February 2010

And here is the obligatory Stuff I’ve Been Reading post.  It feels like I haven’t been reading much because this list has five fewer books than January, but I’ve also been back in school and reading a whole lot of short fiction outside of collections, as well as articles.  You’ll notice from the following how many books are for classes.

1. Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield (for Brit lit)
2. The Second Coming by Walker Percy (for form & theory)
3. Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber (for research)
4. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (for fun)
5. Howards End by E. M. Forster (for Brit lit)
6. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (for form & theory)
7. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, abandoned p. 112 (for Brit lit)
8. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin (for fun)
9. Little Kingdoms by Steven Millhauser (for research)
10. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (for form & theory)
11. Modernist Fiction by Randall Stevenson (nonfiction for Brit lit)
12. Severance by Robert Olen Butler (for form & theory)

My favorite book this month was, predictably, The Thief plus The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, but probably, truth be told, The Thief.  I’ll be rereading the next two in that series to prepare for book four, which is coming out at the end of March.  My least favorite was Sons and Lovers, which I found so unpalatable that I couldn’t even finish.

I hope that with Spring Break coming up next month the March 2010 list will see far more books for pleasure on it.

Another Top Five List

My top five list of books by and about Native Americans.

1. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
2. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
3. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
4. American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa
5. Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy

Read any of these?  No?  Read all of them.  If I ever taught a class about Native American literature, these would be on the syllabus, along with a handful of short stories, speeches, films, poetry, and legends.  (The truth is that I want to teach a bit less than I want to design syllabi, alas.)

And, do you know any others that I missed?

Help

Help!

I’m reading three-going-on-four books at the same time.  This is a most unusual state for me, who prefers to read one book at a time, one after another, over and over and over.

One is Howards End by E. M. Forster, which I have to finish in a week for Modern British Fiction.

Another is Little Kingdoms by Steven Millhauser, which is partly because I’m giving a presentation on him in a week and a half and partly because I really want to read it.

A third is a nonfiction book called Modernist Fiction, for the above class and over which I must write a three-page review in two weeks.

The fourth, which I will pick up soon, is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, a pleasant reread for a third class, which I must review by next Tuesday.

I also have four short stories by classmates and an article on the desk, underneath a mound of grading and various other papers for scholarship applications.

And German lurks in the background.

Graduate school is neither Genius nor Perspiration, but ugly, common Time Management.

The Second Coming

Thus has begun the school reading.  Below are the first two sentences of the four-page response I have written to The Second Coming.  They are really all you really need to know about my opinion.

A late-middle-aged, retired and depressed golfing lawyer falls inexplicably in love with a young woman who has escaped from a mental institution and is living in a greenhouse.  Set in the South and concerned, as the plot would suggest, with the incongruities of life, Walker Percy’s The Second Coming performs varied and skillful technical feats while managing to be a book that I would prefer not to read again.

4.0 / 10.0.