South in the Winter

What Are You Reading?

2009-08-03T12:17:00.003-04:00

Although I keep a separate journal for the sole purpose of cataloguing what I'm reading, it takes me a long time to update with my thoughts - I like to say a bit more than just "good" or give something three out of five stars.

But I'm out of blog ideas right now, so here's what I've been reading, in short form:

The Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire/True Blood books by Charlaine Harris - I'm addicted to True Blood, the TV show, and I've been devouring the books as fast as I can find them in the library (they're very popular). I think I still prefer the TV show, as it brings in a large and fun supporting cast, but I love the hint of sexual tension between Eric and Sookie in the books (Bill is kind of dull, am I right?). I'm about to start number three, Club Dead.

Little Dorrit by Dickens - I finally finished this, and was a bit disappointed. The ending was satisfying, but I still find the mystery of the Dorrit family quite confusing. I was trying to recap it for someone and realized that I still have no idea how it all works out in the end - just that it does. Then there's the "angel in the house" ideology. I admit it, I was annoyed by the titular character's innocence and perfection.

Sarah Dessen - I recently read her two latest novels, Lock and Key and Along for the Ride. I liked the former and LOVED the latter. Me and my young adult fiction!

Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris - this one's in progress. Harris takes the five Best Picture nominees from the 1967 Oscars and looks back at how they were made, looking at acting, directing, screenwriting, and everything else along the way. His thesis is that this was the year a New Hollywood was born, inspired in part by French New Wave and the civil rights movement. I've actually never even seen the five movies he profiles - Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate, Doctor Doolittle, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - but it's still a fascinating read.

What's next? Definitely Shirley. I could use some Bronte melodrama.

In Search of the "Unputdownable"

2009-07-19T11:42:00.005-04:00

Remember Elizabeth Bachner of this post? She has a second article about reader's block up at Bookslut. She says,

There are good, or even great books that are hard to read or slow-going, and also bad, waste-of-time books that are a slog. There are brilliant books that are unputdownable, but also piece-of-shit, brain-rotting books that are unputdownable. How do we tell which is which? How do we sate our cravings without making ourselves sick? And how do we isolate those key ingredients that enhance flavor, and find them in wholesome forms?

I think that's a really interesting question. I've read a lot of books recently with plots that seem promising - the travelling circus (Water for Elephants), a brain injury that changes everything for the son of a genius (The Beautiful Miscellaneous), even The Memory-Keeper's Daughter, which was about a man secretly giving up his daughter with Down Syndrome before anyone knew she had been born. All of those ideas sound interesting, right? But the writing doesn't really live up to each book's fantastic plot.

I'm beginning to think that for me, the best books - those "brilliant books that are unputdownable" - are about the ins and outs of the everyday. But presented in language that thrills, language that awakens all the possibilities which exist in those everyday situations. Simply put, my "best books" are the ones that take our world and hand it back to us blown wide open with promise.

Whether the language of a book is stark and cynical (Bukowski), built on the stuttering rhythms of speech (McCarthy), perfectly precise (Austen), poetic and ridden with imagery (Eugenides), or playful and repetitive (Dickens), it's all about how it balances the plot.

The reason I find books like the ones I listed above mediocre is because the language doesn't live up to the plot. The "best books," the ones I come back to again and again, manage to find a balance between language that excites and enthrals, and plots which speak to something human and timeless.

Bachner worries about how to keep finding those "unputdownable" books, and I can sympathise. I have months where nothing I read is special or mind-blowing. Nothing makes me sit up and go, "Yes, this is it, exactly," which is the reaction I have when some writer describes something that I've always felt and never been able to put into words. But then, sometimes, I'll have that reaction in the most unexpected places. I just read John Kelly's The Great Mortality, a history of the Black Plague outbreak of 1347-50. I couldn't put it down. It was fascinating, terrifying and timely.

In the quest for the unputdownable books, it's always best to just keep reading. And sometimes to avoid the bestseller list and just pick up a book because you like the title.

Bookslut also has an interesting piece about Tolstoy and religion. I've only read Anna Karenina, but Levin's spiritual crisis in that novel is so sympathetically and realistically described that I found it revelatory. I even wrote a paper about it! I was planning to tackle War and Peace this summer but I don't know if I have enough time left (given that I haven't even finished Little Dorrit yet - I like the idea of reading one Dickens novel a summer, though...)

The Great Escape

2009-07-16T23:32:00.005-04:00

The premise of Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman's 2006 novel Literacy and Longing in L.A. is this: Dora, a voracious reader, has never quite abandoned her childhood habit of binging on books when she's going through a rough time. Romantic troubles, a stalled career, and a failed marriage - all of these drive her to barricade her doors, unplug the phone and lose herself in novel after novel for days.

I do this, too.

I've mentioned one or two times here that I had a bit of a rough semester. This isn't a blog about my thoughts and feelings, but for the purposes of this post I'll just say that it was a year of new experiences and ridiculous academic pressure. Since school ended in May I've "dealt" with it by escaping into literature and upholding the bare minimum of contact with friends and family. I am working an undemanding summer job and my shifts have been cut quite a bit recently, so I have a lot of free time.

