(more or less): I'm moving at 10am tomorrow and have hardly had a moment to read, but yesterday I picked up a used copy of an Agatha Christie novel called Towards Zero to run my eye over while I ate a bite of lunch, and finished it later because those books are tiny and it seemed justifiable. I'd read this one before, but not for a long time; classic Christie super-stylized country-house thing, complete with the unthinking class prejudice that makes them seem like they're from a different planet. Almost like science fiction, really.
The most charming thing is that it's a little paperback from the early 70s, and there's a hilarious ad in the middle on glossy paper. "What a good time for all the good things of a Kent," says a small slogan at the top of the page; then a crazy photo of a Partridge-family-style blonde lounging with a book in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other and a really demented smile on her face. "Cozy 'n Kent!" Those were the days. The wallpaper in the background is excellent too.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Monday, August 29, 2005
Patricia Cornwell
is not obsessed with Jack the Ripper. (Link via Bookslut.)
In other news (someone asked me last week, in mild horror at the cumulative effect of my blog, "Do you ever read any news?" In fact, I do. Sometimes. When I have to. Just to say that I am aware of the impossible frivolity of my daily activities...), I did squeeze in a few novels over the weekend, purchased at the airport bookstore on my way to a bacchanalian wedding in Toronto: Zandru's Forge (which has pretty much the trashiest cover of any book I've read for a long time, it's one of these "co-authored" books, Deborah Ross taking up some material left unfinished by Marion Zimmer Bradley when she died--I do rather love those classic 1970s fantasy novels and this was pretty decent, but although I am shameless about my reading choices it makes me feel sheepish to be seen in public with a book that looks like this from the outside); and two Terry Pratchett ones I hadn't read before, Witches Abroad and Lords and Ladies. I always hit the sf/fantasy section in those rather pitiful airport bookstores: I've usually read almost all of the ones in the crime section already, at least the ones I have any interest in reading, and am more likely to discover something new and palatable and entertaining in the other.
In other news (someone asked me last week, in mild horror at the cumulative effect of my blog, "Do you ever read any news?" In fact, I do. Sometimes. When I have to. Just to say that I am aware of the impossible frivolity of my daily activities...), I did squeeze in a few novels over the weekend, purchased at the airport bookstore on my way to a bacchanalian wedding in Toronto: Zandru's Forge (which has pretty much the trashiest cover of any book I've read for a long time, it's one of these "co-authored" books, Deborah Ross taking up some material left unfinished by Marion Zimmer Bradley when she died--I do rather love those classic 1970s fantasy novels and this was pretty decent, but although I am shameless about my reading choices it makes me feel sheepish to be seen in public with a book that looks like this from the outside); and two Terry Pratchett ones I hadn't read before, Witches Abroad and Lords and Ladies. I always hit the sf/fantasy section in those rather pitiful airport bookstores: I've usually read almost all of the ones in the crime section already, at least the ones I have any interest in reading, and am more likely to discover something new and palatable and entertaining in the other.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
"The Wiles of Nice Women in a Civilised Society"
Just read Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment, which was about the lightest thing to hand--I got it at the library last week (NO MORE LIBRARY BOOKS ALLOWED TILL AFTER THE MOVE). I read some of her novels as a teenager, didn't like them much, but my attention was arrested by Barbara Everett's TLS piece on the unexpected affinities between Pym and Philip Larkin, who was her champion and wrote a preface to this particular novel, which was unpublished in her lifetime. (Here are some interesting further excerpts from and comments on the Everett essay.)
It's a reasonably enjoyable read, but there's something impossible dreary and mean-spirited about it at the same time--though the dreariness of middle-class mores in England in the 50s is generally not to be underestimated, by all accounts; no wonder there are all these depressing little novels about that milieu. The author seems to have found some of these characters charming (or is she writing a kind of satire in which it doesn't matter that the people are so unattractive? I can't see this being the case), but from my standpoint they're pretty much altogether offputting, without exception. Too self-aware, not enough warmth, and without the kind of intellectual or intuitive force to make up for that lack.
