book dust flying

Shakespeare - no less

2011-12-27T21:31:00.001-05:00

Oh, this one is nice! Some time ago I made a little project of memorizing some of my favorite sonnets by Shakespeare. This one was on top of the list. And it was not at all caused by the fact that years ago, in my other life, one of my favorite Polish musicians recorded this lovely interpretation of the Polish translation of Sonnet 102, along with some other ones. Translation by Maciej Słomczyński, music by Stanislaw Soyka.

Embedded is Stanislaw Soyka's take on it. As I'm writing this post, I've listened to this song at least 10 times.

SONNET 102
My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new and then but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.

Year-end summary - 2011

2011-12-27T00:08:00.000-05:00

As much as most of the year 2010 had to do with vampires, year 2011 unwittingly became the year of non-fiction - especially the science kind. It was as much of a surprise to me, believe me. I think it was spurred by my sudden TV-prompted interest in Brian Greene, not to mention general disgust in the fact that I've been telling myself all these years that I would not be able to understand some things. As part of my little project of proving to myself that YES I CAN!, I read more stuff to do with science than any other year. So it's a spiteful kind of project. The best kind.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe
Hazen, Robert M. and James Trefil. Science Matters. Achieving Scientific Literacy
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth. The Evidence for Evolution
Hawking, Stephen. A Briefer History of Time

Having said that, I still have Greene's Hidden Reality on the go, and I abandoned Lisa Randall's Knocking on Heaven's Door (too much of the knocking had to do with particle accelerators like this one and the book wasn't very well written so uncharacteristically I abandoned it two thirds in. Need I say I was very proud of myself?). I have a feeling the science is going to stay with me for the better part of 2012. Looking forward to it. I'm actually tempted to make up a list right now but I shall stop myself to do it right, and at a later date. People and bibliographies have to be consulted first - it has to be done properly. The results will be better and the list will be more follow-able.

Christopher Hitchens died, which prompted me to go back to his autobiography, Hitch-22, which will take me to January, and read the Letters to a Young Contrarian that's one of his older books. I find myself appreciating his writing more and more. Eloquence dripping over the edges, with a kind of wit that provokes and baits the sympathetic reader, and enrages the un-sympathetic one. I always get to them when it's already too late to expect any other books! Unfair!

I lost heart for Elias Canetti though. I read the last volume of his quasi-autobiography, Party in the Blitz, and I decided I don't want to subscribe to his kind of almightyishness anymore. I honestly don't want to be his disciple. I know that great artists have certain leeway in how they perceive the world and how they express that perception, but that man was not kind. I was especially struck by his description of Iris Murdoch, with whom he had an affair. It seemed so mean-spirited and devoid of all human sensibility that it was hard for me to finish the book. Now, I have no special attitude towards Murdoch, since I only know parts of her bio that have to do with Canetti and never read any of her books, but I was finding myself slightly sick to my stomach when I was reading his version of their affair. Suddenly I didn't want to have anything do with him ever again. In this way, it is an important year, since Canetti had been my acknowledged favorite writer for at least 12 years. I have to find a new one -- one that sounds right and is obscure enough for people not to know him/her. Shallow, I know. But I have to replace Canetti. He doesn't look good on my bookshelf anymore.

Three interesting fiction books I've read this year are:

Baker, Tiffany. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Donoghue, Emma. Room
Gibb, Camilla. The Beauty of Humanity Movement

And of course I had my fill of the vampire/witch/supernatural fiction. Oh, I'm such a sucker for those!

Trussoni, Danielle. Angelology
Harris, Charlaine. Dead Reckoning
Bray, Libba. A Great and Terrible Beauty
Carroll, Lee. Black Swan Rising
Clare, Cassandra. The Clockwork Angel
Ball, Alan. True Blood Volume 1. All Together Now
Andreyko, Marc and Michael McMillian. True Blood. Tainted Love
Farnsworth, Christopher. Blood Oath
<Harkness, Deborah. A Discovery of Witches

Needless to say, we will try not to make a similar time commitment next year. Some, but not too much.

I managed to fulfill some of my reading resolutions:

I've read 4 books in Polish (planned 5)
I've sort-of read more than 3 books in French
I made myself finish Hilary Mantel's Woof Hall, however painful the experience
I finished Kazuo Ishiguro'a Never Let Me Go (and saw the movie)
I let Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind disappoint me slightly
I gobbled down Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing. I love this woman! I want to be exactly like her when I grow up!

I didn't manage to red Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon, Dennis Lehane's The Given Day, and I didin't read as much as I wanted of the Pat Conroy's stuff. I think the disappointment of not fulfilling them is sort-of built into the whole process of making resolutions, so I'm OK. Of course I can't wait to make new ones. Less supernatural, more natural and scientific stuff. Some religion, why not? Some re-reading, for once; after all, eager to add to my list of books read in English, I haven't done it in years, and Jane Eyre seems to be the only book I've ever re-read. Dickens - why not? More and more science. Some stuff in Italian would be nice. There's going to be some serious horizon expanding happening in 2012! Can't wait!

663 books read to date: 2000 - 2011

2011-12-26T22:42:00.000-05:00

Abagnale, Frank W. Catch Me if You Can
Adams, Douglas. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. The Tender Cut. Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie
Ali, Monica. In the Kitchen
Alighieri, Dante. La Vita Nuova
Allen, John L. Jr. Opus Dei
Andreyko, Marc and Michael McMillian. True Blood. Tainted Love
Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
Arcan, Nelly. Exit
Armstrong, Luis. Satchmo. My Life in New Orleans
Armstrong, Sarah. Salt Rain
Athill, Diana. Stet
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace
Atwood, Margaret. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin
Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale
Atwood, Margaret. Interlunar
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder
Atwood, Margaret. Morning in the Burned House
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride
Atwood, Margaret. Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead
Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips
Austen, Jane. Emma x2
Austen, Jane. Persuasion
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice x2
Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. The Inquisition
Baker, Nicholson. The Anthologist
Baker, Tiffany. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Baldacci, David. Deliver Us From Evil
Baldwin. Go Tell It On The Mountain
Ball, Alan. True Blood Volume 1. All Together Now
Banks, Russell. Sweet Hereafters
Bantock, Nick. Griffin and Sabine
Bantock, Nick. The Gryphon
Bantock, Nick. Sabine’s Notebook
Bantock, Nick. The Golden Mean
Barker, Clive. Abarat. Days of Magic, Nights of War
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk
Barnes, Julian. The Sense of Ending
Barron, Stephanie. The White Garden
Bartlett Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
Battle, Matthew. Library: an Unquiet History
Bade, Patrick, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Bennet, Alan. The Uncommon Reader
Bennett, Arnold. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Blake, Sarah. Grange House
Bloom, Amy. Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Borchert, Don. Free for All
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Mirror of Ink
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451
Bramham, Daphne. The Scret Lives of Saints. Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect
Brand, Dionne. Inventory
Bray, Libba. A Great and Terrible Beauty
Bronte, Charlotte. The Foundling
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights
Brooks, Geraldine. People of the Book
Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code
Brown, Dan. The Lost Symbol
Brown. Ormond
Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Laici
Bruen, Ken. The Guards
Bruen, Ken. Priest
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare. The World as Stage
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods
Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Hides
Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Turtle Boy
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden
Burroughs, Augusten. Dry
Burroughs, Augusten. Magical Thinking
Burroughs, Augusten. Possible Side Effects
Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors
Burroughs, Augusten. A Wolf at the Table
Burroughs, Augusten. You Better Not Cry. Stories for Christmas
Burton, Tim. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects
Byatt, A.S. The Children Book
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories
Byatt, A. S. Possession
Byatt, A. S. Shadow of the Sun
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky
Canetti, Elias. Earwitness
Canetti, Elias. Notes from Hampstead. The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971
Canetti, Elias. Party in the Blitz
Caple, Nataliee. Mackerel Sky
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's
Carey, Peter. My Life As a Fake
Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist
Carroll, Jonathan. Sleeping in Flame
Carroll, Jonathan. White Apples
Carroll, Jonathan. The Wooden Sea
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass
Carroll, Lee. Black Swan Rising
Carson, Anne. The Beauty of the Husband
Carson, Anne. If not, Winter
Carson, Anne. Nox
Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends
Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with a Pearl Earring
Child, Julia. My Life in France
Clarke, Susanna. The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Coben, Harland. Hold Tight
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist
Coelho, Paulo. The Devil and Miss Prym
Coelho, Paulo. The Witch of Portobello
Coelho, Paulo. Veronika Decides to Die
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace
Clare, Cassandra. The Clockwork Angel
Cohen, Matt. The Bookseller
Colette. The Pure and the Impure
Collins, Paul. The Sixpence House
Collis, Sidney. Good Writing for Business
Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games
Collins, Suzanne. Mockingjay
Congreve, William. The Way of the World
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo
Conroy, Pat. My Reading Life
Cornwell, Bernard. Heretic
Corrigan, Maureen. Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Coupland, Douglas. Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
Cox, Michael. The Meaning of Night
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondswoman’s Narrative
Craig, Charmaine. The Good Men
Cumming, Elizabeth and Wendy Kaplan The Arts and Crafts Movement
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Davies, Robertson. Leaven of Malice.
Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus
Davies, Robertson. The Manticore
Davies, Robertson. A Mixture of Frailties
Davies, Robertson. Reading and Writing
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels
Davies, Robertson. Tempest-Tost
Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders
Davies, Robertson. What’s Bread in the Bone
Davis, Hubert J. Facts, Fancies and Folklore about Snakes
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth. The Evidence for Evolution
DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist
Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan. The Strain
DeMarco-Barrett, Barbara. Pen on Fire
Den Hartog, Kristen. The Perpetual Ending
Den Hartog, Kristen. Water Wings
De Rossi, Portia. Unbearable Lightness
Desrochers, Suzanne. Bride of New France
Diaz, Junot. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations
Dirda, Michael. An Open Book
Dobyns, Jay. No Angel. My Harrowing Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel
Donoghue, Emma. Room
Dublanica, Steve. Waiter Rant
Dunmore, Helen. A Spell of Winter
Dunning, John. Booked to Die
Dunning, John. The Bookman's Promise
Dunning, John. Bookman’s Wake
Dunning, John. The Sign of Book
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction
Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum
Eco, Umberto. Mysterious Flame of the Queen Loana
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose
Eliot, George. Middlemarch
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss x2
Eliot, T.S. Prufrock and Other Observations
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
Ellroy, James. The Big Nowhere
Engel, Howard. The Man Who Forgot How to Read
Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About my Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Ephron, Nora. I Remember Nothing
Ephron, Nora. Wallflower at the Orgy
Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting
Erikson, Steven. Gardens of the Moon
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides
Faber, Michel. The Courage Consort
Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Fadiman, Anne. At Large and At Small
Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Farber, Barry. How to learn any language : quickly, easily, inexpensively enjoyably, and on your own
Farnsworth, Christopher. Blood Oath
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses
Febos, Melissa. Whip Smart.
Fermine, Maxence. The Black Violin
Fermine, Maxence. Snow
Fforde, Jasper. The Big Over Easy
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair
Fforde, Jasper. Thursday Next. First Among Sequels
Fforde, Jasper. The Fourth Bear
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book
Fforde, Jasper. Something Rotten
Fforde, Jasper. The Well of Lost Plots
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones
Fielding, Joy. Now You See Her
Findley, Timothy. Spadework
Fitch, Janet. White Oleander
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop
Florescu, Radu R., McNally, Raymond T. Dracula. Prince of Many Faces
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein
Follett, Ken. The Pillars of the Earth
Forster, E.M. Maurice
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India
Forster, E.M. A Rom with a View
Foster. The Coquette
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit
Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone
Frayn, Michael. The Trick of It
Freud, Sigmunt. Dora
Freud, Sigmunt. Three Essays On Sexuality
Freud, Sigmunt. Totem and Taboo
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces
Frye, Northrop. The Well-Tempered Critic
Fuller, Graham. Spymaster's Secrets of Learning a Foreign Language
Funke, Cornelia. Inkheart
Funke, Cornelia. Inkspell
Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South
Gaston, Bill. The Cameraman
Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto
Gekoski, Rick. Nabokov's Butterfly
George, Elizabeth. I, Richard
Gerritsen, Tess. The Bone Garden
Gibb, Camilla. The Beauty of Humanity Movement
Gibb, Camilla. The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life
Gibb, Camilla. Sweetness in the Belly
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones
Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha
Goodman, Allegra. The Kaaterskill Falls
Goodman, Carol. Arcadia Falls
Goodman, Carol. The Drowning Tree
Goodman, Carol. The Ghost Orchard
Goodman, Carol. The Lake of Dead Languages
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa
Goodman, Carol. The Seduction of Water
Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth
Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels
Gowdy, Barbara. Helpless
Gowdy, Barbara. Mister Sandman
Gowdy, Barbara. Romantic
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe
Grossman, Lev. The Magicians
Gruber, Michael. The Book of Air and Shadows
Gruber, Michael. The Forgery of Venus
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Hailey, Kendall The Day I Became an Autodidact
Hanff, Helene. 84 Charing Cross Road
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd x2
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles x2
Harkness, Deborah. A Discovery of Witches
Harris, Charlaine. A Touch of Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Death in the Family
Harris, Charlaine. Dead and Gone
Harris, Charlaine. From Dead to Worse
Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Definitely Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Dead as a Doornail
Harris, Charlaine. Dead to the World
Harris, Charlaine. Club Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Living Dead in Dallas
Harris, Charlaine. Dead Until Dark
Harris, Charlaine. Dead Reckoning
Harris, Joanne. Blackberry Wine
Harris, Joanne. Chocolat
Harris, Joanne. Holy Fools
Harris, Robert. The Ghost
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal Rising
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon
Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss
Hawking, Stephen. A Briefer History of Time
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Selected Tales and Sketches
Hay, Elizabeth. Small Change
Hay, Sheridan. The Secret of Lost Things
Hayder, Mo. Pig Island
Hazen, Robert M. and James Trefil. Science Matters. Achieving Scientific Literacy
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers
Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures
Heller, Joseph. Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project
Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be
Hitchens, Christopher. Letters to a Young Contrarian
Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything
Hoffman, Alice. Blackbird House
Holdstock, Pauline. Beyond Measure
Holman, Sheri. The Dress Lodger
Hodgson, Barbara. Italy Out Of Hand
Hodgson, Barbara. The Tattooed Map
Homer. The Odyssey
Hood, Hugh. The New Athens
Hornby, Nick. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Hornby, Nick. The Polysyllabic Spree
Hornby, Nick. Shakespeare Wrote for Money
Horwood, Harold. Among the Lions
Humphreys, C.C. Vlad. The Last Confession
Humphreys, Helen. The Lost Garden
Huston, Nancy. Dolce Agonia
Husotn, Nancy. Fault Lines
Huston, Nancy. Instruments of Darkness
Huston, Nancy. Longings and Belongings
Huston, Nancy. Losing North
Huston, Nancy. Prodigy
Huston, Nancy. The Tale-Tellers
Huston, Nancy. Slow Emergencies
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited
Hynes, James. The Kings of Infinite Spaces
Hynes, James. The Lecturer’s Tale
Hynes, James. Next
Hynes, James. Publish and Perish
Ibbotson. Eva. Which Witch
Iles, Greg. Mortal Fear
Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go
Iwasaki, Mineko. Geisha, a Life
Jacobs, A. J. The Guinea Pig Diaries
Jacobs, A.J. The Know-It-All
Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colon. Vlad the Impaler. The Man Who Was Dracula
James, Henry. The Ambassadors
James, Henry. The Aspern Papers
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw x2
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew
Jensen, Jan Lars. Nervous System
Johansen, Iris. Eight Days to Live
Joyce, James. Dubliners
Kaewert, Julie. Unsigned
Kaufman, Jennifer. Mack, Karen. Literacy and Longing in L.A.
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted
Kazin, Alfred. Writing Was Everything
Kermode, Frank. The Age of Shakespeare
Kindl, Patrice. Goose Chase
King, James. Margaret Laurence
King, James. Transformations
King, Stephen. Lisey's Story
King, Stephen. The Mist
King, Stephen. On Writing: Memoir of the Craft
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Swan Thieves
Krementz, Jill. The Writer’s Desk
Lafarge, Paul. The Artist of the Missing
Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone
Lamotte, Anne. Bird by Bird
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Played with Fire
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Lasdun, James. The Horned Man
Laurence, Margaret. The Fire-Dwellers
Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House
Laurence, Margaret. The Jest of God
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel
Laurence, Margaret. The Tomorrow-Tamer and other Stories
Lavender, Will. Dominance
Lavender, Will. Obedience
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love
Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow
Lawson, Mary. Crow Lake
Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Lear, Edward. Book of Nonsense
Leavitt, David. Florence, A Delicate Case
Leblanc, Maurice. The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
Lehane, Dennis. Mystic River
Lehane, Denis. Shutter Island
Leibovitz, Annie and Susan Sontag. Women
Lerner, Betsy. Food and Loathing
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook
Lethem, Jonathan. The Disappointment Artist. Essays
Lethem, Jonathan and Karl Rusnak. Omega: The Unknown
Leverkton, The Best Little Girl in the World
Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball
Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener
Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter Is Delicious
Lodge, David. Home Truths
London, Jack. Martin Eden
Lowry, Malcolm. Under the Volcano
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees
MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. The Way the Crow Flies
MacIntyre, Linden. The Bishop's Man
Manguel, Alberto. Borges and I
Manguel, Alberto. The City of Words
Manguel, Alberto. Stevenson under the Palm Trees
Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall
Markley, Stephen. Publish This Book
Markson, David. The Last Novel
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi
Martin, Sean. The Knights Templar
Mayes, Frances. Bella Tuscany
Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun
McCall Smith, Alexander. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
McCall Smith, Alexander. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
McCall Smith, Alexander. Portuguese Irregular Verbs
McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
McFadyen, Cody. The Face of Death
McKay, Ami. The Birth House
McLean, Helen. Significant Things
McMurtry, Larry. Books
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
Mercer, Jeremy. Time Was Soft There: a Paris Soujourn at Shakespeare & Co.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces
Michaels, Anne. Skin Divers
Michaels, Anne. The Weight of Oranges. Miner's Pond
Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault
Miller, Rebecca. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Moers, Walter. The Alchemaster's Apprentice
Moers, Walter. The City of Dreaming Books
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Emily of New Moon
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Blue Castle
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta
Moore, Jeffrey. The Memory Artists
Moore, Judith. Fat Girl
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Morrison, Toni. Sula
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women
Munro, Alice. The Progress of Love
Munro, Alice. Runaway
Myles, Douglas. Prince Dracula. Son of the Devil
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory
Nelson, Sara. So Many Books, so Little Time
Nesbit, Edith. The Magic City
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Three Incestuous Sisters
Norris, Kathleen. Acedia and Me
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer
Oates, Joyce Carol. Rape: a Love Story
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Tattooed Girl
Oates, Joyce Carol. Wild Nights!
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter
Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient
Ondaatje, Michael. Handwriting
Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion
Ondaatje, Michael. Rat Jelly
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family
Ondaatje, Michael. There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do
O'Reilly, Mike and Mike Tennant. The Age of Persuasion. How Marketing Ate Our Culture
Orwell, George. 1984
Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World
Ozick, Cynthia. Levitation: Five Fictions
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense
Pamuk, Orhan. Istambul. Memories and the City
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red
Paris, Erna. The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice In The Age Of Imperial America
Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty. A Friendship
Pennac, Daniel. Better Than Life
Perdue, Lewis. Da Vinci Legacy
Peters, Ellis. Brother Cadfael's Penance
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar x2
Poulson, Christine. Murder is Academic
Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia
Powell, Julie. Cleaving. A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
Pratchett, Terry. The Color of Magic
Pratchett, Terry. The Truth
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News
Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass
Pullman, Philip. The Subtle Knife
Rand, Ayn. Anthem
Reed, Cheryl L. Unveiled. The Hidden Lives of Nuns
Reger, Rob. Emily the Strange
Reger, Rob and Jessica Gruner. Emily the Strange. The Lost Days
Rice, Anne. Lasher
Rice, Anne. Witching Hour
Richards, David Adams. The River of the Brokenhearted
Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Rilke, Reiner Maria. Letters to a Young Poet
Riordan, Rick. The Battle of the Labyrinth
Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief
Riordan, Rick. The Sea of Monsters
Riordan, Rick. The Titan's Curse
Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction
Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare at Goats
Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House
Rotella, Mark. Stolen Figs
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain
Roth, Philip. Plot against America
Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Rubenfeld, Jed. The Interpretation of Murder
Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J.D. Raise the Roof, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2
Schmitter, Elke. Mrs. Sartoris
Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader
Schoemperlen, Diane. Our Lady of the Lost and Found
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
Scott, Michael. The Alchemyst. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Magician. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Necromancer. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Sorceress. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott Fitzgerald, F., Great Gatsby
Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon
Sebold, Alice. Lovely Bones
Sebold, Alice. Lucky
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day
Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale
Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part I
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part II
Shakespeare, William. King Lear
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare, William. The Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William. Othello
Shakespeare, William. Richard II
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night
Shea, Suzanne Strempek. Shelf Life
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein
Shields, Carol. Swann
Shields, Carol. Unless
Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Sigler, Scott. Infected
Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Silverman, Sara. The Bedwetter
Silverstein, Shel. A Light in the Attic
Siskind, Barry. Bumblebees Can’t Fly
Skvorecky, Josef. Two Murders in My Double Life
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle
Smith, Sarah. Chasing Shakespeares
Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind
Smokler, Kevin. Bookmark Now
Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning
Snyder, Scott and Stephen King. American Vampire
Sontag, Rachel. House Rules
Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time
Sontag, Susan. The Benefactor
Sontag, Susan. In America
Sontag, Susan. On Photography
Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963
Sophocles, Antigone
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Sorel, Edward. Literary Lives
Spark, Muriel. The Finishing School
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spitz, Vivien. Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
Spufford, Francis. The Child that Books Built
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
Stix, Gary and Lacob, Miriam. Who Gives a Gigabyte?
Stoker, Bram. Dracula
Sullivan, Rosemary. Labyrinth of Desire
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
Suskind, Patrick. Perfume
Swan, Susan. Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax with
Swan, Susan. The Wives of Bath
Swan, Susan. What Casanova Told Me
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of Tub and Related Pieces
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History
Taylor, Peter Lane. Science at the Extreme
Teasdale, Sara. Love Songs
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Rose and the Ring
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair
Thomas, D.M. Lady with a Laptop
Thoreau, David Henry. Walden: Or Life in the Woods
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante
Tremaine, Rose. Restoration
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden
Trow, M.J. Vlad the Impaler. In Search of the Real Dracula
Trussoni, Danielle. Angelology
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ullmann, Linn. Before You Sleep
Uppal, Priscila. The Divine Economy of Salvation
Vise, David A. and Mark Malseed. The Google Story
Vandever, Jennifer. The Bronte Project
Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five
Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
Wells, H. G. Invisible Man
Welty, Eudora. One Writer's Beginnings
Wente, Margaret. An Accidental Canadian
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence
Wharton, Thomas. Icefields
Wharton, Thomas. Logogryph
Wharton, Thomas. Salamander
Whitehouse, Howard. The Faceless Fiend
Whitehouse, Howard. The Strictest School in the World
Whyte, Jack. Knights of the Black and White
Whyte, Jack. Order in Chaos
Whyte, Jack. Standard of Honor
Wicker, Christine. Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that talks to the Dead
Wiebe, Rudy. The Scorched-Wood People
Wiesel, Elie. Night
Willett, Jincy. The Writing Class
Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit
Wodehouse, P.G. My Man Jeeves
Wolff, Tobias. Old School
Wolitzer, Hilma. Summer Reading
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle's House and Other Sketches
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard B. Adultery
Wright, Richard B. Clara Callan
Wright, Richard B. Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard
Wright, Richard B. October
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Angel's Game
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind
Zaid, Gabriel. So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
Zemon Davies, Natalie. The Return of Martin Guerre
Zuiker, Anthony E. Level 26
Zuiker, Anthony E. Dark Prophecy

Books read in 2011

2011-12-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

I guess it is remotely possible that I will still finish some positions before the end of the year. I will not try too hard though. 70 is a respectable number, especially considering that I managed to read some French and Polish books as well. So this is how it stands effective December 26:

Farnsworth, Christopher. Blood Oath
Hitchens, Christopher. Letters to a Young Contrarian
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion
Coupland, Douglas. Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe
Hazen, Robert M. and James Trefil. Science Matters. Achieving Scientific Literacy
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth. The Evidence for Evolution
Andreyko, Marc and Michael McMillian. True Blood. Tainted Love
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein
Hawking, Stephen. A Briefer History of Time
Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. The Tender Cut. Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers
Vise, David A. and Mark Malseed. The Google Story
Canetti, Elias. Party in the Blitz
Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto
Lear, Edward. Book of Nonsense
Eliot, T.S. Prufrock and Other Observations
Fuller, Graham. Spymaster's Secrets of Learning a Foreign Language
Fielding, Joy. Now You See Her
Arcan, Nelly. Exit
McCall Smith, Alexander. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
McCall Smith, Alexander. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
Barnes, Julian. The Sense of Ending
Hynes, James. Next
Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind
McFadyen, Cody. The Face of Death
Carson, Anne. Nox
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory
Coben, Harland. Hold Tight
Johansen, Iris. Eight Days to Live
Lavender, Will. Dominance
Bloom, Amy. Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Lavender, Will. Obedience
Iles, Greg. Mortal Fear
Huston, Nancy. Instruments of Darkness
Baker, Tiffany. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall
Bennet, Alan. The Uncommon Reader
Baldacci, David. Deliver Us From Evil
Bray, Libba. A Great and Terrible Beauty
Desrochers, Suzanne. Bride of New France
Sigler, Scott. Infected
Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Hides
Riordan, Rick. The Battle of the Labyrinth
Harris, Charlaine. Dead Reckoning
Clare, Cassandra. The Clockwork Angel
Farber, Barry. How to learn any language : quickly, easily, inexpensively enjoyably, and on your own
Silverman, Sara. The Bedwetter
Brown, Dan. The Lost Symbol
Riordan, Rick. The Titan's Curse
Donoghue, Emma. Room
Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter Is Delicious
Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Turtle Boy
Gibb, Camilla. The Beauty of Humanity Movement
Harkness, Deborah. A Discovery of Witches
Ball, Alan. True Blood Volume 1. All Together Now
Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Trussoni, Danielle. Angelology
MacIntyre, Linden. The Bishop's Man
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go
Zuiker, Anthony E. Dark Prophecy
Riordan, Rick. The Sea of Monsters
Ephron, Nora. I Remember Nothing
Bade, Patrick, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
De Rossi, Portia. Unbearable Lightness
Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be
Collins, Suzanne. Mockingjay
Conroy, Pat. My Reading Life
Carroll, Lee. Black Swan Rising
Burroughs, Augusten. You Better Not Cry. Stories for Christmas

Reading for work

2011-10-13T21:47:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers these days. For school.... eh... for work, actually. Workplace book club. My first such enterprise.

