New Century Reading

Let the Great World Spin

Long ago I came to the conclusion that there are far more books I want to read than I'll be able to conquer in my lifetime, and so it was necessary to be heartless when it came to books that didn't "grab" me. I don't have a strict page number policy, except I try to give a book at least 50 pages (more if it's a chunkster) before giving up. I realize in doing so that I might be missing out on something wonderful, but so be it--there are plenty of wonderful books waiting their turn.

So when I got into the second story of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and found my mind wandering, I said, buh-bye, back to the library with you, and I moved on. I read many other books that were engrossing, but I started to notice that the McCann book was getting great praise all over the praise; then it won the National Book Award. Not that I think winning a book award means I'll love it--far from it. But it did give me pause.

Then the Tournament of Books added the book to its shortlist, and shortly afterward I walked into my local bookstore, and there it was, in paperback. On a whim, I snapped it up and brought it home.

Well.

Not that I plan to rethink my overall strategy in terms of plowing through books I'm not enjoying, but I'm so, so glad I gave this one a second chance. Even the story that bothered me the first time was fascinating this time. Is it because I caved to popular opinion, or was I just not in the right mood the first time I tried? I'm going with the latter.

In any event, Let the Great World Spin, if you haven't heard about it, is set in New York City mostly during the summer of 1974, when Philippe Petit astonished the world by crossing the space between the World Trade Towers on a tightrope. That's the framework for this novel in stories, but the heart of the book is in other characters: Corrigan, a young Irish priest obsessed with the lowest levels of New York's population; Claire, a mother grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam; Tillie and Jazzlyn, a mother-daughter pair of hookers; and Lara and Blaine, artists trying to find their way in a world beginning to change from the wildness of the 60's.

To tell how these characters' cross paths with each other and how their lives become woven together would require a great number of spoilers, so suffice it to say that they do become intertwined, rich and poor, black and white and Hispanic, male and female. McCann does a marvelous balancing job of his own (pun intended) in moving between characters and stories, with distinct voices and personalities for each.

It certainly doesn't hurt that he's a fantastic writer:

"A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital."

I loved these characters, even the ones I wouldn't want to meet in real life. I was sad for the book to end; I wanted to know more about these people, more about their lives, but really, McCann told me what I needed to know for the point of the book itself.

So, Tournament of Books and Random House, thanks for the serendipity of the shortlist announcement and the paperback release occurring close enough together to trigger me to give this book another try. I'm so glad I did--it might even make it onto that very, very short list of books I plan to re-read someday.

The Anthologist

"I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read."

So says the endearing narrator of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, Paul Chowder, an occasionally published poet who's suffering from a bad case of writer's block when trying to write, of all things, the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems. Of course there's plenty to distract him: he's in debt; his girlfriend has left him; and the task of justifying rhyming poetry feels a bit overwhelming.

And part of Chowder's problem is his fierce passion about poetry itself:

"One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I'm really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning. And that's what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth."

This is a wild, fun ride, an exploration of poetry from someone who's passionate but not in the least pedantic, someone who's frustrated with his personal life and perceived failures in terms of literary success, someone who's got a wonderfully wry sense of humor about the path his life has taken.

If you don't know much about poetry and poets, you'll learn a lot, and in a very conversational, non-academic way. This book is as much about the history of poetry as it is about Chowder's writing block, and you'll have far more fun than reading most any handbook or history. Not much actually happens in the book, but that's not the point--the point is for Chowder to work his way through his personal demons and ground himself in the most important thing in the world: his love of poetry. He's hilariously aware of pop culture, comparing anthologists to Heidi Klum, "that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway."

By book's end, I felt much more knowledgeable about poetry without having been condescended to, and I felt like I'd had a wonderful time hanging out with a sometimes-exasperating but always entertaining friend. What more can you ask of a reading experience than that?

This book is also a finalist in the upcoming Tournament of Books, where it's first bracketed against the critically acclaimed Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Two very different books--how to call that contest?? But that's a big part of the fun of the ToB. I'd take The Anthologist over Everything Ravaged, but I suspect the outcome will go the other way, since the competitor is taking on "bigger" topics. But really, is there anything bigger than poetry?