Larkin's preface is interesting, though: he tells the story of the book's rejection ("To have one's seventh book turned down by a publisher who has seemed perfectly happy with the previous six is a peculiarly wounding experience, and she felt it as such"--Larkin channeling Pym channeling Austen), then reflects on its strengths and weaknesses. Here's the paragraph that particularly caught my attention, given recent discussions about the term "self-indulgent" and its place or lack thereof in the reviewer's arsenal:
"[I]t is a somewhat self-indulgent book, full of echoes. Sophia and her sister Penelope recall Jane and Prudence, or even Dulcie and Viola from No Fond Return of Love; Sister Dew resembles Sister Blatt from Excellent Women; but other parallels are even more explicit. Barbara Pym was always given to reintroducing characters she had used before, and sometimes this is fully justified (the conversation between Wilmet and Rowena in A Glass of Blessings about Rocky Napier is only fully meaningful if we have met him in Excellent Women), but the concluding chapters of An Unsuitable Attachment are a real omnium gatherum: Esther Clovis and Digby Fox from Less Than Angels, Everard Bone from Excellent Women, Wilf Bason from A Glass of Blessings, and perhaps most extravagantly of all an older but otherwise unchanged Harriet Bede (complete with curate) from Some Tame Gazelle. It is all rather like the finale of a musical comedy."
It's an infelicitous passage for Larkin, I'd say; it's too campy (in a bad way) to assume everyone knows all of these characters, bad enough when people (I myself have been known to fall into this unfortunate habit) talk like that about Austen's. (I am so familiar with Austen's novels that I genuinely find it shocking to think that this is not the case for everyone I talk to. I suppose it is possible that Larkin feels the same about Pym, but from the reader's point of view, it sounds rather affected--I think he really loses me with the rather arch italicized omnium gatherum.) But it's an interesting observation--shelving for the moment the question of whether "self-indulgent" can ever be used fairly, you can see that Larkin singles out two related things for his mild disapproval, characters with different names but similar properties appearing in successive novels (on the one hand) and the same character appearing by name in a different novel. Neither of these things seems to me in itself problematic--after all, the first applies to everyone from Charles Dickens to Philip Roth; and the second is something you see very often too, in many novels that I like a lot. (Madeleine L'Engle did it all the time.)
It's a reasonably enjoyable read, but there's something impossible dreary and mean-spirited about it at the same time--though the dreariness of middle-class mores in England in the 50s is generally not to be underestimated, by all accounts; no wonder there are all these depressing little novels about that milieu. The author seems to have found some of these characters charming (or is she writing a kind of satire in which it doesn't matter that the people are so unattractive? I can't see this being the case), but from my standpoint they're pretty much altogether offputting, without exception. Too self-aware, not enough warmth, and without the kind of intellectual or intuitive force to make up for that lack.
Larkin's preface is interesting, though: he tells the story of the book's rejection ("To have one's seventh book turned down by a publisher who has seemed perfectly happy with the previous six is a peculiarly wounding experience, and she felt it as such"--Larkin channeling Pym channeling Austen), then reflects on its strengths and weaknesses. Here's the paragraph that particularly caught my attention, given recent discussions about the term "self-indulgent" and its place or lack thereof in the reviewer's arsenal:
"[I]t is a somewhat self-indulgent book, full of echoes. Sophia and her sister Penelope recall Jane and Prudence, or even Dulcie and Viola from No Fond Return of Love; Sister Dew resembles Sister Blatt from Excellent Women; but other parallels are even more explicit. Barbara Pym was always given to reintroducing characters she had used before, and sometimes this is fully justified (the conversation between Wilmet and Rowena in A Glass of Blessings about Rocky Napier is only fully meaningful if we have met him in Excellent Women), but the concluding chapters of An Unsuitable Attachment are a real omnium gatherum: Esther Clovis and Digby Fox from Less Than Angels, Everard Bone from Excellent Women, Wilf Bason from A Glass of Blessings, and perhaps most extravagantly of all an older but otherwise unchanged Harriet Bede (complete with curate) from Some Tame Gazelle. It is all rather like the finale of a musical comedy."
