book a week geek

I’ve been reading some poetry by Alice Fulton recently, and simultaneously her lone novel, the Nightingales of Troy.  I love when poets write fiction, because it is truly the most beautiful fiction.  Aspects of Fulton’s fiction remind me slightly of Lorrie Moore, but this is more a comparison of subject matter (not to say that all writers writing wittily about women and their relationships with other women are reminiscent of Lorrie Moore, although in some ways that would be nice) than prose.

This book takes place sparsely over a century, but this passage is from 1999:

Your father’s hotel isn’t what it used to be,” she said when she returned.  “It’s like Père Lachaise up there.  Dark.  Really dark.  With bottles, syringes, and graffiti everywhere.  There was nobody at the desk, and somebody yelled down, Who youse looking for?  Then a big burly guy appeared.  He opened a drawer full of guns and knives.  I was thinking, if we get to choose our weapons, I’ll choose grammar.

Fulton makes for excellent nighttime reading, when summer is ending and the nights are so noisy.  I have been falling asleep reading How to Eat Supper (this hasn’t changed my dreams like I’d hoped it would–they’re not about food or anything).  I am learning so much from this book–this book is meant to be read and absorbed, not just glanced at, like other cookbooks, I think–and feel like all of my dietary habits are lackluster (popcorn for dinner, anyone?) and need to change.  The new semester is about to start, and all the new freshman are arriving with their little refrigerators and their excited parents with their “I’m a Pitt mom!” hoodies and I don’t wish I were moving into a dorm but I do wish I were going back to school (in a more substantial way).   The best thing about a new semester starting is it gives even non-degree seeking students (me!  hi!) a change to reevaluate and set new goals and work towards something different.  I wish I could buy a new Trapper-Keeper or planner or something exciting.  That would feel substantial.

From Garret Keizer’s very excellent Notebook piece in September’s Harper’s (titled “Why dogs go after mail carriers”):

I don’t want to be a seraph or a sunbeam but a citizen, that is, to live in a physical body and a geographical community, bounded by time and space and served in full equality by incarnate fellow citizens like Shirley B.  I’ll keep my email, thank you, but let my “primary communications carrier” be a unionized worker with his feet on the sidewalk and no wings on his feet.  If I have to wait an extra day or two for a parcel, I can bear it.  I’ve already waited half a century for national health care, and I am likely to be as dead as an undeliverable letter by the time all its provisions go into effect.  It you want to talk about things that move at a snail’s pace, might I suggest aiming your metaphor in that direction.

I spent a few days in Toronto visiting my brother and hiding The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest from anyone who might see me reading it.  I think I can reclaim my life again now that I’ve finished it.  These books are stupidly absorbing.  They also make Sweden seem stupidly enticing.  I don’t even like winter, but now I want to get a cabin & several thick sweaters & fritter away my remaining days on some fjord.  Since that actually sounds terrible, I am just going to take some tips from Maureen Corrigan’s list for future reading.

Pre-Salander finishing, I trudged through Friday Night Lights (H.G. Bissinger).  I read this for a book club, and it made me much sadder than I thought it might.  I am afraid to admit this, but I don’t actually know very much about football (I know, a Pittsburgh girl who doesn’t understand football), and I was surprised to actually learn things about football from this book.  I had incorrectly thought that this was some fluff book about Texas and weirdos who like high school a little too much, but damn, this is actually a book about LIFE and the EIGHTIES and the OIL CRISIS and so much more.  I very much like the show (marry me, Tim Riggins?), but mostly for how out-there the plotline gets.  I don’t know what I expected from the book, but I was quite pleasantly surprised.  It even appears that Bissinger actually researched it quite thoroughly, and this always pleases the reference librarian inside me.

I am on the cusp of finishing Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which is untouchably gorgeous.  I promised myself I would go back and read things that I read in high school that I pass off as having read but really I don’t remember a word of them.  I am not, however, going to read a Separate Peace EVER. AGAIN.

