetheless.
   
   
5. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder A mysterious stranger befriends you to teach you all about the history of philosophy - it may not be every 14-year-old girl's dream, but isn't it yours?
   
   
6. Surprised by Joy - C.S. Lewis Christian apologists who hold up Lewis as an example of rationalist conversion need to look closer. I can't help but love this man as he presents himself here.
   
   
7. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame My first favorite book.
   
   
8. Perelandra - C.S. Lewis Paradise Retained. I'm a big advocate of the Space Trilogy, and love the spiritual cosmology Lewis created.
   
   
9. The Oresteia - Aeschylus "Evil for evil is no impiety." It sounds pretentious, but it's true - this made Western Civilization click for me, in the sense of starting to actively see how many ways the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian philosophical dichotomy has us all looking at the world with crossed eyes.
   
   
10. What Do You Care What Other People Think - Richard Feynman Feynman published several volumes of memoir, and though this one is less energetic than others, it's compelling in its own way. A good portion of the second half recalls the investigation of the Challenger explosion, which is interesting but occasionally bogs itself down. More moving is the story of his relationship with his first wife, which you can't help but feel like he consciously avoided in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. They were childhood sweethearts; he married her knowing she was dying of tuberculosis; she died in a New Mexico sanatorium while he was working on the Manhattan Project.
    
    
11. The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde High literature? No, but this is just one of the funniest things out there.
    
    
12. The Epic of Gilgamesh The language is riveting in any translation I've encountered, and I can't help but think about it any time I see lapis lazuli.


13. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte My main impression was that the characters were good and bad in the way that real people are good and bad. No mean accomplishment.
    
    
14. Candide - Voltaire I have a soft spot for oozing satire. There are passages I feel gripped to read over quite regularly.
    
    
15. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen A prime example of the "circumstances of encounter" principle I mentioned in the introduction. Among other things, it's the first book I read when I first moved to Massachusetts for my first professional job. Austen in January became a tradition for the years I lived there.
    

Gogol on Stage

I joined my library book club mid-term (in January), when they started reading Bulgakov (see here, here, and here) but in the fall they had read Gogol, of whom Bulgakov had been a great admirer. So it was through that channel that I heard about the performance of Disappearing Acts: Stories of Nikolai Gogol at the Piven Theater Workshop.

I'd read Gogol on several occasions, though none very recently, so I prepared by re-reading the two stories to be performed, "Overcoat" and "Nose." Gogol is far more readable than I generally think of him as being. (Do you ever unconsciously retain false impressions of a book, author or genre that somehow prove impervious to repeated contrary experience? For example, I always think I enjoy southern literature far more than I ever end up actually enjoying it when I read it, and I always forget how much I like science memoir until I read another one.)

The plays turned out to be exceptionally good. The performance was held in a tiny theater in a cultural center up near Northwestern University - the house probably seats around 50, with the seats and stage at grade with one another. Definitely one of the more intimate theater experiences I've enjoyed. The stories were dramatized in-house (I think), and were performed in a storytelling style, with the ensemble taking on the functions of both narration and portrayal, which the cast worked well.

"We all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," Dostoevsky is often quoted as describing his own generation of Russian writers; the modern response is usually that this is more evidently true of the generation that included Beckett and Kafka. It's not hard to see the Kafka in Gogol (or, properly, the other way around), particularly when reading Gogol with Kafka-on-the-brain, as I've been. Noses don't just vanish and assume false identities any more than traveling salesmen wake up transformed into june bugs, for example; it's also not hard to imagine that G. and K. could have related well to each others' home bureaucracies. But the resemblance was especially vivid with Gogol on the stage - with the overcoat not just emotive, but actually anthropomorphic.

I'll definitely be going back to read more Gogol now - and, I hope, back to Piven next season.

The Devil Takes Moscow

I've been trying to figure out how to write about The Master and Margarita for a while now. It was the final title we read in the library book group this spring, and quite challenging. Fairly considered Bulgakov's unfinished masterwork, it's highly critical of Soviet society and thus wasn't published until 1966, 26 years after the author's death, and even then in a censored edition. Copies were circulated underground among members of the intellectual classes long before that.

Synopsis: One unseasonably warm April, a mysterious foreign magician, Wolland, arrives in Moscow. His retinue: a ghostly Master of Ceremonies with a cracked pince-nez; a vile, fanged demon-type; a large, talking black cat with a mean vodka habit; a naked witch. Hijinks ensue; then hysteria; then terror, as the foreigner turns out to be the very Devil, and a Moscow that has lost its ability to believe in either God or Satan must cope with a visitation by actual evil.