It's an infelicitous passage for Larkin, I'd say; it's too campy (in a bad way) to assume everyone knows all of these characters, bad enough when people (I myself have been known to fall into this unfortunate habit) talk like that about Austen's. (I am so familiar with Austen's novels that I genuinely find it shocking to think that this is not the case for everyone I talk to. I suppose it is possible that Larkin feels the same about Pym, but from the reader's point of view, it sounds rather affected--I think he really loses me with the rather arch italicized omnium gatherum.) But it's an interesting observation--shelving for the moment the question of whether "self-indulgent" can ever be used fairly, you can see that Larkin singles out two related things for his mild disapproval, characters with different names but similar properties appearing in successive novels (on the one hand) and the same character appearing by name in a different novel. Neither of these things seems to me in itself problematic--after all, the first applies to everyone from Charles Dickens to Philip Roth; and the second is something you see very often too, in many novels that I like a lot. (Madeleine L'Engle did it all the time.)
A very cool novel
that's sort of about the Wizard of Oz but more about fantasy and child abuse and the American West--what a strange and interesting book--Geoff Ryman's Was. Ryman has a remarkable gift for writing characters that you care about in spite of their off-putting qualities. This isn't so much my kind of book as Lust, but it's really very good indeed.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Oh, a most mesmerizingly good novel
Geoff Ryman's Lust, or No Harm Done (actually the American subtitle seems to be "Four Letters. Infinite Possibilities"). I really loved this--I think I first heard about Ryman at Shaken & Stirred, then thought of him again when I saw his recent short essay about the people who died in the London bombings last month (Ryman's interactive novel 253, which I haven't read, is about the passengers on a Tube train, thus the essay assignment). I was in the library last week and grabbed a few of his books off the shelf (note to self: STOP CHECKING BOOKS OUT OF THE LIBRARY).
This novel is metaphysical and sexy and sweet and funny and sad and pretty much exactly what I most like. I was reminded a bit of Jonathan Carroll and also strangely of aspects of Neil Gaiman's forthcoming Anansi Boys--I have always been fond of the alternate selves/twin conceit--only really this book is like nothing but itself. I'm pasting in a description from Publisher's Weekly via Amazon, but it doesn't at all do the book justice (I hate the word wacky--it's second only to whimsical for most annoying book-review adjective, when I see either of them I know that either I'll loathe the book or else I thoroughly disapprove of the reviewer's sensibility):
"Reality's got a hole in it." That's what runs through Michael Blasco's head when he discovers that he has the uncanny ability to bring his fantasies to life in this wacky, inspired third novel by Ryman (Was). The 38-year-old gay protagonist is a government scientist experimenting on baby chicks and has a flat in London's West End with Phil, his passionless boyfriend. While seething on a subway platform, he imagines the beefy trainer at his gym stripping naked right in front of him-and poof-it happens! Terrified at first, Michael quickly regains his composure and wills into action a series of characters like Tarzan and cartoon diva Taffy Duck; narcissistically, he also conjures a copy of himself. His reunion with a long-lost high school sweetheart nicknamed Bottles proves to be touching and funny, but his meeting with Mark, a victim of AIDS, turns sad when Mark rebuffs his plea to revive him. In an effort to inject passion into his stagnant relationship, Michael "calls up" a younger version of Phil paired with a younger version of himself. When this scheme backfires, he returns to the anonymous "speedy, functional sex" that has long sustained him. A night out with feisty Billie Holiday, passionate sex with Picasso and dalliances with Lawrence of Arabia on Viagra reinvigorate him and make for some funny, titillating reading, but as Michael's notebook of his wild adventures begins to overflow, the story's whimsical tone changes, revealing more of his true character as well as some particularly troublesome personal problems. Among them is a disturbing boyhood fixation on his father, which mutates into a wincingly unnerving incestuous sequence. Ryman's "careful-what-you-wish-for" message is artfully packaged in this quirky, offbeat, entertaining novel.
Get it and see for yourself. I wouldn't say it's a careful-what-you-wish-for novel, or an allegory, or anything like that, just a very good novel about redemption. Amazing stuff.
Other light reading, around the edges of insane packing and planning: Carol Plum-Ucci's The She (not bad, a bit too young-adult-y for my taste--perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but the best books for this age group can compete with any adult fiction on their own terms while this one reminds you in various ways that it was written "for" teenagers) and Jan Burke's Remember Me, Irene (very good).