Other things:

I listened to the Shawshank Redemption last week & this week.  Mistakenly, I spent 25 years thinking this was about Vietnam.  Wow, wrong.  This is another one that I wouldn’t want to read, but it was fun to listen to.  I found out yesterday that I am actually incapable of both reading and listening to Talking to Girls About Duran Duran (Rob Sheffield).  This book perpetuated about 600 gender stereotypes within the first 15 minutes and infuriated me instantly.  I get a little sad when I think that something like this?  THIS?! is selling well.  I think I am just going to listen to Last of the Mohicans next, because there is no way that won’t please me.  My only wish is that I could somehow incorporate the soundtrack of the movie into the audiobook, because that would be insanely perfect.

I want to finish this off with approximately 200 quotes from Song of Solomon, but that would be robbing you of the pleasure of reading it yourself.

I was incapable of actually reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and yet I really very much wanted to.  I just could not get into this book.  I tried.  I gave up.  I tried again.  I gave up again.  I know that this is criminal to admit, because the whole world loved reading this book.  But then, I did something that I thought might be the next-best thing:

I listened to an audiobook version of The Road.

And, unsurprisingly, I loved it.  That is because this book is great, and while it is probably much better to actually read, I wouldn’t know, and I don’t think I care.  And I am okay with this, because the version I listened to was  a whole new experience for me.  I am something of a noob when it comes to audiobooks.  Audiobooks remind me of the Cracker Barrel, and thus they remind me of childhood, and of being kind of miserable.  But The Road might have changed that.  I found this listening experience to be absurdly pleasurable.  It felt a little like cheating, sure, and it felt a little sneaky to listen to it while at work (I figure the catch is that my place of employment actually supplies us with audiobooks now, so this must be allowed?!), but at the end of an otherwise miserable and boring week at work, I could sit back and think “aha!  I experienced a literary classic this week, and I didn’t have to read a word!”

I know this doesn’t count as reading, but you know what?  It was as much fun as reading.  Twice the fun, even, because I could do other things while the audio streamed.  I am, without a doubt, hooked.  I don’t necessarily believe that academic libraries providing students with audiobooks falls within an academic library’s mission, and I could talk about this for hours, blah blah, but I do think audiobooks are a format that could help auditory learners get more involved in fiction/non-fiction. Because otherwise, I never would have read this book.  And with that, the possibilities are endless.  Now I am thinking of all the things I just plain didn’t actually feel like reading but that I truly wanted to read, and I am searching for them, and queuing them, and hoping we buy them, and work already seems so much better.

And if this doesn’t actually count as reading a book (I don’t think it does), my only dilemma is do I actually have to go back and READ it to check it off my Pulitzer list?  Probably, yes.

But at least I know the ending.

East of Eden was terrific, the kind of epic tale that took me longer to read than I would like, but the kind that I don’t think I will soon forget.  This book also, and notably, featured the most despicable fictional character I can remember having read.  I am semi-interested now in reading more Steinbeck, as I inexplicably escaped high school without having read more than Mice & Men and the Pearl (which maybe doesn’t count because it is approximately 45 pages long).  However, that sounds too formulaic/summer reading list for me, and I certainly do not like a formula (or fun), and furthermore, it’s summer, and all I want to do is sit in the sun and sweat enthusiastically.

This weekend, I basked, cat-like, and also read Nathan Englander’s Ministry of Special Cases.  This book was pretty much written with me in mind.  Englander has been compared to a lot of my favorites (including Philip Roth, but I think this is because both are Jewish and write Jewish characters really well), but BEYOND THAT, this is a book about Argentina, and BEYOND THAT INDEED, it is about the Dirty War.  This book was horrifying and yet so enjoyable.  Word on the street is that Englander has more writing in the works about las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, and you better believe I will be keeping an eye out for that.

