The Reading Nook

I’m in the middle of writing a review while on breaks from cleaning out my waterlogged basement (finding the soaked inspection report from when we bought the house five years ago, with its recommendation to replace the water heater, which at 12 years had exceeded its life expectancy, was the cause of much bitter laughter), but I thought I’d take a few minutes, at the start of this new month, to review my 2008 reading goals:

1. Read 100 pages a day, or 36,600 over the course of the year. I am far behind on this, at an average of 87 pages a day. Although I started the year off like a house afire, life, and some slower books (particularly Tom Jones and Sacred Games), got in the way. However, I’d rather not get tied up in numerical goals, and find myself reading short, quick books in order to achieve an arbitrary number of books or pages, and I’m pleased with the quality of what I’ve read thus far.

2. Read more books I owned coming into 2008 (60%). I’m not doing so well on this goal, either–exactly half of the books I’ve read thus far were purchased this year. Even worse, though, is my book-acquiring trend–although most of the books I’ve acquired have been from BookMooch or the library, the fact remains that I have acquired 49 books so far this year, and read only 32. (I’m not counting audiobooks in these calculations.)

3. Read 25 books of nonfiction. I’m closer to target here–I’ve read 9 thus far, and I’ve been eyeing a number of others.

4. Get more global, and read more in translation. While this could be defined in a number of ways, I have not counted anything from the U.S., England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or Australia. I’ve read 8 books so far that would qualify (from the Middle East, Egypt, Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, India, and Israel).

5. To write reviews of the books I read. So much for good intentions. I still have 13 reviews to write!

I still have seven months to achieve my goals, so I’m not concerned. And they’re arbitrary goals anyway, so I’m still not concerned (well, except for the one about whittling down Mount TBR). But I will try to catch up on some of those reviews over the next couple of weeks . . . after I finish mucking out the basement.

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde (fiction, audiobook)

I love the Thursday Next series–the literary allusions, the punny prose, the various plot threads and the way they all tie together at the end. When Something Rotten ended with no indication of more, and Fforde moved on to his Nursery Rhyme Crime series, I was disappointed (not least because The Big Over Easy, the first Nursery Rhyme Crime book, didn’t have the charm of the Thursday Next books), so imagine my excitement at hearing another Next book was coming out.

Thursday is 14 years older in this next installment, and unfortunately (for this reader at least) she seems to have lost some of her magic along the way. The story itself seemed to take a long time getting started, and once it did more than a few scenes felt like plot filler. I was quite shocked, all things considered, to find myself at the end with a cliffhanger–after a three-year wait, I didn’t expect the book to just be a set-up for another installment. It’s possible Fforde recognizes this himself, and is tweaking the reader about it in a couple of scenes (in one, a character is stuck in an endless time loop waiting in line for a register at a TJ Maxx store, and in other a character is trapped on a boat in the middle of a deserted ocean).

While I highly recommend the series, particularly to book nerds, First Among Sequels is a disappointment. I’m sure I’ll read the next book in the series, but shall probably do so with arms crossed, insistent on getting a better experience than this go-round.

Love Marriage by V.V. Ganeshananthan (fiction, LibraryThing Early Reviewers, 302 pages)

“In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first and toward the second.

Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. There is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not an Enemy at all.

You cannot go unfettered into a family’s history if you are one of them. The nature of certain unions will be hidden from you, rephrased to you, the subject dropped, the music changed. There is Proper Marriage; there is Improper Marriage. This Tamil family speaks of the latter in whispers.” (Love Marriage, page 3)

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage, paints an elliptical portrait of a Sri Lankan family through their marriages and family history. Yalini, the American-born daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, is gathering the oral history of her family as she nurses her dying uncle Kumaran. Kumaran, a Tamil Tiger who married and fathered a child while part of the militant group, has fought his whole life for the identity of his people, an identity that Yalini only understands at a hazy remove.

Unfortunately, that hazy remove is passed along to the reader. In this first-person narrative, it always feels like the real story is tantalizingly out of reach. Yalini sketches her story through a series of little vignettes, introducing us to characters and then abandoning them, and rarely getting to the heart of any one story.

Yalini’s voice, while naive at first, grows in strength as the novel progresses. And yet, she remains the observer. The marriage structure, as outlined above in the quote, really restricted the narrative–the reader gets so much less of Sri Lanka and the current conflict, because it is all seen through the filter of the marriages. And, unfortunately, Kumaran’s marriage, which I was most interested in learning about, is never discussed. The reader learns nothing about his wife or their life together.

Is Ganeshananthan a writer worth watching? Absolutely. But this work is immature, and I think her next book will be so much better. I hope that she embraces her subject matter and her story, and learns to impart it with more immediacy, because I can see her talent yearning to break through.