Posting will be sporadic over the next week and a half, but I expect I'll pop in now and then.
This novel is metaphysical and sexy and sweet and funny and sad and pretty much exactly what I most like. I was reminded a bit of Jonathan Carroll and also strangely of aspects of Neil Gaiman's forthcoming Anansi Boys--I have always been fond of the alternate selves/twin conceit--only really this book is like nothing but itself. I'm pasting in a description from Publisher's Weekly via Amazon, but it doesn't at all do the book justice (I hate the word wacky--it's second only to whimsical for most annoying book-review adjective, when I see either of them I know that either I'll loathe the book or else I thoroughly disapprove of the reviewer's sensibility):
"Reality's got a hole in it." That's what runs through Michael Blasco's head when he discovers that he has the uncanny ability to bring his fantasies to life in this wacky, inspired third novel by Ryman (Was). The 38-year-old gay protagonist is a government scientist experimenting on baby chicks and has a flat in London's West End with Phil, his passionless boyfriend. While seething on a subway platform, he imagines the beefy trainer at his gym stripping naked right in front of him-and poof-it happens! Terrified at first, Michael quickly regains his composure and wills into action a series of characters like Tarzan and cartoon diva Taffy Duck; narcissistically, he also conjures a copy of himself. His reunion with a long-lost high school sweetheart nicknamed Bottles proves to be touching and funny, but his meeting with Mark, a victim of AIDS, turns sad when Mark rebuffs his plea to revive him. In an effort to inject passion into his stagnant relationship, Michael "calls up" a younger version of Phil paired with a younger version of himself. When this scheme backfires, he returns to the anonymous "speedy, functional sex" that has long sustained him. A night out with feisty Billie Holiday, passionate sex with Picasso and dalliances with Lawrence of Arabia on Viagra reinvigorate him and make for some funny, titillating reading, but as Michael's notebook of his wild adventures begins to overflow, the story's whimsical tone changes, revealing more of his true character as well as some particularly troublesome personal problems. Among them is a disturbing boyhood fixation on his father, which mutates into a wincingly unnerving incestuous sequence. Ryman's "careful-what-you-wish-for" message is artfully packaged in this quirky, offbeat, entertaining novel.
Get it and see for yourself. I wouldn't say it's a careful-what-you-wish-for novel, or an allegory, or anything like that, just a very good novel about redemption. Amazing stuff.
Other light reading, around the edges of insane packing and planning: Carol Plum-Ucci's The She (not bad, a bit too young-adult-y for my taste--perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but the best books for this age group can compete with any adult fiction on their own terms while this one reminds you in various ways that it was written "for" teenagers) and Jan Burke's Remember Me, Irene (very good).
Posting will be sporadic over the next week and a half, but I expect I'll pop in now and then.
An excellent new blog
about the pros and cons of deciding to do an MFA degree in creative writing. Check it out if this is something you're thinking about--it's run by Tom Kealey, and he's taking questions as well as providing various useful links. (Link via Maud Newton.)
Saturday, August 20, 2005
My apartment
is astonishingly emptier than it was a week ago, though I've still got massive stacks of papers to sort through and organize; still rather chaotic, in other words, but I've soothed myself with a really excellent novel, Bloodlines by Jan Burke. I really like these books, and I think this one was the best yet--a complex narrative with a number of different time periods and interweaving stories, all completely mesmerizing. A most enjoyable read. And this afternoon on the train back from Philadelphia (I was getting my cat settled in at my mom's house, she is kindly taking him for the year as I can't have pets in my Cambridge sublet), the ritual Dick Francis reread, this time it was Hot Money. In Philadelphia we also dumped a ton of my stuff at the amazingly named Whosoever Gospel Mission, poured roughly 10 years' worth of coins (mostly nickels and pennies, some dimes, the quarters get picked out for laundry) into one of those supermarket machines ($126 and change even after the nine percent service deduction), I helped her sort through all the books in her house & packed up ten boxes to take to a place whose name I can't remember. All very useful. Now I must get back to the real work I have to finish between now and the end of the month. I'm having increasingly violent pangs regarding fiction-writing, I've been heavy on the academic stuff this summer and I am DYING to get to my novel revisions, but it will have to wait till September; on the train this afternoon I was also musing about a frivolous other novel I'd like to write (vampires and lots of sex, first-person narrator, slightly futuristic New York), but I'm psychologically locked in on a sequel to Dynamite No. 1 that I think I must write first. We will see. It is possible that if I work like a maniac I can write both of those this year plus the remaining two chapters and revisions for my academic book, but that has the sound of overreaching.
