July 30, 2009

Bookish books in the post

I only just noticed that the two books I received in the post today both have books on their covers. On the left, we have The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, a library-set novel. I’d actually requested it from the library, which was fitting, I thought, but when I found I was 146 on the holds list, I decided to buy the book instead. I discovered this book via Melanie’s review— it’s structured as a collection of incident reports logged by employees at a public library. As a former library employee myself, I can vouch that these might be as bizarre as you like, and wonder if the fiction will be as wild as fact is. The other book is Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick, whose Fine Lines column I absolutely adore. As she does in the column, Skurnick rereads “teen classics” in this new book (with guests columnists including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner). The reviews are hilarious, insightful and bring back long misplaced memories.

I think that both of these books are going to prove delightful in their own particular ways.

June 22, 2009

It's hard to be hip over thirty

I’ve been rereading my copy of poetry collection It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst (of Alexander’s No Good Very Bad Day). My edition is a gorgeous Persephone Book (endpaper as above) and I’m rereading because I’m turning thirty on Wednesday, and as I certainly found it difficult enough to be hip under thirty, I need all the help I can get. From the title poem:

All around New York
Perfect girls with hairpieces and fishnet jumpsuits
Sit in their art nouveau apartments
Discussing things like King Kong
With people like Rudolph Nureyev.

Meanwhile the rest of us
Serving Crispy Critters to grouchy three-year-olds
And drinking our Metrecal,
Dream of snapping our fingers to the music
If only we knew when to snap.

But it’s hard to be hip over thirty
When everyone else is nineteenm
When the last dance we learned was the Lindy,
And the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbra Streisand
Were trying to do something about it.

We long to be kicky and camp– but
The maid only comes once a week.
And since we have to show up for the car pool,
Orgiastic pot parties with cool Negroes who say ‘funky’ and ‘man’
Seem rather impractical.

The Love Song of J. Aldred Prufrock,
Which we learned line by line long ago,
Doesn’t swing, we are told, on East Tenth Street,
Where all the perfect girls are switched-on or tuned-in or miscegenated,
But never over thirty
Trying hard
To be hip.

June 9, 2009

Out of Time

I’m now rereading Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, prompted by the Harriet/Hatty character within (though ours will be a Hattie, we think, when she’s at home). And the book is more pertinent to my current experience than I would ever have imagined, though it could be said that my mind is so mushy and needy that I could be identifying with pretty much anything right about now. But Tom’s isolation speaks to me, and his insomnia, and the secret world he creeps about in at night when everyone else is asleep. The secret world wherein the clock strikes thirteen, and I feel like I’ve been there lately, up with the squalling baby who refuses to eat properly or be satiated. “Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.”

I loved this book as a child, absorbed as I was by all stories of time travel. From Back to the Future to Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, and many more I’ve surely forgotten. It’s odd because I’ve never liked science-fiction or fantasy in my fiction, but this one element of genre fiction, I’ve always found so irresistible. Perhaps because the alternate world it plays with is still the very one we live in, which is really the only one that ever interests me, however out of time.

May 18, 2009

A country where you don't know the language

“The first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon– and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you’ve had the right shots.”– Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife

May 14, 2009

Reliving my own evolution

“I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar; prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a precious civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly, without misunderstanding.” –Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

February 5, 2009

Babies and reading

A few weeks back I was happy to discover that Kate Christensen has a new novel coming out in early June. I’ll be reading it, naturally, though when, I cannot say. If I do happen to be 41 weeks pregnant in early June, then perhaps a good book will be welcome company, though it’s just as likely I’ll be a brand new mother with just a week’s experience, so I probably won’t be reading much of anything.

There are mothers who read, of course– mothers of babies and mothers of toddlers. I know this mostly because I read their blogs, and these mothers provide me with a great deal of reassurance. That having my baby won’t require handing my brain in (or if it does, at least I get it back in a little while). I’ve been planning my summer rereading project already, as I always do, and it’s mainly consisting of easy, well-loved novels that won’t require a great deal of concentration– I’m thinking Good in Bed, Saturday, Happy All the Time, and, if I’m feeling brave, A Novel About My Wife. It would be nice to read maybe one a week? (At the moment I read about three, but then I also work full time.)

I was going to cancel my subscription to The London Review of Books, but I’ve since decided otherwise. I hope motherhood won’t be an excuse to just give up being challenged, and I certainly won’t have to read the whole of every issue. But the articles that interest me are just so interesting, and I learn so much from them. I will be cutting down on the number of periodicals that come into our house though, which probably would be a good idea anyway.

