Archive for January, 2008
You Make My Day!
Musings from the sofa for talking about life as an ex-pat, and for accidentally starting me blogging in the first place. (And for being an unapologetic book snob, so we can be book snobs together!)
Zoesmom for reminding me what’s great about having a kid and what’s hard. And also for starting to write and post book reviews, since I always like to see what she’s reading.
The QC Report for making me laugh until milk comes out of my nose.
One Cold Hand for pure simplicity.
Musings for her brilliant, thoughtful book reviews.
The Lists – Books for the Obsessive Reader–another blogger whose book recommendations are always spot-on.
I fear I’m getting repetitive, but A Striped Armchair has great reviews and has also introduced me to the wider book-blogging world.
Galley Cat for book-world gossip and bookstore cats.
Eric Berlin because in real life I live in a puzzle world, and because he wrote my daughter’s favorite book of the year (The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, now in its second printing!).
LibraryThing because they keep me up-to-date on the latest happenings on my favorite website and time-suck.
Without these blogs, I might have more time to read, but I might not read as widely.
9 comments January 29, 2008
Assigned Reading
What is it about having to read a book that makes me absolutely not want to read it? I had decided I would read Arabian Nights, followed by Arabian Nights and Days, and then finish up with The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. This was my own decision. And yet, last night, I brought another book up to bed with me along with The Last Voyage just in case. And here I am poking around the Internet instead of reading.
A few years ago, tired of the looming, frightening peaks of my giant Mount TBR, I made myself a reading plan. I picked out a bunch of books I owned but hadn’t yet read, ordered them, gave myself slots for book-group reading and free choice, estimated the amount of time it would take me for each, and started on my way. (I had planned out about a year and a half of reading.) I think I read less in that year and a half than I had in the several years previous. I looked forward with longing to the free-choice slots. I even went off-roading for six books or so when I couldn’t take the structure anymore. I abandoned the plan at the end of 2006, and, rejoicing in the freedom, read more than ever before.
I avoid book-group books until the last minute. I start thinking more than a book or two ahead and I immediately start steering toward something else. It’s like college all over again–assign me a book, and I immediately don’t want to read it. I finally read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell last year. It had been sitting on my shelf for over 20 years, a college assignment that I never could get around to. And guess what? I loved it. But in my own time.
Enough of this–I need to get back to John Barth. But I’m not looking forward to it.
5 comments January 28, 2008
Arabian Nights and Days
Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mafouz (fiction, 228 pages)
(Please note: In this review, spellings differ from my review of Arabian Nights below. In each case, I used the spellings of the edition.)
My first experience with Naguib Mahfouz was his wondrous Cairo Trilogy, a saga of three generations of an Egyptian family from WWI to the overthrow of King Farouk I in the 1950s. He stopped writing for a time after that, and his work when he resumed was more allegorical and existential. As a reader, I have struggled to understand Mahfouz’s underlying messages in his later work, with mixed success.
Such is the case with my experience of Arabian Nights and Days. I could definitely appreciate it on the surface, and I understood some of what he was getting at, but I felt that the true meaning was tantalizingly beyond my grasp.
Arabian Nights and Days picks up where Arabian Nights left off, after the sultan Shahriyar renounces his former bloodthirsty ways and looks forward to a long married life with Shahrzad. Although she does not voice it to the sultan, Shahrzad does not meet this new attitude of Shahriyar’s with unalloyed joy, since his renunciation of his past acts does not erase the bloody past. Also, his reign of terror has resulted in a city where the good, for the most part, are dead or have fled, and the remaining citizens (and their governors) have more than their fair share of corruption.
The story that follows is a struggle between the inhabitants of the town, human and genie alike, towards good or evil. Shahriyar, going beyond mere words, often goes out into the city in disguise at night, attempting to bring himself closer to goodness. Many of Shahrzad’s stories find life in the town, and many characters from them reappear in different guise. The characters (and the readers) learn lessons of goodness, and strive (but do not always succeed) to follow them.