I'm sure it's the same for a lot of adults who used to be bookish children. My large, noisy family has always tired me out. Every so often I need a retreat from reality and books have always provided that. As a child at family parties I would hide in a bedroom or secluded nook somewhere and read, with the laughter and teasing from the dinner table as background music. I became quite adept at focusing on a novel and shutting out the world around me.

And now, though I love to spend time with friends, I can disappear for days, turn down invitations, even ignore my phone sometimes... in favour of reading. What is this impulse to turn to novels - all some form of fantasy, even the starkest realist fiction - instead of real life? I don't know whether my recent excessive reading (I've read about twelve books in the past three weeks, which is a lot for me) has helped me deal with what happened this semester or just pushed it farther away.

In Mack and Kaufman's book Dora's book binges are troubling, suggestive of depression or social anxiety disorder. But can book binges - or novel reading in general - be a way to relate to society? Bookish types are often shy and introverted. I wouldn't use those words to describe myself, but I'm a private person, and I find it most relaxing to be alone rather than around others. For those of us who are exhausted by the actual fact of social interaction, maybe books are a way to get over ourselves. A sort of practice attempt at real life, maybe.

I'm not sure why I turn to books when things are rough, aside from the fact that I love to read and I've been doing it my whole life. Of course, many people love to read, and I'm usually reading something or other, but when I'm upset or tired my reading becomes something else, almost more physical than intellectual. I devour books one after another, finishing whole novels in a few hours, hoarding my stack of books-to-be-read almost greedily.

Tell me, other comfort readers, if you're out there: is this just a habit at this point, a mechanism we use to escape for a while until we can move on from whatever's bothering us? Or is it the way we avid readers deal with the world?

In Defense of Oprah's Book Club

2009-06-05T11:23:00.004-04:00

Note: a list of sources and further reading appears at the end of this post.

Oprah is a lot of things – brand, businesswoman, talk show host, cultural tastemaker. When she picks a book for her book club, it literally flies off the shelves. I’ve witnessed the phenomenon first hand. I worked at a large chain bookstore in high school, right around the time when He’s Just Not That Into you was just a book and not a ridiculously star-studded movie. One mention of this slim self-help volume on her show and the book sold out in, I kid you not, two days. This frenzy for a lightweight self-help book based on a catchphrase from Sex and the City lasted for roughly two weeks; I can't count the number of people who came in and said, "I saw this book on Oprah..."

Of course, He’s Just Not That Into You was only mentioned on the show in passing; the effect is hugely heightened when it’s her official book club. Generally Oprah only picks fiction for her book club, and this fiction goes on to break records, storm the bestseller lists, and essentially become the “it” book of the month or year. And they say people don’t read anymore. Clearly, if Oprah’s reading it, so is everyone else.

People scorn this phenomenon. Jonathan Franzen actually turned down the honour, claiming that his novel was a "hard book for that audience." This smacks of elitism and an alarmingly outdated attitude about the class of people who watch Oprah, but you know what else is obvious here? Sexism. Franzen (and everyone else) knows that Oprah’s audience is mostly women. So when he says he doesn’t want that audience reading his novel, what he really means is that he doesn’t want women to read his work - particularly the type of women he (and we all) assume watches Oprah: stay-at-home moms. I guess only men’s brains are big enough to understand all those complex words.

Well, congratulations, Franzen, you got your wish. After an outburst like that I’ve been convinced to avoid your writing at all costs. My lady-brain doesn’t like to be challenged.

Readers, particularly more academic or egotistical ones, aren’t necessarily fans of the Oprah Effect either. Say there’s a little-known but brilliant novel that you love and discovered a long time ago. Oprah picks it and suddenly your cousin who used to read nothing but magazines and romance novels is raving about the author’s narrative style. As an English student, I totally get that – within reason. It can be frustrating to hear people talking about novels I spend so much time analyzing and dissecting at a high level.

But I would like to extend an invitation to all of those elitist readers who think that Oprah’s Book Club is about showcasing chick lit, or those who think that Oprah should leave literature alone because she can’t understand it properly. Here we go: get over yourselves. What does Oprah really do with her book club? Well, before she started picking only classic novels in response to Franzen’s idiocy, she increased sales for a lot of people who would otherwise be struggling writers. And because she picked a lot of female authors, she was basically helping said authors find a much bigger audience – and paycheck – than they might have on their own, since fiction by women is increasingly marginalized or missing from the pages of "prestigious" (brand-name) reviews like The NYT Book Review.

That’s probably another reason people hate on Oprah’s Book Club: she likes female authors. I think that’s a great way to counteract the pages of, say, the NYTBR, and every other traditional book review out there, which are dominated by men. But some people look at the list of Oprah-approved authors and think, “Oh. Girls. These books must suck.”