A funny essay about novel-writing
by James Hamilton-Paterson at the Guardian. Here's the best paragraph:
Hitherto, to the despair of publishers, agents and readers alike, I have tried never to write the same kind of book twice, my entirely selfish reason being that I don't wish to bore myself. Now, for the first time, I am breaking my vow and have been induced to write the one thing I had always promised myself I never would write: a sequel. Sequels are surely dread things, because if they meet with any success something still dreader lurks ahead: a series. And, of course, once one has launched into a series the iron law of the marketplace takes over, and suddenly that interior mill-owner is cracking his whip. Being by nature a lotus-eater, I hope to avoid this fate.
Hitherto, to the despair of publishers, agents and readers alike, I have tried never to write the same kind of book twice, my entirely selfish reason being that I don't wish to bore myself. Now, for the first time, I am breaking my vow and have been induced to write the one thing I had always promised myself I never would write: a sequel. Sequels are surely dread things, because if they meet with any success something still dreader lurks ahead: a series. And, of course, once one has launched into a series the iron law of the marketplace takes over, and suddenly that interior mill-owner is cracking his whip. Being by nature a lotus-eater, I hope to avoid this fate.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The "new" books shelf
at my local public library must be visited sparingly--it is a scant resource--but I hadn't been for a few months and then I went and got some good stuff, first and foremost Absent Friends by S. J. Rozan. I've been looking forward to reading this ever since I first heard about it, and it did not disappoint: an excellent novel in every way. (It also did what I think crime fiction is particularly good at, which is show how small or medium-sized choices by well-intentioned if not necessarily likeable people can lead to major disaster.) Then I read a novel by Marian Keyes, not quite my cup of tea but on the whole decent, The Other Side of the Story. It's got some pretty funny vaguely satirical stuff on publishing, but the characters were a little fuzzy and the writing is fine but not as sharp as it needs to be to carry something like this off.
I have been thinking in the last few days about a
great post about writing at Elizabeth Bear's blog. (Link via Shaken & Stirred.) This is what Bear says there:
I talk about--and think about--craft a lot. An enormous amount, really. And as I can only speak for myself, in my case, it's not a search for the magic get-published button. I've got that, after all. What it is for me, actually, is an attempt to break away from the magic get-published button. To move away from what I do by rote, automatically, and into a wider space. To hone the craft that makes the most of my talent, in other words.
Here's what I think about talent. It's true: some people have more than others. And I suspect if one is going to make it as a writer, one walks in with a free card. One thing you can do coming out of the gate. One aspect of the tremendous interwoven craft of writing that you're naturally good at. It may be worldbuilding or plot or voice or language or structure or theme. Something you do right, from day one.
....
I got characters for free. I earned pathos next. Grounding detail. Then I learned how to plot. Theme after that. Then voice. Started selling stories about then. What's that, six?
Worldbuilding... um... still working on that one. Sentences too. Getting better at sentences. Worldbuilding. Heck. This is complicated by the fact that "you can't cut one clean." Like a cobweb, every thread affects the shape of every other thread. Cut one, they all shiver.
This seems to me completely true but I'd never thought about it in those terms before. I tend to think that the things that come easily to me are just plain easy in themselves, and same for the hard ones, but Bear's are the opposite of mine. I got sentences for free, and I got worldbuilding pretty easily too. (I am afraid to say I don't really care that much about plot or theme, isn't that awful?) What I have been intensively working on this past year as I revise Dynamite No. 1 to make it as good a novel as I can are voice and the linked thing of character (these two seem to me completely bound up with each other). I realize that my very favorite novels, the ones I read again and again, are the ones where those two things are what's really special. I would love to write a book that works like that myself.
