March 2012: 3 of 3

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: March 2012

10. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. And now for the Classics Kick. I’m a bit dissatisfied with my Barnes and Noble abridged copy of Dumas’s great novel, but I did enjoy the story however much the language may have been diminished. I reserve great fondness for this novel because I remember it as being one of the longest books I’d ever read when I was ten or twelve or so. Not only was it a book I was proud of having read, but I’d even enjoyed the reading of it.

11. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. Remembering that I’d liked Howards End when I read it a couple of years ago in graduate school, and seeing A Passage to India on a top 100 novels list, I felt like taking the challenge. It’s about Race, Class, and Gender. It’s about the oppressive colonization of India. It’s about Dr. Aziz, the gregarious Muslim Indian doctor, Miss Quested, the frigid fiancée of a rising Anglo-Indian civil servant, Cecil Fielding, an educator sympathetic to the Indian plight—and what happens in the Marabar caves that destroys the social fabric of the entire province. Everything is interpretable in several ways. A truly Important novel, and one to be read more than once.

12. The Vow by Kim and Krickett Carpenter. I took a brief hiatus from classics to read this true story I’d borrowed from a friend. After head trauma, Krickett Carpenter cannot remember meeting or marrying her husband of two months; nevertheless, their faith and their rediscovery of who they now are keep them together as a couple.

13. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Narrated by Maugham as a character, this classic of modernism epitomizes a particular style of novel I associate with the Fitzgerald set and the ex-pat scene of the 1920s and ‘30s. After witnessing death in WWI, Larry sets out on a quest for happiness, reading books, traveling the world, and trying to understand his spiritual nature, while Isabel, his fiancée chooses a life for herself that is commensurate with her class and standard of living. Isabel’s uncle Elliott Templeton, a goodhearted snob, is perhaps one of the most shallow and sympathetic characters I’ve read in some time. Readers who find the alienation, disillusionment, and fragmentation of modernist novels unappealing will not enjoy this book, but those who enjoy reading about a world without a center will value the unreliable narrator and finely drawn characters.

14. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. Thanks goes to my friend Connie for the loan of this delightful YA novel about Frankie, a fifteen-year-old girl who blossomed over the summer and has begun to attract the attention of the senior boys at her boarding school. When she realizes that because she is a pretty young girl she will never get invited to their boys-only secret society, she originates a series of pranks that quickly escalate in humor and significance as she explores the disparity between appearance and reality. Both intelligent and hilarious, this book of wit, wordplay, and societal norms will educate and entertain as Frankie discovers just what she’s capable of.

March 2012: 2 of 3

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: March 2012

6. A Gate at the Stairs (40%) by Lorrie Moore. Familiar with some of Moore’s exquisite short stories, I thought one of her more recent novels was a fair gamble at a dollar, but I found it not to my liking, primarily because of the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness style. I left this book in the seat back pocket of an international flight in the hopes that it would entertain someone else more than it did me.

7. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Is it bragging to confess that I purchased this novel in Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore in Paris? (Yes.) Having read only Arthur & George, about which I felt ambivalent, I was worried that Barnes’ award-winning newest novel would not be to my taste, but my fears were groundless. Exploring issues of time, memory, character, and the unknowable minds of those we thought we understood, this contemplative novel slowly accumulates emotional weight as the protagonist learns to reinterpret his past.

8. Old School by Tobias Wolff. After I heard Wolff’s stupendous short story “Bullet in the Brain” read aloud on a podcast, I instantly began searching for his work. Old School was amusingly and unintentionally related to The Sense of an Ending in that both had to do with private boys’ schools; but Wolff’s novel is a bildungsroman of an emerging writer and paid homage to several well-known figures in literature. It would be hard to say which of the two I liked better, for I enjoyed them both very much.

9. Wit’s End by Karen Joy Fowler. On the return flight, I thumbed through Wit’s End by the author of The Jane Austen Club which I read many years ago when it came out and of Sarah Canary, a strange novel about journeying through the West in the time of the railroad. This novel, about a woman who moves in with her mystery-writer godmother after the death of her father makes her the last of her family, is a quirky getting-in-touch-with-oneself narrative dotted with eccentric characters and descriptions of California. I left it on the plane as well.

March 2012: 1 of 3

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: March 2012

1. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. When I’m ill with a cold (which invariably strikes every March and October, lasting the full ten days), I want to read something I know I already like. That’s why I reached for a Sam Vimes book. The Commander of the City Watch is part hard-boiled detective, part beat cop, part unwilling nobility. In this book, he goes back in time to save the city and train his inexperienced younger self.

2. Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Still ill, I moved to the next chronological Vimes novel. This time, in order to dispel the tension between dwarf and troll threatening to overtake Ankh-Morpork, Vimes dives into both psychology and history to solve the murder of a prominent dwarf. I am dying to read the latest Vimes book, Snuff, in which Vimes on vacation nevertheless encounters crime, but it’s still available only in hardback.

3. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. An offhand comment of Chera’s, I think, put me in the mood to reread one of the five funniest novels I’ve ever read (it keeps company with Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman). Willis’s story of time-traveling historians was even better the third or fourth time because she has since put out her masterwork Blackout/All Clear, which resolves some questions about slippage raised in this novel.

4. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (20%). The three dollars I spent on this introduction to Marr’s work was sadly fruitless as I could not finish the book. The premise of fairies in our modern world intrigued me, but the story turned out to be less a fairy tale and more a paranormal romance.

5. Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip. Therefore I migrated to a fantasy author I knew I liked. This story of Roes and her sister had real fairies in it, the dispassionate kind who live in the wood. Several tropes and motifs put me in mind of the Ballad of Tam Lin, which pleased me; I would class this in a category nearby one of my favorite YA novels, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.