But you know what? Oprah has good taste! I guess it’s shocking to some conservatives, or those pretentious literary types (we all know some), that a black woman who was born into poverty likes to read and share what she reads with others. Let’s take a look at some of Oprah’s past picks, shall we? Among others, we have The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Anna Karenina, White Oleander, The Reader, The Poisonwood Bible, and more. She’s picked novels by Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison (more than once).

So not only has Oprah given much-needed exposure to a lot of novels that were formerly unheard of (The Reader, according to Wikipedia, was made into a movie thanks to the Oprah Effect), she encourages her audience to seek out challenging, classic literature. I remember catching an episode where she discussed Anna Karenina. “Hang on!” she said to her audience, holding up her paperback copy. “We’re almost there!”

That kind of encouraging attitude attracts people to reading classic literature. I can see why it scares authors like Franzen deeply – more people reading your novel means more people who can critique your novel. And since Oprah’s audience is predominantly women, maybe they’ll bring a completely new perspective that authors like Franzen didn't even think to acknowledge, being white men benefiting from all kinds of patriarchal privilege.

Oprah’s Book Club moves books out of stores and into people’s homes. It gives the millions of people who watch Oprah every day a shared experience. It makes daytime television a place for serious literary discussion. The only people who can hate on that are people who are too out-of-touch to realize that reading is for everyone.

Items of Interest

2009-05-25T15:07:00.005-04:00

I'm working on the Oprah post I mentioned, but pleasure reading has stolen my time away. I'm immersed in two Madeleine L'Engle books at once - I decided I would finally check out some of her adult fiction - and I'm also smack in the middle of Little Dorrit, which I'm loving (not quite as much as Bleak House, of course).

It is so nice to have whole days for reading novels, and moreover, to not have to write essays immediately after finishing said novels. I love summer. My reading plans for the next little while, after L'Engle and Dickens, include Shirley and some travel literature. But I'm thinking about abandoning structured reading lists and just picking up whatever catches my fancy.

I've been avoiding the Internet, but I saw this lovely essay about Carson McCullers at Bookslut a while ago. McCullers is one of my favourite writers. Many of her works are concerned with loneliness and the unlikely friendships that spring up as a result.

And here is something from Paper Cuts about Shakespeare's sonnets. May 20th was apparently the 400th anniversary of their publication. That article, however, ends with the typical alarmism about whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote the plays, sonnets and narrative poems attributed to him. Why does it matter so much to us who the "real" Shakespeare was? Why do people feel the need to go searching through his sonnets and plays looking for clues to his personality? I understand the desire to have a concrete idea of who actually wrote the plays, but if after 400 years we're no closer to knowing, it might be time to give up the search. As Bill Bryson noted in his recent biography of Shakespeare, and here I'm paraphrasing: while there's not much evidence to suggest that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon known as William Shakespeare did write the plays, there's also no compelling evidence to suggest that he didn't.

Whoever Shakespeare was, his "real" persona is undeniably separate from his art. It's the same for any artist. Writers may put measures of themselves in their works, or be inspired by events from real life - but it's a mistake to marry writers of such craft and creativity as Shakespeare with their literary personae. The fundamental part of writing is making something up.

And what happens if someone definitively proves that Francis Bacon or Charles Vere or some other star candidate wrote the plays instead of the man known as Shakespeare? I remain unconvinced that we'd gain anything at all from this knowledge. Shakespeare's work has obviously appealed to humanity for hundreds of years despite our scant knowledge of his background, upbringing and daily habits. "Unmasking" the "real Shakespeare," if there was one at all, takes a lot of the mystery away, a mystery that I think makes the plays and sonnets all the more appealing. We're free to imagine whatever we like about their author.

This is how Karen Joy Fowler begins her novel The Jane Austen Book Club, which I recently read: "Everyone has their own private Austen." Maybe everyone has their own private Shakespeare, too. In fact, maybe we all have private versions of our favourite writers. Wouldn't it be a mistake to come between readers and the images of these writers we've constructed for ourselves?

Memorable Mothers

2009-05-10T15:46:00.005-04:00

Literature is rife with dead mothers, abusive mothers, saintly mothers... mothers of all shapes and sizes. Here's a post from BookFinder about the worst mothers in fiction. In honour of Mother's Day, here's my own list of fictional moms to remember:

1) Mrs. Weasley, the Harry Potter series. She always has room for a stray orphan or two, cooks up a storm and is kind of traditional. But she also sticks up for the ones she loves with such awesome lines as "Not my daughter, you bitch!" She's the emotional centre of the Harry Potter books, providing Harry with the kind of familial love he's never known.

2) Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice. Sure, she comes off as a desperate flirt who embarrasses her two sensible daughters on a regular basis. But she's also just trying to ensure that her girls have financial security - and marriage is really the only route to happiness for Austen's smalltown Bennet family. Whether you hate her or find her endlessly amusing, Mrs. Bennet is essential to much of the novel's satire.