I have been thinking in the last few days about a
great post about writing at Elizabeth Bear's blog. (Link via Shaken & Stirred.) This is what Bear says there:
I talk about--and think about--craft a lot. An enormous amount, really. And as I can only speak for myself, in my case, it's not a search for the magic get-published button. I've got that, after all. What it is for me, actually, is an attempt to break away from the magic get-published button. To move away from what I do by rote, automatically, and into a wider space. To hone the craft that makes the most of my talent, in other words.
Here's what I think about talent. It's true: some people have more than others. And I suspect if one is going to make it as a writer, one walks in with a free card. One thing you can do coming out of the gate. One aspect of the tremendous interwoven craft of writing that you're naturally good at. It may be worldbuilding or plot or voice or language or structure or theme. Something you do right, from day one.
....
I got characters for free. I earned pathos next. Grounding detail. Then I learned how to plot. Theme after that. Then voice. Started selling stories about then. What's that, six?
Worldbuilding... um... still working on that one. Sentences too. Getting better at sentences. Worldbuilding. Heck. This is complicated by the fact that "you can't cut one clean." Like a cobweb, every thread affects the shape of every other thread. Cut one, they all shiver.
This seems to me completely true but I'd never thought about it in those terms before. I tend to think that the things that come easily to me are just plain easy in themselves, and same for the hard ones, but Bear's are the opposite of mine. I got sentences for free, and I got worldbuilding pretty easily too. (I am afraid to say I don't really care that much about plot or theme, isn't that awful?) What I have been intensively working on this past year as I revise Dynamite No. 1 to make it as good a novel as I can are voice and the linked thing of character (these two seem to me completely bound up with each other). I realize that my very favorite novels, the ones I read again and again, are the ones where those two things are what's really special. I would love to write a book that works like that myself.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Good books and monastic apartments
Sarah Weinman's introductory post about David Bowker (who was guest-blogging at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind last week) made his books sound extremely appealing, so I got hold of a couple immediately, and they were indeed a great pleasure to read. The Butcher of Glastonbury is an interesting police-procedural/horror hybrid (the main detective can travel in his astral body), a bit over the top in its final pages but on the whole very good. And The Death You Deserve is absolutely delightful if you like extreme violence, dark and insanely funny but also serious at the same time (the character of Billy is particularly well-drawn). I am very glad to have read this, can't wait to get the sequel.
My friend M. pressed Jeffery Deaver's The Twelfth Card on me a few weeks ago--I told him I don't much like Deaver's novels and he said that this one included such cringe-makingly awful representations of "Ebonics" (which I have an academic interest in) that I would be very sorry if I didn't read it and glory in its awfulness. And indeed this was right. Deaver is a good story-teller, I can quite see why he's a bestseller though he doesn't seem to have a sense of humor and his representations of forensic techniques are woefully implausible (in fact, he has a sort of genius for implausibility), but the speech of the black characters in this novel is truly outrageously and embarrassingly and offensively absurd. Read it and see. Painful in an almost enjoyable way.
At the public library I found a few things I wanted to read; first off was Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street. I wasn't going to take it out, I was on the whole underwhelmed by The Sunday Philosophy Club, but I flipped it open and came upon a conversation about my beloved North Berwick, the town outside Edinburgh where my Scottish grandparents lived, and after that I had to take it home. Quite a pleasant read, anyway; I think I like it better than the other, and the serial form (it was written in 110 daily installments) is interesting to see in action.
I've finished my chapter, which is a very good thing except that it means I have to deal with all the other stuff I've been putting off doing to get ready for my temporary move to Cambridge (Mass., not England) on Sept. 1. My apartment is in chaos, but I have bagged a huge amount of stuff for charity-shop donation--seven bags of clothes (I don't know what possessed me when I moved here five years ago to think that I would possibly want, you know, every pair of shoes I owned over six carless hard-walking years of grad school, etc. etc.). I have a monastic ideal, I realize I will always be thwarted in this because it's impossible not to have a lot of books and papers but I would really like to own nothing at all otherwise, or nothing more than I could carry myself in a couple of bags. So my subletter will most immediately benefit from this but then it will be lovely and spartan when I come home again in May. A particular favorite former professor of mine (one not known for sparing scathing words--I remember being crushed once long ago when I ran into her after my orals and babbled about how happy I was to get back to writing and talking as opposed to simply reading in a fois-gras-forcefed-goose kind of a way; she just looked at me and said something along the lines of "It seems scarcely possible for even quite intelligent young people today to speak without using 'like' in every sentence"--those weren't the exact words but it was certainly rather chilling) stopped by here for a visit recently and commented on the apartment being awfully spartan. I took it as a compliment.