Feels strange, since we're discussing 2 chapters at a time for an hour once every 2 weeks. Reminds me a bit of how we were reading Vanity Fair and Ulysses for my two Eng Lit classes with professor Henry Auster - every Friday for a year, little by little. As much as I didn't mind a year with Vanity Fair, Ulysses just about killed me - and I decided to abandon it just a few pages before the end.

I know nothing stops me from reading the whole thing instead of bit by bit. I know it's a good book. But somehow because I'm reading it for work - even though it was my idea and in many ways my choice - it feels like work! I definitely have to re-evaluate.

My important ones

2011-09-04T21:24:00.000-04:00

In my 12 years of reading books in English, there were some books that impressed/affected me more than others. Here's the list:

Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess
Byatt, A. S. Possession
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky
Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Eco, Umberto. Mysterious Flame of the Queen Loana
Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair
Gibb, Camilla. Sweetness in the Belly
Huston, Nancy. Dolce Agonia
Huston, Nancy. Losing North
James, Henry. The Ambassadors
King, Stephen. On Writing: Memoir of the Craft
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian
Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball
Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener
London, Jack. Martin Eden
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. The Way the Crow Flies
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Nesbit, Edith. The Magic City
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain
Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey
Skvorecky, Josef. Two Murders in My Double Life
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle
Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963
Suskind, Patrick. Perfume
Swan, Susan. The Wives of Bath
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel
Wright, Richard B. Clara Callan

Obedient and Dominated...

2011-09-04T16:23:00.001-04:00

I've been reading like crazy these last few days. I blame the necessity for subway books - I never used to read thrillers before, and for sure not in the way thrillers are supposed to be read - in huge gulps and with heart pounding until the last page brings the resolution and the blessed exhaustion. I disliked the idea of thrillers. After all, how can one absorb a book properly if by its own nature that book is to be read very, very fast - as if one was running for dear life? Proper - and worthy - literature is the one that can be pondered at leisure and dwelled on at length. Isn't it? Isn't it?

Somehow since I finished listening to Greg Iles's Mortal Fear, I've been on a thriller binge. In the last three days, aside from other readings, I actually finished two books that had me sitting on the edge of my chair, or armchair, or a sofa, trying to stop my eyes from jumping ahead.

To save my face - both books were written by a former English professor and obviously a man of letters, and that can be seen both in the choice of subject matter and the execution. Also in the characters and the setting - as both books are set in academia, often in a classroom, and the characters are students, professors and other academic personnel.

In Obedience, Will Lavender sets up a mystery for the students of a Logic and Reasoning class at a small college. It's a logic puzzle presented to them by their mysterious professor Leonard Williams - he tells them a girl by the name of Polly was abducted and in 6 weeks she will be dead unless they figure out who kidnapped her and why. As the students try to unravel the plot, the events of the puzzle seep into their lives until they lose track of what's game and what's real. The book was impossible to put down. Impossible.

As soon as I was done, I moved on to his second novel, Dominance. The setting here is very similar - again we have a class of select students and a strange professor at the helm, Richard Aldiss. That professor is actually in prison for murder, and he's conducting the class through a satellite link - Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Here we also have a puzzle - a literary one this time. Through reading of the only two novels of a recluse writer Paul Fallows, the students are to uncover Fallows's true identity. And one of them is singled out to prove Aldiss's innocence while she's at it... Dominance has two time frames: the 1994 time frame when the Aldiss's class took place and the identity of Fallows was discovered, and 15 years later when the students who took the class gather for a memorial of one of their colleague who was brutally murdered. His murder is strangely similar to the two killings their professor was originally convicted for. The students have to figure out what they got wrong last time and how to stay alive - as a literary game called the Procedure unfolds all around them.

I finished Dominance about 30 minutes ago and I'm still breathless. Give me a book about books and set in academia and I'll eat it up - but this one also had an amazing pace and was written with great economy. Sometimes it was hard to follow the switches in time frames as in 15 years the leading character Alex didn't really change enough to have a completely different voice. The author helps us by dividing the chapters clearly and marking each part either "The Class" or "Alex" but I must say that in my rush to turn the pages I wasn't really paying attention to those. But I got over that confusion very easily.

Both books have many similarities. We have the same setting, both books have strong male lead of a professor - a bit strange and mysterious. In both there is a strong female lead of a gifted and pretty student, with a sidekick of a male student. There are old men in each book - elderly professors who turn out to hold the key to a lot of what's happening. The persons in the close vicinity of those elderly professors are important engineers of the whole mischief. For a moment I'm afraid that Will Lavender may go the same route as the one that's been so good for Dan Brown - who's been populating his books and surrounding his man Robert Langdon with the same set of stock characters all along. I must say though that this fear is not enough to stop me from picking up Lavender's new novel when it comes out. And I'm pretty sure it won't last me more than 2 days.

Subway books

2011-08-20T00:47:00.019-04:00

I commute a lot these days. More than I used to. I commute at a time when everybody else is commuting. To get to my destination by 9 a.m. To leave my workplace around 5 p.m. It used to be just one paid highway with not much traffic, and then about 20 km down Yonge St. Wasn't so bad. Now it's Hwy 407, 404, 401, and then Yonge St., and then several subway stops. Doesn't matter that I'm being driven. Doesn't matter I don't have to be quite awake. Aggravation builds up, especially considering the Toronto subway part of my daily journey. Those several stops prove to be more and more demanding every day. There doesn't seem to be a good time before 9 a.m. to take the subway. Half of the inhabitants of the suburbs take the subway at exactly the same time, all of them irritated, sleepy, not quite aware of the movements of their coffee cups, with backpacks and coffee breaths in the unpleasant vicinity of me. There is no chance to get a seat, but there is often not even a chance to get a bar to hold on to. Thank the universe I'm tall - at least I have my own layer of air on the subway train that most of the riders don't get to breathe!

The lack of hand support, the necessity of holding on to my bag and paying attention, and the fact that I'm annoyed most of the time, created an interesting situation for me reading-wise. Out of desperation - and because I have to have my hands free to grab on to things when the subway stops suddenly in the middle of the tunnel - I started listening to books in the mp3 format. I've always been doing that but now is the first time when the where dictates the what. Confused? Let me explain.

I used to listen to the exact same kinds of books I would be reading in the traditional way. Literary novels. Impressive non-fiction. Books about books. Books that made me feel better about myself - just for reading them. Books whose titles looked impressive on my reading lists on this blog. Well, that time is over.

I feel like I'm climbing down the isle of reading respectability and soon I will listen to something by James Patterson (or not quite by him but with his holy name in big letters on the cover)!

Turns out, only a specific kind of book can be listened to on Toronto subway. Definitely plot-driven. Definitely non-literary. Preferably low-brow. Fast. Read by the author, if possible. Not too intellectual - or at least not too demanding. Not all the books I've listened to on the subway in the last 5 months were like that. But this is what I strive for these days. Sad.

The list of my to-date subway books on mp3 is as follows:

Harkness, Deborah. A Discovery of Witches (continuation of my vampire/witches obsession)
Linsay, Jeff. Dexter Is Delicious (continuation of my obsession with premeditated blood spatter)
Brown, Dan. The Lost Symbol (I know, I know, I shouldn't have, but actually, it was a great subway book! Fast-paced, with short chapters and the characters I was oh-so-familiar with!)
Silverman, Sara. The Bedwetter (a stand-up comedy/biography book read by the author - quite hah-larious most of the time but very short. Didn't last me long but was quite perfect to get me "de-gravated" in the mornings before the first
liter of coffee.)
Sigler, Scott. Infected (a weird X-files-like sci-fi read unbelievably well by the author. Actually, performed, not read. There are sound effects and such - and he's changing voices! Great stuff, aside from some majorly disturbing descriptions of self-mutilation - which because of the format of the book was impossible to skip, like I would normally do if I were reading it. A lot of knife-poking, self-cutting alien bodies out of one's body and burning one's buttocks on the gas stove. What can I say. Great subway book.)
Baldacci, David. Deliver Us From Evil (a very, very attractive bad guy who might just be too evil to extinguish... Almost Hannibal-Lecter-attractive. Nicely exaggerated Ukrainian war criminal and some quite well done personages trying to extinguish him as creatively as possible. Multiple wounds caused by guns, dogs, as well as a little gadget that allows the wielder to remove all of the unwitting participant's skin - one uninterrupted strip at a time.)

You see the pattern, don't you. It seems it has to be something that will deal with my morning aggression and keep me intrigued enough not to let the subway part of my commute get to me. It has to distract when I hear the announcements that start with "Attention all passengers on Yonge-University-Spadina line. We are currently experiencing...", at which point they become incomprehensible (usually the mumbled part has to do with longer than normal travel time between.. and ... due to: 1) a disabled train 2) signal problems 3) unauthorized presence on the track 4) smoke on the track level 5) passenger-activated alarm on a train. Sometimes they don't say what it is - and that means a very unauthorized and very sudden presence on the track level...

Pat Barker's Life Class will not get heard on my commute. I started it hoping for some fast action with an artistic twist but I had to abandon it. I had trouble getting sufficiently distracted. Too literary. Too good. I'm hopeful though for The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker. It reminds me of Alice Hoffman's stuff, and Alice Munro's, and Wally Lamb's. I am intrigued and impressed - and I'm only on track 17 of 72! I'll stick to that one, despite its literariness...

Finally at Wolf Hall - and it only took 4 months!

2011-08-17T19:50:00.011-04:00

I am about to finish Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. 50 more pages and I'm free. However accomplished the book, it was weighing heavily on my conscience that I didn't seem to be able to finish it.

I do appreciate it for the achievement that it is - and I must admit that there were parts that I was reading with full attention, even engrossment - but I'm glad to be done with it. Because of its large size (the edition I'm reading has 650 pages) and the fact that it's hard to understand everything without some historical preparation, the book is much more of a commitment than I wanted to make. Even though I've been reading Starkey's Six Wives for some time now, I

don't think I would have comprehended one chapter if it wasn't for my recent and almost religious sessions with HBO's The Tudors. The fact that I watched the show in French didn't seem to matter - I got enough history out of it to

appreciate the Wolf Hall and what the author is trying to do.

Wolf Hall deals with a part of the Tudor history from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, the Éminence grise of the Henry the Eight's reign, who orchestrated a lot of the king's actions between the times of Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves (that last one was his undoing, but that's not in the book). It's a sympathetic portrayal although the author does capitalize on the public perception of Cromwell at the time as the devil incarnate. Here is my favorite bit, from the chapter called "A Painter's Eye", dealing with Hans Holbein's portrait of Cromwell and Cromwell's response to it.

Gregory stands at his shoulder. His eyes rest on the portrait. He doesn't speak.
He is conscious that his son is taller than he is: not that it takes much.(...) He feels such tenderness for him he thinks he might cry.
He turns to the painting. 'I fear Mark was right.'
'Who is Mark?'
'A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer.'
Gregory says, 'Did you not know?' (527)

While reading the book, I tried to see Cromwell as he was in that painting.Instead, I kept getting the image of James Frain who portrayed Cromwell in the TV series. Amazing performance. I dare say he affected how Cromwell is perceived now more than Wolf Hall did.

Alright then. 50 pages to go. Only one beer left. Can I make it today? :)

...and this is it.

2011-08-17T12:44:00.010-04:00

What follows is my amateur translation of the first chapter of Maja Lidia Kossakowska's Upiór Południa - Burzowe Kocię, published by Fabryka Słów in 2009.

Storm Kitten

Storm Kitten appeared in the window just as the first raindrops, steel-gray and heavy like bullets from a Kalashnikov gun, urgently hit the glass. It was crunched on the outside window sill, gray, wet and hairy, like a small troll. A blue flare of a lightning slid across the clouds drowning the world in ghostly electric glare, as if somewhere high up in the heaven of the Lord and His Angels a neon sign with “Welcome to Paradise! Aloha!” fell off and dropped down, dragging behind a tail of explosions, and just then the animal’s green eyes lit up like diodes in an old radio.

With effort, Troy Harlows turned his head towards the window. He was rather kind-natured, so if he could, he would have got up to let the cat in. But he couldn’t. Both his legs were horribly broken and quite recently three bullets were pulled out of his chest.

From the moment he regained consciousness everybody kept telling him how lucky he was. Troy, still submerged in the deep murky sea of indifference caused by all the bodily harm and the pain, didn’t protest. Besides, he wasn’t the type to complain or – God forbid – feel sorry for himself. Only sometimes in the night, when Norman Gretz, his companion from the next bed, moaned and mumbled in his coma-induced fog, Troy wondered whether someone with three holes in his chest and multiple complex leg fractures, who spent the last eight months as a prisoner of war, can really be considered lucky.

But his state, however unpleasant, didn’t fill him with bitterness. Troy thanked his good fortune that he managed to exchange the wet and stuffy concrete cell for the gray unfriendly and somewhat repulsive hospital room.

“Doesn’t compare, buddy,” he said to the unconscious Norman as soon as he was able to move his cracked burnt lips and somewhat articulate the sounds. “Man, I swear, it doesn’t compare.”

Gretz whimpered in his sleep like a puppy. Troy of course did not expect anything different. He was talking to Norman not anticipating a response, just like before when talking to an ant, a crack in the wall or the air vent in his cell. He learned this in his captivity and even though he realized that he’s coming unpleasantly close to the boundaries of madness, he wasn’t stopping – because it was helping.

At first they put a long white divider next to Norman’s bed. It looked like a screen at a drive-in movie theatre or a bed sheet drying on the line – the kind Troy and his older sister Janice used for shadow play when they were children. Of course Janice would always eventually go berserk and start pelting him with her fists, suddenly and deceitfully jumping out from behind the hanging sheet, like a furious polar bear from behind the piled up ice floats.

Gretz on the other hand was lying behind the divider fixed and motionless, as if pretending to be a character from Hindu or Indonesian mythology, some Buddha or Baswaswara in meditation, and was so into it that he couldn’t stop anymore. For some time Harlows imagined that Norman is holding his breath, counting out the slow weak heart beats and thinking: “Just a little bit longer. I’ll hold on just a little bit longer and then I’ll scream “Gotcha!”, and then I’ll jump out of this horrible bed laughing like a madman. I’d like to see their faces! Really! But not just yet. I’ll hold on just a little longer. I’ll wait for the right moment.” But the right moment wasn’t coming. Instead, the divider disappeared one day. It was wheeled out on its squeaky wheels as stately as it arrived, pushed by two morose orderlies. Apparently the hospital personnel decided that after several weeks in one room Troy and Norman knew each other enough to give up the illusion of privacy provided by the limp see-through sail of the cotton screen.

From that point on, Harlows could see the contour of his comatose companion and all his unhealthy paleness between the pillows, and not like before, the shadowy image – like a photo negative projected onto the divider. Which obviously wasn’t too bad for his continuous jolly chats with Norman.

“Poor kitty,” he said now with concern in his voice. “Looks like a dirty mop. A wet cat is the most pitiful creature in the world. He’s probably cold. Did you ever have a cat, Norman? I did. Well, technically not me but my mother. His name was Manolo and he fucking loved tuna. Cats are OK. Maybe not like dogs, especially for a growing kid, but OK. Much better than rabbits or turtles.”

Gretz kept silent on the the topic of superiority of cats over turtles but Troy didn’t mind.

“Listen...” he began but in that moment a blue neon fell from the sky with a loud bang, lighting up the window sill with splashes of deafening whiteness.

Harlows strained his eyes.

“Hey! Wait!” he shouted with surprise. “But he’s sitting on this side of the window! How did he get in here, the little weasel? Just think, Norman. I think we have a cat. At least until nurse Moore turns him into a door mat.”

“Gaaaa,” said Gretz.

Crouched in the corner between the wall and the window frame, the cat was watching Harlows carefully. Green unmoving eyes were round as if they belonged to an owl. Bristling wet coat had unusual shade. Dark-brown and gray, with reddish patches and spots. As if someone spilled some sand all over a softened by mud country road. His snout was two-coloured, like a mask of a Venetian harlequin – one side was dark, the other sandy, which gave the creature a grotesque look.

“You’re not too pretty, are you?” stated Troy. “You look like a gremlin from that old movie. The one... damn it, I don’t remember the title. Janice hated it. Like everything else in the world. You don’t remember, Norman?”

Norman didn’t.

The animal licked his paw with a serious expression. The gesture was determined and decisive, as if he was attaching a stamp to an envelope with an important petition. “Dear Felix the Cat, yesterday I found a piece of an old rag in the can of cat food that you’ve been advertising so persistently. Of course I realize that you can’t personally perform quality control of all your products on the market, but if indeed you care so much about quality...”

Troy burst out with laughter and coughed dully. His chest hurt awfully when he laughed.

“You know what?” he said to the kitty when the cough stopped and the pain subsided a little. “I’ll call you Gremlin. You do remind me of the creature from that movie, and if you got in here through a closed window, you must be a bit of a tinkerer. Yeah, Gremlin seems like the right name. Just don’t get attached because in the morning nurse Moore will find you and throw you out on that two-coloured snout of yours, even if there’s a tornado.

The cat’s sombre determined face of a clown turned towards him.

“I’ve had many names, Jacob, but I’ve never borne one of a mediocre monster from a lame mythology,” he said clearly and distinctly. “Personally, I’d prefer if you called me Storm Kitten. That is my name in the Nearby Land. If we are to spend some time together, I’d appreciate if you could address me in that way.”

“Fuck!” moaned Troy, falling deeper into his pillows.

Exercises in Translation

2011-08-17T12:00:00.013-04:00

Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation

Maja Lidia Kossakowska, Upiór Południa - Burzowe Kocię.

I'm toying with the idea of taking up a new hobby. Translating some of my favorite fictions from Polish to English. I know, I know - not done in this direction. I should be going from my second language into the native one. Well, that's not going to happen since I'm no longer credible writing in Polish. Has the Polish tongue changed so much during the almost 12 y

ears when my exposure to it consisted of the infrequent conversations with family or sporadic bouts of Polish fantastic fiction sent my way by the best-read woman
of my life? What I read in Polish so often sounds like a not-so-good translation from English. Especially the new stuff.

Well, I decided to try my hand at translating a bit from a recent book I read in Polish. I remember being struck as soon as I started it by how I could hear the translation in my head as I was reading the Polish sentences. The book seemed so translatable! Aside from lengthy and quite baroque phrases, which I knew might warrant some sentence-splitting in English, even the sentence structure seemed almost English.

Strange I never considered that before. I my work I'm surrounded by French translation and people handling it - people who know what they're doing because they studied translation for years and actuall

y think it's the coolest thing ever. The idea of substituting words for other words does seem very cool indeed. And especially with fiction, it is creating without the necessity of coming up with one's own idea!

To educate myself, I consumed some Umberto Eco who in his little book Experiences in Translation talks about the official theories of translation but most of all about translations of his books and translations that he himself committed. He uses multilingual examples, most of which I could actually understand, and talks at length about the importance of translating the meaning, not the words. So prepared, I approached the first chapter of Burzowe Kocię, a surreal fantasy set in the mind of a recovering modern soldier.

It ended up being much more difficult than I thought. Thank God Kossakowska uses literary and pop culture allusions straight from the English language. That made it easier to take care of the idioms too, aside from the outcry "Pobite gary!", which doesn't exist in English, even in its concept. Or does it? As much as I was trying though, the English outcome of Kossakowska's prose came out a little wooden. However I look at it, I'm not quite satisfied. I will continue though. Maybe with something more traditional and less psychedelic next time.

Red Death; and not too many, after all

2011-07-26T21:24:00.006-04:00

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Veronica Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Heir to the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick
Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Exit, Nelly Arcan

This one is purple...

2011-07-04T22:42:00.005-04:00

The latest novel in the Sookie Stackhouse series is waiting for me - Dead Reckoning. Just obtained from the library, mine for 3 weeks. I am almost afraid to start, knowing that it will suck me in regardless of the book's literary qualities and my self-loathing. I know it will make me feel deliciously ashamed and quite happy at the same time. Completely messing up with my self-image. My time management. My priorities.

Anyways, I hear the latest season of True Blood started off quite nicely... Something to look forward to.

Emma Donoghue, Room

2011-05-18T23:02:00.002-04:00

Written from the point of view of Jack - a surprisingly literate 5-year-old, the book is set in a room. The room is lined with cork tiles, has a skylight window secured with industrial mesh and is separated from the world by steel door with an electronic lock. The room is the world for Jack, who was born in it and has not left it since. The room is a prison for his mother, who was kidnapped at 19 and spent the last 7 years there. She protects her son by building an illusion that becomes his reality. She teaches him that the room is the world and there's nothing real outside it. The pictures he sees on TV are just that - and only in TV. They don't really exist.

The life on the inside is wondrous for the boy - rich, entertaining and full of the most important thing in the whole world - his Ma. He has her at his side all the time - they even take baths together. Also, whenever he wants to, he can "have some" - since his Ma never saw the reason to stop breastfeeding him. Jack's life is perfect, with occasional interruptions when he worries about his Ma. That is because almost every night she gets a visit from "Old Nick", the man who is their keeper and provides both the most basic supplies and the solid barrier between the room and the world.

This book is heartbreaking. It puts in question all the conventions of the modern society - especially methods of rearing children. Jack's Ma is surely better off on the outside, but what about Jack?

Room may just be a giant metaphor for everything from the world to a single cell. Limited and locked it's quite perfect, really. And that's the scariest and the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

Conquered by the French

2011-05-08T03:05:00.003-04:00

It's been going slow. It might be the Wolf Hall slowing me down although I rather suspect that it's French. Lately I've been trying to balance my oral and written French - since I only ever practice the latter.

It seems to me one can't say to know a language

unless it's all even - writing, reading, listening comprehension and speaking. It took me some years to start speaking English - years in which I was producing A+ Eng Lit essays. I only learned to speak because I had to get a job (the job was at a bookstore so at least I had all the vocabulary I needed).

Why am I learning French? Because I like it. I am at a point in life when I can pretty much do whatever I want, limited only by the financial aspect. And some innate inabilities of course. I don't suppose I will ever take on skating or geographical research, for example. But I do like French and it doesn't seem so much out of my league - after all, I did learn languages in the past, I do have a lot of learning aids readily available and I can always find additional justification if I ever need it, since I do live in a bilingual country.

But all that French is taking up a lot of time - time some of which I would be spending reading. So no, it's not just Wolf Hall, which I am enjoying, especially that I'm also watching the 3rd season of The Tudors in French (in fact, I am watching it right this moment, with my left eye). It is a long book though. Long.

I'm also listening to the last installment of the Dexter Morgan story - Dexter Is Delicious. It's all that makes my daily commute bearable - subway may make one homicidal after all. I took from the library some books about the International Criminal Court but it seems my quest to get back to the level of expertise I had when I was writing my Master's thesis on the subject will have to wait. No time to get passionate about too many things. Well, I'm giving myself till the end of the year to be done with French and then I will have much more time for other educational enterprises.

What else am I doing? Oh, well, I'm still reading my biology textbook. Currently stuck at fungi. Since I never learned biology in English, along with re-memorization I have to do some translation. Unfortunately, none of my fragmentary biological knowledge from Poland ever auto-translated when I learned English. So it does feel like learning it all from scratch.

I've been reading Jane Eyre in French, although that was stopped lately by the unfortunate latest movie version. A very, very disappointing adaptation, which the general population somehow seems to like. Dumbfounding. I honestly don't even want to talk about it.

A book just started today is A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. This reading is directly caused by the preview of the new HBO series based on the book - series which I will probably not see until it's out on DVD. After the first 50 pages I am moderately into it. It's another thick book - let's hope I stick with it. It's been too much abandoning books lately.

Well, I did read something impressive not so long ago. And I read it in a day. The new book by Camilla Gibb, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. This was the first book about Vietnam I ever read, and as much as I had no interest in the subject matter - I was just reading it to see what followed in the author's mind The Sweetness in the Belly, my favorite Gibb's novel - I do recognize the accomplishment. The book deals with modern day Vietnam, but because one of its main characters is an aged man, Gibb manages to squeeze in a lot of history. It's a story of an old man trying to relinquish his secrets in expectation of death and a young girl raised in the U.S. and coming to Vietnam to look for any traces of her father, an artist who disappeared after being sent to one of the reeducation camps. It turns out the man's secret and the girl's quest intertwine and in the process of discovery they both find new purpose, new life.

I did like the book, although upon completion I was a bit disappointed in the amount of time I got to spend with the story. It's not a long book but after all it was not a good idea to read it in one big gulp. I got used to the characters only for a short time - not enough to grow to really care about them - and I didn't manage to properly reflect on meanings and concepts. As a result, the book did not spawn a usual interest in/obsession with the subject matter. So I won't be reading anything else about Vietnam any time soon (like I did about Ethiopia after her previous book), even though Gibb still has my admiration.