3) Sophie, Sophie's Choice. Faced with an impossible decision, this mother is wracked by guilt for the rest of her life. Possibly one of the most famous mothers in fiction!

4) Wendy Darling, Peter Pan. She's not technically a mother until the very end of the story (when she decides to leave Never Never Land), but Peter and his Lost Boys call her their little mother and adopt her as a sort of protection against some of the sad and lonely aspects of childhood. She represents the comfort and security that real, grown-up mothers are supposed to give to their children.

5) Marmee, Little Women. One of the saintlier mothers in fiction, Marmee is a shining example of womanhood for her four daughters. She counsels the impulsive Jo, teaches fussy Amy to be kind, helps Meg in matters of the heart and comforts Beth on her deathbed. All while running the household in her husband's absence!

6) Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina. At first a devoted mother, Anna's passion for Vronsky causes her to abandon her son - a choice she goes on to regret, especially when she cannot feel the same love for her daughter as she did for her son.

An honourable mention goes out to all those dead mothers in fairy tales and young adult fiction. They may not be present in the story, but their very absence often leaves a gaping hole which with the young hero or heroine must contend. See: Bambi (of course), The Little Mermaid, I Capture the Castle, Beauty and the Beast, many 18th century novels about young girls making their way in the world (Evelina, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless), Harry Potter again, and so on.

I am working on a post in defense of Oprah's book club. I think I might make it into a two or three part series, so stay tuned.

When Good Eating Makes for Good Reading

2009-05-05T16:33:00.005-04:00

Here's a fun essay from Friday's NYT. Geoff Nicholson revels in literary descriptions of disgusting foods, asserting that "the moments of literary eating I like best are the ones in which the characters suffer because of their food." As proof, he cites a truly disgusting passage about stew from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is really just the kind of meal Orwell ate at boarding school as a child.

I've written about this subject before. Although I can see Nicholson's point - aren't descriptions of disgusting things just as impressive as descriptions of succulent, seven-course meals? - I tend to prefer reading about bloods and guts if I want to be truly grossed out. In terms of writing about food, I like delicious feasts, both lavish and simple.

I mentioned Redwall, I Capture the Castle and Little Women in my previous post on the subject. Why is it that YA lit contains such mouth-watering meals? Funnily enough, many of the books I love for their gustatory delights are British, despite prevailing attitudes about British cooking. "Nobody feels guilty about mocking English taste, least of all the English," argues Nicholson. That may be true - but writers like Dickens delight in descriptions of good food as well. In fact, it's a particular feature of his novels, isn't it, because the food we eat delineates social class very neatly.

When I was younger, these very proper English feasts seemed so exotic to me. It seems odd to say, but I had no idea what the treacle tart and spotted dick Harry Potter and his pals were eating actually looked like. Treacle tart at least sounds similar to the classic Canadian butter tart. But who names a dessert "spotted dick?"

Speaking of Canadian treats, I would love to read a Canadian foodie novel. There's a rich amount of things to choose from: Quebecois poutine, sugar pie, tourtiere and Montrealais smoked meat, of course; southern Ontario meals inspired by church supper traditions (pies, tarts, squares) and Mennonite farmers (cheese curds, fresh breads); the different seafood traditions of both the east and west coasts. And let's not forget peameal bacon, which is apparently what Americans mean when they say "Canadian bacon."

Food is fascinating. How do certain things become regional specialties, and can we trace that in literature? (I need to read more French-Canadian lit, clearly. I wonder if there's a good novel out there about poutine and Montreal bagels...) And most importantly: why don't more Americans know about the butter tart, the dessert of the gods?

Some of my favourite foodie scenes from novels: every single feast at Hogwarts, ever; the aforementioned Redwall, with its ridiculously lavish banquets attended by talking woodland creatures; the Mortmain family's fondness for ham in I Capture the Castle; Christmas breakfast in Little Women; Jhumpa Lahiri's succulent-sounding descriptions of Indian meals in The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth; Miss Havisham's decayed wedding buffet...

Reader Burnout

2009-05-04T23:32:00.002-04:00

I'm burnt out. It was a tough semester and I did a lot of intense reading - from dense literary theory to four huge 19th century novels. And now that I'm done school for a few months I don't know what to do with myself! I've been wanting to read both Little Dorrit and Shirley but I can't stomach any more of the 19th century just now, to be honest. I have some Anne Tyler on my bookshelf, as well as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I've been planning a re-read of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami as well... I just can't make up my mind. I've started and put down three separate novels.

What kinds of things do you read when you need a bit of a palate cleanser, so to speak? I think I might try some Agatha Christie.

Feminine Minds

2009-05-04T16:09:00.005-04:00

A Jezebel link to this fairly innocuous story about S.E. Hinton has prompted me to set down a few of my thoughts regarding the gendering of fiction as "female." In the article, Hinton, author of YA classics The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, is asked about why, or perhaps how, she was able to write from a male perspective.

