April 27, 2007
California
My only problem with Joan Didion is that when I think about her too much, I start singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” with her name in place of Lydia’s. Otherwise I feel about Joan Didion something just short of worship, on the right side of sane. From that magical day four years ago when I first picked up Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I’ve had her voice in my head. I will reread her forever, but it thrills me that there is new reading still in the meantime.
All of this because I’ve just began Divisadero and I find myself in Didion’s California. And so how can I not read my new copy of Where I Was From next? I love the way one book suggests another.
I am concerned though, as Anna Karenina is lined up to be my May Classic and I have this terrible suspicion that I might not get to it….
January 26, 2007
Notes on a Scandal
The Guardian Books Blog on books that make you talk to strangers. Whenever I see someone reading Unless, I want to tell them it’s my favourite book in all the world, though I don’t think I ever have. At my library job, however, I am compelled to let patrons know when I think the book they’ve selected is wonderful. And often lately, it has been Interpreter of Maladies or Small Island.
And books to read on trains. The great train reads of my life have been Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the shinkansen to Hiroshima; Various Miracles on the way to Osaka one afternoon (and I read the story “Scenes” whilst stopped at Amagasaki); when we lived in England, our train rides were usually passed with Sunday papers. And I don’t get to take the train anymore, but last year Sweetness in the Belly sure passed a bus journey from Toronto to Ottawa and back just fine.
An interview with Zoe Heller.
Now reading A Biographer’s Tale by AS Byatt, which was not well-regarded by the amazon reviewers, but I like it much so far. And the Public Library has called, with Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (we watched the movie last weekend; it was an obsession of mine in high school; I’m interested in the novel) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (my February classic). Once again, I suppose I can say I have all I need.
Except hair elastics. All of mine have disappeared.
July 11, 2006
Book News
I reread Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the weekend, which I read right before The Radiant Way in 2004 and which similarly became one of my definitively favourite books. I read it on the bullet train to Hiroshima for a weekend break at the beginning of that July, and I fell in love with it. I’ve read it again since, and expect to read it again and again regularly in the future. Because it’s brilliant. The writing is just so purely good, and Didion can write about anything and make it mythic and when I have her cadences and rhythms stuck in my head, I am a better writer. I am not sure if that constitutes cheating, but it works. And so after I read this book, I decided to read Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, which I thought was the most brilliant book in the world when I read it fifteen years ago. It was sort of Didionesque subject matter if you really think about it, but the writing was so not Didion, and I got to the fourth or fifth page, and, nauseated by Pris’s burgeoning quivering sexuality in Junior High School, I just couldn’t go on. And so I shut the book, which I rarely do. I think if I ever read it again, it will have to be a day when I’m sick in bed and can’t be bothered to think. And so I moved on to The Bell Jar, which was brilliant. I hadn’t read it for years. The narrative voice is so authentic, and much like The Catcher in the Rye, when I read it the first time, I gave the narrator full credit for the story and took it as presented. It’s strange how willingly I did that once upon a time, and now that I am older, older than these characters especially, the books are entirely different. And following that, still riding an Americana wave (with a focus on neuroses), I took up Nine Stories by JD Salinger, and I am exquisitely happy with it.
November 22, 2005
Ursa Major, Asia Minor
I went to see Joan Didion last night, and tears came to my eyes as they always do whenever I’m in the presence of legendary people I’m in awe of. And I am in awe. She read a passage from “The Year of Magical Thinking” which if I was in the hardover-buying-income bracket I would own by now but alas. It was painful to hear, but also wonderful to hear because of her voice. And then there was an interview, which wasn’t particularly illuminating, but it was interesting, and she signed my copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (which I first read on a bullet train to Hiroshima in July 2004).
The Guardian revisits Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. On the brilliantly readable Hilary Mantel.
I am writing an essay now, and have to mark papers all weekend. But tomorrow I will be feting it up for my beloved husband’s first Canadian birthday. I’ve got to bake him a cake. In other exciting news, we are planning a rather grand Christmas party. And I miss Brighton, Basford, Tokyo and Budapest all at the same time. Oh, and congratulations to the Lui/Doerings who became engaged Sunday night with all the ceremony one might expect from such an event.
