My Ireland Reading List, Part 1

We're going to Ireland for our fifth anniversary of marriage, yippee!
So here is the start of my Ireland reading list. (I'll spare you my Ireland Netflix list.)

• The Sea by John Banville (contemporary fiction)
• Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin (contemporary fiction)
• How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (history)
• Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala Ofaolainn (contemporary memoir)
• Dubliners by James Joyce (classic literature)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (classic literature)
• poetry by William Butler Yeats (bit of heaven)

The art of the book cover

Love this ... a whole blog dedicated to the design of book covers., with a special attention to the differences between international editions. (The blogger is Canadian and receives editions from both the U.S. and Europe, so this makes sense.)
I particularly enjoyed the recent post on new covers for Vintage Classics like Sense and Sensibililty and Frankenstein. Check out that post here.

Homeless library users

Many homeless people use the libraries in Tampa, and I wanted to talk to some of them and see what they read and what they think of the local libraries. I ended up writing a profile for the paper of a woman I got to know in Clearwater, a nearby city.
You can read my story via this link here.
Just last week, USA Today had a story about how some libraries are offering specific service to homeless people. I didn't find anything like these programs going on in our area, but I sure would like to write about it happens. Read the USA Today story here.

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, when we honor James Joyce and the novel Ulysses. From RTE:

It is considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century.

All the events in James Joyce's epic Ulysses happen on a single day - 16 June 1904 aka Bloomsday.

A week's worth of celebrations have been taking place throughout Dublin, but Bloomsday itself is still the one that matters.

Dublin 1904, as Leopold Bloom knew it, comes to life as you can eat, walk, swim, listen to, re-enact, or watch the eclectic mix of Bloomsday events.

Here are just some of the events taking place ...

Read all about it here.

Bloomsday is my favorite literary holiday, along with J. Alfred Prufrock Day and Michaelmas.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The New Yorker profiles the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, one of the largest literary archives in the world and part of my dear alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.
It's a fascinating article -- the sheer size of some of these collections of writers' papers; the business of buying collections; the ambition of the center to be the top scholarly archive in the country; and the personality of its raconteur director Thomas F. Staley (a James Joyce scholar, no less -- the center's holdings on Joyce are remarkable). Read the article online at The New Yorker web site while it's still available here.
The story, written by D.T. Max, fills me with admiration for archives and what they mean to literary history and heritage. It also makes me want to read more Don DeLillo, because of his connection Joyce and David Foster Wallace, as this excerpt shows:

One day this spring, I flew to Austin to take a look at the Don DeLillo archive. The Bronx-born writer, whose papers Staley acquired in 2004 for half a million dollars, fits into the Ransom’s collection well: for one thing, DeLillo is part of a node of expansive American fiction that goes back to Philip Roth and forward to novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace; DeLillo has corresponded with all of these writers. DeLillo counts Joyce as an influence, so he connects to the modernist node. And he has kept engaging, detailed notebooks that shed light on the intellectual foundation of his novels. Most important, he writes on a manual typewriter, producing draft after draft of his work, allowing scholars a chance to see his creative mind at work.

D.T. Max is my new favorite journalist. He also wrote a really good NYT mag piece on Happiness 101, about researchers who study true happiness.
As for the Ransom Center, it's that kind of UT effort that makes me wanna shout "Hook 'em, Horns!"

Harry Potter Read-a-thon

Here's a series of emails between me and my dear book group friend L.

L.,
I want to re-read all the Harry Potter books before No. 7 comes out in July. Do you think I should read them in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Or do you think I should read them backwards -- 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ?

It would make sense to read them 1-6, but I was thinking I might detect more clues to the ending by reading them backwards.

What do you think?
--Angie

Angie,
I'm in the process of re-reading the last one. If you have enough time, start at the beginning. What if you burn out though and then stop reading by book 4 and then book 6 is untouched as you are in line to get the new book?

If I were intent on reading them all, I would start with 6 and then 1,2, 3, 4, 5.
--L.

L.,
I think your point about burn-out is a good one! And I hadn't thought of that before, but I think you're right.

I started Book 1 this weekend and I'm almost done. Maybe I'll do 1, 6, 2, 5, 4. Mark jokingly suggested that, but I don't think it's a bad idea!

I have a hunch that Book 2 is more important than we might think, because it has so much of Voldemort's boyhood and the diary was likely a Horcrux, etc. So I want to get that one in if I can.

What fun!
--Angie

What Writers Recommend

What do writers read? It's an interesting enough question that two summer reading news stories have recently asked that question.
In New York magazine, Benjamin Kunkel, author of the wonderful whimsical-yet-serious debut novel Indecision, recommends Mortals by Norman Rush. Mortals is a sequel to an interesting novel called Mating that my book group read last year. Both "Mating" and "Mortals" are about American intellectuals and government workers in Botswana. Kunkel's novel "Indecision" has slightly similar themes of Americans and their place in their international scene, but "Indecision" is more youthful and zany, while "Mating" was serious and a teensy bit pretentious (but kind of enjoyably so). The whole New York package on summer reading is pretty interesting and worth looking at.
Meanwhile, the NYT has a big roundup of what famous authors are reading. I was pleased to see Stephen King recommend Then We Came To The End. I loved that book, I think it deserves a wider audience.

Presumed Innocent sequel

A news report says Scott Turow is working on a sequel to Presumed Innocent, one of my favorite novels:

"I got the idea a couple of years ago when I was working on a serialized book for The New York Times," explained Turow at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. "I had this image of a man sitting on a bed, near the body of a dead woman. And then I realized, 'Wait a minute, that guy on the bed is Rusty Sabich!' And that's how I began the new book." ...

"I've gotten a lot of correspondence saying that `Presumed Innocent' was an epochal event in the reader's life," Turow said, adding that the new novel, currently untitled, would probably not come out before the summer of 2009.

Read the whole news report here.

I would quibble that Burden of Proof was a sequel to "Presumed Innocent." "Burden" is about Sandy Stern, Rusty Sabich's defense attorney, who was so memorably portrayed by Raul Julia in the movie of the novel. I loved that one two. Every couple of years I re-read those novels, just for fun.

Cheever's "The Swimmer"

My spouse wrote a news story about swimming the city's public pools in a single day. (Read it here.) He mentions the short story "The Swimmer," by John Cheever in the beginning. I'd never heard of this short story before the spouse started talking about it, but it's terrific. Neddy Merrill is at a friend's house when he decides to swim home, going from pool to pool in his affluent neighbors' backyards. As he swims he realizes that something isn't right, that his world is changing as he goes along.
The story isn't online, but there's an interesting tribute to it written by Michael Chabon (author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) in Salon. Read it here. It starts:

I read "The Swimmer" for the first time on my bed in the Maryland suburbs, one winter afternoon when I was sixteen or seventeen. I'd been skimming through a battered paperback anthology my grandfather had passed along to me -- "100 Stories Ruined by English Teachers," I think it was called -- starting one after another worn-out old chestnut, quickly moving on, when I reached the famous, classic, puzzling first paragraph that begins, "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night.'"

Chabon talks about how the story meditates on the inevitability of life's end. That's true, but I think it's also about the isolation of addiction. There's a lot going on there.
I can't find the story to link to; it's still under copyright. So go to your local library to find it; it's well worth reading.