Known for her predominantly male characters, Hinton explained that while growing up she was a tomboy. “I had no identity in the female culture,” she said candidly. “I didn’t think like a girl, so it’s always been easier to write from a male point of view.”

There are a number of things about this quote that irk me. Firstly, I'm not sure why anyone assumes that it's difficult for a writer to take on another perspective, male, female or Martian. That is pretty much the point of novel writing. If a writer is good, then his or her characters, whether or not they share the same chromosomes as said writer, will be compelling and realistic.

Secondly, I do understand what she means by female culture - that culture of ponies, pink, princesses and other p-words that we girls are socialized to like - but it's a mistake to assume that said female culture is inherent or biological. I know I wasn't born loving pink and rainbows. In fact, I still don't particularly care for either of those things (I've never been a fan of the colour pink; ask my parents). And what does it mean to "think like a girl?" If she's a girl, and she's thinking, then she's thinking like a girl. I'm not a biologist and I don't know whether or not the claims that men and women process information differently are actually true. I do know, however, that not all girls - or all boys, for that matter - think in the same way. That's why we have such difficulty agreeing on the Radical Feminazi Agenda.

Jokes aside, and my love for Hinton's novels aside, I do think this is somewhat troubling, and indicative of much larger trends in YA and adult fiction in general. I've heard Hinton's novels praised because they are about "boy" things - fights and violence, "greasers," brothers, etc. People seem to assume that boys need to read about things they can immediately relate to in order to be interested in reading at all. Girls, however, are not extended this luxury. As girls, and therefore the "second" or "other" sex, we are always expected to sympathize with and understand the experiences of the dominant culture, i.e. male experiences.

(Side note: in the same way, the typical white, middle class North American experience is assumed to represent all North American experience in movies, books, television, and so on, unless these movies, books and television shows make a conscious effort to subvert this or highlight other aspects of experience. And there are plenty of people who think of, say, Toni Morrison as a "black female author" rather than just an "author" because she writes about experiences which are not those of the majority.)

A quick look at pop culture will tell you this. Movies about women are "chick flicks," even when they do not contain the stereotypical shoes, shopping and Cosmopolitans that Sex and the City unleashed upon the world. Take Sunshine Cleaning, which I recently saw. It stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as two sisters starting up their own business. Yes, it's funny, but not with the kind of broad comedy that usually characterizes a "chick flick" - pratfalls, misunderstandings between the female lead and the male object of her affection, etc. Furthermore - spoiler alert - neither of the two women ends up with a man at the end of the movie. And yet I've heard it labelled a "chick flick" even though it adheres to none of the conventions of the genre. It just happens to be a movie about women.

It's the same with books. I never read Anne of Green Gables or the Little House on the Prairie series in grade school. I did read The Outsiders, however. It's genuinely a wonderful novel that I think all children can relate to. But obviously someone thinks that not all children can relate to Anne of Green Gables - despite the fact that it's about the power of imagination and spunky characters who often break the rules, two aspects of the typical boy experience, at least according to the media. But AoGG is about a girl, and boys don't want to read about that, right?

I've gone on something of a tangent here. Anyway, I've been thinking on and off about fiction and gender for weeks now, inspired by the comments on this post I wrote a while ago about speed dating for book lovers. In the article I dissected for that post, someone called men who read fiction "a bit girly." Really? I mean, according to statistics that I have seen cited over and over but don't have the energy to find right now, it is true that more women read fiction than men.

But is there any evidence at all to suggest that this is innate and caused by actual sex differences? Women read fiction because fiction is "feminine," since it's not the manly truth? Please. Up until perhaps the mid 20th-century fiction was written for and by men. There has always been a subversive, "trashy" subsect of popular literature written by women - the Gothic novel of the late 18th century, or Eliza Haywood, for example - but the vast majority of fiction has been more "masculine" than anything, as it was written by men. Are we going to start claiming that Hemingway had a feminine mind because he wrote novels? What is a feminine mind anyway?

I don't know when or how this happened, but it does seem obvious to me that recently fiction has become very, very gendered as feminine. We are told that boys don't like to read, especially not books about girls, and instead of encouraging boys to read more "girly" books and, perhaps, develop some empathy for characters who don't exactly resemble them, we just say, oh well, fiction is for women. Is it any wonder that chick lit is so reviled in the publishing world? It's for those icky women-folk. Men wouldn't touch frivolous literature with a ten-foot pole - oh, wait. Except for this, and this, and this.

There are a lot of issues to unpack here but those are some preliminary (despite their length) thoughts from me.

Literary Landmarks

2009-05-03T14:13:00.003-04:00

I saw this post about the boarding house where Thomas Wolfe grew up on Paper Cuts the other day. I've never read any of Wolfe's novels, but I've been to the house, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, in Asheville, North Carolina.

There's the house. It's the kind of rambling Victorian house with a porch that I've always wanted to own and fill with books and cats.

