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.

The Moleskine talks back

Here's a quick piece from McSweeney's on what your abandoned journal might say.

It starts:

You say things are "hectic." Then you add that you "don't want to talk about it." And that's all? Nothing else happened to you on April 22, 2007? Well, if I'm to believe that, then my name isn't Moleskine.

Read the rest here

Then We Came to the End

I really adored the book, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.
Funny and touching and deeply serious, "Then We Came to the End" is what happens at a Chicago ad agency as the dot-com bubble bursts and the lay-offs begin.
And it's written in first-person plural! (For the most part.) How cool is that?
Because I'm an office worker myself, this book reminded me that there's so much drama and poignancy in everyday life. This point has been made before (most notably by James Joyce's Ulysses), and maybe it's an easy, obvious point. But I still find the phenomenon to be emotionally moving and almost miraculous. Such is the artistry of the novel.
I interviewed Joshua Ferris for the newspaper, which was great. Some authors I've interviewed don't like talking about their work, but Ferris was very articulate, especially about the different characters in his book.
Read my interview with Joshua Ferris here.
Read the first chapter of Then We Came to the End here.
Here's the opening:

WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, annotated by David M. Shapard. P&P is a classic, but I read it for the first time only a year or two ago. Now I love it, this is maybe my fourth time reading it. The annotated edition has lots of interesting insights about how Jane Austen moves her plot along almost entirely through dialogue -- very interesting. It also explains nuances of vocabulary that might slip by the modern reader, i.e. amiable: "a common term of praise. It had a broader meaning then, signifying general kindness and friendliness."
I'm also reading The Untouched Minutes by Donald Morrill. It's a fascinating memoir by an English professor about how he and his wife were victims of a home invasion. It's kind of a slim book, I would describe it as a literary essay. The home invasion happened around the same time as 9/11 and the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, two professors at Dartmouth. Morrill weaves those events into his narrative to create a meditation on violence and experience. So far, it's excellent.

My strategic borrowing

If I'm browsing the stacks at a library and I run across a book I like but might not have time to read, I will check it out anyway with the idea that it will improve the book's library survival. Books that don't get checked out for years tend to lose their place on the shelves and end up on the book sale tables, and this is my little way of forestalling that.

But it's hard to tell sometimes when the last time a book was checked out. It used to be, you could flip to the back of the book and check the date due stamp. With the advent of computerized check-out, though, the dates don't always get stamped. So I ask the librarian. They usually can tell me.

Example: I recently checked out a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected works. The stamp said the last check out date was 1995. But I asked the library assistant to look it up, and the last actual check out date was 2005.

Author letters

Reader No.7 sent me this fascinating link about 300 letters written by Flannery O'Connor that were made available to the public for the first time last week:

By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.

Few people knew that Hester — an avid and insightful reader — was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O'Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O'Connor's death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were "the most personal" of O'Connor's correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester's literary executor.

In an event highly anticipated by O'Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester's request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.

The article is mostly about O'Connor, but it also notes that there is a sizable trove of letters by T.S. Eliot that are under seal -- 1,200 letters that will be opened in 2020.

Then there's a follow-up to the O'Connor story, about what happend on the day the letters were released:

Maybe it was just too sunny a day to be spent in the archives on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library on Emory's campus. By 2 o'clock — five hours after the correspondence in two large folders was made public — only five people had signed in and perused the collection of letters written between 1955 and the author's death in 1964.

Larry Hammond, 65, an insurance salesman from Atlanta, was the first to thumb through the stack. "I took a literature class a few years ago and read about this and I was just interested," he said. "I was real surprised by the language — and all the typos."

A closer inspection by O'Connor scholars may yet find great gravity in the missives.

The Movie of Us

I recently reviewed The Movie of Us, a collection of poetry by Kevin Jeffery Clark. The book has an interesting back story; I wrote about it here.
Excerpt:

The Movie of Us captures a cinematic landscape of language. The poems are scenes sketched out in the cool blues and grays of a lake photographed just after sunset or just before dawn.

I attended a poetry reading last night; Clark's brother, Michael Klein, read his poems. It was quite touching.