With all the books I have on the go, I'm still somehow dissatisfied. I keep looking for a new volume to sink my teeth into. Some years ago it would be absolutely normal for me to have a big stack of books I was reading at any given time; now I'm uncomfortable if I ever get over 3. There's always the danger of abandonment (of the book by me or the other way around) if I put it away for too long. And the disappointment that follows - also in me and the book. I'm still torn in my choices between plot-driven page-turners and literary novels that will make me feel good about myself. Not to mention, some nice non-fiction positions that I have lined up but which are all very substantial so I can't read them now when I am only at 17 books for the year! I need to catch up, read some short books (=cheat) - maybe poetry?

Or maybe I should stop being so shallow and acknowledge for the first time since I started counting that numbers don't matter? Hm, don't know if I'm ready...

Not another bite!

2011-02-20T21:14:00.001-05:00

I tried to read the first volume of The Vampire Diaries. I really tried. And yesterday I gave up after 60 pages. I think part of me wanted to get back the feeling I got when I was reading the Sookie Stackhouse series. Instead, the book reminded me too much of the Twilight series (of which I read only book one but that one was more than enough). I don't need any more of that, it turns out.

I experienced a weird feeling when I closed the book - still not quite comfortable with abandoning books in which I invested more than an hour. There was a momentary hesitation, and an immediate necessity of a decision what to read next. Such a pleasant decision!

I landed on three things - Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and two books in Polish that just arrived in a lovely care package. I started all three and got between 100 and 60 pages in in all of them. Unusual for me recently - but I think I was overcompensating for abandoning The Vampire Diaries.

And I did enjoy switching the languages - for many years now I've been getting uncomfortable reading Polish, especially after a heaping dose of Eng lit. Somehow everything I read in Polish seemed like a bad translation from English all of a sudden. But I'm recovering now, and aside from occasional instances when I'm weirded out by some phrase in my native language, I can actually read in Polish without much displeasure. And I will continue, and I will continue mixing it up. Makes me feel good - like I speak languages and such. ; )

Lee Carroll, Black Swan Rising

2011-01-07T23:02:00.001-05:00

It makes me wonder how it's actually done - a collaboration on a work of fiction. Black Swan Rising was done by a husband and wife team: one of my favorite authors, Carol Goodman, and her poet and a hedge fund manager Lee Slonimsky. Goodman used Slonimsky's poems once before, in her novel The Ghost Orchard - and I enjoyed them there. But those were just pieces inserted into Goodman's material, after she supposedly gave her husband some direction as to what she was looking for. For Black Swan Rising they even came up with a nom de plume - Lee Carroll. It must have been way more than that.

As I was reading the book, I kept wondering how technically all that cooperation was done. Did they plot it together and then she'd write it? Did they write alternating chapters? I didn't see the shifts in style that surely would produce - although a good editor would probably smooth things over. Did they spend winter evenings thinking up twists and turns, and mythologies? Fascinating.

The book didn't hold my attention like Goodman's other books did. It seems Lee Carroll went for the recently very popular magic-mythology-vampire theme. We have the English magician John Dee, Oberon the king of the faeries, Melusine, a vampire who was the young man who inspired William Shakespeare and then took away the love of his dark lady, and a Watchtower - a woman expected to protect the world from all things demon. Seems like a winning combo these days. Seems like something I should devour and lick the plate after, especially after my Alchemist-True Blood binge last year. Well, I didn't. I enjoyed it but finishing it took longer than it should have, and towards the end I found myself rushing through the pages.

Does that mean Carol Goodman should stay within the sphere of reality in the future and not share her desk with her husband anymore? I don't know. Probably because of my attachment to her, I will keep reading - Black Swan Rising is clearly set up to start a series. But I will keep checking for her solo work. Maybe one day she produces another cookie cutter heroine (did I mention that all her main female characters seem the same person?) in an academic profession who will fill my week with wonder.

593 books read to date: 2000-2010

2011-01-03T16:11:00.000-05:00

Abagnale, Frank W. Catch Me if You Can
Adams, Douglas. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie
Ali, Monica. In the Kitchen
Alighieri, Dante. La Vita Nuova
Allen, John L. Jr. Opus Dei
Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
Armstrong, Luis. Satchmo. My Life in New Orleans
Armstrong, Sarah. Salt Rain
Athill, Diana. Stet
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace
Atwood, Margaret. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin
Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale
Atwood, Margaret. Interlunar
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder
Atwood, Margaret. Morning in the Burned House
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride
Atwood, Margaret. Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead
Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips
Austen, Jane. Emma x2
Austen, Jane. Persuasion
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice x2
Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. The Inquisition
Baker, Nicholson. The Anthologist
Baldwin. Go Tell It On The Mountain
Banks, Russell. Sweet Hereafters
Bantock, Nick. Griffin and Sabine
Bantock, Nick. The Gryphon
Bantock, Nick. Sabine’s Notebook
Bantock, Nick. The Golden Mean
Barker, Clive. Abarat. Days of Magic, Nights of War
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk
Barron, Stephanie. The White Garden
Bartlett Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
Battle, Matthew. Library: an Unquiet History
Bennett, Arnold. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Blake, Sarah. Grange House
Borchert, Don. Free for All
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Mirror of Ink
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451
Bramham, Daphne. The Scret Lives of Saints. Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect
Brand, Dionne. Inventory
Bronte, Charlotte. The Foundling
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights
Brooks, Geraldine. People of the Book
Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code
Brown. Ormond
Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Laici
Bruen, Ken. The Guards
Bruen, Ken. Priest
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare. The World as Stage
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden
Burroughs, Augusten. Dry
Burroughs, Augusten. Magical Thinking
Burroughs, Augusten. Possible Side Effects
Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors
Burroughs, Augusten. A Wolf at the Table
Burton, Tim. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects
Byatt, A.S. The Children Book
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories
Byatt, A. S. Possession
Byatt, A. S. Shadow of the Sun
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky
Canetti, Elias. Earwitness
Canetti, Elias. Notes from Hampstead. The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971
Caple, Nataliee. Mackerel Sky
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's
Carey, Peter. My Life As a Fake
Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist
Carroll, Jonathan. Sleeping in Flame
Carroll, Jonathan. White Apples
Carroll, Jonathan. The Wooden Sea
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass
Carson, Anne. The Beauty of the Husband
Carson, Anne. If not, Winter
Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends
Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with a Pearl Earring
Child, Julia. My Life in France
Clarke, Susanna. The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist
Coelho, Paulo. The Devil and Miss Prym
Coelho, Paulo. The Witch of Portobello
Coelho, Paulo. Veronika Decides to Die
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace
Cohen, Matt. The Bookseller
Colette. The Pure and the Impure
Collins, Paul. The Sixpence House
Collis, Sidney. Good Writing for Business
Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games
Congreve, William. The Way of the World
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo
Cornwell, Bernard. Heretic
Corrigan, Maureen. Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Cox, Michael. The Meaning of Night
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondswoman’s Narrative
Craig, Charmaine. The Good Men
Cumming, Elizabeth and Wendy Kaplan The Arts and Crafts Movement
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Davies, Robertson. Leaven of Malice.
Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus
Davies, Robertson. The Manticore
Davies, Robertson. A Mixture of Frailties
Davies, Robertson. Reading and Writing
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels
Davies, Robertson. Tempest-Tost
Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders
Davies, Robertson. What’s Bread in the Bone
Davis, Hubert J. Facts, Fancies and Folklore about Snakes
DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist
Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan. The Strain
DeMarco-Barrett, Barbara. Pen on Fire
Den Hartog, Kristen. The Perpetual Ending
Den Hartog, Kristen. Water Wings
Diaz, Junot. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations
Dirda, Michael. An Open Book
Dobyns, Jay. No Angel. My Harrowing Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel
Dublanica, Steve. Waiter Rant
Dunmore, Helen. A Spell of Winter
Dunning, John. Booked to Die
Dunning, John. The Bookman's Promise
Dunning, John. Bookman’s Wake
Dunning, John. The Sign of Book
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction
Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum
Eco, Umberto. Mysterious Flame of the Queen Loana
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose
Eliot, George. Middlemarch
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss x2
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
Ellroy, James. The Big Nowhere
Engel, Howard. The Man Who Forgot How to Read
Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About my Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Ephron, Nora. Wallflower at the Orgy
Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting
Erikson, Steven. Gardens of the Moon
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides
Faber, Michel. The Courage Consort
Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Fadiman, Anne. At Large and At Small
Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses
Febos, Melissa. Whip Smart.
Fermine, Maxence. The Black Violin
Fermine, Maxence. Snow
Fforde, Jasper. The Big Over Easy
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair
Fforde, Jasper. Thursday Next. First Among Sequels
Fforde, Jasper. The Fourth Bear
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book
Fforde, Jasper. Something Rotten
Fforde, Jasper. The Well of Lost Plots
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones
Findley, Timothy. Spadework
Fitch, Janet. White Oleander
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop
Florescu, Radu R., McNally, Raymond T. Dracula. Prince of Many Faces
Follett, Ken. The Pillars of the Earth
Forster, E.M. Maurice
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India
Forster, E.M. A Rom with a View
Foster. The Coquette
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit
Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone
Frayn, Michael. The Trick of It
Freud, Sigmunt. Dora
Freud, Sigmunt. Three Essays On Sexuality
Freud, Sigmunt. Totem and Taboo
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces
Frye, Northrop. The Well-Tempered Critic
Funke, Cornelia. Inkheart
Funke, Cornelia. Inkspell
Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South
Gaston, Bill. The Cameraman
Gekoski, Rick. Nabokov's Butterfly
George, Elizabeth. I, Richard
Gerritsen, Tess. The Bone Garden
Gibb, Camilla. The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life
Gibb, Camilla. Sweetness in the Belly
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones
Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha
Goodman, Allegra. The Kaaterskill Falls
Goodman, Carol. Arcadia Falls
Goodman, Carol. The Drowning Tree
Goodman, Carol. The Ghost Orchard
Goodman, Carol. The Lake of Dead Languages
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa
Goodman, Carol. The Seduction of Water
Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth
Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels
Gowdy, Barbara. Helpless
Gowdy, Barbara. Mister Sandman
Gowdy, Barbara. Romantic
Grossman, Lev. The Magicians
Gruber, Michael. The Book of Air and Shadows
Gruber, Michael. The Forgery of Venus
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Hailey, Kendall The Day I Became an Autodidact
Hanff, Helene. 84 Charing Cross Road
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd x2
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles x2
Harris, Charlaine. A Touch of Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Death in the Family
Harris, Charlaine. Dead and Gone
Harris, Charlaine. From Dead to Worse
Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Definitely Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Dead as a Doornail
Harris, Charlaine. Dead to the World
Harris, Charlaine. Club Dead
Harris, Charlaine. Living Dead in Dallas
Harris, Charlaine. Dead Until Dark
Harris, Joanne. Blackberry Wine
Harris, Joanne. Chocolat
Harris, Joanne. Holy Fools
Harris, Robert. The Ghost
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal Rising
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon
Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Selected Tales and Sketches
Hay, Elizabeth. Small Change
Hay, Sheridan. The Secret of Lost Things
Hayder, Mo. Pig Island
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers
Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures
Heller, Joseph. Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project
Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything
Hoffman, Alice. Blackbird House
Holdstock, Pauline. Beyond Measure
Holman, Sheri. The Dress Lodger
Hodgson, Barbara. Italy Out Of Hand
Hodgson, Barbara. The Tattooed Map
Homer. The Odyssey
Hood, Hugh. The New Athens
Hornby, Nick. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Hornby, Nick. The Polysyllabic Spree
Hornby, Nick. Shakespeare Wrote for Money
Horwood, Harold. Among the Lions
Humphreys, C.C. Vlad. The Last Confession
Humphreys, Helen. The Lost Garden
Huston, Nancy. Dolce Agonia
Husotn, Nancy. Fault Lines
Huston, Nancy. Longings and Belongings
Huston, Nancy. Losing North
Huston, Nancy. Prodigy
Huston, Nancy. The Tale-Tellers
Huston, Nancy. Slow Emergencies
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited
Hynes, James. The Kings of Infinite Spaces
Hynes, James. The Lecturer’s Tale
Hynes, James. Publish and Perish
Ibbotson. Eva. Which Witch
Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man
Iwasaki, Mineko. Geisha, a Life
Jacobs, A. J. The Guinea Pig Diaries
Jacobs, A.J. The Know-It-All
Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colon. Vlad the Impaler. The Man Who Was Dracula
James, Henry. The Ambassadors
James, Henry. The Aspern Papers
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw x2
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew
Jensen, Jan Lars. Nervous System
Joyce, James. Dubliners
Kaewert, Julie. Unsigned
Kaufman, Jennifer. Mack, Karen. Literacy and Longing in L.A.
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted
Kazin, Alfred. Writing Was Everything
Kermode, Frank. The Age of Shakespeare
Kindl, Patrice. Goose Chase
King, James. Margaret Laurence
King, James. Transformations
King, Stephen. Lisey's Story
King, Stephen. The Mist
King, Stephen. On Writing: Memoir of the Craft
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Swan Thieves
Krementz, Jill. The Writer’s Desk
Lafarge, Paul. The Artist of the Missing
Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone
Lamotte, Anne. Bird by Bird
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Played with Fire
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Lasdun, James. The Horned Man
Laurence, Margaret. The Fire-Dwellers
Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House
Laurence, Margaret. The Jest of God
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel
Laurence, Margaret. The Tomorrow-Tamer and other Stories
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love
Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow
Lawson, Mary. Crow Lake
Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Leavitt, David. Florence, A Delicate Case
Leblanc, Maurice. The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
Lehane, Dennis. Mystic River
Lehane, Denis. Shutter Island
Leibovitz, Annie and Susan Sontag. Women
Lerner, Betsy. Food and Loathing
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook
Lethem, Jonathan. The Disappointment Artist. Essays
Lethem, Jonathan and Karl Rusnak. Omega: The Unknown
Leverkton, The Best Little Girl in the World
Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball
Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener
Lodge, David. Home Truths
London, Jack. Martin Eden
Lowry, Malcolm. Under the Volcano
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees
MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. The Way the Crow Flies
Manguel, Alberto. Borges and I
Manguel, Alberto. The City of Words
Manguel, Alberto. Stevenson under the Palm Trees
Markley, Stephen. Publish This Book
Markson, David. The Last Novel
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi
Martin, Sean. The Knights Templar
Mayes, Frances. Bella Tuscany
Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun
McCall Smith, Alexander. Portuguese Irregular Verbs
McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
McKay, Ami. The Birth House
McLean, Helen. Significant Things
McMurtry, Larry. Books
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
Mercer, Jeremy. Time Was Soft There: a Paris Soujourn at Shakespeare & Co.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces
Michaels, Anne. Skin Divers
Michaels, Anne. The Weight of Oranges. Miner's Pond
Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault
Miller, Rebecca. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Moers, Walter. The Alchemaster's Apprentice
Moers, Walter. The City of Dreaming Books
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Emily of New Moon
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Blue Castle
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta
Moore, Jeffrey. The Memory Artists
Moore, Judith. Fat Girl
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Morrison, Toni. Sula
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women
Munro, Alice. The Progress of Love
Munro, Alice. Runaway
Myles, Douglas. Prince Dracula. Son of the Devil
Nelson, Sara. So Many Books, so Little Time
Nesbit, Edith. The Magic City
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Three Incestuous Sisters
Norris, Kathleen. Acedia and Me
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer
Oates, Joyce Carol. Rape: a Love Story
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Tattooed Girl
Oates, Joyce Carol. Wild Nights!
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter
Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient
Ondaatje, Michael. Handwriting
Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion
Ondaatje, Michael. Rat Jelly
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family
Ondaatje, Michael. There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do
O'Reilly, Mike and Mike Tennant. The Age of Persuasion. How Marketing Ate Our Culture
Orwell, George. 1984
Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World
Ozick, Cynthia. Levitation: Five Fictions
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense
Pamuk, Orhan. Istambul. Memories and the City
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red
Paris, Erna. The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice In The Age Of Imperial America
Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty. A Friendship
Pennac, Daniel. Better Than Life
Perdue, Lewis. Da Vinci Legacy
Peters, Ellis. Brother Cadfael's Penance
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar x2
Poulson, Christine. Murder is Academic
Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia
Powell, Julie. Cleaving. A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
Pratchett, Terry. The Color of Magic
Pratchett, Terry. The Truth
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News
Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass
Pullman, Philip. The Subtle Knife
Rand, Ayn. Anthem
Reed, Cheryl L. Unveiled. The Hidden Lives of Nuns
Reger, Rob. Emily the Strange
Reger, Rob and Jessica Gruner. Emily the Strange. The Lost Days
Rice, Anne. Lasher
Rice, Anne. Witching Hour
Richards, David Adams. The River of the Brokenhearted
Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Rilke, Reiner Maria. Letters to a Young Poet
Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief
Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction
Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare at Goats
Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House
Rotella, Mark. Stolen Figs
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain
Roth, Philip. Plot against America
Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Rubenfeld, Jed. The Interpretation of Murder
Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J.D. Raise the Roof, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2
Schmitter, Elke. Mrs. Sartoris
Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader
Schoemperlen, Diane. Our Lady of the Lost and Found
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
Scott, Michael. The Alchemyst. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Magician. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Necromancer. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Sorceress. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott Fitzgerald, F., Great Gatsby
Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon
Sebold, Alice. Lovely Bones
Sebold, Alice. Lucky
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day
Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale
Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part I
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part II
Shakespeare, William. King Lear
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare, William. The Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William. Othello
Shakespeare, William. Richard II
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night
Shea, Suzanne Strempek. Shelf Life
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein
Shields, Carol. Swann
Shields, Carol. Unless
Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Silverstein, Shel. A Light in the Attic
Siskind, Barry. Bumblebees Can’t Fly
Skvorecky, Josef. Two Murders in My Double Life
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle
Smith, Sarah. Chasing Shakespeares
Smokler, Kevin. Bookmark Now
Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning
Snyder, Scott and Stephen King. American Vampire
Sontag, Rachel. House Rules
Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time
Sontag, Susan. The Benefactor
Sontag, Susan. In America
Sontag, Susan. On Photography
Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963
Sophocles, Antigone
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Sorel, Edward. Literary Lives
Spark, Muriel. The Finishing School
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spitz, Vivien. Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
Spufford, Francis. The Child that Books Built
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
Stix, Gary and Lacob, Miriam. Who Gives a Gigabyte?
Stoker, Bram. Dracula
Sullivan, Rosemary. Labyrinth of Desire
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
Suskind, Patrick. Perfume
Swan, Susan. Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax with
Swan, Susan. The Wives of Bath
Swan, Susan. What Casanova Told Me
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of Tub and Related Pieces
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History
Taylor, Peter Lane. Science at the Extreme
Teasdale, Sara. Love Songs
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Rose and the Ring
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair
Thomas, D.M. Lady with a Laptop
Thoreau, David Henry. Walden: Or Life in the Woods
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante
Tremaine, Rose. Restoration
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden
Trow, M.J. Vlad the Impaler. In Search of the Real Dracula
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ullmann, Linn. Before You Sleep
Uppal, Priscila. The Divine Economy of Salvation
Vandever, Jennifer. The Bronte Project
Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five
Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
Wells, H. G. Invisible Man
Welty, Eudora. One Writer's Beginnings
Wente, Margaret. An Accidental Canadian
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence
Wharton, Thomas. Icefields
Wharton, Thomas. Logogryph
Wharton, Thomas. Salamander
Whitehouse, Howard. The Faceless Fiend
Whitehouse, Howard. The Strictest School in the World
Whyte, Jack. Knights of the Black and White
Whyte, Jack. Order in Chaos
Whyte, Jack. Standard of Honor
Wicker, Christine. Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that talks to the Dead
Wiebe, Rudy. The Scorched-Wood People
Wiesel, Elie. Night
Willett, Jincy. The Writing Class
Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit
Wodehouse, P.G. My Man Jeeves
Wolff, Tobias. Old School
Wolitzer, Hilma. Summer Reading
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle's House and Other Sketches
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard B. Adultery
Wright, Richard B. Clara Callan
Wright, Richard B. Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard
Wright, Richard B. October
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Angel's Game
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind
Zaid, Gabriel. So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
Zemon Davies, Natalie. The Return of Martin Guerre
Zuiker, Anthony E. Level 26

Books 2010

2011-01-03T16:09:00.000-05:00

> Dobyns, Jay. No Angel. My Harrowing Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
> Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan. The Strain
> Markley, Stephen. Publish This Book
> Snyder, Scott and Stephen King. American Vampire
> Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colon. Vlad the Impaler. The Man Who Was Dracula
> Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man
> Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire
> Grossman, Lev. The Magicians
> Wright, Richard B. Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard
> Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games
> Manguel, Alberto. The City of Words
> Scott, Michael. The Necromancer. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
> Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
> Frayn, Michael. The Trick of It
> Lehane, Denis. Shutter Island
> Zuiker, Anthony E. Level 26
> Hailey, Kendall The Day I Became an Autodidact
> Harris, Charlaine. A Touch of Dead
> Spufford, Francis. The Child that Books Built
> Harris, Charlaine. Death in the Family
> Harris, Charlaine. Dead and Gone
> Harris, Charlaine. From Dead to Worse
> Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead
> Harris, Charlaine. Definitely Dead
> Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Played with Fire
> Febos, Melissa. Whip Smart.
> Harris, Charlaine. Dead as a Doornail
> Scott, Michael. The Sorceress. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
> Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
> Harris, Charlaine. Dead to the World
> Harris, Charlaine. Club Dead
> Harris, Charlaine. Living Dead in Dallas
> Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger
> Goodman, Carol. Arcadia Falls
> Moers, Walter. The Alchemaster's Apprentice
> Kostova, Elizabeth. The Swan Thieves
> Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
> Reger, Rob. Emily the Strange
> Leibovitz, Annie and Susan Sontag. Women
> Reger, Rob and Jessica Gruner. Emily the Strange. The Lost Days
> Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
> Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time
> Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief
> Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
> Harris, Charlaine. Dead Until Dark
> Sontag, Susan. On Photography
> Sontag, Susan. In America
> Lethem, Jonathan and Karl Rusnak. Omega: The Unknown
> Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
> Sontag, Susan. The Benefactor
> Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963

2010 Year End Summary

2010-12-18T16:17:00.000-05:00

It hasn’t been an outstanding reading year. Not nearly as good as I was hoping in January. Susan Sontag was a great start – that reading made me feel good about myself. It took me back to the essay-writing time – time I had the time to read around things. Time and will. The will has been weak lately. I’ve been distracted with life and work, I must say. I lost focus. I got distracted with vampires (not the first year that happened but last time it triggered scholarly reading of all sorts while this year it made me watch and re-watch 3 seasons of True Blood) and Scandinavian bestsellers (and movies based on them).

I’m not yet done with this year’s reading – 3 more books to finish – but maybe aside from Lee Carroll’s Black Swan Rising, they will not be in my top ten. Let’s see what will be. And let’s completely ignore the Sookie Stackhouse series in this – after all, for all its appeal, I already spent enough time on it (new book coming out in March – can’t wait!).

Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard by Richard B. Wright will surely be the biggest disappointment and the biggest waste of time I committed this year. I keep waiting for another Clara Callan but after 3 subsequent books I’m beginning to suspect that maybe Mr. Wright doesn’t have it in him anymore.

Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard is one of the most pointless books I’ve read in a long time. Aside from an adequate representation of the Shakespeare’s era, I found nothing admirable in it. The main character is not interesting at all, nothing interesting happens to her (more like nothing happens, period) and despite the whole premise, Mr. Shakespeare is almost completely

absent from the book – and when he does appear, it is so underwhelming that it actually added to my disappointment instead of diminishing it. I kept reading the book quickly till the very end hoping something would redeem it. Nothing did.

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy certainly made an impression, despite some unnecessary repetitions in the text (sometimes it seemed like the author stopped writing for a longer period of time and when he came back, he had to remind himself where he left off), and almost blatant, although I hear unplanned, product placement (IKEA and Apple). I learned things I didn’t know before and I got to like a character I previously thought was completely out of my comfort zone. I also got to see 3 best movie adaptations ever – the Swedish movies based on the 3 books. They had the right look and feel and even though they didn’t quite correspond with m

y vision of the books and their characters, I didn’t find it as inconvenient as I normally would. Even though I don’t enjoy watching movies with subtitles and I don’t like the sound of Swedish, these movies I will watch and re-watch for many years – many more times than I’m planning to reread the books.

Suzanne Collins’s young adults Hunger Games trilogy, of which I am yet to read the last one, Mockingbird,

was also very impressive. It reminded me of many books and movies – mostly utopian sci-fi, but even though it was obviously influenced by them all, Collins’s books rem

ain quite great on their own. The main character is very attractive – although for me hard to relate to. The reader is exposed to social and political ideas and gets to care about all the characters very much. The idea of Hunger Games – a reality show of sorts where the population gets to watch their children kill one another – is very daring and I was very curious how it could be executed in a book for teens. It was flawless.

The weirdest book I’ve read this year was surely Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. It’s sort of a Harry Potter for adults, at the same time more and less real than the HP books. It’s probably the not-real part that makes me still dream about it – just last night I was in Fillory, the magical land Grossman describes in the book.

And this is saying something, considering I am completely not predisposed to self-transportation into imaginary lands, especially Narnia-like (those books I never enjoyed – maybe it’s like with skating: you can’t learn it properly when you’re 22, and I am waaaaay too old to learn to like those).