A leading literary figure is decapitated by a streetcar; a young poet is declared insane; a theater manager finds himself mysteriously transported to Yalta; Wolland's single magic performance rains chaos (and eventually fire) on the city. Meanwhile, in an autobiographical gesture on Bulgakov's part, a writer (The Master) whose finest work is an abandoned novel about Pontious Pilate, lives in ignominy, and his lover (Margarita) sells her soul to Wolland to assuage the Master's disgrace.

I have no hope of doing this justice - it's difficult to describe, and is something of a favorite among students of Russian literature, with its many layers of social commentary and political criticism and Christology and Faustian themes. The annotation provided in this 1995 translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is exquisite and enlightening. It's a piece that will surely deserve to be revisited.

Long My Motto

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make. ... And these things that have mattered for thousands of years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink merchant in his laboratory invents a new kind of mischief.

Good-Bye Mr. Chips, James Hinton (1934)

Thinking About Kafka

I had a large coupon and store credit to spend at Borders back in December, so I decided to give myself the Christmas gift of purchasing entirely at whim. (For fun, I also had my self-present gift wrapped.) The sparkly that caught my eye that day was James Hawes's Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life. (And seriously, check out that cover. Can you blame me?)

Titled Excavating Kafka in Britain, this book is Hawes's attempt to debunk the "K-Myth," the author's name for the mystique that surrounds the idea of Kafka even in the minds of those who have never read him - that image of mysterious, bleak, tortured Orientalism, conveyed as much by piercing stare of the iconic 1905 portrait as by that Z-and-two-Ks virtually engineered to tantalize westerners.

A few aspects of the K-myth Hawes wishes to debunk:

• Kafka was a neglected genius in his lifetime. (According to Hawes, Kafka played the contemporary literary scene rather masterfully, though he did chose to withhold rather a lot of his work from publication during his lifetime, for various reasons.)
  
  
• Kafka plodded away at a dead-end job, and struggled to find time to write. (Hawes: Kafka was a government lawyer with an unmistakably upper-middle-class salary.)
  
  
• Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. (Hawes: Kafka maintained a rather expensive pornography habit and was a connoseur of Prague's better brothels.)
  
  
• Kafka was destructively honest about himself to the women in his life. (Hawes: Kafka was a manipulative jerk with all of his multiple girlfriends and fiancees.)
  
  
• Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. (Hawes: Kafka's settings were biting and obvious caricatures of the Hapsburg world that any of his countrymen would have recognized. Except for the whole cockroach thing - and that was a literary construction.)

Like other pieces of populist expose, Why You Should Read Kafka exagerates its own originality and, perhaps, significance. Though I've read some Kafka over the years, I'd never read a great deal about him, nor studied him in depth, but I was still familiar both with what Hawes terms the K-myth, and, casually, with several of the arguments against it.

In an extreme example, Hawes tries to point out that the opening image of The Metamorphosis, in which the story's hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect, was lifted directly out of the opening passage of a major work of Goethe, a central piece of the German literary canon, and that, in a century of Kafka scholarship, nobody has noticed this before. Not only is this as far-fetched as it sounds, I can attest that it isn't true, since I've certainly heard that before, and I'm no scholar of Kafka or Goethe.

I admit that these criticisms should have implications in terms of the book's credibility, but they're strangely easy to forgive, presumably on some combination of the following grounds:

1. They're all the kind of exaggeration that's familiar enough in works of popular, rather than rigorous, scholarship.
   
   
2. The general thrust stays believable - really, the whole Kafka-mytique is so over-the-top romantic that anyone with sense should know to doubt it.
   
   
3. The presentation is rollicking good fun.

If nothing else, reading this did get me curious about Kafka and his influences and has got me reading and re-reading his work. More on that later, no doubt.

Corduroy Mansions

Sam at Book Chase brought my attention to Alexander McCall Smith's latest concept work, Corduroy Mansions, which was published weekdays in serial format through February on the website of The Guardian. Serial publication isn't new to McCall Smith, who's been publishing the 44 Scotland Street series daily in The Scotsman for several years now - I'm not sure how long, exactly, but as of this year there will be 5 novel-length volumes compiled. I was interested, since I do like McCall Smith's work very much, and 44 Scotland Street is probably my favorite of his series, but also because I'm fascinated by his volume of output - counting the serials, I think he's producing 4-5 novels a year lately, plus children's books.