Mahfouz does not follow an easy path, and there are no easy answers or endings in this book. As always, his writing is beautiful and contains much to think about. There were several passages I read over again, to savor the words and the meaning behind them. This is a book I will turn to again, in hopes of understanding more.
6 / 7 owned prior to 2008. 86%!
2 / 7 global/translation. 29%!
4 comments January 28, 2008
My First Meme
From Musings from the Sofa comes my first meme, Eva’s Reading Meme. Here goes:
Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews? Oh, so many. Anything by Jodi Picoult, anything by Alexander McCall Smith . . . essentially the New York Times bestseller list. In my defense, the times I’ve overcome my reluctance to read books like this (The Kite Runner, The Da Vinci Code, The Alienist, and Running with Scissors come immediately to mind) have usually ended in confirming my original assessment.
If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be? Jo March, Danny Deck, and Rhett Butler for a long night of dinner and drinks. Jo and Danny would tell us stories, and Rhett would make sure we all had a good time.
(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave? I’ve read excerpts but haven’t been able to face the actual book, so it could surprise me, but Pilgrim’s Progress looks deadly.
Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it? I think I’m usually pretty honest about this. There are wide gaps in my readings of the classics, and I’ve been trying to fill them in. But I will say that I claim I’ve read War and Peace when I haven’t read the essay at the end, and I’ve only read half of Don Quixote (I just couldn’t face book two).
As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book? Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I was positive I’d read it before, only to discover when we read it for my book group that I was reading it for the first time. (Either that or I’m even more forgetful than I think I am.)
You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (If you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead and personalise the VIP) Although I hesitate to recommend a classic, for fear of scaring off someone who’s not a big reader, I would recommend The Count of Monte Cristo, since it’s such a thrilling adventure and should be an opening to further reading.
A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with? I have to go with French on this one, since I’ve been saying for several years now that I want to learn to read French so I can read Dumas in the original language.
A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick? I thought about picking Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, but I think I’ll have to go for Little Women, since it’s probably the book I go back to most often. As I get older, I can see where Alcott gets sanctimonious, but I still love the story, and start sobbing from the moment Beth gets introduced.
I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)? I’m really new to book blogging, so this is a hard question for me. I’m going to open it to the larger online book community and say that while I discovered quite a few wonderful books on LibraryThing that I wouldn’t necessarily have found otherwise, the best of them is probably Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie, which was a wonderful book and had the bonus of teaching me about Biafra.
That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free. My dream library has floor-to-ceiling shelves, with lovely woodwork and a beautiful set of stairs. It has large windows with curtains so I can protect the books from the sun, a stone fireplace with comfy chairs and ottomans before it, and a well-cushioned chaise longue. There are soft, comfortable blankets to snuggle into, and although there are hardwood floors, there are also bright, soft throw rugs scattered throughout. There is also a wooden table well-stocked with paper and pens and a laptop computer. As for the books, they are primarily pristine trade paperbacks, with some signed first-edition hard covers. Classics and contemporary literature coexist comfortably, with a robust nonfiction section including (but not limited to) biography, history (especially science history), and sociology, and a strong reference section. The children’s section has enticing cushions for them to sit on, and the YA section contains all my old favorites, packaged in such a way as to make them irresistably appealing to my children.
Eva’s rule is that everyone who does this meme has to tag four people, but most of the bloggers I know have already done the meme, so I’m only tagging Laura at Musings.
7 comments January 27, 2008
Persuasion
Last night, Tom, the girls, and I watched Persuasion, the first installment in Masterpiece Theatre’s The Complete Jane Austen. This went better than our Shakespeare foray of a few weeks ago, with all participants watching the entire movie. For the record, Alice liked it, and Emma thought it was ok. (For those who fear that I’m raising my children on a diet of whole-fiber classics, today being actual TV day, they will be gorging on the candy and soda of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.)