We had a great, very informative tour while we were there; I recommend checking it out if you're in the area. Despite being unfamiliar with Wolfe's writing (beyond the infamous quote "You can't go home again"), touring the boarding house a few years ago got me thinking about the impact of "place" on writers. So many writers become indelibly linked to one place or another. For Wolfe, it was Altamont, his fictionalized version of Asheville. F. Scott Fitzgerald, until he moved out west, chronicled the lives of the young, rich and restless in New York. Then, of course, there are the literary tours of certain regions: a trek through the London areas mentioned in Dickens' novels, Jane Austen's Bath, and so on.

Going to a writer's home is a strange experience, though. Take Shakespeare's childhood home in Stratford, for example. There's really nothing there that tells us anything about Shakespeare the writer, or his plays. We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's day-to-day life. There seems to be this need to memorialize what we do know of him - to recreate his childhood home as it might have been in the 16th century, to exhaustively pour over wills and possible signatures and documents that relate only very slightly to William Shakespeare, the playwright - in order to convince ourselves that his writing is not just writing, but present in our reality. His house stands as one tangible thing we can definitely connect to him, whether or not he ever did any writing there and only set a few of his plays in "his" England.

Recreations of writer's homes, right down to period details and first edition copies of their works, are always just as much about those works as they are about the writer's life. After all, no one would be visiting the Thomas Wolfe Memorial if Wolfe wasn't a famous American writer. And so the Thomas Wolfe Memorial becomes a way to access Wolfe's works, not just his life apart from writing. Visiting a place he wrote about is a method of attempting to understand that place through lived experience rather than just words on a page.

Roundup

2009-05-01T18:05:00.004-04:00

Jezebel's Fine Lines series returns with a look at that most beloved of YA classics, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

The Guardian's Book Blog discusses how to recommend books for children, and asks readers to pick their favourite children's books of all time. I'm afraid that my list would be rather long, but a top five: Peter Pan, the Little House on the Prairie series (cheating, I know), The Little Prince, The Wind in the Willows and Little Women. Mine tend to be for older readers, but some of the suggestions at the Guardian are picture books and so forth.

England has its first female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

The Wall Street Journal has an amusing blog post on negative book reviews.

My guest blog about episode 5 of Little Dorrit is up at The Egalitarian Bookworm (Chick?).

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer

2009-04-25T23:34:00.002-04:00

Oh, my. The author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is working on a biography of Abraham Lincoln that includes vampire slaying. Presumably with stakes, honesty and killer oratory? Or will he "attack them with the North?" (Bonus points to anyone who gets that reference!)

There's something in here about the awesome combination of classic lit/heroic figures with pop/cult sensibilities, but I'm too tired to make that point. Mainly, I'm wondering: will Abe defeat sparkly vampires?

Reading like a Teenage Girl

2009-04-24T15:33:00.003-04:00

There's just so much to blog about today! Publishers Weekly says that more and more grown women are reading YA and teen fiction. That's not a surprise to me at all. As I have frequently said, I find that classic YA novels are rife with strong female characters, the kind you're not likely to find in modern chick lit. (No offense meant to any chick lit lovers, but I think we can agree that Laura Ingalls is a step above Andy Sachs.)

One of the books cited by Pub Weekly is, unsurprisingly again, Twilight. Now, no, I don't read that series because of strong characterization or compelling writing. But there are plenty of other YA books that offer those things, even new YA - Sarah Dessen, for one. I would certainly classify Harry Potter's Hermione Granger as a strong female character. I also love Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and (most of) its sequels, though those are a bit mature.

And of course, I've gone on ad nauseum about classic YA offerings with wonderful female characters. Madeleine L'Engle, the Little House series, Little Women, I Capture the Castle. You've heard it all before. It's no wonder, in my mind, that women are turning to YA fiction, both new and classic, to satisfy an urge to read about funny, complicated girls. That urge would certainly not be satisfied by much on the current New York Times bestseller list.

At Jezebel, Sadie also notes that, "Invariably the protagonists of these books have the power to change things." That's certainly true of the fantasy-oriented novels of the genre. Hermione and Lyra of His Dark Materials both put their powerful urges to do good and change the world into action - sometimes reluctantly, sometimes forcefully. I think a lot of mature women can relate to that, particularly in a culture which often stifles the voices of strong women.

(Via Jezebel.)

You Should Read - Stone Garden by Molly Moynahan

2009-04-24T14:52:00.005-04:00

In honour of my post on how hard it is these days to find good literary fiction to read, I bring you my third You Should Read post. I meant this to be a series and never got around to working on it. But it’s back for the summer!

I first heard about Molly Moynahan’s 2003 novel Stone Garden in a teen magazine. I find that mildly discomfiting now, because it’s a novel about murder. The novel begins with the finding of a teenage boy’s bones in a Mexican mass grave, and much of the plot revolves around narrator Alice’s attempt to come to terms with this shocking murder of her best friend and “soul mate,” Matthew.

