June 2010

Stuff I’ve Been Reading – in June

1. Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson (20%).  I began reading this text that my professor had eliminated from the Modern British Fiction syllabus due to time constraints and, after the first couple paragraphs, understood why it was expendable.
2. Slam by Nick Hornby.  My husband and I, Hornby fans, read this book aloud in the car.  We decided we liked some of his other books (High Fidelity, A Long Way Down) a bit better; but all the things we like about him, we still like.
3. The Ape Who Guards the Balance by Elizabeth Peters.  By this time, book ten of the Amelia Peabody series, things are really starting to drag.  I began entertaining ideas of abandoning the series.
4. Tinkers by Paul Harding.  Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, 2010.  It was terribly short and felt more like an extended character sketch than a novel.  The writing was lovely, but I didn’t much like it.
5. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.  I mistakenly read this book believing that I was shortly to review it for the American Literary Review blog; but I ought to have read Interpreter of Maladies instead.
6. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.  Whenever I get my act together, I’ll be writing a conference paper about this book.
7. The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope.  And since this was Pope’s only other novel, I read it too for good measure.
8. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.  This first book in the Border Trilogy has nearly persuaded me to change my class schedule for next semester; it isn’t looking too fun to spend two months reading eight McCarthy novels.
9. The Man Who Made Friends With Himself by Christopher Morley (30%).  Despite coming highly recommended, I disliked the narrator’s pithy flights of fancy and plotless wanderings.
10. Stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.  Yes.  I squealed when I saw this on the shelf.  It did not disappoint me.
11. Postsecret compiled by Frank Warren.  This, believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, will be a secondary textbook for the college writing class I’ll be teaching in the fall.
12. The Falcon at the Portal by Elizabeth Peters.  I continue to stagger through book eleven.
13. Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  The most eloquent book of the month by far, this memoir of a French pilot’s experiences delivering the mails during the 1930s is a tremendous tale of adventure and philosophy.
14. He Shall Thunder in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters.  And I decide to stop at an even dozen.  No more Peabody.
15. The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.  I wonder who the old man who keeps bees and solves mysteries could be?
16. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis.  A retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Orual, Psyche’s sister, Lewis’s novel is one of the most underappreciated retold tales.  It remains one of my ten favorite books.

June 27

10 Random Facts

1. I am alive.
2. I am in Oklahoma.
3. I am thinking about making chocolate chip cookies this afternoon.
4. I am almost done writing chapter nine of ten.
5. The next book I’m going to read is Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis.
6. Anastasia likes to sleep all nested in a sheet in a bottom drawer.
7. I have been re-watching Firefly in order, and the next episode is my favorite episode, “Ariel.”
8. It’s nice to do laundry in a non-demonic washer.
9. I did not win Munchkin last night, even though I cheated.
10. Though I slept until 11:00 today, I am still sleepy.

ALR Summer Book Club: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Everyone who hasn’t yet read Interpreter of Maladies should go find a copy now.  But if you need more convincing, you can read my post about it over at the American Literary Review (ALR) blog.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) is our highlight this week at the ALR blog.  Fans of Lahiri’s first published story collection will also want to read her novel The Namesake (2003) and her most recent publication of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) to follow her map of questions about self and family.  A story is a series of sentences, one after another, but it does not follow that perfect sentences make a perfect story.  While the smooth, minimalist sentences of Interpreter of Maladies can feel unemotional, the stories gather a pathos that will certainly move readers.  Her exploration of the Indian-American experience, especially the effect of immigration on the different generations, provides a study of human nature that transcends age, gender, and nationality: everyone hopes and everyone grieves.  The nine stories in this collection model for writers the truth that there is no more compelling subject than human relationships.

Read the rest of this post here.

June 21

I’ve been reading and writing, and I haven’t gone away yet, though I will, shortly, to Oklahoma for a while.  Until August.  But I’ll still blog.  Maybe.

I’m about ready to give up the Amelia Peabody series, which I’ve been reading for two months, but which has gone drastically downhill.  It’s such a shame!  I enjoyed the hilarity for the first few, but the three most recent have been decidedly lacking in quality.  Maybe I’ll give it one more book.  Because I’m generous like that.  But just in case, do you have any ideas for an alternate default series?  Light, easy, and fun, with plenty of books in the series already, and possibly a mystery?  (Don’t say Agatha Christie.  I’ve already been there.  Twice.)

I’m also working on a guest post for the American Literary Review blog, to which I’ll post a link when it goes up on Wednesday.  It’s about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth.  It’s a good book, far better than my post about it.

I read somewhere that you should avoid beginning most of your sentences or paragraphs with “I,” because that’s egotistical and, ultimately, uninteresting.

I guess I’m egotistical.  Which I wouldn’t mind, if I could be this guy.

Anton Ego

June 16

1.  The two books I haven’t finished this month so far are Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson, a remainder from my modern British fiction class that I opened to justify the purchase, and The Man Who Made Friends with Himself by Christopher Morley, which I was more than a little bit sorry to dislike.  I’d enjoyed Parnassus on Wheels, Morley’s whimsical first novel, but this his last novel lacked the same lightheartedness, I felt, as well as any discernible plot.  The main character was just too pithy for me.

2. The book I’ve set the former aside for is Stories, a collection of all-new fantastic fiction edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.  I tore it open and read the first three stories in the bookstore and on the drive home.  So far, they have not disappointed.

3. I’m formulating a list of books to bring with me on my five-week absentation from my bookcase.  Books that are coming with me that I’ve already read are The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner, Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, about which I’m writing a paper, and Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King, which I plan to reread before segueing into Language of Bees, the next book in the series.  I consider this a modest list.

June 15

Word Count:  25,088.

With Chapter Five complete, I am halfway done with JuNoWriMo.

Am I jazzed about this fact?  Yes, I am jazzed about this fact.

June 13

Here is Fiction L-N.  I wish I had a snazzier introduction for it than that, but sometimes honesty is the best policy.

Virtual Shelf

Books on these shelves I have not read:

Shelf 1.  Most of the C.S. Lewis nonfiction, excepting  The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, each of which I’ve read twice to make up for the fact that I’m probably never going to get to The Abolition of Man.  I’ve also not read Christopher Logue’s War Music, which is a retelling of some parts of The Iliad.  I also haven’t read The George MacDonald Treasury, can’t remember how long I’ve had it, and have no memory of buying or receiving it.  I haven’t read The Last Legion by Valerio Massimo Manfredi; it’s one of my husband’s books.  Nor have I made it through the entirety of either The Mabinogion or Le Morte Darthur, though I’ve been through bits of both.  I haven’t read A Year in the World, travel essays by Frances Mayes, and am thinking of reselling it.  I haven’t read either of Frank McCourt’s books, though they’re on the reading list.  And lastly, which should come as no surprise, I haven’t read and don’t plan to read Moby Dick.  I’m not sure why I own it.  It’s probably my husband’s fault again.

Shelf 2.  I bought The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud when it first came out, have picked it up several times…but put it inexplicably back.  And that’s all! 

See?  I’ve done ever so much better with reading Lois Lowry and Robin McKinley and China Mieville and Steven Millhauser and David Mitchell and Audrey Niffenegger.  That first list was starting to make me look bad (my tastes shy away from nonfiction and select historical epics), but I think I redeemed myself with the second.