Remember Flat Stanley–the kid who gets flattened when his bulletin board falls on him while he’s sleeping, which leads to many exciting adventures? Well, Stanley has been musicalized. Blocking my memories of the horror that was Dora the Explorer: Pirate Adventure, I bid for and won five tickets to The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley at our school’s silent-auction fundraiser, and dragged the whole family out for an evening. (My conversation this afternoon with Tom: (Tom) “I could be going out tonight.” (Me) “I’m sorry. But there were five tickets. It was perfect!” (Tom) “No, four tickets would be perfect.”)

So, how was the show? Well, let me give you a clue: here’s the touring company’s website. I dare you to find an actor listed anywhere. The first fifteen minutes were squirmingly bad, but after that it was tolerable. I don’t think it was that the show got any better as it went along–it was Owen’s rapt attention as he sat on my lap. At 5, he’s smack in their demographic.

At 12, Emma is unfortunately not in their demographic–she made it clear afterwards that this was an hour of her life she was never going to get back–and even Alice at 9 was a bit beyond it. I have to give the actors credit, though. I can’t imagine that performing in the touring company of a musical based on an early chapter book is any aspiring actor’s dream, but there was energy and perkiness to spare on that stage. Stanley got mailed to Hollywood, Washington D.C., Paris, and Hawaii, smiling and singing all the way. And for the under-6 crowd, at least, it was a magical musical adventure.

Strange Ways (Of fremde Vegn) by Rokhl Faygenberg (fiction, 192 pages, LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)

Strange ways, indeed. I don’t know if it was the writing or the translation, but I found this book very hard to follow. While I am not unfamiliar with narratives moving back and forth in time, Rokhl Faygenberg’s Strange Ways (written in Yiddish in 1925 and recently translated by Robert and Golda Werman) read more as if someone had taken each chapter, cut it into individual paragraphs, thrown them in a pile, and pasted them back together randomly.

Strange Ways takes place in a Polish shetl at the turn of the twentieth century, and follows several Jewish characters, but it is primarily the story of Sheyndel, a young woman who becomes a midwife and entertains various intellectuals in her salon apartment, and Borukh, her married businessman lover. Strange Ways also tantalizes the reader with the possibility of being about the shetl itself, and the rising tensions between the Jews who live in it and the Christians who want to move them out of it, but that story is strangely dropped without ever coming to an end.

I wanted to like Strange Ways, but I just couldn’t. Aside from the confusing temporal changes and the abandoned conflict between the Jews and the Christians, my modern sensibilities were too offended. Without giving too much away (but don’t read on if you really don’t want any spoilers) the burden of the forbidden love affair is all on the woman, while the man not only gets away with everything but is given the possibility of a second chance.

Faygenberg has some interesting points on morality and religion, and some of her prose is lovely. Strange Ways gives the reader a good sense of place and atmosphere. But most of her characters are viewed at a remove, and (possibly due to the translation) do not stay consistent from moment to moment. In the end, the reader is left without an emotional connection to any of the characters, and a feeling of disappointment for the story she didn’t get.

In honor of Mother’s Day, a poem by my Alice:

It’s Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day, and I think to myself
What a nice little present I found on the shelf
I’ve looked and looked all through the store
And I’ve finally found what I was looking for
It looks so nice, it looks so pretty
It looks as cute as a little kitty
It’s red, and green, and around it is blue
From when it was tiny it grew and grew
The top is smooth, the bottom is spiny
The spiny parts are really tiny
In a blue vase sits my beautiful rose
As it is holding a beautiful pose
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!

I would probably blog more if I didn’t spend so much time on LibraryThing, so when I read about this meme at their own blog, I had to do it for myself.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:

bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (according to my library I have 2 copies)
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by MIguel de Cervantes Saavedra (I read Book I but not Book II)
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce (I think I got 3/4 through)
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (I didn’t read the essay at the end, but I still count this one)
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens*
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (It takes an awfully long time for them to get off the docks)
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (I might have read the whole thing, but I doubt it)
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (hate is a strong word, but I wasn’t terribly fond of it)
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (but it’s Tom’s, and I have no intention of reading it)
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce*
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift*
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen*
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas*
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (but see Atlas Shrugged above)
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote*
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole* (but I’m sure I haven’t read it since college)
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (I had a copy at one time, but I must have lost it)
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (I was supposed to read it in college, and have been carrying it around ever since. Someday . . .)
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (see my review)
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire (did I read this? I can’t remember)
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (one of the worst endings I have ever read)

My final tally:

read: 62
started, but did not finish: 4
hated: 2
read more than once: 11
own, but not yet read: 24

How about you? If you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged!