The Glass Castle and The Road

I read The Glass Castle right before I read The Road, so that's two books about pitiful starving children in a row. Meanwhile, the next book group pick is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I also can't stop thinking about a bit from Cormac McCarthy's NYT interview, which I blogged about yesterday:

McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

His is a very purist view of writing. I admire his view, but I'm not sure I share it. It's a great point for debate, though.

More on The Road

So today The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize when I was just blogging about it yesterday. I did some more research on the book today, one interesting piece was from The Chicago Tribune about Oprah picking the The Road for her book club. The writer, Julia Keller, calls Oprah and author Cormac McCarthy "one of the oddest and most unlikely cultural pairings since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe." She also reports on McCarthy's notorious aversion to the press:

Whatever McCarthy's motivation for agreeing to be on the show, it isn't money, say longtime observers of McCarthy's work. He turns down speeches, awards, teaching gigs and other familiar trappings of the contemporary writer's life, preferring to live in the desert Southwest and do his work. Like literary recluses such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, McCarthy is more familiar through his absence than his presence.

Read the whole article here.

I also found this longer, more definitive profile of McCarthy from when he gave a rare interview to the New York Times in 1992. You can find it via the previous link or on the NYT's Cormac McCarthy page here.

Oprah's Pic: The Road

I read Oprah Winfrey's current book club pic this weekend: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I can't remember the last time I read a book this disturbing. A man and his young son are on the road, traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape (nuclear war? meteor strike?) and hiding out from other survivors bent on rape, murder and cannibalism.
If that sounds austere, it certainly is, but the writing is elegant and convincing. I can't get some of the grimmer scenes out of my head.
I would say the pick is out of character for Ms. Oprah, but one of the things I like about Oprah (and I do like her) is that she usually has a surprise up her sleeve. So it's not out of character in that sense.
The Oprah web site says that Cormac McCarthy is going to give her his first television interview. I'm sure the chance to reach the massive Oprah audience is to tempting to pass up. (Only one author ever did, I think.)
Maybe I'll think of something more profound to say upon further reflection, but right now all I can do is shake my head in disbelief over the power of The Road.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the great anti-war novels, maybe the best in American literature. My eighth grade English teacher used the book to teach World War II to us Catholic school girls, which seems smartly subversive to me now. I need to find a copy and re-read it.
It begins like this:

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

Then it tells about Billy's serving in World War II and surviving the bombing of Dresden; his postwar life in the suburbs; his capture by aliens and being taken to another planet.
After reading that book, I went ahead and read all the rest of his books before I graduated high school; I loved them. He was the first adult author who I read pretty much all of his work. The obits (read the NYT one here) have been mentioning Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as his major works, but I always preferred Breakfast of Champions, which has sly illustrations of human anatomy and features the trials of his alter-ego, science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.
Later in life, Vonnegut defended civil liberties and librarians.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes.

The dreaded "twee" appellation

My book group is preparing to discuss Eat, Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. I really liked it -- I've been a fan of Gilbert's ever since I came across her distinctive chatty-but-smart magazine stories in GQ years ago. This book is a memoir Gilbert's emotional recovery from a painful divorce. Her solution is to seek pleasure worldwide by eating in Italy, praying in India and finding balance in Indonesia. It's a clever premise, and in the end the book moves beyond her divorce to her spiritual maturation as a complete woman. Her writing is a joy -- breezy, funny and modern. And I really liked the way she documented the hard-to-describe feelings of silent meditation.
But I fear my dear book group compatriot J. is not going to like it. I can hear her now, she will tag it with the dreaded "twee" appellation. What is twee? Twee is anything that J. considers too cutesy or precious or sweet or clever for it's own good. It's the opposite of J.'s most complimentary adjectives, which are -- can you guess? -- "ironic" and "dark" (and sometimes "sarcastic"). Other books we have read that J. said were twee are Winkie by Clifford Chase (a satirical memoir in which a teddy bear becomes ensnared in a terrorist plot) and The World to Come by Dara Horn (a cross-generational love story celebrating Jewish art and literature, hinged around a stolen Marc Chagall painting).
So I'm thinking up my twee counterarguments now.