New Century Reading

Moby Dick

Hey, Amy, what did you do on your summer vacation? Oh, I'm so glad you asked! I participated in the Summer of Moby Dick challenge! Our fearless leader, Beth, led a small but determined group through this daunting classic. We also chatted on Twitter using: #TCMoby (the "TC" stands for Twin Cities, where most of us are located, but no one had to live here to participate).

What's my take? Well, as an English major who has long felt guilty about not reading this, I'm relieved to finally cross it off my literary bucket list. I'm thankful to the blogging world, and Twitter, and IRL book clubs that are allowing me to slowly and steadily get through some of the shocking gaps in my literary education. There are books I've read over the past few years that, not only did I love, I do want to read again, like Middlemarch and War and Peace and Bleak House. There are books that I'm glad to have read, and maybe wouldn't read again, but would seek out other novels by the same author, like The Brothers Karamazov.

And then there's Moby Dick, which falls in the category of so happy I read it, will never read it again, and I'm on the fence about whether or not I would seek out other Melville books, like Typee or Omoo.

Here's the thing about Moby Dick. It had so much more humor than I expected, especially in the beginning. And it has long--looooooooong--parts of whale/whaling arcana. What I did not expect was, with a 500-page book titled Moby Dick, that we wouldn't actually *get* to the damned whale until the final 50 pages. That mightily tried my patience.

But this is where a good edition with a thoughtful introduction comes in handy. Here are some valuable insights:

"The epic...aspires towards achieving a 'totality of objects', as opposed to drama which aims for a 'totality of actions'. Melville's imagination...was 'profoundly undramatic', but there is an extraordinary feeling of totality--of immensity, range, inclusiveness--in Moby Dick."

Further analysis of the role of world events, of literature, of religions and myth, all made me appreciate the book more than I did while actually reading it.

What did I appreciate while reading it? Here are just a few samples of the writing that I loved:

"'Yes,' said I, 'we have just signed the articles.'
"'Anything down there about your souls?'
"'About what?'
"'Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any,' he said quickly. 'No matter though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em, and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.'"

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shapes of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"

"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's?"

So--worth the read; not an easy task, but I'm glad I persevered.

 

How to Build a Girl: the end

And now we've reached the end of How to Build a Girl. First I want to thank Emily and HarperCollins for including me on this event. It's always fun to read a book with other like-minded readers and compare notes.

Caitlin Moran is an interesting writer. She's created such an interesting character in Johanna, someone with real heart and intelligence, but (mostly) with the naivete that causes problems in the teen years. She's been on many adventures in this book, and now Moran swoops in and wraps up lots of loose ends, not always believably or satisfyingly. The relationship Johanna has with John Kite is too good to be true. I don't for a second believe that Johanna's father wouldn't have hounded her about that demo tape. Is she really blind to the fact that Krissi is gay, or is she being sarcastic? The pace is crazy-fast. I would have liked fewer tied-up endings and more time with Johanna in her present.

Again with the overly insightful:

"So what do you do when you build yourself--only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things?

"You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teenage years--to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times and wars. To be fearless, and endless, in your reinventions--to keep twisting on nineteen, going bust, and dealing in again, and again. Invent, invent, invent."

Pretty calm, sage words from a narrator who is supposedly 17 years old and just suffered a humiliating sexual adventure and responded by cutting herself. Nope, not buying the present tense here.

This is Moran's first book, and she's got some definite strengths. She can create interesting characters that I care about, flawed as they are. She can tell a great story. But she needs to really think about the story she wants to tell overall. Is it better to tell it from Johanna's 17-year-old viewpoint, or from Johanna's adult viewpoint looking back? Doing both just did not work for me. There are pros and cons to either, but that's part of being a writer--having to make the tough choices. When the past-tense sections showed up, it felt like an authorial intrusion, not a plot device.

That said, I never felt like giving up on this book, and would likely read the next novel Moran writes. The promise is definitely there.

How to Build a Girl read-along

And we're back to the How to Build a Girl read-along, offered by Emily and HarperCollins.

You know how when someone starts a sentence by saying, "Now, I'm not a [insert objectionable thing here], but..." they probably are at least somewhat that objectionable thing? This section made me find myself wanting to say, "Now I'm not a prude, but..." I enjoy a good sex scene as much as the next person, if they're well written, but I found myself twitching a bit during the scenes in this section.