My friend M. pressed Jeffery Deaver's The Twelfth Card on me a few weeks ago--I told him I don't much like Deaver's novels and he said that this one included such cringe-makingly awful representations of "Ebonics" (which I have an academic interest in) that I would be very sorry if I didn't read it and glory in its awfulness. And indeed this was right. Deaver is a good story-teller, I can quite see why he's a bestseller though he doesn't seem to have a sense of humor and his representations of forensic techniques are woefully implausible (in fact, he has a sort of genius for implausibility), but the speech of the black characters in this novel is truly outrageously and embarrassingly and offensively absurd. Read it and see. Painful in an almost enjoyable way.
At the public library I found a few things I wanted to read; first off was Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street. I wasn't going to take it out, I was on the whole underwhelmed by The Sunday Philosophy Club, but I flipped it open and came upon a conversation about my beloved North Berwick, the town outside Edinburgh where my Scottish grandparents lived, and after that I had to take it home. Quite a pleasant read, anyway; I think I like it better than the other, and the serial form (it was written in 110 daily installments) is interesting to see in action.
I've finished my chapter, which is a very good thing except that it means I have to deal with all the other stuff I've been putting off doing to get ready for my temporary move to Cambridge (Mass., not England) on Sept. 1. My apartment is in chaos, but I have bagged a huge amount of stuff for charity-shop donation--seven bags of clothes (I don't know what possessed me when I moved here five years ago to think that I would possibly want, you know, every pair of shoes I owned over six carless hard-walking years of grad school, etc. etc.). I have a monastic ideal, I realize I will always be thwarted in this because it's impossible not to have a lot of books and papers but I would really like to own nothing at all otherwise, or nothing more than I could carry myself in a couple of bags. So my subletter will most immediately benefit from this but then it will be lovely and spartan when I come home again in May. A particular favorite former professor of mine (one not known for sparing scathing words--I remember being crushed once long ago when I ran into her after my orals and babbled about how happy I was to get back to writing and talking as opposed to simply reading in a fois-gras-forcefed-goose kind of a way; she just looked at me and said something along the lines of "It seems scarcely possible for even quite intelligent young people today to speak without using 'like' in every sentence"--those weren't the exact words but it was certainly rather chilling) stopped by here for a visit recently and commented on the apartment being awfully spartan. I took it as a compliment.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
And then this afternoon
I saw the best play I've seen for quite a while, Terence McNally's Dedication. It's funny and sweet and really rather moving, and both Nathan Lane and Marian Seldes are absolutely spectacularly good (though the whole cast and direction are excellent--the dialogue is very, very funny in particular, it's worth going for that alone). I really think Seldes is a genius, I don't think I've ever seen anything else to match the Beckett/Albee thing a couple years ago.
This cast is only on till Sept. 4 so do go and see it soon if you get a chance.
This cast is only on till Sept. 4 so do go and see it soon if you get a chance.
Lightest of light rereading
Two children's books by Eva Ibbotson, Which Witch? and Island of the Aunts. I really love Ibbotson's books, she should be much more widely known in the US than she is; the adult novels are my favorites (A Company of Swans is a good one to start with), but her recent children's ones (Journey to the River Sea and The Star of Kazan) are as rich and satisfying as the adult ones and even more fairy-tale-like.
I am having only lightest rereading because I'm very, very close to finishing the new chapter of my "Breeding" book. It has gone surprisingly painlessly--for once I'm actually on schedule. It was originally going to be called "Husbandry and the Idea of Improvement," but it turned out not really to be about that at all. Currently I'm deciding between "The Problem of Culture" (slightly jargony?) and "The Trouble with Culture" (too hipster-academic-y? I dread nothing more than seeming to aim for trendiness in my academic writing; the thing that always makes me cringe is when decidedly NON-sexy academics use the word "sexy" to describe academic writing that really has nothing sexy about it in any sense that a normal person would recognize).