In keeping with my great Pulitzer-readathon-of-2o1o, I am currently reading Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres.  I thought I would like this book more than I do.  The descriptions all led me to believe it would be directly up my occasionally trashy-lit alley, but it isn’t really so (aka it is much better than that, so why do I not like it?  I don’t know!).  When I am reading it I am also mortified by the cover of my version, which isn’t helping matters much.  I was tempted to get one of those old-school book covers that I had in middle school, but at this point it is too late and I am resigned to be the girl on the bus reading the book with Michelle Pfeiffer hugging Jessica Lange.  OH WELL.

I am tentatively considering reading every finalist or winning Pulitzer novel.  Looking over the list I realized I’ve already read approximately 20%, and there is little that I like more than an ambitious reading goal.  Butler’s book of short stories (see below) won in 1993.  I really loved this book (it is simultaneously so serious and funny!), and I love the majority of the ones that I’ve already read, but do I want to be so tied down, so restricted in my reading choice?  I’m not sure yet, although there is nothing wrong with being ambitious.  Note to self.

Last week’s readings:

• Michael Ondaatje-In the Skin of a Lion (recommend x 1000)
• Robert Olen Butler-Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (also recommend x 1000)
• Maile Chapman-Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (will elaborate on)

On to a not yet heralded book: Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is so gorgeously written.  It is perhaps a nod to Chapman’s ease with words & scenes that although I largely read this book in a bathing suit on my couch, desperate for the AC to kick on, I was easily transported to Finland in the winter.  I hate saying that I was transported somewhere by a book, because that is totally cheesy, but alas, it wasn’t hard to become entirely absorbed in Chapman’s prose.  I love how Chapman writes, and the momentum of the first 150 pages was incredible, considering it is such a lush, slow-moving book.  Chapman handily writes quite well about nothing at all, and that is why it was so shocking that I hated later plot developments so much.  I would have gladly read a book about a “home” for troubled women in 1920s Finland in which nothing so much happened (because that is a unique and great topic/scene), and it was when something did in fact happen that I stopped caring.  This is either because the something that happened (I won’t say what) wasn’t developed enough initially, or because I just plain didn’t care.  Either way, a considerable problem.  I look forward to future works by Chapman, because I think in a way this could be a maturity thing (I sure as shit couldn’t carry out a plot for 260 pages) or just a hurried thing, and perhaps something that will resolve itself with practice.  Time will tell.

I am currently reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which I can file under “things I should have read a long, long time ago.”  I probably won’t have much to say about this that hasn’t already been said, and much better than I could say it. Next up is either Wideman’s Fatheralong (I am obsessed) or perhaps Ford’s Independence Day (1996 winner, and sequel to the Sportswriter, which I labored over and was so delighted by).  That or I will fervently defend the audiobook, which just might be my new passion.

I am a little heart-broken to be back from Panama.  It was lovely & hot.  I got a lot of work done.  I worked a lot.  It feels good to get up very early (when the roosters qui-qui-ri-qui) and walk in the dark to the place where I work, giving buenas to the folks that I pass (and “hi buddies!” to every street dog).  The problem with Panama is that napping feels so good, so every time I tried to read in the hammock I fell asleep, which means my reading only amounted to this:

John Edgar Wideman-Brothers & Keepers
Gloria Anzaldua-Borderlands/La Frontera-the new Mestiza
Vincent Lam-Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
Bitchfest

I say this a lot, but I found Brothers & Keepers to literally be life-changing.  There are many passages I read over & over & over (many about Pittsburgh).  I want to return to this book indefinitely.  I will read this again, and I would  suggest it to anybody who is interested in prison (and injustice), families and, frankly, human beings.

Since home, I’ve read:

Lee Martin-The Bright Forever
Jose Saramago-Blindness

I finished Blindness yesterday on the bus (ugh).  I feel stunned & relatively emotional about it.  The lucidity of Saramago’s writing kind of fucked with me, and I feel like I’ve been drifting since I started it.  I have my own dog of tears, and for that I guess I will just say I am happy.

It’s good to be home.

I gave Woodcuts of Women by Dagoberto Gilb my undivided attention the last two days.  I’m glad I did.  Gilb is a superb writer.