Persuasion is one of my favorite Austen books, and Anne Elliot one of my favorite characters. Anne is good, kind, and loyal, takes care of her family even though they treat her horribly, is not persuaded by the attentions of a bad man in a shiny package, and remains true to her love even when it would appear that there is no hope. In many ways, she is similar to Fanny Price. But Anne has so much more personality and backbone than Fanny. To be fair, Anne is much older than Fanny, and perhaps her regret over allowing her family to persuade her to reject Captain Wentworth has given her this strength of character.
As far as the ITV production of Persuasion goes, it looked lovely, and I thought it was well acted. Anne was suitably plain, although Captain Wentworth was a bit too young and dashing. It felt a bit rushed (after, they did have to cram the whole story into 90 minutes), but I still thought it went well, right up to the dramatic conclusion. SPOILER ALERT!!! I don’t remember Anne chasing after Captain Wentworth like this. I mean literally chasing–she runs up and down the streets of Bath, trying to find her man. And for those of us who were horrified at the tacky, tacked-on American ending of the recent theatrical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, that was nothing compared to the full-on make-out session in the very public streets of Bath when Anne finally does chase down the Captain.
I will forgive Masterpiece Theatre the ending, however, because now I will of course have to reread Persuasion in order to see it done Jane-style. And with the much-lauded Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice on their schedule, I’m sure I’ll be tuning in for future installments. But please–no more kissing!
2 comments January 27, 2008
Arabian Nights
Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted from Richard F. Burton’s unexpurgated translation by Jack Zipes (fiction, 595 pages)
I’m sure I read some of Scheherazade’s tales as a child, but any memory of them is hazy at best, and I wanted to read the originals before starting in on Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. Of course, whatever I read as a child would have been sanitized for my protection. Not so this version, which was full of sex and violence.
When King Shahryar and his brother King Shah Zaman discover their wives have been cheating on them, they kill their wives and go off to find someone more unfortunate than themselves, to make them feel better. They find a jinnee who has captured a virgin and is keeping her for himself, but unbeknownst to him, to get back at him for holding her captive she is having sex with other men whenever he falls asleep. Of course, instead of feeling sorry for the captive woman, they see this as more evidence that no woman can be trusted, so King Shahryar decides to marry a virgin every night, sleep with her, and then have her killed in the morning. He does this every day for three years, by which time his kingdom is pretty much emptied of virgins. His grand vizier, whose task it is to procure the virgin every day and then kill her the next morning, laments to his daughter Scheherazade that he can’t find anyone for the king. The lovely and educated Scheherazade volunteers to marry the king in order to stop the madness. That night, she asks the king if her sister can spend the night in the room with them so she can say goodbye. By prearrangement, her sister asks Scheherazade to tell her a story.
And thus begins the thousand and one nights, with Scheherazade telling tales, and tales within tales, and tales within tales within tales, stopping every night as dawn comes (at a very exciting point!) and tantalizing the king so that he keeps her alive for one more night so he can hear more.
The tales are exciting and fantastical, and the structure is beautiful, with each tale opening the way to a new one. This particular volume (as far as I can tell, there is no one definitive volume) has some familiar stories (like Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, and the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Seaman) and unfamiliar ones (like The Ebony Horse and The Hunchback’s Tale), with kings and slaves, jinnees and demons, giant birds and dragons. There is a running theme of storytelling to save one’s life, which of course eventually works its way up to Scheherazade herself.
The tales of the Arabian Nights were written long, long ago, and I should have expected them to be offensive. I guess I did expect them to be offensive, but somehow I was still shocked and offended over and over again by the sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and all the other -isms. I think I would have been less offended if some of this had been acknowledged by the editor of this book, which was after all published in the 1990s. But instead, the back-cover copy (and the editor’s afterword) refers to “Prince Behram and the Princess Al-Datma” as “a delightful early version of The Taming of the Shrew.” This particular story is delightful in the same way as General Hospital charmed us all by having Luke rape Laura late at night in the disco, sparking off their long-running love affair. The Princess Al-Datma has rejected countless suitors and defeated others in one-on-one combat. After losing a jousting match with the princess, Prince Behram disguises himself as an old gardener, charms the princess by pretending to by a harmless crackpot who gives beautiful jewels to her ladies-in-waiting in exchange for kisses, and when she decides to give him a kiss for the jewels, grabs her, throws her to the ground and rapes her. Delightful, right?