Anthony E. Zuiker’s Level 26 was the most interactive book I’ve read. It was meant that way – after every 10 pages or so the reader was invited to go to a website, punch in a code and enjoy a visual interlude, which was basically a mini-movie using the characters and themes of the book (after all, the guy birthed CSI, one of my favourite shows ever). The book itself was a very good thriller – with a very promising serial killer at the wheel. The movie pieces kept me going – wanting to read more and more to get to the next one. It was satisfying and exhausting at the same time. I loved ever moment of it.

So it wasn’t all bad but there was no rhyme or reason to it. I will do better next year – once I get rid of my distractions. I’m thinking, reading year 2011 will probably start around March.

The Tiny Man in Her Eyes

2010-10-03T11:14:00.000-04:00

How is it done – all that literary inspiration and its execution? This is the question that bothers the narrator of Michael Frayn’s novel The Trick of It – a young college professor obsessed with the works of a major woman writer (identified in the book only by her initials “JL”, curiously rhyming with “jail”, Majwoot, the Maj and Her Majesty, as the narrator continues to call her as their relationship evolves). He teaches her works, writes about them and knows her bio by heart. It's actually quite normal for an English professor - after all, literary research invites that kind of attitude. When he manages to convince her to come and speak to his class, he gets a chance to insinuate himself into her life. For the rest of the book he spends his time and effort alternating between trying to find out how the literary magic is done and making himself useful as a midwife to his wife's (oh, yeah) success.

The novel is written in an epistolary style – the narrator is writing majorly self-conscious letters to his friend, another college professor in Australia. We get a study in narratorial unreliability as he goes from a full of praise disciple to a control freak with delusions of influence. He tries to find a purpose in her life and a role in her creative process - to become an editor of sorts, the ideal reader by whom she should be running things. He becomes even more obsessed when he realizes that the only kind of renown he will ever procure will be through his association with her - and he can't decide if he wants that kind of renown or not.

The book is short and economically written, yet it was exhausting to read it. I was oscillating between the sympathy and violent dislike for the narrator. I was seeing how he's stilting everything in his life (and hers by extension); how by never actually naming his wife in the letters he takes revenge for his eventual namelessness. Several times I almost stopped. But then I kept on, prevented by some rare and surprising gems in the writing, which didn't make me like the narrator any better but which did make me want to give Frayn some more of my time.

I read every word she writes, even though not a single one of them is about me. She reads not a single word I write, even though most of them are about her. (50)

What else? Computer's got the curse again. In fact the whole Department's having its monthlies. (56)

A blink in her eyes is as rare as a sea-bream in the Sahara (...) They're serious eyes, that's the next thing you notice about them, and they shine in the soft light reflected upwards from the tabletop beneath the shaded table-lamp. The pupils stand wide in the half-darkness, and in each of them is a tiny man. This tiny man fits into the pupil most perfectly, like a jewel into a jewel-case. His appearance is striking. He reminds me of a small golden cloud left in a clear evening sky, or a smile left in the bathroom mirror. No description of her would be complete without a complete description of him, so I'll start with his eyes, since they always seem to be looking at me. They never blink, either. They're not so serious as hers, but they also shine in the soft upward light, and the pupils are wide. But what makes them immediately recognizable is that in each pupil is a little woman. Now, no description of the little man could even be exhaustive unless it included a description of the little woman in his pupils... (74)

Do you know I once won the Sydney and Louisa Dibdin Prize for English Composition? Little did I think that, as the assembled school applauded and the Chairman of the Local Education Committee pressed the richly inscribed book-token into my hand, that I should end up married to one of the major writers of our time.

Little did I think, for that matter, that I should end up married.

Little did I think, period.

No, bollocks. Not little did I think at all. Big did I think. I thought I'd end up married all right - married to the wife of one of the major writers of our time. (84)

I wasn't trying to find out what she was doing - I knew what she was doing. I just didn't know how she was doing it. After all these years I still had not the slightest idea how the conjuring trick was done. And this time I'd seen the whole performance going on right in front of my eyes - that's what maddened me. In slow motion. Month by month, nothing hidden. It wasn't like the novels, where probably it was all done with secret wires to her childhood and concealed tubes to her unconscious. I'd seen the aunts and mothers put in - I'd seen the words taken out. So simple!

But how had the one turned into the other? (163)

The narrator wants to switch sides. He wants to be the creator, not the describer and analyzer. He wants to be the subject instead of the commentator. He wants to be the original. He does not succeed.

And here I am, openly criticizing an acknowledged masterpiece.

The Year of the Vampire?

2010-09-23T18:43:00.000-04:00

I blame Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse for the downfall of my whole reading year. The goals were lofty: I was going to read with a plan this time and write at length and with uncommon erudition about what I read. I was going to read thematically, consequently and consistently. Well, I did, in a way.

Charlaine Harris’s name came up when my coworker inflicted on me the first season of True Blood – a TV series based on some unknown to me before southern vampire series of books. When I saw the first episode, I was hooked. Little did I suspect how much and for how long. The first book in the series was purchased the same week.

I could not stop until I finished my marathon of 10 books plus some short stories. From time to time I came out for the air to cleanse my palate with some biography but since at the same time I kept watching and re-watching the two seasons of True Blood I managed to get my hands on, it wasn’t a real break. I don’t remember reading anything faster. It might have been the frenzy of having to find out what happens next or just a simple shame to be reading the books at all. Even now, when I’m completely done with them (at least until the next one comes out or when I get season 3), I’m still conflicted about it.

At first I thought the books appeal to the same part of me that liked the Twilight movies (not the books, oh, no, still not the books! I have yet to crack open the second volume and there is a person on speed dial to prevent me if I’m ever tempted.) – that adolescent girl who used to quiver at the thought of a boy being within 2 yards of her. I recently saw the New Moon movie on DVD and it took me back in time just like the first movie did – to my high-school years when all my thoughts were wonderfully focused and only one element of my future seemed worthy of my effort – getting a boy to kiss me. In Twilight that boy is cold and white but strong and knightly.

In New Moon, he’s just as strong but he also runs around half-naked communing with his animal nature (easy to guess that I’m team Jacob, not team Edward). Even Bella’s permanent frown wouldn’t spoil it for me. The 17-year-old in me wants to appreciate that lovely curve in Jacob’s back and the amazing abs that nobody in my high-school had. The incline of his head as he leans towards a kiss that never happens... Despite its circular structure (many, many circles, making me reach for the gin and tonic again to make the time go faster), the movie succeeds in building the same tension that every teenage girl feels until she’s done with her last diary and moves on to men.

But I digress. Let’s go back to figuring out why I liked the Sookie Stackhouse books so much.

I decided that it had more to do with the vampire interest that was spawned by Vlad the Impaler and the likes of him. The vampires in the Sookie Stackhouse stories are very grown up after all. Somehow I was very attracted to the main character (actually the cross between the Sookie from the books and the character played by Anna Paquin in the TV series), even though I could not relate to her at all. After all, it was the TV show that I loved from the start – and reading the books was just a way to get more of the story before the next season comes out.

Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress and a telepath, finds herself in the middle of the supernatural underbelly of Louisiana. Vampires went public some years ago, “coming out of the coffin” after the invention of artificial blood that made it unnecessary for them to kill people anymore. Needless to say, they still do it from time to time – drink people’s blood, that is, but mostly for extra pleasure for both parties. Overall, they are integrating into society more or less successfully. Sookie is drawn to them because she can’t hear their thoughts, which is a needed relief after 25 years of being subjected to what everybody else is thinking.

But the vamps aren’t the only supernatural creatures out there. Soon in addition to her deep involvement in vampire politics, she has to handle the knowledge of the werewolves, shapeshifters, faeries and demons. Needless to say, despite vampires being out, her association with them doesn’t gain her much support from the human race. In their eyes, she becomes a fang-banger, a vampire-lover. As accepting as the human race was to vampires, it seems that acceptance has worn off a bit and now there’s even an anti-vampire religion. Sookie’s in the middle of all that.

There’s blood – spilled, sucked and drunk. There’s sex – inter-hm-racial? There’s feudalism and politics. There’s fanaticism in every color and shape. There’s a war. Sookie becomes an unwitting epicenter of all the attention, affection and intention.

There’s also Eric (I will completely disregard here vampire Bill, Sookie’s boyfriend. He didn’t interest me much in the books or in the TV show. And next to Eric, as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t exist). He’s one of the oldest, most powerful vampires, and he happens to be the vampire sheriff of the area where Sookie lives. Turns out vampires’ society is quite organized, with kings and queens, magistrates, sheriffs and investigators. Eric is beautiful and long-haired in the books, and brooding and with his head permanently tilted forward, since he’s taller than everybody else, in the show. Even though the book Eric is more likeable and more sympathetic, although a bit flat as a character, it was Alexander Skarsgaard’s portrayal of him in the show that captured my imagination and replaced the book’s character completely in my head.

He added some serious personality to Eric and that is boding very well for the TV show’s progression. In the TV Eric’s eyes you can see the tortured creature that’s been “alive” way too long, the ruthless leader determined to stay “alive” and a lonely man at the top looking for some warm body to make him feel alive again. Eric does evolve in the books but his evolution seems artificially built. Skarsgaard’s Eric is going to become somebody else and he will make it seamless. Can’t wait! And the brooding stance with looking up from up there does work, even though it sounds neck-breaking.

So is my response to werewolf Jacob and vampire Eric not age-appropriate? It connects me to the world of the undecided, unfinished – even un-started. Should my vampire reading be much more private?

I once heard Margaret Adler say on NPR that vampires want to be moral; that they have more rules and regulations just because it wouldn’t be that hard to break them. The choice that they make makes them so much more attractive to us – whichever choice that is. They are extreme – and if they can try to be moral, so can we.

So Sookie Stackhouse ends up being the moral center of life – especially as she becomes more and more entrenched in the supernatural world that makes one more prone to losing their moral center. She does make some questionable moral decisions but is always the first one to question them. That draws her out of the sub-world (night-time) of the soul. She’s intensely likeable, although, as I mentioned, hard for me to relate to. I do hear her voice in my head speaking with a lovely sing-song southern accent (that Anna Paquin is overdoing so adorably in the show), which may affect her credibility in my eyes. She is not very educated and she surely doesn’t read the right books. But then again, do I? She is an intensely moral person, with a moral compass of her grandmother always in the back of her head. We will always root for Sookie and we will always agree with her choices – she represents humanity in the story, she represents us.

Reading Sookie Stackhouse vampire books engaged my imagination and made me read like a child again. They didn’t make me feel good about myself but boy, did they ever make me feel good!

Kids on the Road

2010-04-25T23:30:00.000-04:00

It is the usual old story: some quite special children find out they’re special and then go to a special school for other children that are also special. After some time they start feeling like they finally belong. Then the special children are sent on a mission/quest to save the world/the world as we know it. The story that was by no means started by the Harry Potter books, but whose popularity grew exponentially since the phrase “philosopher’s stone” was first translated from English into American.

The Lightning Thief is just such a story but with a mythological twist. It’s the first book in a series of five, whose hero, Percy Jackson, fights the supernatural element in a form of ancient gods. It turns out, Mount Olympus moves along with the Western Civilization – from Greece to Rome, then after a short stint in Western Europe, to the United States.

The gods are quite like we remember them from Joseph Campbell: almost omnipotent, working within their own silos, spiteful and siring illegitimate offspring right and left. Percy Jackson happens to be such an offspring. He is therefore uniquely qualified to fight the gods, following in the lengthy tradition of various rebellious heroes.

Despite some questionable moral choices the characters make (like the proper use of the cut-off Medusa head), the book is entertaining and will appeal – as it tends to happen these days – to adults as well as children. So will the movie, which skips and changes some crucial parts of the story but also corrects some of the moral problems. However formulaic the story, Percy goes on a quest, saves the world and discovers himself in the process.

Now, The Mysterious Benedict Society is also going on a trip (perilous, as usual). In the second and third book in the series conceived by Trenton Lee Stewart, the four highly talented kids are again fighting the old foe, and in both books it requires a journey: to a deserted island and to an old prison. Their journey is riddled with riddles and quite physical dangers. They do save themselves, their mentor, and the world, while they’re at it.

Despite working in a bookstore for some years, and being quite aware of Emily the Strange, I somehow never read any of her books until now. The black-haired frowning girl with a bunch of cats somehow spoke to my contrarian streak, especially in those days when my work consisted almost solely of being agreeable (glorious years of retail!). The get-lost attitude wouldn’t take me far in the world of customer service but Emily could afford it. Here we have another highly talented 13-year-old, genius with mechanical things and able to communicate with cats. She’s a night-time creature and can fend for herself with surprising ingenuity. She dislikes people and bright colors. She always wears the same clothes – sleeveless black dress with bottomless pockets and white Mary Jane shoes.

As the book The Lost Days begins, Emily also seems to be on a journey, but the reader doesn’t quite know the details. More than that, Emily doesn’t know the details either, since she happens to have amnesia. The clever device where the main character and the narrator (since the book is in a form of a diary) learns the story at the same pace the reader does, makes the outside observer so much more connected with the book. Finally the reader has no disadvantage. (One must hate the omniscient narrator! They know the whole story and are trickling it to us at their own pace, withholding some pieces and switching things around! Quite unfair.) Emily doesn’t even know her back story – in fact, since she writes in her diary immediately after the events occur, she’s never much ahead of us. If anything, we know more – we know her real name (from the title), while she keeps calling herself Earwig!

Well, if anybody is able to handle this not-knowing, it’s Emily. You see it clearly from the earlier, very minimalist book about Emily, titled just Emily the Strange. That little volume contains no story but a complete character sketch.

“Emily may be odd…
…but she always gets even.”

“Emily doesn’t make imaginary friends…
…she creates imaginary enemies.”

“Emily isn’t evil…
…she’s just up to no good.”

The reader can’t help but like her – even though she doesn’t like us all that much. After all, we’re not cats. Emily’s journey ends of course with profound self-discovery – and she finds out that she really likes who she is. And so does the reader, despite of losing their advantage.

In the teen fiction world, so overran with vampires these days, children on a quest still work. Not just because it is an undeniable metaphor for growing up but also because the quest allows us to metaphorize anything, really. These books make for easy reading, and probably for easy writing. Would that be why the formula will never get old? As for me, for the time being I’m done with teen fiction. Knowing my luck, now that I’m moving back to my regular literary fiction shelf, I’ll be faced with even more kids on the road. They grew up a little, and are not necessarily that talented anymore; they probably have more moral and not-so-moral choices to make. They will not be saving the world anymore – as you get older, the scope changes just as much as your importance to yourself and your surroundings diminishes.

They will save a world, probably. Or not.

The Mystery of Self-Creation - Two Months with Susan Sontag

2010-02-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

Susan Sontag seemed like a good author to read systematically. Various outputs, manageable body of work, forceful and impossible to ignore persona. I’ve been aware of Susan Sontag for quite some time – even if my main notion of her was mainly based on one of the beautiful photos of her. Before the last two months, I never read anything by her though – an omission I was planning to correct as an inauguration of the year 2010. I did manage a respectable cross-section of her work as well as some reading “around” Susan Sontag and inspired by her. Here, in order of reading:

• Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963
• Sontag, Susan. The Benefactor
• Epstein, Joseph. “The Culture of Celebrity”
• Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
• Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”, “Notes on Camp”
• Sontag, Susan. In America
• Sontag, Susan. On Photography
• Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
• Ozick, Cynthia. “Alfred Chester’s Wig: Images Standing Fast”
• Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time

I read her first and her last novel, her early essays, her seminal work on photography that contains a survey of the history of photography as well as the theory of it, and which reads like a novel. I read – in both primary and secondary sources – about her life and career. I listened to podcasts and radio programs that talked about her. I read about people that were prominent in her life and looked at photographs that influenced her.

She was a child prodigy of sorts. Raised by her mother and a war pilot stepfather, during most of her Arizona childhood she worked on opening her horizons through extensive reading (some of it in a hole in the ground she dug out herself!), of material way too serious for a child, and in a manner rarely seen in someone so young – with a purpose. It must have been that reading that produced a girl prematurely educated way beyond her years, who started university at 16 and married a philosophy professor Philip Rieff at 17. The marriage survived 8 years.

Sontag continued her education throughout her youth and after – both through organized instruction and diverse extracurricular (and extramarital) experiences. Her bi-sexuality bothered her a bit but she explored it nevertheless, without ever making it quite public. Despite various stints as a graduate student, research assistant of sorts (for several years she cooperated with her husband on a study on Freud, which Philip Rieff “got in the divorce”), bohemian in Paris, lecturer and university teacher, what she really wanted to be is a writer. She started with fiction, The Benefactor, but it was critical essays that made her reputation. And once she had it, she quickly became the woman everybody knew and had an opinion about. And she knew everybody and had an opinion about most issues – usually, a controversial one. Sontag became a public intellectual – somebody she claimed it was never her intention to be. In her early diaries she talks again and again about being a writer. She doesn’t seem to be comfortable with many people around and keeps questioning her social graces. But her constant presence in people’s awareness made her public in a way. She belonged to the crowd. She managed to keep her private life private to an extent but what she thought and said about “the issues” was announced, printed and reprinted, talked about and fought against. And Sontag wouldn’t budge. As her son David Rieff says in the foreword to her last book of essays At the Same Time, published after her death in 2004, “she was interested in everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Even travel, she once wrote, she conceived of as accumulation. And her apartment, which was a kind of reification of the contents of her head, was filled almost to bursting with an amazingly disparate collection of objects, prints, photographs, and, of course, books, endless books. If anything, the gamut of her interests was what was hard (for me at least) to fathom, impossible to keep up with.”From all I’ve learned about Susan Sontag, this trait attracts me most. I’m sure it’s her passion that made people forgive her over and over again (after all, she did have some unpopular opinions over the years: ranging from visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War to blaming America for 9-11).

The Benefactor was her first attempt at becoming what she thought she was destined to be. It was published in 1963, preceded by some doubts in her diaries. Its protagonist, Hippolyte, is a man who prefers to live out his dreams – his actual dreams – than to lead a regular life. His life becomes an interactive dream interpretation (how suitable, considering Sontag’s work on Freud), to the point of paranoia. It takes the reader some time to realize that the first-person narrator is seriously unreliable. The plot is quite clever – with a surprise ending that I definitely was not expecting from Sontag, whom I thought more interested in ideas than narrative devices. More than that though, it becomes a vehicle for her to launder her doubts and fears – mostly about writing. She’s testing new approaches to the vocation she chose, trying to establish some basic ethics of writing.

“The truth is always something that is told. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. Thus, to me, my life and my preoccupations are not the truth. They are, simply, my life and my preoccupations. But now I am engaged in writing. And in daring to transpose my life into this narrative, I shoulder the dreadful responsibility of telling the truth.” (11)

“When we write the truth, we should always address ourselves. When in writing we are didactic and admonitory, we must consider that we instruct and admonish only ourselves, for our own failings alone. The reader is a happy accident. One must allow the reader his liberty, his liberty to contradict what is written, his liberty to be distracted by alternatives.” (12)

This theory of truth and its relationship to writing makes me wonder how she would have felt about the publication of her diaries. It was the first volume of those diaries that started me on this journey.

Maureen Corrigan’s mildly critical review of Reborn, the first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (she starts by saying “Maybe the unexamined life is worth living after all.”), completely failed to discourage me. Instead, it made me aware of the book that would be a perfect start for my planned Susan Sontag January. Even though Sontag herself discouraged any kind of autobiographical reading of hers or anybody else’s work, I felt that getting to know the person was important in my decision whether to read on. Besides, how could I resist the book after the following reading: “From her teenage years onward, Sontag willed herself to carry out the promethean task to know everything. Her journals are filled with lists of the books she's read or feels she needs to read. For instance, in an entry dated December 19th, 1948, when Sontag would have been 15 years old, she writes: “There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read. Here are just a few.” The list, which includes the works of Andre Gide, Dante, Faulkner, George Meredith, Dostoyevsky, Tasso, Shaw and O'Neil, goes on in the original notebook for more than five pages and includes over 100 titles. The notebooks are also filled with sterner versions of Ben Franklin-like self-improvement lists.” If anything, it sounds more like a recommendation to me – and not only because my diaries contained similar lists, and not because I really enjoyed Ben Franklin’s idealistic approach to self-improvement. Corrigan ends her review by saying that “it's a story to admire, not a story that inspires.” I wanted to see if I could manage to get inspired anyway.

Susan Sontag provokes strong opinions – and the ones that I heard before I knew anything about her were usually negative. It shouldn’t really surprise to find out that Susan Sontag had a very strong and quite negative opinion of Susan Sontag. Once I calmed down and got over my initial enthusiasm for Reborn – I still continued to fill out pages after pages with titles of books that she mentions but not longer insisted on reading it all immediately – I was a bit disturbed by this constant self-deprecating. So much self-doubt and self-disappointment! No wonder she kept trying to reinvent herself through constant self-improvement. Often it sounds like her achievements don’t give her much pleasure because she knows she would never be done – she would never complete the picture of herself she had in mind.

Between the self-doubt (before the deed) and self-flagellation (after the deed), Sontag makes some very acute observations. She seems a cautious writer already at 15, when the diary starts. But what seems like writing for an audience was really writing for an audience of one – herself. It was herself she wanted to impress.

“...Language is not only an instrument but an end in itself...” (9)

“Can I never escape this interminable mourning for myself? My whole being seems tense – expectant...” (12)

“I revel even in the inevitable depression which follows the reading of the book, simply because I have been aroused to a barren agitation in such a skilful manner.” (14)

“Somewhere in an earlier notebook, I confessed a disappointment with the Mann’s [Doctor] Faustus ... This was a uniquely undisguised evidence of the quality of my critical sensibility! The work is a great and satisfying one, which I’ll have to read many times before I can possess it...” (19)

She makes proclamations and plans: “I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge!” (28); “The love of possessions – books and records – those are two oppressions which have been very powerful in me the last few years, yet what, what bars me from putting my papers, notebooks, and a couple of books in a small box, sending them to a storage company in another city, getting into a couple of shirts and my levis, stuffing another pair of socks and a couple of bucks in my coat pocket, walking out of the house – after leaving an appropriately Byronesque note to the world – and taking a bus – anywhere?” (29-30).

From plans of self-improvement, she moves on to theories of love and life. She claims that one can decide to be in love – that’s how it works with her. When her marriage to Philip Rieff starts to fall apart, she elaborates on her theories of marriage: how it’s binding and grounding her. After the separation, she writes down the story of her leaving her husband, in one sweep validating it, making it real by writing it down, but also exploiting it by fictionalizing it. She writes about writing a lot – after all that’s what she’s planning to do with her life (her becoming what Joseph Epstein calls a public intellectual was just a side-effect).

She talks about writing a journal – about how it’s not life recorded but life created. That helps me deal with the publication of her journals and the fact that her son selected and edited the entries. Since he was her official editor during her life (and sometimes it seems the monster/golem created by her own hands and in her image), this is probably how she would have wanted it. As a reader, I have a problem with the selective quality of the entries. I feel like something is being withdrawn from me after somebody decided I will not be allowed to know it. Does anything but a full disclosure make published diaries skewed and dishonest?

After the diaries, the next natural step for me was to read the only biography of Susan Sontag there is. Susan Sontag. The Making of an Icon filled in the blanks where the diaries left me hanging. The book paints a picture of a formidable figure. A woman who was her own creation (even though the creation of her public persona is often attributed to her publisher). It almost explains the unexplainable marriage at 17; it spends ample time on Sontag’s relationship with her son David who becomes her mirror and her defender by default, a willing prey forever caught in her net. The authors spend a lot of time discussing Sontag’s publicity photos – but they manage to interpret them in accordance with the principles she laid out in her essay “Against Interpretation”. Even though the book is meant to be unbiased (the authors mention that Sontag was trying to prevent the publication), it is also a serious tribute.

One of the last entries in Reborn – an entry from 1962 – shows how Susan Sontag saw herself pretty much till the end: “I write to define myself – an act of self-creation – part of [the] process of becoming – In a dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers...” (297). Two entries down she’s back to her old tricks: “I don’t know what purpose my work serves” (297). And then she wins me again with instantly and irresistibly relatable “My reading is hoarding, accumulating, storing up for the future, filling the hole of the present” (308).

Sontag’s last novel, In America, was published in 1999. It is very different than her first, and much more satisfying.

Maryna Załężowska, a great Polish actress at the height of her fame, caught between an aristocratic husband and an artistic lover-writer, decides to emigrate to America to live the simple life. She plans to lease a farm, grow her own food and sell what she can’t use. It’s not a singular and not a cheap experience though so she recruits her husband and her lover, and a few other couples, to go with her. They plan to realize the ideal of a communal life.

We get to observe the great leading lady sweeping floors, riding horses and trying to manage a household of several people who seem to be held together only by the relationship/fealty to her. In the meantime, her husband takes care of business and stabilizes the whole group. Count Dembowski, a seriously underdeveloped character, one might say, seems to make it his mission to go with whatever his wife’s heart is set on – and he enables it all beautifully, both financially and emotionally. He somehow manages to stay his own person – with designs and desires – and keeps that life quite secret from the group. We see only glimpses of the real him through his diary entries, which appear in only two chapters.

After several years of the simple life, as it may have been predicted, Maryna decides to go back on stage. This time in her adopted country though, and in English – the language whose intricacies she’s still conquering. Her goal is to be in her element again – and becoming as much of a star as she was in her country is just a fringe benefit. Needless to say, she accomplishes both without a single hiccup.

Maryna’s failing in my mind is that she doesn’t progress. It’s a simple path: from being a star to being a star again, with a short stint as something else. The only visible change is her name, which she changes to Marina Zalenska to avoid grating mispronunciations and make herself just foreign enough to justify her strong accent, but not too foreign. Her husband, on the other hand, evolves from an appendage to a man who can fly, quite literally. Her lover manages to disentangle himself and possibly go on to do great things. Maryna is what she’s always been – a great actress. Are great actresses supposed to stay unchanged like statues? Count Dembowski tells his wife that she thrives on obstacles. Why was I waiting for Maryna to fail to overcome some of them? Would her failure humanize her more or maybe she wasn’t supposed to be quite so human? Maryna’s greatness is very photogenic but not that interesting.