I am having only lightest rereading because I'm very, very close to finishing the new chapter of my "Breeding" book. It has gone surprisingly painlessly--for once I'm actually on schedule. It was originally going to be called "Husbandry and the Idea of Improvement," but it turned out not really to be about that at all. Currently I'm deciding between "The Problem of Culture" (slightly jargony?) and "The Trouble with Culture" (too hipster-academic-y? I dread nothing more than seeming to aim for trendiness in my academic writing; the thing that always makes me cringe is when decidedly NON-sexy academics use the word "sexy" to describe academic writing that really has nothing sexy about it in any sense that a normal person would recognize).
More Heyer
It has strangely been the summer of Georgette Heyer, and a really interesting post and comment thread at Justine Larbalestier's blog sent me back to reread just one or two more. Cotillion is Heyer writing slightly against type--the heroine ends up with the sweet and good-natured and reliable and rather silly guy, not the handsome rake (I was reminded of a whole series of eighteenth-century novels that take positions on the truth or falsehood of the old adage "a reformed rake makes the best husband"--Samuel Richardson was really the one who started it off...). I enjoyed it very much but I think I don't like it as much as the best of the others; I find Heyer is at her best with the livelier and more intelligent heroines, these characters seem to me slightly tiresome (the male protagonist's father is actually rather more like the usual Heyer hero, he only makes a couple minor appearances but they are quite refreshing) and I find the handling of the "imbecilic" Lord Dolphinton character actually not funny at all. Then I read The Nonesuch, which has always been in my mind as among the better ones but not as good as the very best (also it is marred by the hero having the ridiculous name Sir Waldo Hawkridge and an implausible subplot about orphan asylyms), no reason to change my opinion on this. It is strange how few other writers have been able to write romances as captivating as Heyer's, though; I don't really read many mainstream romance novels, it's not the way my taste takes me (I prefer crime and science fiction and fantasy as far as so-called "genre" stuff goes, although of course a good novel is a good novel and the labels largely irrelevant), but I would read more if there were more like this. Other authors who have some of the same charms, and whose books I'd highly recommend: Victoria Clayton; Eva Ibbotson; some of Joan Aiken (though on the whole her writing for children is so brilliant that the variable quality of the adult fiction really stands out, I have always been a huge fan of all of her stuff, I was pretty upset when I randomly read an obituary many months after she'd died, it felt like a betrayal not to have known sooner); Mary Stewart.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Yesterday
I read a book sort of by mistake, Turning for Home by Sarah Challis. It's good in its way, but it's not my kind (I think the name came up off an Amazon UK recommendation based on the fact that I'd ordered books by Victoria Clayton, whose novels I adore; I got it through my beloved BorrowDirect, but it wasn't what I was expecting). The thing that really gave me a pang is that while the book is itself about a bond between a twenty-something drifter and an old lady who she comes to work for as a carer, which resonates with me greatly, it is SO much a book that my actual grandmother would have loved. It is just her kind of book. It pains me that I don't know whether she read these books or not, though I can't help but feel she must have. I have had this several times recently, as you do for someone you really love who's died: I don't care about my birthday, but she always sent me a birthday card, and it was very kind that my mother stepped in and made sure to send me one to arrive on the day because I was so much thinking about my grandmother and missing her. And I recently went to a quasi-bachelorette party that she would love to have heard about, the hostess was a former southern belle in her 80s who knew Zelda Fitzgerald (who came to afternoon tea when she was on furlough from the asylum or whatever) and Harper Lee and generally the evening would have provided much grist to my grandmother's mill (I was dying to send her a description of the dinner entree, Chicken Hong Kong, which is indescribable but may have included Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and canned water-chestnuts; we washed it down with vast amounts of Veuve Cliquot).
Thursday, August 11, 2005
I felt quite sad
reading Ed McBain's latest (last? but internet rumor says he wrote one in advance that would finish off the series after his death) Fiddlers : A Novel of the 87th Precinct. It feels curiously inconclusive, knowing that Evan Hunter is dead now and will not write any more novels. In the last few, the best drama for me has been in following Fat Ollie's romance, the latest development of which provides the cliffhanger ending here.
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