Anyone who has ever had a baby is probably by now hysterical with laughter at my naivete, but let me tell you that whenever I’m told something isn’t possible, I tend to get it done. My mother says that babies sleep a lot. If I remember correctly, Alice Munro has said something much the same, so I believe it. I am also determined to master nursing and reading, which can’t be impossible as I’ve already taught myself to floss and read, and knit and read, so this is just another challenge. But I will try to keep an open mind and my expectations only moderately high.

If by the end of the summer, I’ve read Kate Christensen’s new novel at all, I’ll consider myself not too far off track.

September 3, 2008

Being Taken Places

Oh, how books do take us places. After reading Francine Prose’s Goldengrove last week, I absolutely had to watch the movie Vertigo. Which wasn’t a particularly good or convincing film all around, but there was something about it, how it came by its filmishness absolutely brilliantly, and was so thrilling to watch. How the movie and Prose’s novel informed one another; I absolutely loved it.

And then I finished reading Owen Meany, which became far less plodding halfway through. And yes, I understand that some of the plodding was a narrative device, but I think some of it could have been fixed by an editor. Still, I remembered why I’d loved it, which had been the very point.

Then onward to The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy. And I’ll say this– I think Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best writers I’ve ever read, ever. Out of children’s lit. and lit. the world over. I loved The Long Secret when I was young, and I could see why upon rereading– I was just as baffled and fascinated as I would have been the first time around, and not every kids book reread can do that twice. In both of her books I’ve read, Fitzhugh captures the awfulness and inexplicableness that is real life in a way I can only compare to Grace Paley (class differences of their characters aside, of course). In no way watered down at all, Fitzhugh renders that reality palatable for children, which is truly amazing. This is the kind of literature children deserve…

And how strange here to see the number of parallels between The Long Secret and A Prayer for Owen Meany— religious fanaticism, grandmothers, bad parenting, coming of age, summertimes etc. etc.– which would have gone unnoticed had I been reading in any other direction.

August 27, 2008

Schedules Amok

Schedules are all running strangely of late, because we have a house guest, because she arrived in the middle of the night Sunday night, because we keep going out for meals with her and feel as though we’re on vacation too. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany and just not getting into it. I always loved John Irving, but I’ve not read him for years, and I feel I may have lost the habit. It’s also looong and I am eager to get through it in order to reach my final reread (The Long Secret), and then begin to tackle the wonderful stack of unread books on my shelf that have been gathering there since the end of June.

And so I’ve made no time for writing these last few days (here or anywhere) and consequently we’ll all have to make due to with links. Oh, like Lizzie Skurnick revisits Flowers in the Attic. Nigel Beale refuses the Refuses. Laurel Snyder interviewed at Baby Got Books (and I’ll be reading her book v.v. soon). Why postscripts still matter in the digital age. Rebecca Rosenblum is a Reader Reading (and now she’s got her own Facebook group too).

August 15, 2008

Whatever I write reflects

“…But since I am neither a camera nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.” –Joan Didion, “A Preface” to Slouching Towards Bethlehem

August 8, 2008

Rereading Late Nights

I just finished rereading Late Nights on Air, the novel that stole my heart last September. Back then I was reading it outside one afternoon when it started raining, and the book got wet, but I could not find the drop-splattered page this time. I kept expecting the book to get rained on this time, but the clouds kept holding off until I was safely indoors. Anyway, I tried to read it more critically, to reflect on the many different arguments I’ve heard about the book since then– for its worth and otherwise. But I really couldn’t help it, slipping right back into the same sweet dream that held me as I read it the first time, as easy as a paddle dip into a glass-calm lake.

I love this book, and I’ve decided I love its shape more than anything. The paddle dipping almost right, because it’s about water, or I suppose the way that water makes a shape inside whatever vessel is holding it– so absolutely fluid, yet contained. But here contained without a container even, molecules just suspended. That the chapters aren’t numbered, for example, and their construction is not consistent. This is the only novel I’ve ever read whose lack of quotation marks for speech seemed to matter, that lack of containment, and yet held. The lack of division between speech, narration, inner thoughts and the voice in each of the characters’ heads (which is different than their inner thoughts, of course). Utter calm, throughout, or maybe I’m just feeling mellow for once in my life, but it’s the book, I think. As subtle and pointed as a name like “Gwen”, how it slips from your lips. The word “slip” too, it’s the same. Dipping paddles, quiet speed.