On the other hand, I was heartened to discover that the real hero of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” isn’t Ali Baba himself, but his slave girl Morgiana, who cleverly discovers the thieves and defeats them, saving Ali Baba numerous times in the process. And I was completely absorbed in Sinbad’s seven voyages (although I kept imagining his friends and family begging him not to get on a boat again, since he was clearly cursed!) and the story of The Ebony Horse. Like King Shahryar, I was often entranced, and rather than put the book down, I would push on to hear just one more of Scheherazade’s stories.
5 / 6 purchased prior to 2008. 83%!
1 / 6 global/translation. 17%!
2 comments January 26, 2008
The Story of Forgetting
5. The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block (fiction, 313 pages)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine mailed me an advance reader’s copy of Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel The Story of Forgetting, with the understanding that I would mail it on to someone else when I was done with it. I mailed it off this morning with a heavy heart, and with plans to buy a copy for myself when it goes on sale in April.
The Story of Forgetting intercuts the first-person narratives of Abel Haggard, a 70-year-old hermit mourning the loss of his family, and Seth Waller, a 15-year-old outcast struggling to come to terms with his mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, along with a study of a fictitious strain of Alzheimer’s and tales of the legendary land of Isadora, where no one has memories and everyone communicates through feelings. In a style reminiscent of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Block explores the themes of love and loss, remembrance and forgetting.
Block’s characters were well drawn and believable. The narratives of Abel and Seth were the strongest parts of the book. While the concept of the Isadora tales worked well, Block originally wrote those stories in college, and it shows.
I find it hard to approach first novels without trepidation. So many show promise only to founder at the end, or fall into typical first-timer traps (like show-offy language, telegraphed plot points, or my ) throughout. Mr. Block traversed the first-timer minefield beautifully, and brought his story to a satisfying (although not pat) conclusion. I look forward to future work by this author.
1866 / 36600 pages. 5% done!
3 / 5 purchased prior to 2008. 60%!
2 / 25 nonfiction. 8%!
0 / 5 global/translation. 0%!
3 comments January 23, 2008
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
5. Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser (biography, 548 pages)
A couple of weeks ago, Tom and I watched Sofia Coppolla’s Marie Antoinette, which was a good movie, but it left a lot unexplained. The end credits said “Based on Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser.” “Hey,” I said, “I’ve got that book!” Thus, this latest read.
As a kid, I really enjoyed biographies, but I have only just gotten back into reading them recently. I have particularly fallen in love with Claire Tomalin, whose biographies of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys captivated me over the past few years. Antonia Fraser didn’t grab me with that same intensity, but her biography of Marie Antoinette was solid, if light on in-depth analysis and broader context.
Fraser paints an extremely sympathetic portrait of Marie Antoinette, a caring family woman who was dreadfully wronged and maligned in her time and for the over 200 years since her violent death. While I would have preferred a more balanced look at the Queen’s life (while she surely wasn’t the sole, or even a major, cause of France’s economic woes in the latter part of the 18th century, Marie Antoinette’s lavish spending and her attempts to forward Austria’s interests in French politics certainly didn’t help matters), I appreciated the side of the story I did get. Married off to the French Dauphin at the age of 14, the youngest Archduchess of Austria was sent by carriage away from her beloved family, home, and friends to a 16-year-old husband who vastly preferred hunting to being with his new wife. Living in a highly ritualized, rigid court existence where her every move was watched–some to copy, and others to condemn–Marie Antoinette endured the humiliation of seven years of unconsummated marriage that was earnestly discussed by everyone from her mother (in scolding letters to her) to the pamphleteers (who speculated, wrongly, on her finding sexual consolation with many of the men and women of her inner circle). Is it any wonder she turned to an increasingly frantic party lifestyle?