Part of it may be due to my being the parent of teenagers. I'm not clueless enough to think teens don't have sex. But when a teen sets out to become a Lady Sex Adventurer, doesn't mention using protection, and has described herself as being rather overweight, I start worrying about 1. Diseases 2. Pregnancy 3. Abuse. Yes, the scene with the guy with the big dick was funny. Sort of. But more detailed than I needed, and frankly, gratuitous. As if she was trying to be a teen version of Samantha from Sex and the City. I couldn't find it as entertaining as Moran seemed to want it to be. All I could think about was the damage (beyond physical) Johanna was doing to herself. It's one thing to be sexually confident and OK with who you are, but I don't see that in Johanna. I see a girl desperately trying to fit in somewhere and using sex to do it.

And then, more of the changing of past/present tenses that seems to indicate flashback. I really have grown tired of this strategy. It feels sloppy, and it makes me feel, when she's in present tense, like she's lying to me. Well, she is--this is fiction, right? But I'm supposed to believe that the present tense moments are actualy happening, when they're interspersed with older/wise Johanna commenting from the future?

The tirade she goes on about cynicism near the end of this section does not feel like something Johanna the teenager would come up with. Then there's this paragraph:

"But it's okay--I've got plenty of time to be nice...later on. Plenty of time. When you're seventeen, the days are like years. You've got a billion lifetimes to live and die and live again before you're twenty. That's the one positive thing about being so young. You've got plenty of time left to make things right."

Who's saying that--present or future Johanna? I don't see this as something the teenaged Johanna would come up with. What teen ever thinks of themselves as young, and what teen realizes how skewed their view of time is?

I really, really wish Moran had picked one or the other--present or past tense--then worked within that for the whole book.

How to Build a Girl read-along

I've got to give Caitlin Moran props. I'm now so deeply invested in Johanna as a character that even as she continues to do things that are Bridget Jones-level cringeworthy, I'm still on her side. She's just a teenaged girl, teetering on the brink of becoming something, if she can hold herself together.

When we left Johanna (or, as she wants to be called, Dolly Wilde), she'd just talked her way into a dream job for a music magazine. Now they're sending her on a dream assignment to Ireland, to interview musician and hard-partier John Kite. She's never been out of Britain; she's never been on a plane. The flight is a form of intoxication to her:

"I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer."

Floating on that triumphant high, she meets John Kite, and it's a delirious experience. He calls her Duchess, talks to her like no one's ever talked to her before, treats her like she's the most important person in the world. She returns to Britain and writes her article about him. We're not given the text of the article, but when the music magazine suddenly stops sending her assignments, it's not hard to figure out that she likely went a tad bit overboard with hyperbolic praise. She may have devoted herself to learning about music, but she's still a 16-year-old girl who's never had this kind of attention from a male before.

The timing of the magazine backing off couldn't be worse: the event Johanna's been fearing finally happens, and the family is being investigated by the welfare organization that keeps them afloat.

Almost as bad, her brother Krissi, with whom she shares a room, lets on that he knows that she's not, um, scratching herself night after night. But that turns into a good thing: Krissi talks his parents into letting him move into the unused dining room, and Johanna suddenly has a writing space all her own.

The music magazine finally agrees to give her another chance, she meets John Kite again and realizes the awful truth that he treats a lot of people the way he treats her, and she understands that it's not puff pieces that will make her writing career, but witheringly angry putdowns instead.

And thus endeth this week's section.

Mostly I really liked it. I feel very maternal about Johanna at this point--she's dealing with a whole load of personal issues, enough that they would overwhelm anyone, and she's only 16. She could so easily go completely bad, or become an addict, or some other traumatic path. But she's also got some smarts and some goals, and I really hope she doesn't.

That said, Moran did another change of tense in this section that really annoyed me. We have Johanna in the present tense, thrilled with her first airplane experience, and the very next scene, which comes after the flight, is a past-tense flashback. This is sloppy and lazy and seems to have been done only to give Moran the ability to use Johanna's voice from a more knowledgeable future time: "This was, clearly, where business would be conducted--but this was also the theater of the human heart, where all things happened and all things would be revealed, given the fullness of time." That's not something a 16-year-old would say. I can't help but think that if Moran was an unknown writer, an editor somewhere would have slapped her wrist and said, "Choose one or the other, but you can't have both. It doesn't work."

But it's not a deal-breaker, at least not so far. My thanks to Emily and to HarperCollins for including me on this fun read-along.