Moynahan’s prose is beautifully evocative. She describes the effects of loss and grief upon the physical body as well as the mind. Alice is a complicated narrator – self-absorbed like many teenage girls, confused, hurting, desperate to keep Matthew for herself even after his death. She decides to work in a creative writing program for convicted felons as a high school project, befriends a shy girl with a tragic past of her own and generally searches for answers by wandering through her small town dazed and angry.

The adult characters are interesting enough – from Matthew’s grieving mother to sensible, caring teacher Mrs. Hardwood – but the stars of the novel are Moynahan’s teenagers. Alice, as noted, is complicated; her friend Sigrid, a musical prodigy struggling with the murder of her childhood babysitter, and Matthew’s sisters, troubled with drug and alcohol problems, are all compelling and relatable, if a bit mysterious.

The ending is oddly satisfying, perhaps not the most realistic as it tends towards the feel-good – but it’s what you want for these characters, who have had to come to terms with shocking, senseless violence at such a young age. (N.B.: the novel is mostly about rich students at a private school and they can often be smug.)

I recommend Stone Garden to anyone who likes smart teenage characters and excellent descriptive prose. Personally, I would put this right on the YA-adult fiction border. It's shelved in the adult fiction section in most of the bookstores where I've bothered to check, but it's definitely an acceptable read for a mature teenager.

I could see this as an Oprah's Book Club pick, but to be honest I think she usually makes good choices, so that shouldn't dissuade anyone!

to dream of Spring

2009-04-24T14:35:00.002-04:00

My semester is finally done! Here, have a poem by e.e. cummings:

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness--

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

I am so, so, so happy to be done. I haven't been this relaxed in a while. And I have actual blog posts planned!

On Reading

2009-04-19T20:08:00.004-04:00

So first, a heads-up! Fellowette and friends have been blogging their thoughts on the BBC's newest Dickens miniseries, Little Dorrit. Fellowette cordially asked me to guest-blog episode 5 quite a while back, and as that is next week I'm gearing up for it by catching up on the episodes I've missed in my past few weeks of insanity (I'm having a hard time finding somewhere to view it online from Canada, but I'm sure I will find a way by next week...). Lots of fans have been chirping in over at Twitter (see what I did there?), so check that out as well.

Yes, it's been a crazy few weeks with exams and final papers. I'm not completely out of the woods yet, but by Little Dorrit time next week I'll be free! And with freedom comes reading for pleasure. I've missed it so. Actually, the first book I plan to read for fun is Little Dorrit, or maybe Shirley by Charlotte Bronte.

My real reason for posting is to highlight this interesting article from April's Bookslut. Elizabeth Bachner writes of the search for the perfect novel to read:

The real sufferers of Second Novel Syndrome are failed readers, those of us with the literary equivalent of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Disorder, bookish tropical fish who thrive in fragile ecosystems in temperate waters, who die when our reefs are destroyed by ozone or refuse. We hunger for brilliant, exhilarating, awe-inspiring books that are literary and great, or just trashier, juicy books that are entertaining without being condescending. Yet, somehow, successful writers and their entourages seem hell-bent on producing and celebrating resolutely tepid work that falls into neither category.

This is something I think about frequently: the sheer amount of mediocre, but competent, fiction that gets published these days. In my very short review of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, I noted that I found the book boring and bland, very morally straightforward, even though Gruen's prose was called "darkly beautiful" on the back cover. It's about as darkly beautiful as a glass of milk, to quote myself again. I mean, that's not really anyone's fault. Kudos to Gruen for being published at all! Lord knows I'm not a novelist.

But it just seems to be symptomatic of something weird happening in the publishing world (and I still mean to get to my post on fiction being gendered as "girly," I promise). It just seems like there's a lot of middling stuff that's neither entertaining nor brilliant. Just kind of dull, novel-writing-by-rote. As Bachner notes,

It’s fine when I want to read Great Literature -- I just read something old, or foreign. Sometimes the old or foreign books even hit that perfect edge of juicy readability and brilliant, awe-inspiring, high lit goodness.

So true. But when you want something in between "life-altering classic" and "boring fiction"? When you're hankering for an entertaining but still vaguely literary, unique, exciting read? Whither the next The Secret History or The Virgin Suicides? These are Bachner's examples, and she describes them thusly:

It’s not exactly work that challenges the status quo, explodes the language, generates a haunting change in the timbre of the art world, or radicalizes the reader. But it’s genuinely entertaining, without the insinuating condescension of formula genre fiction. You can put your feet up and read the novel in a couple of escapist hours, hours where you don’t have the urge to flick on the TV, call your ex-boyfriends, think about genocide, or stare into the gaping, thrilling hole of your own life. Such books are pleasant. The problem is finding them.

Actually, she's very quotable, so go read the entire piece. I think she makes an interesting point, although for me there are a lot of levels between "classic," "unpretentious modern fiction" and "formulaic trash." Bachner notes that this is problematic when writers establish themselves with one great novel and don't follow up - again, like Tartt. (She cites Eugenides as well but I loved Middlesex.)