The Waves

Just like that, we're done. We've finished Woolf in Winter, two months, four novels. I faint, I fail.

I'm really unsure what to say about this book.Like Orlando, which left me in an utterly clueless, confused state of mind, The Waves has me feeling inarticulate, especially in the sense of "I'm sure there's SO MUCH that I haven't gotten from this book." But unlike Orlando, where I ended the book feeling like I could not for the life of me figure out what the overall purpose was (and really didn't care to find out), I have a stronger sense of what Woolf was trying to do with The Waves, although I think it bears many readings to really fully grasp it (for me, anyway--I'm not speaking for the rest of you!). Which is to say, while I didn't particularly like Orlando, I did very much like The Waves, even if I can't 100% tell you why.

Certainly much of it--as is typical of Woolf--is beautifully written. Often I found myself pausing, then (provided I wasn't, say, in public) reading certain lines aloud, like I do for poetry, just to linger over the feel and sound of them. I have oodles of passages marked with admiring notes. I loved the repeated use of the word "immitigable," which I confess was a word I didn't know, although I could easily guess what it meant from related words like unmitigated and mitigation. Talk about a word that is a pleasure to say out loud: "immitigable." Almost sounds like what it means.

Woolf writes movingly about being a mother, apparently at the suggestion of her sister, Vanessa, and she captures the conflicts inherent in any young mother's life: "I have lost my indifference, my blank eyes, my pear-shaped eyes that saw to the root. I am no longer January, May or any other season, but am all spun to a fine thread round the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon made of my own blood the delicate limbs of my baby...

"So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, 'No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.' Yet more will come, more children; more cradles, more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening; and onions glistening; and more beds of lettuce and potatoes. I am blown like a leaf by the gale."

And the ending. Well. What a roller coaster that last ride with Bernard is, through despair and realization of how far short his life's fallen, his re-evaluation of his own life and that of his friends and companions, to his determination to rise up, to the return of the waves themselves.

That's it. That's all I got. I know I'll spend the day Friday reading far more thoughtful, insightful posts about The Waves, and I so look forward to that. My heartfelt thanks to Sarah, Emily, Frances, and Claire for organizing and hosting this wonderful read-along.  

In the meantime, I have both the Hermione Lee bio and the first volume of the diaries. Which would you recommend I read first?

Blame

This is the first book I've read for the Chunkster Challenge.

Blame by Michelle Huneven

This barely qualified as a Chunkster, as I read the large-print edition, which was exactly 525 pages. But oh well! It counts!

Patsy MacLemoore is a young, single history professor with more than a little bit of a drinking problem. When she wakes up in jail one morning, she thinks it's another DWI--which it is, but worse this time: she's hit and killed a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses, a mother and daughter, in her own driveway.

To say that this takes a toll on her own life would be an understatement. There's a prison sentence; there's facing up to her parents, including her father, a currently sober alcoholic himself; there's the impact on her career (the college she teaches at is not a first-rate school, but after prison, she's lucky to have a job at all).

Life after prison is daunting, even with the support of her family and friends. Her probation requires daily AA meetings and has a zero-tolerance alcohol policy. Reuniting with friends she hasn't seen in two years is awkward:

"Patsy was not intentionally quiet. They hadn't found a subject yet. Their old standbys, departmental gossip and men, were not serving them. Why Brice wouldn't spend the night or when exactly Sarah's long-distance lover Dan took up with someone else had been yearlong conversations. Patsy had no man to talk about now and, with Henry, Sarah's whole life had fallen into place with a resounding thunk, all tendrils of dissatisfaction shorn clean off."

Huneven follows Patsy's life for more than 20 years after the deaths of the mother and daughter. In time, Patsy meets the father and son left behind and forges a cautious relationship with them. She works at her sobriety, navigates a world so different than the one she knew before prison, and eventually marries an older man, also a sober alcoholic, and together the two of them become something of a power couple in the AA world.