The novel is closely based on the life of a real Polish actress who at some point was overshadowed only by the great Sarah Bernhardt. Helena Modrzejewska (Modjeska to her American public) left her country (at that time a non-existent entity split between three conquering foreign powers) to make a life for herself in California. In America, she did go back on stage and became a star again, despite the fact that she never managed to get rid of her strong Polish accent.

Marina Zalenska is Helena Modjeska. My opinion of In America will always be clouded by that fact. I grew up reading about her, watching a great Polish actress Krystyna Janda portray her in a TV miniseries. That persistent awareness of Modjeska created many preconceptions, which were completely satisfied by the novel. Would I be as pleased if I didn’t have the context though?

Form pleased me too. Sontag explores various narrative modes and mixes and matches them without trying to be too consistent. Aside from the regular third-person narration, we have some small almost journalistic pieces that seem like fragments of an interview. They introduce Maryna at the beginning of the novel and give us some of her back story. There are diary entries, in which Count Dembowski relates his trials and tribulations, and where his passion for young men is often signified only by a sentence fragment here and there. There is a transcript of Maryna’s one visit to Poland after she re-establishes her acting career in America. That part, which goes on for several pages, contains only Maryna’s reactions to what’s going on. She answers questions we never see asked, reject ideas we never see presented and makes plans we never see executed. Those few pages, with no paragraph breaks, give an illusion of restlessness. They give us all we need to know about that trip. In the final chapter of the book, Sontag uses similar format for the drunken monologue by the great tragedist – Edmund Booth. Finally, there’s the introduction to the novel – thought by many to be one of the most autobiographical pieces she’s ever written. It is also a great exposition of what the writing process is: a writer “sees” (imagines? hallucinates?) a scene and its participants, lets it run for some time and then makes it her own. Sontag imagines a dinner. She “watches” the group of people, trying to guess their occupations and relationship to the woman in the centre of the gathering. She then renames and adjusts them here and there to suit her – dare I say artistic? – purpose. Of course, the dinner, if it ever did, happened at the end of nineteenth century in a country far far away. Sontag puts her fly-on-the-wall narrator on the wall of a place that by now can only be imaginary. Recreating and creating it at the same time.

At the Same Time, the last book of essays that Sontag was planning during her last bout with cancer was published only after her death. David Rieff tells us that it’s as close to what his mother would have wanted it to be as possible – the editors tried to do as thorough a job as Sontag was known to do with any of her drafts. Maybe because of that lack of authorial over-editing, the book seems much more approachable than her other non-fiction. It’s more conversational and less abstruse, even though it consists of pieces most of which were already published in some form. She again does what she’s great at: she talks about other people. In the past, she helped launch many people’s careers by announcing her approval and destroyed some bright futures by withdrawing it. She wrote about Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti but withheld her critical affection from Alfred Chester (with whom in her youth she had a master-disciple relationship, where he was the master, and who wrote a book in which one of the characters was based on Sontag) and Edmund White (whom she rejected after he used her and her son as bases for two of his fictional characters). Edmund White remained afloat but Chester all but disappeared from the literary scene as a result. In At the Same Time, there are essays about Dostoyevsky, Laxness, Victor Serge, Anna Banti – loving essays. This is Sontag spreading around her passion. She knows it’s her responsibility as a writer to popularize great writing but these essays have also a quality that might be lost if she ever got a chance to edit them for publication in a book format – that feeling that you get when you’ve read something incredible and you just want to show the whole world so that they can enjoy it as much as you did. You can feel Sontag’s enthusiasm seeping through the intellectual phrases and meaty paragraphs – and almost hear her saying “Oh my god, this book was soooo great!

Susan Sontag has been called “a literary pinup” (Herbert Mitgang), “the belle dame sans merci of the literary world” (Zoë Heller), “the sibyl of Manhattan” (Boyd Tonkin) and “a brick” (Bruce Chatwin). She probably was all that. I wonder if she enjoyed her popularity as much as she seemed to. The persona that emerges from her diary and her public persona seem two different people. Her public’s interest in the face she was showing to the world created that face over and over again. Yet much more than her beautiful publicity photographs, which are partially credited with how the public perceived her, her work makes a statement of what she believed in. She would probably object this but it also tells us who she was.

My time with Susan Sontag was framed by only two photos of her. I didn’t want to give them more prominence because every piece about her that I’ve read stresses the importance of her physical graces. The first photo I discovered in the book The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz. She’s sitting at a table piled up with books, The NY Review of Books displayed prominently next to the black phone. An ashtray in front of her, conveniently positioned on a stack of books. A poster for Olivetti typewriter behind her on a white wall. It’s been 7 years since I first saw this photo. I looked at it many times over the years and every time it makes me want to be her (not like her). Not because of how beautiful she looks but because of this space that she’s in – defining what she does and what she wants in life. With her back to the wall she’s wide open to anything that may enter.

The other photo, if we are to believe the caption under the picture I found on the internet, was taken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in November 2003. This is the picture that makes her look the most formidable of all the photos of her I’ve seen. This is the photo that ended up on my desktop for the last two months. She’s the ancient priestess, the wise woman – she’s fierce and she’s the only one that can stand against the storm that’s brewing in the background.

Still reading Susan

2010-02-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

I'm extending my Susan Sontag month till middle of February. My initial goal has been achieved: I have read enough of/about her to form an informed opinion. But I'm finding that the more I learn, the more I still want. Not to mention, it's so much fun reading all around her. I'm spinning off to Edmund White, Cynthia Ozick, Alfred Chester and all kinds of interesting people.

Susan Sontag liked to read the whole oeuvre of an author she was interested in. Systematic and thoughtful reading of her works makes me feel connected with her somehow. A little tribute, that's all. A private thing.

January Syllabus

2010-01-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

Sontag, Susan. Reborn. Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963. New York: Picador, 2008.
----. At the Same Time. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007
----. The Benefactor. New York: Dell, 1978
----. The Volcano Lover. New York: Doubleday, 1992
Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000
A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, 1982 - selection

542 books read to date: 2000-2009

2009-12-31T02:15:00.000-05:00

Abagnale, Frank W. Catch Me if You Can
Adams, Douglas. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie
Ali, Monica. In the Kitchen
Alighieri, Dante. La Vita Nuova
Allen, John L. Jr. Opus Dei
Armstrong, Luis. Satchmo. My Life in New Orleans
Armstrong, Sarah. Salt Rain
Athill, Diana. Stet
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace
Atwood, Margaret. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin
Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale
Atwood, Margaret. Interlunar
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder
Atwood, Margaret. Morning in the Burned House
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride
Atwood, Margaret. Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead
Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips
Austen, Jane. Emma x2
Austen, Jane. Persuasion
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice x2
Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. The Inquisition
Baker, Nicholson. The Anthologist
Baldwin. Go Tell It On The Mountain
Banks, Russell. Sweet Hereafters
Bantock, Nick. Griffin and Sabine
Bantock, Nick. The Gryphon
Bantock, Nick. Sabine’s Notebook
Bantock, Nick. The Golden Mean
Barker, Clive. Abarat. Days of Magic, Nights of War
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk
Barron, Stephanie. The White Garden
Bartlett Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
Battle, Matthew. Library: an Unquiet History
Bennett, Arnold. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Blake, Sarah. Grange House
Borchert, Don. Free for All
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Mirror of Ink
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451
Bramham, Daphne. The Scret Lives of Saints. Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect
Brand, Dionne. Inventory
Bronte, Charlotte. The Foundling
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights
Brooks, Geraldine. People of the Book
Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code
Brown. Ormond
Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Laici
Bruen, Ken. The Guards
Bruen, Ken. Priest
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare. The World as Stage
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden
Burroughs, Augusten. Dry
Burroughs, Augusten. Magical Thinking
Burroughs, Augusten. Possible Side Effects
Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors
Burroughs, Augusten. A Wolf at the Table
Burton, Tim. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects
Byatt, A.S. The Children Book
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories
Byatt, A. S. Possession
Byatt, A. S. Shadow of the Sun
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky
Canetti, Elias. Earwitness
Canetti, Elias. Notes from Hampstead. The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971
Caple, Nataliee. Mackerel Sky
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's
Carey, Peter. My Life As a Fake
Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist
Carroll, Jonathan. Sleeping in Flame
Carroll, Jonathan. White Apples
Carroll, Jonathan. The Wooden Sea
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass
Carson, Anne. The Beauty of the Husband
Carson, Anne. If not, Winter
Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends
Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with a Pearl Earring
Child, Julia. My Life in France
Clarke, Susanna. The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist
Coelho, Paulo. The Devil and Miss Prym
Coelho, Paulo. The Witch of Portobello
Coelho, Paulo. Veronika Decides to Die
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace
Cohen, Matt. The Bookseller
Colette. The Pure and the Impure
Collins, Paul. The Sixpence House
Collis, Sidney. Good Writing for Business
Congreve, William. The Way of the World
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo
Cornwell, Bernard. Heretic
Corrigan, Maureen. Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Cox, Michael. The Meaning of Night
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondswoman’s Narrative
Craig, Charmaine. The Good Men
Cumming, Elizabeth and Wendy Kaplan The Arts and Crafts Movement
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Davies, Robertson. Leaven of Malice.
Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus
Davies, Robertson. The Manticore
Davies, Robertson. A Mixture of Frailties
Davies, Robertson. Reading and Writing
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels
Davies, Robertson. Tempest-Tost
Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders
Davies, Robertson. What’s Bread in the Bone
Davis, Hubert J. Facts, Fancies and Folklore about Snakes
DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist
DeMarco-Barrett, Barbara. Pen on Fire
Den Hartog, Kristen. The Perpetual Ending
Den Hartog, Kristen. Water Wings
Diaz, Junot. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations
Dirda, Michael. An Open Book
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel
Dublanica, Steve. Waiter Rant
Dunmore, Helen. A Spell of Winter
Dunning, John. Booked to Die
Dunning, John. The Bookman's Promise
Dunning, John. Bookman’s Wake
Dunning, John. The Sign of Book
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction
Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum
Eco, Umberto. Mysterious Flame of the Queen Loana
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose
Eliot, George. Middlemarch
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss x2
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
Ellroy, James. The Big Nowhere
Engel, Howard. The Man Who Forgot How to Read
Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About my Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Ephron, Nora. Wallflower at the Orgy
Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting
Erikson, Steven. Gardens of the Moon
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides
Faber, Michel. The Courage Consort
Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Fadiman, Anne. At Large and At Small
Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses
Fermine, Maxence. The Black Violin
Fermine, Maxence. Snow
Fforde, Jasper. The Big Over Easy
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair
Fforde, Jasper. Thursday Next. First Among Sequels
Fforde, Jasper. The Fourth Bear
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book
Fforde, Jasper. Something Rotten
Fforde, Jasper. The Well of Lost Plots
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones
Findley, Timothy. Spadework
Fitch, Janet. White Oleander
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop
Florescu, Radu R., McNally, Raymond T. Dracula. Prince of Many Faces
Follett, Ken. The Pillars of the Earth
Forster, E.M. Maurice
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India
Forster, E.M. A Rom with a View
Foster. The Coquette
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit
Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone
Freud, Sigmunt. Dora
Freud, Sigmunt. Three Essays On Sexuality
Freud, Sigmunt. Totem and Taboo
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces
Frye, Northrop. The Well-Tempered Critic
Funke, Cornelia. Inkheart
Funke, Cornelia. Inkspell
Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South
Gaston, Bill. The Cameraman
Gekoski, Rick. Nabokov's Butterfly
George, Elizabeth. I, Richard
Gerritsen, Tess. The Bone Garden
Gibb, Camilla. The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life
Gibb, Camilla. Sweetness in the Belly
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones
Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha
Goodman, Allegra. The Kaaterskill Falls
Goodman, Carol. The Drowning Tree
Goodman, Carol. The Ghost Orchard
Goodman, Carol. The Lake of Dead Languages
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa
Goodman, Carol. The Seduction of Water
Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth
Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels
Gowdy, Barbara. Helpless
Gowdy, Barbara. Mister Sandman
Gowdy, Barbara. Romantic
Gruber, Michael. The Book of Air and Shadows
Gruber, Michael. The Forgery of Venus
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Hanff, Helene. 84 Charing Cross Road
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd x2
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles x2
Harris, Joanne. Blackberry Wine
Harris, Joanne. Chocolat
Harris, Joanne. Holy Fools
Harris, Robert. The Ghost
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal Rising
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon
Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Selected Tales and Sketches
Hay, Elizabeth. Small Change
Hay, Sheridan. The Secret of Lost Things
Hayder, Mo. Pig Island
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers
Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures
Heller, Joseph. Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project
Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything
Hoffman, Alice. Blackbird House
Holdstock, Pauline. Beyond Measure
Holman, Sheri. The Dress Lodger
Hodgson, Barbara. Italy Out Of Hand
Hodgson, Barbara. The Tattooed Map
Homer. The Odyssey
Hood, Hugh. The New Athens
Hornby, Nick. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Hornby, Nick. The Polysyllabic Spree
Hornby, Nick. Shakespeare Wrote for Money
Horwood, Harold. Among the Lions
Humphreys, C.C. Vlad. The Last Confession
Humphreys, Helen. The Lost Garden
Huston, Nancy. Dolce Agonia
Husotn, Nancy. Fault Lines
Huston, Nancy. Longings and Belongings
Huston, Nancy. Losing North
Huston, Nancy. Prodigy
Huston, Nancy. The Tale-Tellers
Huston, Nancy. Slow Emergencies
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited
Hynes, James. The Kings of Infinite Spaces
Hynes, James. The Lecturer’s Tale
Hynes, James. Publish and Perish
Ibbotson. Eva. Which Witch
Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Iwasaki, Mineko. Geisha, a Life
Jacobs, A. J. The Guinea Pig Diaries
Jacobs, A.J. The Know-It-All
Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically
James, Henry. The Ambassadors
James, Henry. The Aspern Papers
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw x2
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew
Jensen, Jan Lars. Nervous System
Joyce, James. Dubliners
Kaewert, Julie. Unsigned
Kaufman, Jennifer. Mack, Karen. Literacy and Longing in L.A.
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted
Kazin, Alfred. Writing Was Everything
Kermode, Frank. The Age of Shakespeare
Kindl, Patrice. Goose Chase
King, James. Margaret Laurence
King, James. Transformations
King, Stephen. Lisey's Story
King, Stephen. The Mist
King, Stephen. On Writing: Memoir of the Craft
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian
Krementz, Jill. The Writer’s Desk
Lafarge, Paul. The Artist of the Missing
Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone
Lamotte, Anne. Bird by Bird
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand
Lasdun, James. The Horned Man
Laurence, Margaret. The Fire-Dwellers
Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House
Laurence, Margaret. The Jest of God
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel
Laurence, Margaret. The Tomorrow-Tamer and other Stories
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love
Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow
Lawson, Mary. Crow Lake
Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Leavitt, David. Florence, A Delicate Case
Leblanc, Maurice. The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
Lehane, Dennis. Mystic River
Lerner, Betsy. Food and Loathing
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook
Lethem, Jonathan. The Disappointment Artist. Essays
Leverkton, The Best Little Girl in the World
Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball
Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener
Lodge, David. Home Truths
London, Jack. Martin Eden
Lowry, Malcolm. Under the Volcano
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees
MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Macdonald, Ann-Marie. The Way the Crow Flies
Manguel, Alberto. Borges and I
Manguel, Alberto. Stevenson under the Palm Trees
Markson, David. The Last Novel
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi
Martin, Sean. The Knights Templar
Mayes, Frances. Bella Tuscany
Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun
McCall Smith, Alexander. Portuguese Irregular Verbs
McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
McKay, Ami. The Birth House
McLean, Helen. Significant Things
McMurtry, Larry. Books
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
Mercer, Jeremy. Time Was Soft There: a Paris Soujourn at Shakespeare & Co.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces
Michaels, Anne. Skin Divers
Michaels, Anne. The Weight of Oranges. Miner's Pond
Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault
Miller, Rebecca. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Moers, Walter. The City of Dreaming Books
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Emily of New Moon
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Blue Castle
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta
Moore, Jeffrey. The Memory Artists
Moore, Judith. Fat Girl
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Morrison, Toni. Sula
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women
Munro, Alice. The Progress of Love
Munro, Alice. Runaway
Myles, Douglas. Prince Dracula. Son of the Devil
Nelson, Sara. So Many Books, so Little Time
Nesbit, Edith. The Magic City
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Three Incestuous Sisters
Norris, Kathleen. Acedia and Me
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer
Oates, Joyce Carol. Rape: a Love Story
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Tattooed Girl
Oates, Joyce Carol. Wild Nights!
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter
Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient
Ondaatje, Michael. Handwriting
Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion
Ondaatje, Michael. Rat Jelly
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family
Ondaatje, Michael. There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do
O'Reilly, Mike and Mike Tennant. The Age of Persuasion. How Marketing Ate Our Culture
Orwell, George. 1984
Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World
Ozick, Cynthia. Levitation: Five Fictions
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense
Pamuk, Orhan. Istambul. Memories and the City
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red
Paris, Erna. The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice In The Age Of Imperial America
Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty. A Friendship
Pennac, Daniel. Better Than Life
Perdue, Lewis. Da Vinci Legacy
Peters, Ellis. Brother Cadfael's Penance
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar x2
Poulson, Christine. Murder is Academic
Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia
Powell, Julie. Cleaving. A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
Pratchett, Terry. The Color of Magic
Pratchett, Terry. The Truth
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News
Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass
Pullman, Philip. The Subtle Knife
Rand, Ayn. Anthem
Reed, Cheryl L. Unveiled. The Hidden Lives of Nuns
Rice, Anne. Lasher
Rice, Anne. Witching Hour
Richards, David Adams. The River of the Brokenhearted
Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Rilke, Reiner Maria. Letters to a Young Poet
Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction
Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare at Goats
Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House
Rotella, Mark. Stolen Figs
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain
Roth, Philip. Plot against America
Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Rubenfeld, Jed. The Interpretation of Murder
Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J.D. Raise the Roof, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2
Schmitter, Elke. Mrs. Sartoris
Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader
Schoemperlen, Diane. Our Lady of the Lost and Found
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
Scott, Michael. The Alchemyst. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott, Michael. The Magician. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
Scott Fitzgerald, F., Great Gatsby
Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon
Sebold, Alice. Lovely Bones
Sebold, Alice. Lucky
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day
Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale
Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part I
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV part II
Shakespeare, William. King Lear
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare, William. The Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William. Othello
Shakespeare, William. Richard II
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night
Shea, Suzanne Strempek. Shelf Life
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein
Shields, Carol. Swann
Shields, Carol. Unless
Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Silverstein, Shel. A Light in the Attic
Siskind, Barry. Bumblebees Can’t Fly
Skvorecky, Josef. Two Murders in My Double Life
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle
Smith, Sarah. Chasing Shakespeares
Smokler, Kevin. Bookmark Now
Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning
Sontag, Rachel. House Rules
Sophocles, Antigone
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Sorel, Edward. Literary Lives
Spark, Muriel. The Finishing School
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spitz, Vivien. Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society
Stix, Gary and Lacob, Miriam. Who Gives a Gigabyte?
Stoker, Bram. Dracula
Sullivan, Rosemary. Labyrinth of Desire
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
Suskind, Patrick. Perfume
Swan, Susan. Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax with
Swan, Susan. The Wives of Bath
Swan, Susan. What Casanova Told Me
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of Tub and Related Pieces
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History
Taylor, Peter Lane. Science at the Extreme
Teasdale, Sara. Love Songs
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Rose and the Ring
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair
Thomas, D.M. Lady with a Laptop
Thoreau, David Henry. Walden: Or Life in the Woods
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante
Tremaine, Rose. Restoration
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden
Trow, M.J. Vlad the Impaler. In Search of the Real Dracula
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ullmann, Linn. Before You Sleep
Uppal, Priscila. The Divine Economy of Salvation
Vandever, Jennifer. The Bronte Project
Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
Wells, H. G. Invisible Man
Welty, Eudora. One Writer's Beginnings
Wente, Margaret. An Accidental Canadian
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence
Wharton, Thomas. Icefields
Wharton, Thomas. Logogryph
Wharton, Thomas. Salamander
Whitehouse, Howard. The Faceless Fiend
Whitehouse, Howard. The Strictest School in the World
Whyte, Jack. Knights of the Black and White
Whyte, Jack. Order in Chaos
Whyte, Jack. Standard of Honor
Wicker, Christine. Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that talks to the Dead
Wiebe, Rudy. The Scorched-Wood People
Wiesel, Elie. Night
Willett, Jincy. The Writing Class
Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit
Wodehouse, P.G. My Man Jeeves
Wolff, Tobias. Old School
Wolitzer, Hilma. Summer Reading
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle's House and Other Sketches
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard B. Adultery
Wright, Richard B. Clara Callan
Wright, Richard B. October
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Angel's Game
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind
Zaid, Gabriel. So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
Zemon Davies, Natalie. The Return of Martin Guerre

Books 2009

2009-12-30T02:01:00.000-05:00

So here's my inventory for 2009. I almost didn't make it. Needless to say, Icefields, which I just finished yesterday, was a bit of a sprint, but now it's on the list and I officially hit 70. Methinks, not too shabby.

Wharton, Thomas. Icefields ***
MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) ***
McCall Smith, Alexander. Portuguese Irregular Verbs ***
Powell, Julie. Cleaving. A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession ****
Moers, Walter. The City of Dreaming Books ****
Ali, Monica. In the Kitchen **
Oates, Joyce Carol. Wild Nights! ***
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl ****
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk ***
Whyte, Jack. Order in Chaos ***
O'Reilly, Mike and Mike Tennant. The Age of Persuasion. How Marketing Ate Our Culture ****
Teasdale, Sara. Love Songs *****
Jacobs, A.J. The Guinea Pig Diaries ***
Carr, Caleb. The Italian Secretary **
Epstein, Joseph. In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage *****
Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare at Goats ***
Silverstein, Shel. A Light in the Attic ***
Carr, Caleb. The Alienist ***
Barron, Stephanie. The White Garden ***
Baker, Nicholson. The Anthologist ***
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2 ***
Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 ***
Forster, E.M. A Room with a View ***
Gruber, Michael. The Forgery of Venus ****
Dunning, John. The Sign of the Book ***
Dunning, John. The Bookman's Promise ***
Bartlett Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much ****
Norris, Kathleen. Acedia and Me ***
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day ****
Scott, Michael. The Magician. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. ***
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project ****
Child, Julia. My Life in France ***
Bronte, Charlotte. The Foundling **
Wicker, Christine. Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that talks to the Dead ***
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Angel's Game ****
Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia ***
Dublanica, Steve. Waiter Rant ***
Funke, Cornelia. Inkspell ***
Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect ***
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle's House and Other Sketches ***
Brand, Dionne. Inventory ***
Cumming, Elizabeth and Wendy Kaplan. The Arts and Crafts Movement ****
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction ***
Byatt, A.S. The Children Book ****
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival ****
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours ****
Huston, Nancy. Prodigy ****
Welty, Eudora. One Writer's Beginnings ***
Carroll, Jonathan. Sleeping in Flame ****
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight **
Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends ****
Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault ****
Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta ****
Hornby, Nick. Shakespeare Wrote for Money ****
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Mirror of Ink ***
Bramha, Daphne. The Secret Lives of Saints. Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect ***
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer ****
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History ****
Atwood, Margaret. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda ***
Harris, Robert. The Ghost ****
Atwood, Margaret. Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes ***
Armstrong, Luis. Satchmo. My Life in New Orleans ***
Wolitzer, Hilma. Summer Reading ****
Diaz, Junot. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ****
Blake, Sarah. Grange House ****
McMurtry, Larry. Books ***
Ozick, Cynthia. Levitation: Five Fictions ***
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante **
Cohen, Matt. The Bookseller ****
Dante, La Vita Nuova **

Some statistics:

Fiction: 35

Biography: 11

Cultural Studies/Politics/Other nf: 6

Children/YA: 5

Drama: 1

Poetry: 4

Literary Essays: 4

Comics: 4

There will be some resolutions based on the above. Next year will be much more organized (and a tribute to Nick Hornby and his Believer articles - more about that later). There will be a method to my madness (and madness it is, not necessarily all that gentle). There is a fresh bookcase in my room, only partially filled. So much shelf space! What possibilities!

Slowing things down to see

2009-12-20T22:50:00.000-05:00

I was reading in Italian today and I had an epiphany. I understood what reading is for me. I must explain that my knowledge of Italian leaves a lot to be desired and I insist on reading in that language only to strengthen my denial of that fact. I know my basics but it never seems enough to forgo the dictionary (unless I’m reading kids’ stuff or lyrics to Laura Pausini’s songs). When I read in Italian, the first go is usually just to get the feel for the passage and the second go is underlining the words that I didn’t understand and looking them up.

And then the story becomes clear.

And this is it. The necessity to look up the words essential to make sense of things not only slows things down but also makes the process visible to me. This discovery, this unveiling – this is what I want. A slow-arriving understanding, like eyes suddenly seeing the whole panorama instead of just a small snippet of the horizon. In this way I could almost manufacture the same sensation one has when reading a book that’s very plot-driven. The finding-things-out part makes it soooooo good! The reward of getting the whole picture is almost independent of the story itself. In how many ways can I exploit/explore it!

Henry James, The Golden Bowl

2009-12-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

Me and Henry – we had some unfinished business. The unfinished business was The Golden Bowl, which I started and abandoned close to the middle some weeks ago. Or was it months? The book seemed too dense – almost impossible to get through, despite its obvious qualities. So I left it unfinished close to the end of part I, Prince.