From page 128 of his story “Bottoms,” a paragraph that makes me think of the here & the now, in what seems to be the middle of Pittsburgh summer already:

Though I follow curves that never seem to unbank, my intention is to learn to straighten out, to get along and be simple too.  I am tired and I hurt.  I want blue swimming-pool calm even if it’s crowded.  It’s hard for me to even walk to my pool.  The asphalt is hot, it’s a hill up and then down from the complex which is my home, in and out of the dappled light through a shade of trees.  My feet ache.  I have no explanation for that because I swear I am in healthy shape.  Compared to most, I’m sure of it.  It’s the hot summer.  The quiet–cicadas and grackles and hedge trimmers and nail guns–sounds like the heat.  I wear a baseball cap because I don’t want my face to burn.  That sun.  I can take the humidity, even like it.  I believe in the sweat, because sweat is religious, cleansing and purifying.  But not the direct sun.  Hide from that sun on the skin.  And dark glasses.  Though I like the light, the daylight, sunlight.  And I feel too much darkness in me.  I seek light but not an Anglo sunburn.

I am reluctant to turn this book back in to the library.  I kind of want to hold on to it indefinitely.

From page 131 of the same story, there is this all-too-familiar feeling:

I try to read.  I have told myself to get through it fast and then see what I can come up with.  But I don’t get it, or maybe I’m tired of reading, tired tired, a delirium tremendum of images, trembling with dread and sadness and defeat and lust and desire and love.

And back this goes to storage, although I am sad to see it go.  I feel personally affronted when books that I am delighted by are in storage (why don’t people love these books as much as I do?).  Things to not take personally, right here.

Last week, Dagoberto Gilb’s Magic of Blood (largely enjoyable).

This week, I caved–the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I confess to having loved this).

I leave for Panama in a week so from here on out for the next month I think I will be light-reading/magazine reading.   Long weekend reading will involve Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women and the second in this stupid Swedish hacker series.  I am 5% embarrassed but 100% enjoying them, so who cares.

When I finished Lonesome Dove I felt a little anxious, because what do you follow that up with?  I was partly relieved I didn’t have to lug it around anymore (and have people think I was reading the Bible on the bus, yech), but for the most part I was anxious.

I followed it up with a scary young adult book by Allegra Goodman-the Other Side of the Island.  How’s this for an endorsement: I read it in one day.  I love a good dystopic tale, and moreover, I love dystopic tales for teens, because what is better than terrifying a young adult?  I like most of the things I’ve read of Goodman’s (for the most part, short stories in the New Yorker), and this didn’t disappoint.  It was part the Giver, part Oryx & Crake, part Catching Fire.  All great favorites of mine.  I am learning that I very much enjoy speculative science fiction (this came as a shock), and Goodman managed to work in some hugely important themes that I think could have a great effect on young adults, as it certainly affected this not-quite-young young adult. I do recommend this for adults and young adults alike.

I am stubbornly pushing through Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate right now.  I think I was absent during the week of tenth grade that I was supposed to read this?  Maybe.  Either way, this is one of those “I have always meant to read that!” books, and I wouldn’t say I love it, but I also wouldn’t say I hate it.  I have well-documented problems with reading about cooking, but that aspect of this book is actually probably my favorite part (that and I love, love, love Mexican food and keep fantasizing about mole and chiles).  I am just not that dazzled by this, which isn’t necessarily bad.  I know that I don’t always love magical realism, and that might explain why I am so lukewarm.  I’m sure this is good, it just isn’t for me.  I initially wanted to read this in Spanish, but I don’t think I’m quite there yet.  I’ll keep trying.  But I’ll finish it, and then move on.  After all, I usually do.

I have about 45 books in my mental queue that “I have always meant to read;” things that are notable or acclaimed for one reason or another, but things that I just never get around to reading.  I sometimes wonder if I am a bad reader for never reading things I am “supposed” to read.  But that, I think, takes away from reading as an activity that I just simply love.  What do I know?