If this sounds trite, it's because a summary doesn't do the story justice. Huneven shows with painful clarity how this one event changes forever the trajectory of Patsy's life. She can never forget about what happened, and her more-or-less conscious goal is to do something good in life, even though she knows she can never quite balance out the deaths. Her marriage, while comfortable, is not the blissful, romantic relationship she'd hoped for, yet when the opportunity to leave him for a more thrilling relationship arrives, she holds steady, unwilling to cause any more pain.

Patsy's no martyr. She doesn't elevate her own suffering above that of anyone else. She is, above all, very human and realistic. And when late in the book, there's a new development, it shakes her to her core.

SPOILER ALERT

I feel like I can't really review this book without talking about this event. Actually, there are two events, and I'll do a spoiler on only one of them.

More than 20 years after the accident, Patsy learns that she may have not been the one driving the car that night. A man she picked up at a hotel bar might have been behind the wheel and responsible for the deaths.

In some ways, this isn't much of a spoiler, since the jacket copy hints at this, and it's foreshadowed throughout the text (Patsy was in a blackout state and doesn't remember the actual accident). Although in many ways this is good news, it can't undo what 20 years has already done. The years she's spent traveling from meeting to meeting, being interviewed in the press to educate the public about the dangers of drunk driving, appear in an entirely different light. Her marriage, already strained by the arrival of her husband's adult daughter and family to live with them, becomes even more tenuous as her husband refuses to absolve her of responsibility; from his point of view, the fact that she'd been drinking that night is still a direct cause. Patsy has spent most of her adult life defining herself through the prism of that night; now she has to redefine herself in light of what didn't happen.

Huneven's book was an engaging read. At times I felt there was too much "tell" instead of "show." But I felt her instincts about people were strong, and she handled what could have been trite events with a sure hand, veering away from cliche and sentimentality every time.

Orlando

Going into Woolf in Winter, my approach has been: read the book. Collect thoughts. Write blog post. Then go and read the other blog posts, but not before I've written my own, because it's fun to see what I gained from the reading versus what everyone else did.

Orlando nearly pushed me into a personal form of cheating.

Because when I got to the end of this book--no small feat; if it wasn't for the read-along, I would have abandoned ship long ago--all I could think was, WTF?

Reading Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse were such rewarding experiences, and I knew at the end of each of them that I most certainly hadn't gleaned everything possible from my reading. But I gleaned enough to be left stunned and wanting to read those books over and over, to get more and more from them.

Orlando, however--I don't get it. I just don't get it.

Well, I get little things. I get that this is supposed to be a love letter of sorts to Vita Sackville-West. I get that there's commentary on society, and women's roles:

"The man has his hand free to seize his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion."

and the passion of art:

"The manuscript which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a living thing...It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned with violence against nature. Elk hounds and rose bushes were about her in profusion. But elk hounds and rose bushes can none of them read."

I get that there's some tongue-in-cheek humor operating. Woolf even mocks herself  with the repeated references to clocks chiming: "Eleven times she was violently assaulted," as opposed the the leaden circles dissolving in Mrs. Dalloway.

I get that one of Woolf's obsessions was how certain moments can strike a person with the seemingly unrelated memory of persons or events of another time. I certainly get that it's pretty damned hard to top Woolf's linguistic capabilities.

"That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take oath."

So maybe I "get" more than I thought I did. :-) But: overall? Not so much. I don't get the man turning into woman thing, or the woman living for centuries thing. I felt more like this was a large-scale in-joke, and I didn't have access to the source. It may be partly due to the fact that I rarely like fantasy kinds of stories; it may be that I simply don't know enough about Woolf's life, particularly as it related to VSW, to understand the story. I do plan to read the Hermione Lee bio when we're done with this quartet, and maybe that will drive me back to Orlando.

I was severely tempted to go and read all your blogs before I posted, so I could be a poseur and "borrow" some insights and look all intellectual and stuff. But, apparently, I do have some integrity, and so, complete befuddled honesty instead.

Farewell, Orlando. It's doubtful that we'll meet again.

But oh, how I look forward to a non-Orlando reading weekend.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

Hosted by Raidergirl

I'm in a barn in an unnamed community, trying to deliver an overdue introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems while sorting through my messy personal life (girlfriend left me, deep in debt). No matter what, though, I'm very passionate about poetry, and sometimes I'm even funny. (Yes, I'm enjoying this book!)