How to Build a Girl read-along

I may have gotten off to a slow start with this one, but Caitlin Moran has me good and hooked now. Our narrator, Johanna, had just experienced an ego-shattering TV experience when we ended the last section. Now she's determined to overcome that and remake herself into a persona she calls Dolly Wilde. Dolly Wilde, Johanna decides, is going to become a music journalist. Never mind that she doesn't know anything about what's happening in the world of music, or that she lives far away from places like, say, London. She diligently finds a radio station (this is pre-internet) that has the latest music and begins requesting it at her local library.

I have to say, the scene of Johanna carefully dialing in the radio station brought me waaaaaay back in the day, growing up in northern Minnesota where the local radio stations played country and very, very lite rock, but where, if the weather was good (and preferably cold, so winter helped), I could get WLS from Chicago on my radio. Chicago! And they played things like Manfred Mann's Earth Band! So unusual! So different from what I could hear on my local radio!

Johanna--er, Dolly--then writes several reviews for a London music publication, which finally invites her in for an interview, then give her a job. As an honest-to-God music journalist. Once she really believes she's earning money, she announces she's quitting school, because why does she need math and science? She's already got a job writing. She's going to be fine.

Right?

The great thing about the writing so far is that Johanna is neither overly precocious nor precious in the least. She has moods, she's tempestuous at times, she can be selfish the way teens are, and yet she's never not aware of the difficulties in her family. In this section, we learned more about why her father seems to be a loser, and there's a big reason for it. That doesn't make his behavior any less appalling, but at least it's more understandable, as is Johanna's (and the rest of the family's) tolerance of it.

The only difficulty I'm having at the moment is not cheating and reading ahead. I really, really want to find out what happens when Johanna quits school. Read-alongs are hard, y'all.

How to Build a Girl read-along

I'm reading How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran as part of a read-along organized by As the Crowe Flies (And Reads). I have not previously read anything by Moran, but loved the blurb on the back of the book: "Imagine The Bell Jar--written by Rizzo from Grease."

And that's kind of what we have, at least in the opening. Johanna Morrigan is 14 years old and living in a highly flawed family: a mother depressed after the birth of twins, conceived unexpectedly, making the total number of kids in the household five; a father who's a belligerent sot who quite enjoys gaming the welfare system; siblings running wild. Johanna herself is overweight and longs to lose her virginity, even though she's not quite sure how to make that happen.

But when she perceives a threat to her family's (admittedly precarious) fortunes, her anxiety levels reach an almost unbearable peak, and she wants to do anything she can to help her family financially. There's not much available to a 14-year-old except a TV-show-sponsored poetry contest. She writes a poem, wins--and the live TV broadcast of her reciting her poem turns into a nightmare beyond her wildest dreams.

It's a peppy, action-packed beginning, and at times I was concerned that the snappy, humor-filled narration (from Johanna's first person) would become tiresome. But by the time she appears on the TV show, and all hell breaks loose, I was already so attached to her that it was almost unbearable to read (not to mention bringing up teen memories better left forgotten). Moran does a great job of fleshing out this struggling, stumbling girl with good intentions and a wry sense of humor that doesn't tip over into precocious.

At this point, my only critique is that the narrative veers back and forth between present and past tense, and that's a bit annoying, but not enough to make me want to stop reading. Looking forward to part 2!

Summer of Moby Dick

All righty! Beth over at Beth Babbles About Books is helping me clear a big item off my literary bucket list this summer: Moby Dick. This one has been intimidating me for quite a while, but she's set up what seems to be a reasonable reading schedule. Bonus: an optional text to go with it called A Whaler's Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick, published by Milkweed Editions. I'm thinking this will be very fun. Join us!

 

David Copperfield

I have the Penguin Classics edition of Davy, with an introduction by Jeremy Tambling. Mr. Tambling had some interesting things to say about the book. Here are the points I found most intriguing:

• Copperfield fell midway in Dickens' career, before the final run that included masterpieces like Great Expectations and Bleak House. In fact, he apparently re-read Copperfield before writing Great Expectations and said he was greatly affected by the re-read in a way that may have affected his work on the later book.
• Dickens' use of repetition: "David Copperfield is introduced to London twice (chapters XI and XIX); makes a new start so that he goes to two different types of schools; has two different forms of occupation; marries twice. Smaller, but equally odd, forms of repetition appear: he has two fathers, and he is surrounded by two women called Clara (his mother and Peggotty)...At the end of the novel Mr. Murdstone is doing just what he was doing at the beginning: torturing a young wife.
• Marriage is a major theme of the book, what with Davy's two marriages, his mother's two marriages, Aunt Betsey and her mystery husband, Peggotty and Barkis, the Strongs...and there's Rosa Dartle, who wants to be married, and Emily, who does not, both seduced by Steerforth.
• Copperfield had influence on other novelists of the day: "Tolstoy, who was reading it in 1852, and whose Childhood uses it, as does his War and Peace, or with Dostoyevsky, who took the Micawbers and made them the Marmeladov family in Crime and Punishment, or with Freud, with Joyce, in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; or with Kafka, whose [The Man Who Disappeared or America] is an attempt to rewrite Dickens' novel."
• Here's a statement I'm not sure I agree with: "The others [characters] move towards what the novel would take to be the central ground, which is the subordination of their own otherness to the values of David Copperfield." What? I don't see anyone giving in to Davy's values. Rather, he--like most of us--seeks out people who share his values, or whose values he admires.
• Finally, an interesting reference from the Bible: Uriah the Hittite is the just husband who is murdered by David when David is pursuing Uriah's wife Bathsheba. Copperfield is an intriguing twist on this story, with David being the just man while Uriah is the villain, and both of them ultimately pursuing the same woman.

So...what was in your edition? What do you think of these points?

David Copperfield

And so we reach the end. As I suspected, Dickens hustled all those loose ends into a giant woven piece. Agnes and Davy get married (did I call it when I said that Dora told Agnes to marry him???), Uriah Heep is at least in prison, if not actually repentant, Mr. Micawber finally came into his own in Australia, Little Em'ly is alive if not frolicking, Mr. Peggotty is relieved at that, and Mrs. Gummidge, bless her soul, is no longer a lorn, lone creature.

But I have one question that went unanswered: what happened to the Murdstones? Last we heard, he'd married another young woman, and the two of them were driving her towards imbecility and an early grave. How could Dickens have left that hanging, given the awful start they caused Davy in the beginning???

I have to admit I finished the book a couple of days ago and have been trying to figure out my reaction. I liked it, I guess, but it felt predictable and a bit anti-climactic. Not quite as satisfying as the ending of Bleak House. But then, I've been saying all along that I wasn't finding this as satisfying as Bleak House. I'm glad to have read it, but think it's one of those books I'm not likely to return to.

Next week, if you have an intro to your book, pop by and let's discuss. Also, I'm coming down to the end of Dickens books that I'm dying to read. Miss T. proposed this for next winter's read-along. What say you? It's a Dickensian type of book, if not by Dickens, and sounds like it'd be a jolly good winter read. As for summer? Keep an eye out for Beth's Summer of (Moby) Dick.

David Copperfield

We're in the great wind-down phase now. Much happened in these four chapters, of which the most important feels like the deaths of Ham and Steerforth during that dreadful tempest. Tempest--there's a word that sounds downright lighthearted and not at all like the nightmare it really was, rather like last month in Britain.

Unfortunately this section was bookended with two chapters on the Micawbers, who, by this point, I'm happy to see fading off into the sunset, heading to Australia. I have no doubt they will be no more financially responsible there than they were in their home country. And long-winded. Mr. Micawber is quite fortunate that he chose to do the right thing in terms of Uriah Heep, or he'd be trapped forever in debtor's prison.

Speaking of the Heep of infamy, what's up with him filing all those suits against Micawber? Shouldn't he be hiding somewhere, hoping Davy and Agnes don't haul him to court?

The storm was more than impressive, and the impact of Ham trying to help the person who turned out to have destroyed his life--in more ways than one--was of course tremendously sad. Even Steerforth's loss is sad, as Davy faces the difficulty of first what to do with his body and second notifying his family. Interesting tidbit: At the beginning of chapter 56, there's this line: "They felt as if it were not right to lay [Steerforth] down in the same quiet room." In the footnotes, this: "MS adds, 'While I tried to consider what it would be best to do, the wind plucked at the flag, as if it were eager to get underneath and see its work.'" I wish Dickens had kept that line intact.

And oh my, Miss Dartle! What a picture of vengeance and anger! Yet Mrs. Steerforth, before he tells her about her son's death, clearly knows something is amiss and still finds it in her to say kind things to Davy about his being a widower.

I still feel like there might be more Heep to come. Certainly I hope he meets his "great pulverisation", as Mr. Micawber put it. But clearly ends are wrapping up. Ham, Steerforth, Emily, Martha, the Micawbers, the Peggottys, Mrs. Gummidge--all accounted for. What's left? Davy, Agnes, Aunt Betsey, Mr. Dick, and Heep.

All righty then. One more week. Finish the book.