At that time I knew that the Prince in question is Amerigo, an Italian aristocrat from an impoverished family, who can’t afford his own life. Through efforts of Mrs. Assingham, a friend and a confidante, he marries Maggie, the daughter of an American millionaire and collector. In exchange for a decent kind of happiness and means to procure the way of life he grew accustomed to, Amerigo becomes another feather in Mr. Verver’s cap. But his life is not to be so comfortable after all. Charlotte Stant, a ghost from his past, appears on Ververs’ door. She knows Maggie from their school days – everybody in the family knows that, and she knows Amerigo from that time in Italy when they loved each other passionately but could not marry because they were both penniless – and nobody in the family knows that. Mrs. Assingham knows but does not tell because she is immensely impressed by both Amerigo and Charlotte and has much faith in their ability to restrain themselves from resuscitating their relationship. Besides, Mr. Verver seems like a perfect candidate for a husband – why shouldn’t Charlotte have as much comfort as Amerigo?

And that’s where I stopped. When I returned, it was to part II, Princess. One might say, that’s where the story begins. This part is all for Maggie – how she discovers her husband and mother-in-law’s common past and what she does with that knowledge. Needless to say, Maggie becomes much more impressive than Charlotte and Amerigo have ever been. She surpasses everybody’s expectations and ends up on top.
There is a movie, which I will probably not watch because according to reviews it doesn’t maintain James’ vision. But I was reading the book with the actors’ images in my mind so I think it’s most appropriate to use those for the character sketches that follow.

Amerigo is charming and humble, and seriously humiliated by his position in life. He becomes a trophy husband/son-in-law but also genuinely respects his wife and her father, and even loves them for making his life easier. Yet he’s also a victim, as he realizes that he can’t have the life he wanted (with Charlotte) and will have to settle. He wants to maintain his value in the eyes of his purchaser, Mr. Verver, but he’s constantly tempted to regain some measure of independence. We grow to like him very much in the first part, where we sympathize with him – so much in fact that we may miss his opportunism and spinelessness, which become so apparent in the second part of the book. Amerigo, still as charming as ever, allows women to deal with the consequences of his actions. The resulting loss of self-respect he can deal with, and become all the more sympathetic. And everybody forgives him.

Maggie starts off as an innocent, though perceptive young girl. In the beginning, Amerigo is quite taken with her, and may be the only one suspecting her actual depth. She is capable of much more understanding – and much more resolve and action, as we find out later – than people give her credit for. In the end, she is the one to hold everybody together but of her own volition she becomes the destroyer – the one breaking people apart. Yet she still manages to make it seem like she’s holding everybody together. All she’s holding are the strings, I’m afraid. But her husband doesn’t seem to mind...

Mr. Verver, Maggie’s father, may either be a man who’s clueless and unaware of what’s happening in his small circle or who possesses some kind of wisdom that allows him to remove himself from any unpleasant situation and remove any kind of unpleasant feelings from his mind. His relationship with Maggie is troubling – he arranges his whole life to facilitate that relationship. He finds her a husband who will be forever bound to him. Even thought on the surface he marries Charlotte to please his daughter, he doesn’t spend enough time working on convincing Maggie that it’s a real marriage and that she should really go on with her life. A genius or a naive old man?

Charlotte Stant is trying to organize her life. She may be amoral but she doesn’t have much choice after all. She’s got no means of her own so she has to depend on the kindness of strangers, which is given very much on merit, since she doesn’t have anything else but her personality to recommend her. Because of her circumstances, she perfected the art of survival and manages to create a comfortable life for herself. She doesn’t have illusions – she knows Mr. Verver doesn’t love her and is only marrying her because he thinks it will allow Maggie not to worry about her father for a change. She works with what she’s got – so when an old lover crosses her path, she takes him in just as she would any other opportunity to better her life. Charlotte is as much of an opportunist as Amerigo, but she doesn’t have his charm and she’s a woman so her character is much more “stainable”. Needless to say, nobody forgives her.

James is a miniaturist – he takes four people, puts them into a situation and lets the people develop. There’s not much plot – the characters are everything and even though it’s difficult to plough through that solid prose (with only an occasional relief of a dialogue), the result is as rewarding as the execution. I can’t really say I understood or appreciated everything in the book; for that I would have to re-read it many times. But I’ve seen enough to appreciate it and allow it to impress me, even without the full grasp of all its qualities. Having said that, I’m planning to refrain from reading James’ novels for now. Too much meat. I’ll focus on his memoirs, maybe a biography, his Italian sketches, a short story or two. I need to take it slow but our relationship will develop.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

2009-11-21T20:28:00.000-05:00

Some weeks after I finished the book, alas, it's time. I have to record some of this stuff that I've been trying to consume at a fast pace till the end of the year. So now I'm going back in time to leave here some words about The Anthologist.

I expected much more of this beautiful cover but I still enjoyed it. I thought it would be a beautiful book about an unfulfilled writer and it was, in a way. The protagonist of this book is an anthologist. As such, he's taking on and making his own work of others -- that's why he will remain nameless in this review. He isn't nameless in the book.

He is a poet writing an introduction to a poetry anthology. Which does not contain his own poems, I might add. So who is he? A poet or an introduction writer? He isn't sure himself but he doesn't seem to want to cross over to the dark side -- so he is completely blocked. He rambles about what he might be putting in the introduction but nothing ends up on paper.

He unwittingly compares himself to other poets who wrote introductions to anthologies of poetry: Auden, Longfellow, Merrill. Putting himself in this glorious company doesn't seem to help but it almost gives him an illusion of being in the same league. Besides, if they did it, maybe it wouldn't be such a betrayal for him to do it. But shouldn't he be writing beautiful poems instead of obsessing about a deadline for the introduction? The completion of it would put his life in order -- his girlfriend would come back to him and the angry though encouraging e-mails from his editor would stop. Would it make him the man he wants to be though?

The book is beautifully written and very informative. I jotted down a lot of names of the poets I've never heard before. Some reading will follow. It didn't touch my soul but it did affect my future. Isn't that all I'm really looking for?

Back from New York Caleb Carr, The Alienist

2009-11-17T20:47:00.000-05:00

We just came back a few days ago from a week long trip to New York. My first. After many books and many movies set there, I now finally have some context and can exclaim enthusiastically "I was there!" next time I encounter even the smallest allusion to NY. In this way, I adopted it and by simple being there I have the right to call it my own.

Nothing unpleasant happened (like a mugging or somebody peeing on my shoes - what can I say, travel preparation and pre-travel research can make one slightly paranoid) so the experience was completely unspoiled. I did almost all that I wanted although had to skip New York Public Library and the Morgan Library. Maybe it's better this way - I already want to live there for some time and I don't need additional motivation.

Of course living there will not be happening. For now, I just have the unfortunate New York wannabe, much smaller, although with some interesting places that I will be visiting from now on, if only to stay in the New York state of mind. And when I get really nostalgic, it's not really that far. 12 hours on a train - a much more humane way to travel. Besides, on a 1.5 hr long plane trip I couldn't attempt anything longer than a Coelho or a Coetzee. Here instead I treated myself to The Alienist by Caleb Carr - a New York period mystery which was quite exciting now that I could imagine some architectural and geographical details to go with the story.

It's a good book to read on a train - in my first bout I didn't have to stop reading for about 4 hours and that really allows you to get into the story. It's a book easy to abandon - it's dense and gory in places, seems to contain almost too much for comfort. But it's a rich story, full of details and useless knowledge which it's always so nice to obtain. About turn-of-he-century psychiatry, serial killers, juvenile crime, asylums and prisons. About politicians and patricians (Theodore Roosevelt figures in it pretty prominently, and there is a meeting that happens in J. P. Morgan's house, which made me really sorry that there was no time for the Morgan Library). About crazy doctors, deviants and journalists. The Alienist wasn't completely satisfying but it was a clever book. I would probably enjoy it even more if I read a nicer edition.

On the trip back, after I finished The Alienist, I sunk my teeth into The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers - a book I've been unsuccessfully trying to find in Canada (I was only able to find a Polish edition in a Polish bookstore in Mississauga, and that wasn't quite what I was going for). Haven't finished it yet (am distracted by The Men Who Stared at Goats, among other things), but it's about a dinosaur who's a writer and who travels to a city where everybody thinks, eats and breathes books. Just the descriptions of the city make my mouth water. Mmmmmmm...

John Dunning, The Sign of the Book

2009-10-25T11:03:00.000-04:00

Serialization. This was one of the first literary terms I learned during my stint at UofT. That was during my first day, in my first class. Since I didn’t speak a word of English at the time, I went with an escort. The escort was supposed to take notes for me, just in case I wasn’t making it. He was also supposed to deflect attention if by some strange coincidence the professor’s gaze landed on me. While I was busy blending with the wall, my escort (who in later years became my designated essay editor/proof-reader, which probably didn’t help our relationship in the least, but it’s still too early to broach the subject on some therapist’s couch) participated in the class discussion. If I remember correctly, he used fantasy novels as an example of serialization. That was after he witnessed my absolute enchantment with the unparalleled Sapkowski and his Polish fantasy series, The Witcher. I would read and re-read those volumes constantly – because once you start, you can’t just stop in the middle of the series, no matter how well you remember the ending from the last time!

The effects of serialization got to me with Dunning. Having discovered him while I worked in Chapters some years ago, I somehow stopped reading his Cliff Janeway series (that stoppage may have coincided with the beginning of my banking career). I liked the books a lot but since my new job demanded constant re-education (in order to have a hope of ever finding a way out of it, of course), much recreational reading was forsaken (with the exception of the material geared specifically towards preventing the splattering of my brains on a sidewalk in the Lawrence and Dufferin area of Toronto). Dunning was forsaken too. He featured proudly on my Books-about-Books list (one has to collect something, and at the time, in the absence of a room of my own – with a view or without it – I collected things that can be written down, like book lists), but I didn’t come back to him until recently. After The Bookman’s Promise, the effects of serialization kicked in and minutes after finishing it I proceeded to Indigo to purchase the next book in the series. I happened to find it in a nice slightly enlarged mass-market format – it didn’t open very well but it was nice to the touch and quite pleasant-looking. And the plot didn’t disappoint either.

Cliff Janeway is a bit restless now and possibly getting bored with being just an antiquarian bookseller (having left behind a career in Denver police in the first volume of the series). He still has the girl that he caught in The Bookman’s Promise and overall life is good, but the book (and life) formula of him stumbling upon a book mystery is wearing a little thin. Maybe he could become a private investigator specializing in book mysteries instead? I think it’s a very good idea. It would legitimize what Dunning was de facto doing with Cliff but giving the books more of a direction and clear-cut corners.

In The Sign of the Book, Cliff’s girlfriend Erin asks him to investigate a murder allegedly committed by her former best friend. Laura Marshall is accused of (and confesses to) killing her husband. Bobby Marshall was a book collector but also Erin’s first love. A wall full of signed first editions may be the murder motive. Aside from the usual book stuff and shady bookseller stuff, Dunning gives us some psychological drama here. He builds an interesting love triangle (or a quadrangle, really, as dead Bobby features quite prominently in the lives of all characters), starring Erin, Cliff and Laura, that takes the book to the next level. Nice surprise. Nice surprise ending too.

Wasn’t that much of a surprise for me tough – about 80 pages to the end I realized that the uncanny déjà vu feeling that I was having from the beginning is completely justified. The Sign of the Book is on my Books-Read-in-2005 list! I must have skipped its predecessor – The Bookman’s Promise – and just gone to this one. Very unusual. Did I just ignore the serialization imperative? I skipped a piece of a puzzle – has the puzzle been affected by it? Has my enjoyment of it? I’m going to assume it has and even though since I re-read The Sign of the Book and it can’t go on my Books-Read-to-Date list (524 on last count), I enjoyed the fulfillment that comes with patching up that hole. I restored order to my series.

Allison Hoover Bartlett, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much John Dunning, The Bookman's Promise

2009-10-04T11:42:00.000-04:00

Books. Of course he loved them too much. He stole them from unsuspecting book dealers using stolen credit card numbers, which then made his victims liable for fraudulent charges. The way he saw it, he wanted first editions and the fact that he couldn’t afford them made the world unfair. The dealers were overpricing the books, didn’t want to make them available to him. So he punished them. How was it fair that they had them and he didn’t? He wanted the books and he “got” them.

John Gilkey didn’t spend much time in prison. Even though the price of a rare book available to him from the rare book dealers could reach tens of thousands of dollars (the really high-ticket items usually changed hands in a more private – or a more public – way), in the public mind a book is still a book. Did Gilkey avoid a long-term incarceration because of the perception, because he was clever or just lucky? Allison Hoover Bartlett doesn’t get an answer to this question. She doesn’t get many answers, really – her research is stilted from the start by the first lesson Ken Sanders taught her: that all book thieves are liars. Ken Sanders would know. For years he had been the security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. He organized an information network that tracked book thefts all over the country – and he was instrumental in Gilkey’s arrest.

It did seem Gilkey lied a lot. He did it with a single-mindedness and consistency of a psychopath. He justified his crimes with the same skill. He didn’t see anything morally reprehensible in “taking” the books from the booksellers. He didn’t see a reason why they would deserve these treasures more than he did.

Allison Hoover Bartlett tells a good story. Sometimes she comes dangerously close to becoming an enabler and she does give Gilkey an outlet – to present his story to the world. But Gilkey has an agenda. Does the author write down what he wants us to see? Considering how concerned Gilkey was with how he’s perceived, I wonder what he thought of the book. The same moral blind spot that he had when it comes to books may have allowed him to see the book not for what it was but for what he wanted it to be. He may have actually believed that his final plea – for people to send him rare books to keep him from stealing them – will be answered with all the seriousness it deserves…

When I worked in Chapters, I was subjected to first editions daily. They were usually pristine, with shiny unclipped dust jackets and pages that made a crackling sound when they were turned for the first time. Of course those first editions were all too modern to be valuable but I still left most of my paycheck in the store. Some of the books were even signed by the authors who came to the store hoping that by making their mark in the book they will increase the sales. Of course we would never let them sign too many copies – if the books were autographed by the author, it was that much harder to return them to the publisher if they didn’t sell…

John Dunning’s books made me aware of the other first editions. The ones that should not be in pristine condition but are. The ones that have a history and don’t smell of ink anymore. After finishing The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, I wanted to stay a bit longer in that world so I picked up The Bookman’s Promise (mass-market paperback that I picked up some years ago at a Goodwill for $2 – quite expensive by Goodwill standards, although I hear that a signed first edition of his Booked to Die can be bought for 950.00 USD).

Cliff Janeway, former cop turned bookseller and rare books expert, makes a dying woman a promise. He’s going to find the rare book collection that belonged to her grandfather and after his death ended up in hands of dishonest book dealers. I haven’t finished it yet but I already know I will like it. And probably, like so many other books, it will put me on a journey that will continue long after The Bookman’s Promise is over. Let’s just say, I’m expecting to acquaint myself with Richard Burton in near future. I just have to find out how he learned those 29 languages…

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

2009-09-09T23:31:00.000-04:00

Many things prepared me for The Lazarus Project and its author.

My immigrant experience allowed me to read the early chapters of the book with the sense of recognition, which would hit me in the face with such strength that sometimes I thought Hemon overdid it a little. My eastern European past makes me understand both the visuals and the history – that history that in my country was both hidden and drilled into me by teachers and grandparents. My early wish to become a writer writing in English – a language still so foreign to me – made me very sensitive to Hemon’s use of language. Without thinking I looked for any kind of overkill, and both disliked and admired it. It often seems that he’s trying to prove his fluency over and over again – like Conrad whom he acknowledges as one of his influences, he is writing in a language wet and sticky with adjectives and adverbs. The word “hirsute” appears in the book at least twice. The elaboration of his descriptions makes it impossible to skip anything, but also plays nicely with the idea of taking pictures. The author seems to be competing with the photographer for the best representation of something that can’t be expressed in any medium – grief. I recognize that too...

Hemon’s protagonist is Brik (last name to a first name that is used very infrequently – like for all eastern Europeans, last name is the important one, fist name not being individualistic enough, not really having much meaning at all), a Bosnian writer living in Chicago. As part of his writing project, he embarks on a journey to learn everything there is to know about the subject of his book – Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who having survived pogroms of the Jews in the Ukraine comes to Chicago only to get shot on a suspicion of being an anarchist.

It’s impossible to read this book and not to interpret it biographically. I don’t think the author would mind either – he seems to be provoking it. He surely managed to exorcise some demons along the way there.

The story moves back and forth between Brik and Lazarus. At first, the two twines are strictly divided; later they become almost interchangeable as Lazarus’s story seeps into Brik’s.

The book is highly quotable – I found myself groping around for a pencil whenever I opened it. I want to remember it. It will help me navigate my own grief...

Julie Powell, Julie & Julia Julia Child, My Life in France

2009-09-09T23:20:00.000-04:00

I’d been waiting for another Nora Ephron movie. I’d been excited and expectant, and reading cookbooks to put myself in the right mood for it. Then Julie & Julia arrived and I liked it a lot.

I framed the movie with two books it’s based on: Julie & Julia and My Life in France. I considered making Julia Child the foreword and Julie Powell the afterword but the movie cover of Child’s mass-market edition discouraged me a bit. So I purchased Powell’s book first – also with a movie cover, but somehow less irksome.

My knowledge of this book at that time consisted of what’s in the movie trailer. Needless to say, when I started reading, I was at first slightly annoyed by all the information that was not in the trailer. Later the good qualities overshadowed my initial doubts and I read on with pleasure, skipping and skimming only on occasion.
I’m familiar with similar projects as the one Powell undertook. A.J. Jacobs and his read-the-Encyclopaedia-Britannica and follow-the-Bible-literally-for-a-year books managed to both impress and discourage me. Impress – because the idea of doing something wholly and completely appeals to me immensely. Discourage – because of how rarely we can actually commit without compromising along the way. Even if Jacobs wasn’t skipping, he surely wasn’t retaining either. As for the Bible, can we be surprise that at some point he had to start picking and choosing the rules he would follow? We can’t but we can still be disappointed that here there’s another finite task that can’t be completed.

It was similar with Julie Powell – in her project to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and writing a blog about her progress, she did arrive at a point where she decided to skip the recipe variations (I think it was around the aspic section). That’s completeness compromised.
Enough about compromises though. The book is funny and touching at times. Julie Powell is both proud of her accomplishment and humbled by what she still can’t do. In the course of the book, we see her life change – not just because all of a sudden she gets a publishing contract and everybody’s interested in what she has to say, but also because she proves to herself that with a bit of inspiration and some spite one can do remarkable things.

I gained even more respect for Julie Powell after I read that Julia Child wasn’t thrilled with the Julie/Julia Project. Powell’s reaction to it, after the initial shock, is admirable, and endears her to the reader even more.

Now on to Julia. Because of the above, I didn’t like her very much when I was starting My Life in France. I did like Meryl Streep’s portrayal of her in the movie but I didn’t know enough about Child to manufacture a soft spot for her in my heart. I never saw her show; as a cultural icon, she’s still completely unknown to me. Yet the Julia Child of My Life in France is an adorable creature – full of life and passion, and color. She talks about food and people, and the world she travelled. She talks about her marriage and friendships. She lovingly describes every apartment and every remarkable meal. The language is smooth and beautiful – probably to great extent thanks to Alex Prud’homme, her husband’s grandnephew who co-wrote the book and finished it himself after Julia’s death.

The book is one of the more effective autobiographies I’ve ever read. It’s also very entertaining. Powell was right – this is not the Julia who would discount the blog devoted to her recipes, however spicy the language.

Christine Wicker, Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that talks to the Dead

2009-08-20T16:28:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, I was very interested in paranormal phenomena. I watched The X Files religiously. I participated in the Silva Mind Control Method workshops and I learned Reiki. I let people lay their hands on me and tell me that I’m allergic to dairy and that there is some energy around my throat. I practiced visualization and was very pleased when in my university years (the first time around) my marks looked exactly like I imagined them. I didn’t have any qualms – it was still me getting all those As – I was just using some extra tools. I was initiated as a Reiki practitioner by a Reiki master. He put his hands on me and afterwards, a blue light was coming out of my head. At least that’s what was reported by the aura-seeing woman who helped with the workshop. After that, I cured some headaches.

I have a propensity to believe though. Even when the religion disappeared from my life, I was still looking for something to hand on to. As of now, it’s knowledge. I believe in learning things and in becoming a larger person in this way. But I’m still open – wide open, in a new-agey sort of way.

Every summer mediums come to Lily Dale. They set up in Victorian houses and wait for people with questions. The mediums give them answers to questions often unasked. Often, they’re wrong. On occasion, they’re right.

One day I’ll go to Lily Dale, take some courses, walk around the Stump, maybe stay at Shelley Takei’s house. I want to. I feel I could relax there. That’s what Christine Wicker did. She came to Lily Dale to write a book – a proper piece of journalism. No prejudices but also no going easy on things. She sketches a miniature of a town and its people as they are now. On occasion, she mentions them as they used to be and still everything and everybody rings real. She comes and goes. She starts to believe and she’s turned off right after. That’s the only response we can have in these empirical times to a place like Lily Dale.

Next summer. Some long weekend. It’s only about 3 hours away from where I am.

Ewa Madeyska, Katoniela

2009-08-14T22:09:00.001-04:00

What is it about books that allow us such self-recognition!

If anything, I am predisposed to dislike Polish literature, if only because I sometimes feel that after years of obsession with the English language I can't understand it properly. A lot of it reads like a bad translation from another language. My lack of attachment, and unfortunately lack of contact with today's Polish (how much could it change from what it was 10 years ago, you ask -- well, quite a bit) makes me fear books in Polish. I usually can't find the connection anymore -- and I end up annoyed both by my sudden disconnect with my native language and the seemingly inept prose that I'm subjected to.

Katoniela ended up in my mailbox by way of the same wonderful person who years ago put in my hands The Land of Laughs and Salem's Lot. I tend to read what she recommends. I tend to love what she recommends, even if I'm predisposed to hate it. But with Katoniela it was so much more.

The book circles around the life of Aniela, a girl, then a woman, who feels around to find an appropriate spiritualiy in the world dominated by catholicism. It circles around it but never quite gets to the centre. As the book unfolds, we get new layers of Aniela's life -- and the different kids of religiousness that she manufactures for herself. We start with her suspicions that she was never baptised. We get her attempt at being a creator herself. We see her world populated with various religious and quasi religious personas: Black Marian who proudly displayes what's best of him in the bushes near the White Church (I know the White Church -- I've spent many hours in it praying for various As during the 4 years I spent studying to be a lawyer in B.

There was no Black Marian there -- but then, that was some years later.), Marta -- Aniela's saintly sister -- a real saint, Totalny -- Aniela's blessed husband -- a fake one. There is something not out of place in an epic poem in this book. The character travels through the circles of hell to emerge stronger and victorious, however scathed. I was proud of Aniela.

Back to self-recognition then. Even though my home looked different than Aniela's (my agnostic parents never encouraged religiousness), my youth was centered around the church. I was a member of a group like the one led by Aniela's nameless husband, named "Totalny" ("total" in English) for the completeness of his surrender to the glory of God. I knew people like him. I've seen assorted Black Marian's in parks. My best friend, whom I met at a church camp (where we both led groups of unsuspecting young minds into even more submission) almost became a wife of a failed seminarist. As I said, I know the White Church, which is so prominent in the book and in Aniela's life.

Katoniela is an amazing book. Aside from the subject matter, which I may be finding fascinating because of all this familiarity, it is so well written, it made me put away several other books that I was reading at the time (hasn't happened before for a book in Polish). I set aside Henry James for Ewa Madeyska! Her turn of phrase and elaborate, many-stories high descriptions of tiny events make for a prose that's miniature and universal at the same time.

Katoniela made me set up a Polish section in my blog.

Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement

2009-07-06T21:48:00.000-04:00

The Arts and Crafts movement is very close to my heart. It proclaims that every manner of artistic expression is equally worthy. It promotes a holistic approach to an artistic endeavour, encouraging the artist to become a master of all trades adjacent to his main pursuit. In this way, an architect would become a draftsman, master builder and landscape designer; a furniture designer would learn woodworking and finish his own designs and a painter would mix his own paints and frame the finished product.

The movement that started in England in late nineteenth century, and was fronted by three great architects: William Morris, C.R. Ashbee and W.R. Lethaby, with John Ruskin as its theorist, gave power to the people (like socialism, with which it was associated). They now had the right to produce the things that would beautify their lives, if they were so inclined. Or they could purchase affordable useful works of art produced according to the Arts and Crafts movement principles. The Arts and Crafts movement was supposed to be the end of the art for the elite.

The movement failed to meet the goal of art for the people, as the objects designed with love and made by hand proved very expensive and slow to produce. But it inspired people and it soon crossed the ocean where it contributed to the creation of a bungalow, for example. The principle of building things into the landscape (not demolishing the landscape in order to supplant it with buildings) added to many a neighbourhood in California.

There’s a need for Arts and Crafts approach these days. In Toronto, nothing looks natural anymore – and there is no need to create anymore. Mass-production of everything a human being may need depletes the object of originality, not to mention, soul. Pottery Barn tries to manufacture whimsy, but somehow IKEA seems much closer to the Arts and Crafts ideal (even though as mass-produced as they come, the items made by IKEA have simplicity and usefulness. Clean lines, sturdiness – and there is always a face, a real person, behind each weird name, each angular shape.). Since there’s already not much art in our lives these days, maybe we should replace it with crafts?

I first encountered the Arts and Crafts movement principle in fiction, of course. It was Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree, with its heroine, a stained glass artist, and its ghosts, Augustus Penrose and his wife Eugenie, who carried out a diversified artistic enterprise – from stained glass, through furniture design, to tapestry. And then, just recently, I read A.S. Byatt’s The Children Book, in which not the person of Olive Wellwood, a writer, inspired me, but the potters, jewellery makers and puppeteers who constituted a background for her.