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Miz B. The rules:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!   

I'm going to give more than two sentences, but no spoilers:

"What did she really mean by 'It doesn't have to rhyme?' Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote 'FREE VERSE' on the board."

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. A great, fun read so far (not quite done). It's also on the shortlist for the 2010 Tournament of Books.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm revisiting a beloved place--a worn, well-loved family beach house in Scotland, where a protective, loving mother watches over her family with keen, insightful perspective, while entertaining various houseguests.

I've decided that as long as I'm doing the "It's Tuesday, Where Are You?" piece, I might as well do the other Tuesday component, hosted by Miz. B. 

 

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

"To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation [sic] so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said."

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, for this week's Woolf in Winter read-along, hosted this week starting Jan. 29 by Emily. The Mrs. Dalloway conversation was wonderful--if you've read or are reading To the Lighthouse, be sure to check in with Emily on Friday for more insights!

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm in 18th-century Jamaica, following the story of a young woman born to a teenage slave, who died and left the baby with the unmotherly Circe...

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (on the shortlist for the 2010 Tournament of Books)

Mrs. Dalloway

So, Virginia Woolf. She kind of intimidates me. OK--she totally intimidates me. I think of myself as reasonably intelligent, not as smart as some, not as dumb as others, but I have a terrible fear of reading Woolf and, you know, not getting it. This in spite of the fact that I have read some Woolf, and while I found it difficult, I also found it enormously rewarding.

I want to say that I love Mrs. Dalloway, and I do, but then I feel compelled to spout forth some highly erudite thoughts as to why I love it. Once compelled, I'm struck with images of Mrs. Woolf roaring in vexation from the great beyond at my insolence and lack of capability. Sort of how I imagine Kurt Cobain to react when I listen to his music. Or how they'd both react to being put in one paragraph together, which one probably shouldn't do, but there you go--that's how I roll.

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself."

This is heady stuff, and it's beautiful, and not in an empty way devoid of meaning. Although not much happens (with one notable exception), this novel contains an entire world full of flawed, yet sympathetic people, people who have views and opinions on those around them which are so often wrong, and yet so often well-intentioned and based on years of contact. Some of them are unbearably sad--Septimus, obviously, and the rigid Miss Kilman (seriously? I wish Woolf had written a book just about her). But they all have their reasons for sadness, private or not, and they all have a certain amount of self-awareness and self-deception operating at the same time.

One thing I noticed was the frequent use of "thread" or "string", which made perfect sense, given how these people are all connected, some very tenuously, and yet their lives touch and affect each other, sometimes to an extent they don't realize or understand.

The edition I chose to read was in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, edited by Francine Prose. Now having read the novel, I can go back and read the essays about the novel included in the reader--and I so look forward to doing just that.

Little Bee

Well, this certainly got 2010 off to a ripping start for me. I saw this on lots of "best of" lists late last year, and when it showed up on the long list for the 2010 Tournament of Books, it seemed more than logical to add it to the library queue. It conveniently showed up just in time for New Year's weekend, and has become my first completed book for the National Just Read More Novels Month challenge.

But how to describe it? Clearly, given that I'm not the speediest reader, finishing the book in four days shows that I was pretty deeply engaged (a long holiday weekend also helped). But the plot itself is so spoiler-ific that I hardly know what to say. The back of the book says this:

"We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story, and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you will want to tell everyone about it. Please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how it unfolds."

Although that summary reeks of hyperbole, it is, for the most part, right. About all I can say without a spoiler is that it's about an orphaned illegal refugee in England, trying to find her way after escaping terror in Nigeria. The beach scene is rough indeed--although I've since read some reviews that have understandable criticism of that part of the book--but there are many other scenes which, while not as graphic, are equally painful.

And yet, there's also humor. Some readers apparently don't like the British people who become involuntarily entwined in Little Bee's life, but I thought they were sympathetically drawn. Let's face it--most of us have no clue what Little Bee's life would be like, and we wouldn't necessarily respond any better.

It's a little frustrating, not being able to tell more. But it's a good book. Go read it, quick, before the Tournament of Books announces its short list.