Corduroy Mansions bears a strong resemblance to 44 Scotland Street. Both tell the stories of the residents of the various flats in their eponymous addresses, but that's just the beginning. They also share plenty of themes - art, wine, grown children - and characters - narcissist, lovable eccentric, dog whose carni-centric thoughts the narrator can read.

One interesting feature: each installment was posted both in text and audio, the audio being read by British actor Andrew Sachs - remember the Spanish waiter from Faulty Towers? And he was good.

I enjoyed it, because it certainly carries that McCall Smith charm, that brainy coziness that makes his fans so fiercely loyal. In the final accounting, hard-core McCall Smith fans will appreciate this, while acknowledging it's a bit derivative; casual readers, particularly those of his other serialized work, will find it more of the same; and novices are advised to seek out his other, somewhat stronger, pieces first (and heaven knows there's enough of them).

Illiteracy in the Library?

In search of a bit of Lenten reading, I went online last night to check whether my local library's copy of the new Barbara Brown Taylor book was checked in, and found this rather unexpected message where the search field should have been:

Due to the Adult Services renovation, the Nonfiction, Audiobooks on Cassette, Reference, and Paperback collections will be inaccessible until further notice.

The implicated renovation is phase 2 of a full overhaul of the building interior. Last spring they revamped the foyer and circulation area, and if the course of that project is an indication, this one should be done well and in good time - "until further notice" is perhaps a melodramatic choice of words, since the whole thing is scheduled to take something like six weeks.

But really, the entire adult nonfiction and reference collections will be completely inaccessible? That's kind of embarrassing.

I'm slightly reminded of my local library back in Massachusetts. The library I primarily used was in a larger, adjacent town, since the town where I actually lived was a bedroom community with a handy location but only 2,000 residents. The public library in the little town willingly advertised itself as, and I quote, "strong in popular fiction." Sigh.

A book meme

This meme lifted from Bookgirl's Nightstand this morning...

One book you’re currently reading: Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project)

One book that changed your life: perhaps not changed, but dovetailed nicely with change in progress: When Life and Beliefs Collide, by Carolyn Custis James

One book you’d want on a deserted island: Depends how long I'd have to be there...but maybe Sophie's World?

One book you’ve read more than once: The Scarlet Letter, to pick one at random

One book you’ve never been able to finish: my most dramatic abortment was of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, but I have no intention of ever trying to take it back up. I've also been interrupted in my reading of Portrait of a Lady more than once, though not for lack of desire to finish.

One book that made you laugh: most recently, The Lump of Coal by Lemony Snickett

One book that made you cry: Where the Red Fern Grows, but I was, like, 12.

One book you keep rereading: Girl Meets God, by the inimitable Lauren Winner

One book you’ve been meaning to read: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, to name one of many.

One book you believe everyone should read: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (with limitations)

Finally,
Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence…

That's entirely meaningless because Oxford will never, ever sell them, to anyone, for anything, any more than the Louvre would or could sell the Mona Lisa.

-Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, James Hawes, regarding the valuation of the University's Kafka collection at GBP 100,000,000.

Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

This was the second short work for our February group discussion, and though it was a faster read than The Fatal Eggs, it was also much darker.

Synopsis: Sharik, a mangy Moscow mutt, is taken in and nursed to robust health by Professor Preobrazhensky, a physician. The dog is bright, affectionate, devoted to his rescuer...until the operation, in which the Professor and his assistant implant Sharik with the testicles and pituitary gland salvaged from the body of a petty criminal, lately killed in a bar brawl.

Miraculously, Sharik survives the surgery, and rapidly begins to take human form - he begins to speak, walks on hind legs, loses his fur, wears clothes, reads Engels. Sharik becomes more and more human with time; or, rather, he becomes more and more the caricature of the vilest, most vulgar proletarian, terrorizing the home and lives of his creators.

If Sharik (who, as a man, improbably dubs himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov) is the slovenly Plebian, Preobrazhensky embodies the bourgeois ideal, living comfortably, operating his practice, wishing only to be left alone by his local committee. Little wonder, perhaps, that Heart of a Dog wasn't published in Russian until 1987 (at which time it apparently made no little splash).

Reading these two works has made me rather more aware and curious about the political change through the earliest years of the Soviet era - we in the West have an impression of that period as one of uniform bleakness, when, really, they were packed with nuance and tumult. Definitely looking forward to the final Bulgakov work on the syllabus, The Master and Margarita, and our group discussions.

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.