I’m finding that these days, there’s not much encouragement for artistic expression in a manner of Arts and Crafts movement. Landscape design that we can afford for our backyards doesn’t try to blend the garden in – there is often no landscape left to blend into anymore anyway. With all the stainless steel around, there’s no need for pottery (unless strictly ornamental, and even such would stick out too much). Even my artistic and sensitive husband wouldn’t welcome a tablecloth lovingly embroidered with my own little hands! The solution is to fake professionalism – to make arts and crafts endeavours look mass-produced (brings to mind some of the Arts and Crafts designers who sold their soul to the devil of industrialism and decided to use machines to increase their output, but then made sure to include some fake tool marks in the final stage of production to give the objects the appearance of being hand-made). I wonder whether Arts and Crafts theorists would appreciate the irony.

The book by Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan is a very good introduction to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Even the chapters about architecture held my attention (from all artistic endeavours, architecture is the least interesting to me. It’s hard to get really into something that can’t be done without years of specialized education.). This book brought it to me – and made me see the arts and crafts principles in my own world (from my room to my neighbourhood), even if it’s mostly their absence that I notice. I enjoyed everything but the cover (a painting of a living room design by Joseph Maria Olbrich).

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

2009-05-23T17:38:00.000-04:00

I saw Eudora Welty for the first time in a picture -- one of many included in a book of photographs depicting writers at their desks. That one photo bread a familiarity that made me feel like I've read all her books. That, of course, wasn't the case. This is my first and only book of hers. And I enjoyed it not only because it deals with one writer's beginnings.

She states herself in the last sentences of the book:

As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

I did not like her much while reading -- if only because I also considered her life very sheltered. Privileged upbringing, still with pretenses to simplicity coming from her parents' farming origins. Doting father and a mother who read to her in every spare moment. The darkness in people mentioned in passing -- the death of her predecessor in the family (a brother who died at birth) and the death of her father's mother when he was still a child. I missed the darkness and the real.

I enjoyed the book because it gives me histories. It makes me want to collect my own. The family history that I hear my grandmother in Poland is writing down -- in school notebooks, I'm sure -- somehow becomes more and more interesting. Family photographs suddenly gain importance. Writing the lectures that became the book surely made Welty more conscious of her own genesis. I also have histories. The time will come when my darkness and my real (that is safely hidden in the diaries I kept between the age of 12 and 18) can be pulled out and described along with the memories of my grandfather's homemade fairy tales or my grandmother's tapioca, just as homemade.

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends

2009-05-23T13:47:00.000-04:00

I’d never read anything by Chabon before. I read about him, I saw his name mentioned in many books, I heard Nora Ephron being very impressed by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck, that I listened to on CD. All this made me consider reading his fiction, but however nice the books felt to the touch, somehow it wasn’t happening. Many times I stopped to read the back cover descriptions and they never grabbed me enough not to let go of the book. This one was different.

Here, Chabon talks about his influences – books that shaped him and his writing, or the ones that just impressed him. He talks about his life a little. He talks about how he plays with the biographical in his fiction and how he plays with the reader. The topics of the essays range from the review of McCarthy’s The Road to divagations about golems. Some time ago, I firmly decided never to read The Road, and my interest in golems is limited to their guest appearances in one episode of The Simpsons, yet those two pieces made me consider the ideas in a way I wasn’t planning to before. I was glad my recent reading of V for Vendetta prepared me for several essays about the comics. Those prompted an immediate trip to the library for The Contract with God by Will Eisner. I was pleasantly vindicated reading Chabon’s thoughts on Pullman’s His Dark Materials – my impressions were similar.

Even though Maps and Legends reminds me in many ways of Anne Fadiman’s familiar essays – Ex Libris and At Large and at Small, it draws both on the real and the imagined, and it connects the two creating more of the imagined. Chabon managed to come up with a book of literary essays that reads like a fictional biography or a fireplace conversation – whatever you like better. It’s a fireplace conversation for me – one that I consumed in two big gulps (focus and determination that becomes rare as I get older). It makes me want to write my own part – one day, when I have a fireplace and years and years of experiences to draw on.

Alan Moore, David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

2009-05-06T22:30:00.000-04:00

My childhood was comic books-free. I had some copies of something called Tytus, Romek i Atomek – a Polish comic book where the characters were two boys and a monkey, if I remember correctly. Didn’t make much of an impression. Comic books were not present in my grandparents’ library – and that was the main source of my reading material throughout my childhood and adolescence.

In a way, V for Vendetta was my first comic book (I recently watched a cartoon based on Watchmen, but I don’t suppose it counts). It came very highly recommended but I was surprised by how hard it was to read it. I’m quite unused to the convention so reading handwritten captions and balloons was a huge adjustment. It took some time to get used to the drawings – since I didn’t have much experience with comic books, I expected the graphics to be much more polished and attractive. They weren’t and it’s just right because the rugged and imperfect drawings are much more appropriate for the subject matter. The only context I had, aside from Watchmen, was Blade Runner and Fahrenheit 451.

What happens doesn’t seem very complex. Evey Hammond is rescued by a mysterious vigilante by the name of V from a very unpleasant predicament which almost ended with her death. England is a Nazi state, with constant surveillance and the anthropomorphised computer called Fate running things. V takes on Guy Fawkes’ tendencies and continues the mission. Evey becomes his protégé and even though she doesn’t want to participate in violence and murder, in many ways helps V carry out his activities.

Once I got over the convention, I started noticing things. The book is very nicely balanced, action being slowed down not just by empty panels but also by chapters where not much happens. And then there’s the bang. It seems the authors realise that the reader will need a rest period between the parts that seem so hard and so believable that we sometimes just can’t keep reading. So we get a relief chapter after a heavy-loaded one. Several times I was grateful for that.

I was not very much surprised by the ending – the book ends in the only possible way. Since V is really an idea, this idea lives on.

My favourite part – my favourite venue was V’s home, the Shadow Gallery. He accumulated old music and books there. The Shadow Gallery becomes in a way the last seat of civilization, just as V is the last example of humanity – human resistance. He maintains (often through exaggeration) the qualities that are pruned out of the society by constant supervision and removal of unwanted element.

V for Vendetta was a good introduction to comics for me. It makes me crave more. It makes me plan what else I could get to surprise me like this. It took precedence over Anne Michaels...

Losing focus

2009-05-03T12:00:00.001-04:00

Finished Anne Michaels this morning. It took me much, much longer than I expected. I did get distracted by other books, both in English and in Polish, fiction and non-fiction. I'm afraid it got a bit diluted due to this lack of focus. It will be hard to review it properly. I half decided to at least re-read parts, to give it justice. The weather is lovely today -- finally, after months and months of winter -- so maybe I'll take my birthday bike out to a park and go back to it so that I don't lose it.

Or maybe I'll continue the travel/adventure book in Polish that recently arrived in my mailbox. (By the way, I used to be a great enemy of online bookstores, feeling that shopping for books online strips the experience of its tangibility. It changed recently when I ordered several books from Indigo. The feeling of expectation every time I'd go to the mailbox to see whether my order arrived yet is almost as pleasant as thumbing the book in the bookstore. Delayed gratification beats the instant one hands down. And when the book finally arrives, it's like Christmas all over again!)

When I read in Polish now, I feel like I'm learning the language again. I'm slow and careful not to miss anything. I no longer have the ability to skip and skim in my mother tongue. I wonder if I care to regain it...

Short books

2009-04-10T15:50:00.000-04:00

The Winter Vault arrived one day after my last post. I must say that I wasn't expecting it. I just got Nick Hornby's newest volume of book musings from the library and I was actually looking forward to the short book period. But Anne Michaels is here, demanding to be read.

I did good, considering. I finished my two short books, trying to speed up just a little.

Jorge Luis Borges' The Mirror of Ink was really tiny, but I can't in any way say insignificant. Borges is as significant as they come, although it's clear how unaffected he is, despite all that. The Mirror of Ink is one of the Pocket Penuguins -- 56-pages short, containing seven of his more famous short stories: "The Mirror of Ink", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel" (the only one I read before), "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero", "The Witness", "Ragnarok" and "Blue Tigers". I was surprised how hard it was for me to get into the spirit of this book. With Borges, I always have a feeling that the structure is missing, that there is no central theme and that what I'm reading are just some disconnected visions. I'm always surprised when the ending turns out to be the only appropriate ending for the piece, proving that there was a forethought and structure there to start with. It takes getting used to though. Maybe I should always consume Borges in Pocket-Penguin-size bites.

Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money was consumed in three gulps. I had a notion to go back to my review of its predecessors, The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, which I read some months ago, but then I decided not to, since this book is a perfect more-of-the-same kind of writing. It's a selection of 2 years' worth of Hornby's column that he wrote for The Believer -- all about what books he bought and read every month. There's not much overlap between mine and Hornby's reading; in fact, let's go back to the book and see how many books he mentions I actually read or considered:

Robert Harris, Imperium (considered, actually, only yesterday)

George Orwell, Essays (considered every time I'm in a bookstore; read some)

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (read, loved)

Cormack McCarthy, The Road (considered before I knew the premise; now nobody can make me)

Robert Harris, The Ghost (read, or actually listened to, quite recently)

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (read in Cuba while recovering from a light food poisoning)

Not that many, eh? Well, he does live in another country after all! Of course there are quite a few books that I will read based on what he wrote about them. To name some:

Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat

Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built (already ordered from Chapters)

Clare Allan, Poppy Shakespeare

But that will all be after The Winter Vault.

Cheating

2009-04-07T20:00:00.000-04:00

I've been cheating a little. Reading short books to fudge my list. Not really feeling bad about that -- Margaret Atwood's children's books were pretty satisfying and quite entertaining. But now I have a good reason for reading short books: for years I've been waiting for Anne Michaels' next book. Her first fiction book, Fugitive Pieces, was the first book in English that I ever re-read. (That was when I was still obsessed with filling up my mental shelves with new stuff, since I felt like I lost everything I ever read in my native language after switching to English. Re-reading anything seemed like a waste of time then. It's still hard, but I'm getting better.) And now there is her new book, The Winter Vault. Today a confirmation e-mail arrived -- it's on its way to me! It will probably take 3 more days before I get it so in the meantime I need some short-term reading material. That is why there are going to be some short books between now and The Winter Vault. I'm not going to double-book that one. Michaels demands all my attention. Can't wait.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

2009-04-07T19:48:00.000-04:00

I didn’t read any Mary McCarthy after all but I had to have some of my long overdue academia reading. This book was just right for it.

The premise is simple: a close-knit group of classics students murders one of their own. It takes half the book to find out how; it takes the rest to see what kind of revenge they exact upon themselves and each other. It is a very good story.

I expected the secret, the mystery, to be more external. In a way, it is, as the murder is a very external act. But premeditation is internal. That premeditation is moving the external act of murder into the inside. The idea of the inside is highlighted by the isolationist character of the perpetrating group.

The members of the group don’t socialize much with the outsiders. Special character of their studies – classics and Greek lessons with a professor who is an eccentric recluse and monopolizes their attention and devotion – makes it hard to make friends. They become closer to their mentor Julian, and to each other. The only two that have some outside connections are Richard, the narrator, who managed to break into the group by spinning lies about his family connections, and Bunny, the victim of the crime. We know what happens to Bunny. Richard becomes a perpetual foil, mirror, whipping boy – to everybody in the group – but ultimately he makes things possible. He’s the enabler here.

Richard’s quest is a usual one – his father doesn’t give him what he needs so he spends his time at the college looking for a strong male figure. At first it seems that person might be Julian, a colorful personage filling his office with flowers, cooking gourmet meals for his students and giving them all the intellectual stimulation they can handle. Julian has an uncanny ability to either not see certain things that don’t fit into his manufactured perception of reality or to remove those things from the situation.

Henry Winter, a fellow student, becomes Richard’s inspiration instead. Unfortunately, Henry is as unsuited for the real world as Julian. He doesn’t repress troubling issues like Julian. Instead, he removes himself from the situation. Unlike Julian’s escape, Henry's is not to save face or save himself the embarrassment. It is to realize his messianic destiny and to imprison the rest of the group into that specific point in time. They stay frozen, feeling the same way they felt then, unable to move past it or to really live on.

The Secret History is not a fast read. The narrator is hard to relate to and difficult to like. Many scenes seemed not to have a point. All scenes dealing with smoking, drinking and taking pills seem like one scene. But the characters are well drawn and the topic – in all its simplicity – very well executed. If it wasn’t for the ugly mass-market edition that I was reading, it would be hard to put down.

Robert Harris, The Ghost

2009-03-16T20:46:00.000-04:00

This is another one for my list of books about writers. The hero of Robert Harris’s The Ghost is not the kind of writer whose name will often appears on the book covers. He is a ghostwriter, renting out his abilities and not expecting fame or respect. He is a skilled ghostwriter though, and seems satisfied with the inconspicuous anonymity his work gives him. That anonymity is even more implied when he is contracted to ghostwrite a political memoir. The “author” is Adam Lang, a former British Prime Minister, currently in a very difficult political situation. Lang, a charming and charismatic politician, is being accused of authorizing rendition and may soon be facing charges before the International Criminal Court. What is more, Lang’s long-time collaborator and former press aide Mike McAra, who was originally working on the memoirs, dies in suspicious circumstances. The gloom spreads over the memoir that’s held under lock and key in a fortress-like mansion in Martha’s Vineyard where Lang found temporary refuge in the satisfying proximity of his American friends (or masters?).

I decided not to get any context information till I was done with the book. The similarities between Adam Lang and Tony Blair would not help me appreciate it – they may even distract me from appreciating the book for what it was. And it was a very effective political thriller with a clever surprise ending (the book would’ve been satisfying even without that). Also, I always appreciate any reference to the ICC in fiction.

I haven’t read many books of this kind but I just might in the future. After I plow my way through Mary McCarthy…

No book report today

2009-02-25T20:25:00.000-05:00

I've been on vacation. A week in Cuba, in a hammock, staring at the shapes of the palm trees against the blue sky. I decided there will be no review of the two books I read there: Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Summer Reading by Hilma Wolitzer. I enjoyed both very much, although I will always associate Oscar Wao with feeling sick to my stomach due to a one-day food poisoning and Summer Reading with feeling nervous that it's almost time to leave. No book report after vacation though.

My body is still recovering from a thermal shock after coming back home from the warm climates. I'm making it easier on myself by plunging back into an academia literature. Donna Tartt's Secret History is on the menu. And I have a lot of Mary McCarthy waiting for me. Such a dose will probably depress me intensely and make me yet again want to go back to school. Looking forward to it.

Sarah Blake, Grange House

2009-02-11T00:22:00.000-05:00

Recently I’ve been finding that library books don’t satisfy the proprietary aspect of reading for me. I use the library mainly for audio books these days. But occasionally I do take a trip to the fiction section and reach for random books to see if the cover image grabs me. Grange House was a result of such trip.

The cover is beautiful. It shows a girl in a white dress running through a grown-over garden; a house looming in the background – all in sepia and out of focus. A very encouraging beginning.

Grange House is a vacation place where we first meet young Maisie Thomas. She’s spending summer there with her parents – summer that becomes an important time for her. Maisie is developing her idea of what life should be – she’s a girl, becoming. She’s not quite sure whom she wants to become but she knows quite well what she does not want in her life:

Would my stone read only Maisie Thomas: beloved wife of ______?Only that? Never the story of this full-throated longing beyond it (198).

As she is trying to decide how to fill this desire to matter, to be more than an appendage to somebody’s life, she becomes close to Miss Grange, a spinster writer who resides in the house and quietly reigns over the vacationers. Miss Grange reels Maisie in with her stories and family histories. The girl becomes the old woman’s pupil but also the keeper of those stories. She’s charged with a task to finish the unfinished one – the one for which even Miss Grange doesn’t know the ending. While finishing Miss Grange’s story, Maisie unwittingly stumbles upon her own.

Grange House is subtle and elegant. The prose changes pace, allowing the reader to rest between the plot-driven parts. The form moves between the firs-person narrative, letters, diary entries and stories. The novel starts a little slow but that can be justified. It takes time to build this kind of atmosphere – there is something Jamesian in the story; something more than just the obvious comparison to “What Maisie Knew.” After the sluggish beginning, I read the book in three large gulps. Definitely a solid achievement.

Larry McMurtry, Books

2009-02-11T00:19:00.000-05:00

So, Larry McMurtry is a bookseller. He is a writer too, but that’s just his vocation. Bookselling is what he does.

Books is a memoir that deals with this aspect of his life – selling, not writing. He does mention his writing but mostly as background. After all, we all know that he was doing it while he was buying and selling whole libraries. He acknowledges it sort to get it out of the way.

I reached for this memoir as part of my quest to read everything that has the word “book” in the title. It may actually keep me interested in McMurtry for a while – to see what kind of man emerges from his fiction for a change.

Here’s the passage that I find especially moving:

I’m proud of my carefully selected twenty-eight-thousand-volume library and am not joking when I say that I regard its formation as one of my most notable achievements.

Yet, when I walk along the rows of bookshelves now, I feel that a distance has opened between me and my books. Some things had happened to diminish the sense of rapport I always had with those books. (…) I think sometimes that I’m angry with my library because I know that I can’t reread it all. I would like to, but the time is not there. It is this, I think, that produces the slight sense of alienation that I feel when I’m together with my books now. They need to find other readers soon – ideally they will be my son and grandson, but if not them, other book lovers (167)

It’s the most poignant way to express fear of dying – not the inability to do things but the inability to do things again. I see myself 40 years from now, lost and undecided in front of my shelves, at the same time eager and already nostalgic for what I can’t finish anymore…

Cynthia Ozick, Levitation: Five Fictions

2009-02-02T16:59:00.000-05:00

I don’t read short stories very often. Curious, considering that this is the format I like to write in (unless it’s just because I have commitment issues and short attention span). I reached for this collection because it contains only five stories and because it is only 158 pages long. My one other attempt at Ozick was Heir to the Glimmering World and even though it impressed me, it did not leave a lasting mark. It’s different with this one.

The little book is comprised of five short stories: “Levitation,” “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” “Shots,” “From a Refugee’s Notebook” and “Puttermesser and Xanthippe.” They deal with search: for identity, knowledge, a perfect picture, sexual fulfillment, religion, motherhood, a solution, a connection. There are some little gems of expression that I would like to have come up with:

“…died with thorny English a wilderness between his gums (36)”.

“He had exactly the kind of mentality – cumulative, analytical – I least admired, but since he also had the only umbrella in sight, I stuck with him (44)”.

“The little trick was this: whatever he said that was vast and public and South American, I would simultaneously translate (…) into everything private and personal and secret (46)”.

The book did work for me. Puttermesser, the heroine of two of the stories, reminded me of the Peter Kien, the hero of Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fe. The distopic past of “From a Refugee’s Notebook” reminded me of some books by Margaret Atwood. Ozick’s economical beginnings (“A pair of novelists, husband and wife, gave a party (3),” “That night the golem cooked spaghetti (119)”) make me want to rethink my own elaborate sentences.

Africa

2009-02-01T21:59:00.000-05:00

Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa
Vassangi, M.G. The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall
Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener
Gibb, Camilla. Sweetness in the Belly
Kapuscinski, Richard. Empire of the Sun
Kapuscinski, Richard. The Emperor
Lessing, Doris. Golden Notebook
Lawrence, Margaret. The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories
De Soto. The Blade of Grass

Writers

2009-02-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

Plath, Sylvia. Bell Jar
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted
Lodge, David. Author, Author
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Byatt, A. S. Shadow of the Sun
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting
Goodman, Carol. The Seduction of Water
Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover
James, Henry. The Aspern Papers
London, Jack. Martin Eden
Manguel, Alberto. Stevenson under the Palm Trees
Markson, David. The Last Novel
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Emily of New Moon
Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World
Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty. A Friendship
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out(bio)
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante
Willett, Jincy. The Writing Class
Blake, Sarah. Grange House

Byatt, A.S. The Children Book

Academia

2009-02-01T21:52:00.000-05:00

Jensen, Jan Lars. Nervous System: or Losing my Mind in Literature
Byatt, A.S. Possession
Shields, Carol. Swann
Segal, Erich. Love Story
Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and Its Discontents
Lurie, Alisaon. Love and Friendship
Lurie, Alison. The War Between te Tates
Lurie, Alison. Foreign Affairs
Lurie, Alison. Truth and Consequences
Parker, Gail Thain. Teh Writing on the Wall: Inside Higher Education in America
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Fanshave
Wolfe, Tom. I Am Charlotte Simmons
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History
Lodge, David. Changing Places
Lodge, David. Small World
Lodge, David. Nice Work
Lodge, David. Thinks
Lodge, David. Souls and Bodies
Lodge, David. Home Truths
Russo, Richard. Stright Man
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain
Roth, Philip. Letting Go
Roth, Philip. The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer
Prose, Francine. Blue Angel
Dubus, Andre. We Don't Live Here Anymore
Amis, KIngsley. Lucky Jim
McCarthy, Mary. The Group
McCarthy, Mary. The Groves of the Academe
McCarthy, Mary. Birds of America
Jaffe, Rona. Class Reunion
Adams, Alice. Superior Women
Smith, Zadie. On Beauty
Bellow, Saul. Ravelstein
Bernays, Anne. Professor Romeo
Cather, Willa. Lucy Grayheart
Cather, Willa. The Professor's House
Chabon, Michael. Wonder Boys
Dyer, Geoff. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence
French, Marilyn. The Women's Room
Goldstein, Rebecca. The Mind-Body Problem
Goldstein, Rebecca. Properties of Light
Jarrell, Randall. Pictures from an Institution
Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude
Lipman, Elinor. My Latest Grievance
Malamud, Bernard. A New Life
Malamud, Bernard. Dublin's Lives
Smiley, Jane. Moo
Wolitzer, Meg. The Wife
Davies, Robertson. Leaven of Malice
Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels
Davies, Robertson. High Spirits
Davies, Robertson. Tempest-Tost
Davies, Robertson. What's Bread in the Bone
Goodman, Carol. The Drowning Tree
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa
Huston, Nancy. Dolce Agonia
Hynes, James. The Lecturer's Tale
Hynes, James. Publish and Perish
Lasdun, James. The Horned Man
Skvorecky, Josef. Two Murders in My Double Life
Smith, Sarah. Chasing Shakespeares
Sayers, Dorothy. Gaudy Night
Vandever, Jennifer. The Bronte Project
Paulson, Christine. Murder is Academic
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace

Italy

2009-02-01T21:48:00.000-05:00

Here are books which are maintaining and encouraging my Italian fetish. Some of them are most loved, others not that much, but they have one thing in common – they are about all things Italian. They don’t make me feel like I’m there though. They make me want to go. Desperately. They don’t quench my appetite. They make me realize my starvation. Here is my Italian bookshelf:

Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun
Mayes, Frances. Bella Tuscany
Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures
Eco, Umberto
Hodgson, Barbara. Italy ouf of Hand
Rotella, Mark. Stolen Figs
Dunant, Sarah. The Birth of Venus
Leavitt, David. Florence. A Delicate Case
Holdstock, Pauline. Beyond Measure
James, Henry. Aspen Papers
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal
Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa
Berendt, John. The City of Falling Angels
Alighieri, Dante. Divine Comedy
Tosches, Nick. In the Hand of Dante
Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour
Jones, Tobias. THe Dark Heart of Italy: an Indecisive Portrait of Europe's Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country
Harrison, Barbara Grizutti. Italian Days
Hofmann, Paul. That Fine Italian Hand
Barzini, Luigi. The Italians
Norwich, John Julian. A History of Venice
MOrris, Jan. The World of Venice
De Blasi, Marlene. A Thousand Days in Tuscany: a Bittersweet Adventure
Leon, Donna. Uniform Justice
McCarthy, Mary. The Stones of Florence
King, Ross. Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture; Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
Alexander, Sidney. The Hand of Michelangelo
Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy
Martin, Valerie. Italian Fever
Cornelisen, Ann. Any Four Women Could Rob the Bank of Italy
Marciano, Francesca. Casa Rossa

Schools

2009-02-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

Swan, Susan. Wives of Bath.
Uppal, Priscilla. Divine Economy of Salvation
Goodman, Carol. The Lake of Dead Languages
Goodmna, Carol. Seduction of Water

Goodman, Carol. The Sonnet Lover

Goodman, Carol. Arcadia Falls
Harris, Joanne. Gentlemen and Players
Canin, Ethan. Palace Thief
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Hodgson Burnett, Frances. A Little Princess
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Sparks, Muriel. The Finishing School
Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Whitehouse, Howard. The Strictest School in the World
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society
Wolff, Tobias. Old School

Clergy

2009-02-01T21:44:00.001-05:00

Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose
Hulme, Kathryn. The Nun's Story
Baldwin, Monica. I Leap over the Wall: a Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent
Pazzi, Roberto. Conclave
Lewis, M.G. The Monk
Diderot, Denis. The Nun
Scott, Sir Walter. The Monastery
Reed, Cheryl L. Unveiled. The Hidden Lives of Nuns
Craig, Charmaine. The Good Men

Vlad the Impaler

2009-02-01T21:37:00.001-05:00

Fiction
Stoker, Bram. Dracula
Hambly, Barbara. Renfield
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colon. Vlad the Impaler. The Man Who Was Dracula
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian
Humphreys, C.C. Vlad. The Last Confession

Non-Fiction
Myles, Douglas. Dracula. Son of the Devil
Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Between the Woods and the Water
Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul
Treptow, Kurt. Vlad III. The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula
Florescu, Radu. McNally, Raymond. Dracula. Prince of Many Faces
Trow, M.J. Vlad the Impaler. In Search of the Real Dracula
Scott, George Riley. History of Torture
Movies
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Dracula. Entre l'Amour at la Mort (musical)
Dark Prince. The True Story of Dracula (2000)
Vlad (2003)
The Impaler: A Biographical/Historical Look at the Life of Vlad te Impaler, Widely Known as Dracula (2002, documentary)

Dracula 2000 (2000)

Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante

2009-01-31T16:23:00.000-05:00

It did get better towards the end (or was it just the light in the tunnel that changed my outlook?). I will not become Tosches’ fan but I can see the book’s greatness, even though the author didn’t connect with this particular reader. The book is elaborate and intimidating, and it seems to me absolutely meant to be that way. The author doesn’t respect the reader that much and if there is any inadequacy of the reader’s mind to the task at hand, the above-mentioned impediment will be communicated, rubbed in and snickered at. (I’m suddenly reminded of Dante’s helpful if patronizing comments in La Vita Nuova. Tosches doesn’t try to be helpful. He takes it up a notch.) After all, Tosches does have a great mind – and who wouldn’t enjoy parading it around, right?