When Marie Antoinette and the mild, indecisive Louis XVI finally became truly man and wife three years or so into his reign, and (most importantly) started producing heirs, their domestic tranquility would have turned them into no more than a brief paragraph in French history if not for the Revolution. It was only under extreme adversity that Marie Antoinette came into her own, showing strength and courage through four long years of terror.
Fraser’s epilogue lays out the analysis that I longed to have ongoing in the book, which was filled instead with too many portents of doom (“In her enjoyment of Figaro, Marie Antoinette could not imagine the consequences to her personally of the piece’s wild popularity . . .”) for my taste. And I longed for a timeline and a “Cast of Characters” to help me keep everything straight. All in all, though, Ms. Fraser’s exhaustive research makes this a worthwhile read.
1533 / 36600 pages. 4% done!
3 / 4 owned prior to 2008. 75%!
2 / 25 nonfiction. 8%!
0 / 4 global/translation. 0%!
Add comment January 21, 2008
The Jane Austen Book Club
My book group met this week to discuss Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Now, don’t get me wrong–I don’t think there’s an Austen book that I wouldn’t be happy to read many times. As my friend Becky says, “It’s Jane, innit?” But they can’t all be favorites, and Mansfield Park is not at the top of my Austen list.
(Warning: This next paragraph is full of SPOILERS.) It’s not just that I think Fanny Price is too passive and humorless and rigid and unforgiving, and that the vibrant Mary Crawford, in any other Austen novel, would be the heroine instead of the villain. It’s not just that I think Edmund Bertram is an old stick-in-the-mud and that I would be much happier, were I Fanny, to spend my life with the witty Henry Crawford. And it’s not just that Fanny ends up with a man who lived with her as a brother since she was ten. (Although that part always gives me a shudder.) It’s mostly that I think the true story of Mansfield Park is Henry’s conversion by his love for a good woman into a wonderful, kind, generous, thoughtful person, but since that didn’t go with Austen’s ultimate goal of a novel about “ordination,” she was forced to sacrifice it all for the unlikely elopement of Henry and Maria.
We had a great discussion of the book. You never know how it’s going to go–sometimes we have so much to talk about (especially if some or all of us didn’t like the book we read–have you ever noticed that it’s so much easier to articulate what you don’t like about a book?), and sometimes we’ve wrapped up the book in about 20 minutes and we’re off on other tangents. But the book itself, and the social context, kept us going for quite a while. It’s a good thing, too, because the service at the restaurant where we met was incredibly slow.
Book group combines two of my favorite things–reading and food. We hold every meeting at a restaurant, preferably one that we can tie in in some way to the book itself. (Our Mansfield Park meeting was at Tavern on Main, an atmospheric old tavern with hardwood floors sloping downward towards the several fireplaces.) And while sometimes our discussion of the book itself can be short, we never seem to be at a loss for things to talk about, so it’s always an enjoyable meeting.
There are some downsides to being in a book group–two of my least favorite books of last year (The Tale of a Dog, by Lars Gustaffson, and PopCo, by Scarlett Thomas) were book-group selections (although one of my favorites of 2007, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, was also a book-group read), and I do often find that, as soon as I have to read a book, I don’t really want to–but I always look forward to the meeting itself, and getting together with a group of smart book lovers to share our thoughts. I always emerge the richer for it. (And a night out on the town doesn’t hurt, either.)
5 comments January 20, 2008
A New Look
I know, I know–a new look already. I couldn’t get my pages (My 2007 Book List and My 2008 Book List above) to show up on the old layout, which I preferred. Therefore, expect more tinkering in the days ahead.
4 comments January 19, 2008