Alice got home from her overnight trip to Plimouth Plantation this afternoon. For those who have never been, this is a fascinating educational trip. The Plantation itself is staffed by actors in period costume, who stay in character the entire time and are able to answer many questions on life in Plimouth for the early Pilgrims. Just outside the plantation wall is a small Wampanoag community. They do not do period recreation, but they are also an interesting source of information about native life. We had a great talk at dinner about her trip, and Alice and I shared information we had learned about the Pilgrims. I chaperoned when Emma took the trip with her class three years ago, and Alice’s recounting of her experience brought back some good memories.

In preparation for Alice’s trip, I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (nonfiction, 415 pages) last week. First off, let me say that I hate the title of this book. The Mayflower returns to England on page 101 and is never heard from again. Plymouth would have been a much more appropriate name for the book. That said, I don’t have much more to quibble with over Philbrick’s fascinating history of the Pilgrims and early-Anglo New England history.

In Philbrick’s history, neither the Europeans nor the natives were painted as all good or all bad. Philbrick traces the origins of this early American settlement from the departure of the Pilgrims from Leiden, Holland, in 1620; through their initial exploration and settlement in Massachusetts; their treaties, early disputes, and agreements with the natives (in particular with Wampanoag leader Massasoit); their acquisition of land from the natives and their increasingly contentious relationships with them; and finally into their war with Massasoit’s son, King Philip, and the rest of the area natives. Throughout, Philbrick highlights the points at which poor judgment, by Europeans and natives alike, worsens relationships between the parties and leads to an avoidable, catastrophic war.

Near the end of his book, Philbrick points out that most Americans think of American history as the first Thanksgiving and the American Revolution, with nothing in the 150 years between. I think that’s a fair statement, and I appreciated learning about some of the “between” history.

I started Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra this week. I’m finding it interesting, but fairly slow going (lots of flipping back to the glossary), and at over 950 pages, I suspect it will take me a while. And this is a problem, because I am overbooked.

My book club meets next week to discuss The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I already had it on audio, so I’m listening to it rather than reading it, and I have about 7 hours to go. I agreed to discuss The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies in May with an online group, and my book club meets again late May to talk about The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. At last night’s Big Read discussion of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury at the kids’ school, people enjoyed getting together and talking about the book so much that we made a date for a next meeting–June 5, to discuss The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I’m also expecting two Early Reviewers books (Strange Ways by Rokhl Faygenberg and Love Marriage by V.V. Ganeshananthan), for which I feel I should drop everything and read so I can write the reviews.

“Speaking of reviews, Chris, how’s that review-writing resolution going?” Funny you should ask. I’m woefully behind! I haven’t yet written reviews for The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, John Adams by David McCullough, the aforementioned Fahrenheit 451, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Nancy S. Lovell, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, and Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde.

So many books, so little time!

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (fiction, 349 pages, publication date June 3, 2008 )

In Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, a historical adventure set in the Mughal empire and Renaissance Florence, a mysterious blond stranger arrives at the court of Akbar the Great with a secret that is cursed for all but the emperor’s ears–the story of Qara Köz, the hidden princess, who left India and traveled to Florence and beyond. Rushdie warns the reader up front that this will not be a straightforward narrative:

The traveler had money in his pocket and had made a long, roundabout journey. This way was his way: to move toward his goal indirectly, with many detours and divagations. (The Enchantress of Florence, page 10)

and indeed, the story works back and forth between settings and time periods, with the narrative folding upon itself in many ways. Characters in one location or time have mirrors in another (and Qara Köz has her own Mirror who travels with her), events and phrases occur and recur, and questions of religion and identity and truth are brought up again and again. At its heart, The Enchantress of Florence is about the power of story.

Rushdie put years of research into this book (those interested in learning more can peruse his long bibliography, which he claims is not a complete list of books he consulted), and much of the background of the story has firm pinnings in historical fact. Akbar was a real emperor, who tried to embrace all religions and encouraged philosophical thought. Machiavelli is also a main character, and Lorenzo di Medici, Vlad the Impaler, and Queen Elizabeth I all make appearances. For the most part, Rushdie works these figures, and much of his research, organically into the story.

The Enchantress of Florence is out now in England, and reviews are decidedly mixed. I liked it for its adventure/historical novel/Rushdie-ness, and as always with Rushdie, it left me with quite a bit to think about. I’ve been reading some interesting takes on religion lately (primarily in Purple Hibiscus and Fieldwork), and this just adds to the mix.

It’s not a book I would recommend whole-heartedly, because it’s not going to appeal to those who have no patience with post-modernism in general or with Rushdie in particular, or with magical realism. Also, and I think this is typical of Rushdie, even in a book where the title character is a woman, it’s all about the men. The female characters have no existence without the men (one of them literally so–she was imagined into life by a man), nor, it seems, do they want to. Akbar’s explorations of religion and humanity and goodness will earn Rushdie no currency with those who already condemn him:

If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path. (The Enchantress of Florence, page 310)

However, it’s this questioning, this reaching and searching that elevates the tale above the adventure, and will stay in the reader’s mind long after the story itself has faded.