Just to give this piece a semblance of a book review – the book moves between the story of Dante trying to gain the understanding of the world to write the greatest all-encompassing poem of all times, and the contemporary plot to acquire the manuscript of Divine Comedy. The acquirers have ties to organized crime and co-operation of one Nick Tosches, a fictional persona based on the author himself. Even though Dante sections are a hard read, probably meant to be not quite comprehensible, the crime-and-reward sections did impress me. Te dark world that Tosches invokes is so real that it’s almost tangible. And scary as hell. His fictional counterpart swims between the world of Dante and this one with ease and grace of someone written by Hemingway.

Yet through all this, I had a strong feeling that the author’s need to impress made him forget to entertain.

2009-01-25T21:45:00.000-05:00

I was going to be good this year. I was going to plan and organize my reading. I was going to read slowly. I was going to be single-minded. I was going to learn to stop reading if I don't enjoy the book after 50 pages. Well, I'm in the middle of In the Hand of Dante and enjoying it only 30 per cent of the time but there's no stopping happening. Not much progress on Six Wives because as part of my research to prepare for In the Hand of Dante, after La Vita Nuova I'm still reading Divine Comedy.

The research is turning to be more interesting than the reason for it. Knowing me, I'll stick with it till the end. Not sure whether any review will come out of it. Nick Tosches makes me angry.

Trying to remember the books that I abandoned before finishing. There haven't been that many. One for sure deserving a note was Ulysses, which I put away 5 pages till the end when my Victorian lit class ended. The professor spread Ulysses over the whole year -- we were discussing it on Fridays, chapter by chapter. Was I supposed to savor it better that way? It would have looked so good on my book list. It tickled my snobbish bone. Yet I didn't want to put it on my list.

Another one was D.M. Thomas' Charlotte which appalled me, even though due to its length it wouldn't have been much of a commitment to finish.And quite recently I abandoned Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost which seemed like just the book for me at first.

Why then am I sticking with Tosches? Must be the snobbish bone again. I am past the middle so three more hours should do it. Will report how it went.

Matt Cohen, The Bookseller

2009-01-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

Paul Stevens, the hero of Matt Cohen’s novel The Bookseller, is not his own man. He gets under the spell of people and can only escape by physically distancing himself from them. Then he comes back and is caught again.

His mother leaves his father for another lie. His father dies of a heart attack on the floor of his jewelry store instead of “with dignity, in his armchair, drink in hand” (89). His brother Henry becomes Paul’s only anchor – or is it the other way around? Paul is Henry’s “lifeline to reality” (25). Henry seems well adjusted, with a wife, a child and a business, but he suffers from bouts of gambling and hustling. Judith, a girl Paul meets at the bookstore where he works, is another spell. Paul falls in love and even though he doesn’t participate in her drug habit full time, she becomes a sort of drug for him. Nicko Ross, a cup masquerading as a hustler/drug dealer/friend/surrogate brother, is also a habit. Paul can’t escape him any more than he can escape Judith. The events that connect all these people will anchor Paul forever.

Even though he is an observer, often looking at the world through sort of a lens, Paul takes things on. “I have found out about Henry’s problem, now its was mine,” he says (216). He takes care of his older brother’s problem. While so unwillingly attached, he still maintains outside perspective and cold irony: he sees Henry as a “minor Dickensian character” (21); he coldly decides “whether or not to drink a particular cup of coffee” (34). And then there’s the final “I am wearing the clothes of the dead man” (240). Paul manages to stay involved and detached at the same time. Only in this way can he maintain his sanity and survive.

The book has a passage about working in a bookstore that I enjoyed. It is true and it is well put. That is how it feels.

For those of us who work in bookstores, the hundreds of thousands of bookstores scattered in their dusty glory over the surface of our planet, this job has a strange romance. We modest bookstore workers are the custodians of all that has been written. The living membrane through which passes the wisdom and the idiocies of the ages. We are the clerks of the hotel of language. It rises out of our collective brains, always available, always dependent on us to keep it smoothly functioning, to welcome new arrivals, to keep the guests moving in and out according to rank and demand, following values carefully constructed over the centuries yet capable of satisfying every need.

And for those of us who live this strange romance, usually planned as something between a one-night stand and a provisional passion on the way to something more suitable, nothing could be less romantic than the job itself. The packing and unpacking. The constant worry about small accounts. The debtors and the creditors. The fact that people never wipe their feet when they come in the door. The way customers lick their thumbs before turning the pages of expensive art books they’ll never buy. The way your “best” customers always think you owe them something. And so on. Te shopkeeper’s litany (58-59).

Bookstore quotations aside, I enjoyed the story even though it was not what I expected. There is not quite enough of a bookseller in The Bookseller but I read on, for the story this time, not for the title.

Dante, La Vita Nuova

2009-01-11T10:57:00.000-05:00

After several years of troublesome obsession with the book and the movie Hannibal, I finally read Dante’s La Vita Nuova – a work from which Tomas Harris quotes through the lips of Hannibal Lecter. Probably not the best reason to read it but who cares how I get to want to do the things that I do! I purchased the little book five days ago, read the first 30 pages on the route home. Trying to see what makes it great.

La Vita Nuova was written probably in 1294. According to the Introduction to my Penguin Classics edition, “the Vita Nuova is treatise by a poet, written for poets, on the art of poetry.” In a way, it’s a chronicle of the poet’s “relationship” with his lady – a stalking kind of relationship where he would watch her from afar, listen to news about her and then have an emotional reaction to it. A poem would usually allow, sometimes preceded by a vision provoked by some encounter.

At that time Beatrice was married to another man.

Each poem is introduced by a sketch describing what situation inspired it, what the vision that usually followed contained and how that vision was interpreted by the poet. Each poem is followed by an explanation of the poet’s intent and execution of it. That last part is the one I had some problems with. A little sample from part IX:

The sonnet has three parts. In the first I relate how I met Love and how he looked; in the second I tell what he said to me, though not everything for fear of revealing my secret; in the third I tell how he disappeared. (40)

I don’t know about those poets that the work is meant for but I feel a bit insulted. Needless to say, this and similar pieces deprived me of the pleasure of trying to figure the poems out for myself (or annoyed me not to try). I’m in a good company though. According to the Introduction, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a go at the translation of La Vita Nuova, he disliked those explanatory parts so much that he had his brother William translate them.

I will still need to re-read the poems – on their own, skipping the annoying prose. I’m curious what my response will be then.

On a lighter note, my second-hand edition provided some marginal (quite literally) entertainment. The previous owner annotated the text nicely and once I stopped my impulse to erase the marginalia before reading, I actually found them occasionally helpful. I enjoyed various drawings of hearts and related symbols but my favorite note was on page 59. Dante just made a slightly patronizing comment about his possible reader’s mental inadequacies:

Certainly to uncover still more meaning in this canzone it would be necessary to divide it more minutely; but if anyone has not the wit to understand it with the help of the divisions already made he had best leave it alone. Indeed I am afraid that I may have conveyed its meaning to too many by dividing it ever as I have done; if it should come to the ears of too many.

The marginal comment clearly elucidates ITS author’s feelings about the above:

Lah-di-dah

Couldn’t say it better myself.

No more books in 2008

2008-12-18T19:46:00.000-05:00

I decided I will not finish any more books this year. As far as I'm concerned, the year is over. I'm tempted, of course, to try to get to 80 -- after all, I'm on vacation till Dec. 29 so I could technically manage. So tempted...

No, I can't. The 2008 book list is up. 73. I will read magazines. I will start The Witching Hour -- somehow a re-read seems OK. I will continue with The Six Wives. I will read some stuff in Polish to get ready for Christmas with the family. I will read recipies and catalogs. I will review some details of Vlad's life that seem blurry after a year.

I've been watching a lot of Star Trek. I used to read while watching Star Trek but a promise is a promise. I'm out of the race. Till January. If I can.

Books 2008

2008-12-18T19:06:00.000-05:00

Hornby, Nick Housekeeping vs. the Dirt ****
Sorel, Edward. Literary Lives ***
Markson, David. The Last Novel ***
Whitehouse, Howard. The Faceless Fiend ***
Pullman, Philip. The Subtle Knife *****
Ullmann, Linn. Before You Sleep ****
Heinlen, Robert A. Starship Troopers *****
Borchert, Don. Free for All ****
Barker, Clive. Abarat. Days of Magic, Nights of War ***
Poulson, Christine. Murder is Academic ***
Brooks, Geraldine. People of the Book ****
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis ****
Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting ****
Pratchett, Terry. The Truth ****
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2 ***
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods ****
King, Stephen. The Mist ***
Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything ****
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Memories of My Melancholy Whores ***
Rubenfeld, Jed. The Interpretation of Murder ***
Coelho, Paulo. The Devil and Miss Prym ***
Coelho, Paulo. The Witch of Portobello ****
King, Stephen. Lisey's Story *****
Nesbit, Edith. The Magic City ***
Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop ****
Fforde, Jasper. The Fourth Bear ***
Stewart, Trenton Lee. The Mysterious Benedict Society ****
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World *****
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited ****
Paris, Erna. The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice In The Age Of Imperial America *****
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Blue Castle *****
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five ****
Fadiman, Anne At Large and At Small *****
Bruen, Ken. The Guards ****
Wodehouse, P.G. My Man Jeeves ***
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's ***
Spitz, Vivien. Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans ***
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business *****
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing ****
Smokler, Kevin. Bookmark Now ****
Davies, Robertson. The Manticore *****
Follett, Ken. The Pillars of the Earth *****
Wolff, Tobias. Old School *****
Canetti, Elias. Notes from Hampstead. The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971 ***
Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero ****
Burnett, Frances Hodgson The Secret Garden ****
Huston, Nancy. Losing North *****
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace ***
Gerritsen, Tes.s The Bone Garden ****
Fforde, Jasper. Thursday Next. First Among Sequels ****
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare. The World as Stage ****
Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass ***
Reed, Cheryl L. Unveiled. The Hidden Lives of Nuns ***
George, Elizabeth. I, Richard ***
Goodman, Carol. The Drowning Tree *****
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Tattooed Girl ***
Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew ***
Michaels, Anne. The Weight of Oranges. Miner's Pond ****
Lethem, Jonathan. The Disappointment Artist. Essays ****
Goodman, Carol. The Night Villa *****
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ***
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden ***
Peters, Ellis. Brother Cadfael's Penance ***
Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically ***
Miller, Rebecca. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee *****
Hayder, Mo. Pig Island ****
Huston, Nancy. The Tale-Tellers ***
Willett, Jincy. The Writing Class ****
Sontag, Rachel. House Rules ***
Humphreys, C.C. Vlad. The Last Confession *****
Bruen, Ken. Priest ***
Cornwell, Bernard Heretic ***
Burroughs, Augusten. A Wolf at the Table ***

Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

2008-12-18T18:57:00.000-05:00

I started by Burroughs reading with Dry, which I listened to on my way to and from my bookstore job. At least that’s how I remember it. (I may have to compare my reading list with my resume and cross-reference some dates but for now let’s just go by what I remember. My recollection may not be as vivid as Augusten’s but it’s a part of my frame of mind as I write this. Besides, it goes with the convention. If I thought I’d find an audience for reminiscences of my Polish childhood, I’d be in Staples now using that opportunity to enlarge my collection of writing supplies.) It may have been the first book about addiction that I read in English. I keep saying “read” when in fact the audio aspect was a huge part of the experience. Read by the author – so I was sure I was getting the right interpretation, the right tone, modulation and volume. I’m very concerned with getting things right so it was a great source of comfort then.

Running with Scissors, which I listened to after Dry, didn’t make the same impression. Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects, also in audio, were entertaining and a bit more relatable. Sellevision, although very promising in its premise, held my attention for about three pages. (Maybe I should have tried the audio book there too.) A Wolf at the Table was almost abandoned after three tracks.

I recognized the voice but the perspective changed. It was a view of the world from down there instead of from in front of a mirror. Burroughs is re-evaluating (and explaining the missing part of) his childhood as it applies to his monster of a father. His father, a respected southern gentleman and a philosophy professor, stole it – the childhood – as he murdered his son’s hamster, turned the family dog into Cujo, called to say that he’s coming to kill him, his psoriatic epithelia falling like snow while he was doing these horrible things. It’s tempting to assume that this is all a child’s exaggeration, embellished and exacerbated after years of living without a proper father. Burroughs may have built this creature in his head and tricked himself into believing the monster was his father. Maybe it seemed better to have a larger-than-life demon in your life than just a lousy dad. Somehow I don’t think he imagined it though.

In his conversation with Burroughs, George Stroumboulopoulos remarks that there’s no closure in the book. Even on his death bed, the father remains a monster. In may be the most disturbing aspect of the story. Like Augusten, the reader/listener aches for some release – but it never comes. There were several moments when I was hoping that finally something was getting explained, that the father would be redeemed. Redemption didn’t happen.

It was an exhausting book to listen to but I’m glad I didn’t abandon it. It completes the picture sketched by the other books. It also introduced me to music I never heard before – for the audio version, Burroughs asked his favorite musicians to contribute songs inspired by the book. The concept of adding an interpretation to a work of art interests me. A song inspired by a life story, a poem inspired by a painting – something I would like to explore some more in the future.

I can’t say I was entertained by A Wolf at the Table, but I was moved by it much more than by Burroughs’ other books. I’ve grown to appreciate that kind of a response more.

C.C. Humphreys, Vlad. The Last Confession

2008-12-14T11:57:00.000-05:00

My Vlad the Impaler obsession started in a most pleasant way. A friend of mine gave me Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian one Christmas. A beautiful TP edition, with sleek pages and the spine that allowed it to open properly and hang in nice arches over the edges of the holding hands. The form was almost as pleasing as the content. That’s how my relationship with Vlad begun.

I got my fill of the vampire aspect of Dracula pretty quickly – I watched and read the canon, finding Bram Stoker’s version the least satisfying. Then I branched out into nonfiction and I really got to know Vlad.

Vlad. The Last Confession is the first fictionalized version of his life that I came across. The premise – three of Dracula’s old acquaintances are asked to tell his story six years after his death. They are supposed to give a truthful account of the Impaler’s life while the Church representatives decide whether the redeeming qualities weigh heavier than the monstrosities. If Vlad turns out to be a justified sinner, the Order of the Dragon he used to belong to can retake its place at the right hand of the Church and take part in the crusade.

The witnesses are Vlad’s lifelong friend, his mistress and his confessor. Each tells a part of the story. Vlad that emerges is a wonderfully complex creature – not a monster with a heart but an extreme politician who strives for total control of his life in response to having no control over it at some point.

The book touches on two interesting aspects of the Dracula issue. Dracula has always been a character that people love to hate; the fear that we love to embrace, again and again. His monstrous qualities were so entertaining to observe that we took it further, making him an undead, a vampire, a man who even after death carries on his bloodthirsty activities. Well, after over 500 years of this, the public is ready for a new Dracula – a sympathetic one. Humphreys gives us one.

Second interesting issue in the story is the idea that everything we know about Dracula is secondhand knowledge. Vlad’s monstrous deeds were publicized by the pamphlets published after his death – pamphlets written by the ones who had something to gain from demonizing him. How interesting that Vlad’s last confession – the one that’s to redeem or to condemn him and his order – is also a secondhand one. So what do we learn and how true is it? Quite, I’d say. Quite.

Been a while...

2008-12-13T08:15:00.000-05:00

The only part I've been updating since August is my 2008 book list. No reviews. Books read but no reviews. Laziness. Interesting how getting paid for writing affected my non-work-related output. For the last 7 months my title has been Technical Writer. I really thought that if anything, I would be writing more of the "normal" stuff, if only in order not to lose the ability to use adjectives and adverbs. Didn't happen that way. And the year is almost up.

I will be better though. I've been reading and I just finished another one from my Vlad the Impaler canon. A good one. That will be my last review of the year (once I've written it - and I'm determined to do it today, at least in longhand). I am determined to arrange things better next year. It will be a task to do, like dusting or brushing my teeth. It will go on the list and the check mark will be next to it once it's completed. I'm already looking forward to it!

Nancy Huston, Losing North

2008-08-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

I share the emigrant experience with Nancy Huston. We both left. She left Canada, I left Poland. She was already fluent in French when she arrived in Paris; I consistently pronounced “comfortable” to rhyme with “table” although I could sing most of the songs by Chicago (phonetically and with no comprehension of the subject matter). As she says towards the beginning of the book:

The acquisition of a second tongue destroys the “naturalness” of the first; from then on, nothing can be self-evident in any tongue; nothing belongs to you wholly and irrefutably; nothing will ever “go without saying” again (31).

She went to a life that would be organized; I had to organize everything (or let people organize it for me, buy me things, drag me places). Whenever you let yourself be uprooted like this, there’s always a big sense of loss, no matter how much you’re gaining. Disorientation – this is what Losing North is about.

Huston plays with the idea right from the start. Disorientation means losing the east. As somebody who left Canada, what she lost was the North. In her adopted language, losing north means losing track of what one was going to say. How fitting to talk about disorientation in a way of language. That IS what happens.

The book doesn’t just deal with the language. After all, in certain aspects, she did become more fluent in French than in English. Although:

Even now, after all these years, I can become excruciatingly self-conscious when required to speak French in public. The more formal and intimidating the circumstances, the more liable my tongue is to slip, causing me to say one word instead of another or to commit unforgivable grammatical errors. Whence, most likely, my preference for the written word. On the page, at least, I can correct my mistakes, insert a word here, delete one there . . . On the page, moreover, my accent is inaudible (27).

Would this be why I still run a spell check in my head before I say anything? Is this why for four years of university I probably said ten words in class (outside of required oral presentations which I memorized word for word)?

Huston deals with what else is lost when you leave your country and your mother tongue behind. She talks about people who will never understand you again, jokes that don’t make you laugh anymore and sense of split self that never leaves you.

You’ve got one life here, and another there – with everything the word life implies: codes deciphered and mastered; systems of reference learned; the incredible complexity of the everyday; possibly even a different language, which is a whole world unto itself (10).

Yes – the folks back home take little interest in the things you’ve been thinking, saying, reading, seeing and doing, day after day for decades (11).

As time goes by, your communications with “back home” become fewer and farther between. Imperceptibly, your friends from there are replaced by friends from here; now they’re the ones who ask you the important questions… (70).

The truth, however, is that your soul, like your body, has moved away from its point of departure. And the day comes when you’re forced to recognize that you no longer share the values of the people who brought you into the world, talked and sang to you as a child, cuddled and fed you in the warmth and comfort of the family home. Even if you haven’t been initiated into the intricacie
s of a foreign language, you no longer speak their tongue (14).

Because, when you come right down to it, if your own family knows next to nothing about your life – its shape, context, passions and preoccupations, hopes and ambitions – perhaps your life isn’t as interesting as you thought it was. Go ahead. Try and describe it to us. We’re listening. Uh-huh . . . what’s so extraordinarily fascinating about that? Ah . . . ? Never heard of it. Never heard of her, him, them. Nope. Don’t know what you’re talking about (17).

I was reminded about the countless times I tried to explain to my parents what it is that I do for a living. Certain presences and absences on my bookshelves wouldn’t mean anything to them. After some years they lost the will to feign interest and I lost patience to translate. We talk about politics now (I do a bit of research before I call them, since Polish political issues are low on my list of priorities now – go figure).

The split self Nancy Huston is talking about makes you forever wonder what your “other” life would have turned out to be like and whether you could maybe still get it. It makes you try and then you find that it’s too late and that your “other” life is somebody else’s now. But by then you don’t want it anymore.

Nancy Huston states her case succinctly and elegantly. Very quotable, she names my experience for me and gives me license to start mining it.

Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead. The Writer’s Notes: 1954-1971

2008-08-04T14:41:00.000-04:00

I first met Elias Canetti when I was browsing my own bookshelves (it did feel like a meeting then, really). I was young and easily influenced and there he was – a man with such a sense of his own value that it seemed he considered himself invincible. Well, shortly after, I joined him in that admiration of Elias Canetti.

It was just the first volume of his autobiography – The Tongue Set Free. I didn’t know there were any more. I’d never heard of him before and I had no context for my reading. I loved the book instantly.

I read and re-read the book, almost memorizing parts about little Elias learning German and getting his first book in English. I gathered all the haphazard information about Canetti I could find. I managed to locate the two remaining volumes of his autobiography somewhere at a bookstall at a bus station. I purchased a cheesy gilded edition of Auto da Fe and went to much effort to get his magnum opus, Crowds and Power. I learned German to be able to read him in original. An obsession formed – one that was since equaled only by my attitude towards Vlad the Impaler some months ago.

Since I started reading in English, Canetti’s presence subsided somewhat. I resisted reading him in translation and was content to just amass all I could find by him in English, just in case, but not to read it. Those days are now gone, along with my fluency in German. What choice do I have?

The Notes from Hampstead are snippets from Canetti’s notebook, one of many. I found Canetti who appears in these notes a little bit more approachable and less intimidating than the Canetti from the autobiography. There’s still an overwhelming sense of self-importance that I’ve seen in his other books. This self-importance though is mitigated by slight humility.

I found myself many times in this little book.

He who would know all will lose his way in the expanding realm of his own ignorance… This vain desire to know everything, which has pursued me since childhood, is something I must get over(19-20).

My library, which consists of thousands of books I have undertaken to read, is growing ten times faster than I can read. I have tried to expand it into a kind of universe where I can find everything. But this universe is growing at a dizzying pace. This pace will never slacken; I feel its growth physically within me. Every new book I add sets off a mini-catastrophe that only subsides when the book is seemingly brought into line on the shelf and temporarily disappears (20).

I would really like to loosen up. Everything in me is too tightly wound; I am always aware of a direction, a goal. Nothing around me breathes. I have a world of my own, but how narrow it is! It is stifling me: what kind of world is that? I must let myself be borne along by my own invention again, without knowing where it will take me (34-35).

As long as I am writing I feel safe. Perhaps I write for just that reason. But it doesn’t matter what I write. It’s important only that I not stop. It can be anything as long as it is for me, not a letter or something imposed or required from outside. But if I have not written for a few days I become confused, desperate, down, vulnerable, mistrustful, threatened by a hundred perils (91).

This is that recognition that makes us read, is it not? I am like Elias Canetti in more aspects than one. I find myself again so close to this man to whom Iris Murdoch dedicated her novel The Flight from the Enchanter. I will let him enchant me again, this time in English. Now, on to The Tongue Set Free.

Vivien Spitz, Doctors from Hell

2008-07-21T22:18:00.000-04:00

When I was about 12, my mother used to suggest reading material for me. One of the books I read then was about prisoners of Ravensbruck, a women concentration camp during World War II. It seems like a hard reading for a child but at that time two factors made it right. My mother was very interested in Holocaust, reading up on concentration camps and writing the life history of my grandfather who spent some time in one. I thought I was wise beyond my years and could handle anything.

I remember the general feel of the book – visions of vivisections and cut-off legs lying around dominated my evenings for a while. I was a fast reader and soon I graduated to Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis. Or was it something more appropriate for my age? I honestly don’t remember. One thing I do remember though – the book about Ravensbruck made me want to read more about such horridness – like a horrible picture that makes one want to both turn away and keep looking.

I did manage to read some more along those lines later on but before Doctors from Hell, not in English. This book was supposed to be the revival of the interest for me. In many ways, it was.

It is in part a memoir, in part a history book. This duality sums up the book’s problems.

Vivien Spitz was a court reporter during the Nuremberg trials – specifically, in the doctors’ trial. She took down their excuses and assertions as well as witnesses’ testimony. She saw the scar tissue and the knife in the hand of a man who couldn’t put his life back together after all that was done to him. She recorded the admissions of nurses specifying how many people died within 40 minutes, and how many survived certain experiments. She looked at the people stand in front of the defendants’ bench and point out the hand that had held the syringe. The court records are quoted verbatim in the large part of the book.

Unfortunately, Spitz decided to punctuate the record with the memories of her life during the trials, her observations about the defendants and witnesses as well as her life after the trials and her subsequent work to increase Holocaust awareness among the Americans. Next to the trial records, these seem out of place. Spitz’s reflections make the text incongruous – the effect is highlighted by the stilted and uncomfortable style of the writing. I was finding myself skipping over the memoir chapters to get to the court records.

I still learned a lot. The trial records are arranged by the type of the experiment conducted and of course by the defendant and the facility. Spitz gives us a good background on Nuremberg trials; there are pictures and her impressions of the accused. That’s the extent of her input I would have liked to see. The wooden prose about other court reporters, the plane trip and the accommodations I could have lived without. Her memories would be a perfect material for a magazine article (heavily edited or ghostwritten from the start) but there should have been no place for them in this book.

I’m tempted to look for some primary sources from the doctors’ trials – just to reread them the right way, without being distracted by descriptions of a Halloween party at an air base that took place before Vivien Spitz left for her post. Having been a court reporter during the trials does make her a very informed activist, but it doesn’t make her a writer or a memoirist.

The informative quality of the book still overcomes its drawbacks but reading was a troublesome experience here.