One last quote from the piece:

I remember being nine years old and loving everything I read, loving it earnestly, sopping it up like a little sponge, believing in all of it, hoarding it in the backseat of the car and ignoring the beautiful mountains outside. I loved it even when it was boring, The Hardee [sic] Boys or Les Miserables, anything, just as long as it was a book. It may be that reader’s block is incurable. It may be that it’s not a sign of being a failed reader, but rather an understandable disorder that plagues fragile souls in a disordered society.

Isn't that gorgeous? When I was nine years old I was so eager to fall into the world of a book that I had to be called to every dinner five times and read late into the night with a flashlight. My greatest goal in life was to figure out how to read and walk at the same time without wandering into traffic. And while I still love to read, it's true: right now I always wonder where my next great read is going to come from, instead of feeling sure that every book on the library shelf holds a story worth reading.

Literary Quiz!

2009-03-28T00:44:00.004-04:00

A post otherwise known as: I ran out of blog ideas and then got tagged by Fellowette to do this literary quiz!

1) What author do you own the most books by? Agatha Christie, most definitely. A friend's mother gave me about thirty of her books, and I had a sizable collection before that.

2) What book do you own the most copies of? Peter Pan. I have a very old copy that relatives used to read to me when I was a child, an illustrated edition that was released a few years ago, and an everyday paperback that's more portable.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Yes indeedy!

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Ha, none of my fictional crushes are secret: Darcy, Thornton, Adam Eddington, Gilbert Blythe...

4a) What fictional character would you most like to be? I agree with Fellowette: Lizzy Bennet. I mean, it's an obvious choice but there you go.

4b) What fictional character do you think most resembles you? I would go with Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle. And maybe throw in a dash of Hermione Granger.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life? I'm something of a compulsive re-reader so a lot of books could be the answer here. Probably Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light, or Peter Pan, or I Capture the Castle. Or the fourth Harry Potter book!

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? The Long Winter from the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year? I'm going to cheat and steal Fellowette's answer again: Breaking Dawn (fondly known as "Breaking My Will to Live").

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year? Bleak House!!! I'm very enthusiastic about it. Also loved Ethan Frome and A Very Long Engagement.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I wasn't planning on tagging anyone though... which is perhaps a clever statement on loneliness and the obsessive-compulsive reader! (Or not.)

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature? No idea. I know next to nothing about current fiction.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie? A Fine Balance.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie? Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald. I think I cited it as something begging for adaptation in an earlier post, but its lush, dreamy quality could easily be ruined by the wrong director.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. Er... I don't usually remember my dreams.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? Twilight? I devour Agatha Christie novels and SOMETIMES even read chick lit for fun (and also loathe the term chick lit). But I don't like to label things.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Oh dear. I don't really read "difficult" books. I'm slogging through Middlemarch right now. I am enjoying myself, but it's still very much a slog of a read.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? I haven't seen anything truly obscure... I've read A Winter's Tale, though.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Russians.

18) Roth or Updike? Never read any Updike; never managed to actually finish a Roth novel. Therefore, neither.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Sedaris!

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? NOT Milton. Probably Shakespeare. But I do like Chaucer.

21) Austen or Eliot? Have you been paying attention? Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I've never read a Henry James novel (I don't count The Turn of the Screw), no Moby Dick, no King Lear, and I skipped Paradise Lost when I was supposed to read it last year.

23) What is your favorite novel? The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is my favourite novel right now and has been for a few years. But the eternal spot is held by Peter Pan.

24) Play? The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard.

25) Poem? Ezra Pound's "Lament of the Frontier Guard." Anything by e.e. cummings. The Emily Dickinson that begins, "I measure every grief I meet / With narrow, probing eyes."

26) Essay? Hmm, I don't think I have a favourite.

27) Short story? "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates, "The Lottery" and "Charles" by Shirley Jackson, "Wunderkind" by Carson McCullers.

28) Work of non-fiction? Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett.

29) Who is your favorite writer? Jane Austen. Honourable mentions to Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald!

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today? Three words: Jonathan. Safran. Foer.

31) What is your desert island book? Bleak House.

32) And ... what are you reading right now? Middlemarch, assorted 16th century poems and prose, Eva Moves the Furniture.

I'm tagging... whoever wants to do this!

People Are Seriously Thinking About This?

2009-03-18T11:40:00.005-04:00

From Jezebel comes news of an apparent controversy in the book reviewing and publishing world: too-sexy author photos. They have a bunch of links back to previous stories about this, most notably some kerfuffle I missed about Marisha Pessl being "book hot" in the photo for Special Topics in Calamity Physics (a book I very much enjoyed).

You have got to be kidding me.

Since when is it acceptable to question the hotness of an author (female, natch) when writing a book review? Well, Janet Maslin apparently thinks it's okay: in writing a review of University of Oregon prof Miriam Gershow's book, she first checked her "hotness" rating on RateMyProfessors.com.

Because that's appropriate.

You know, I hate to be the one pointing this out over and over again, but why isn't anyone making noise about male authors with "hot" photos? Why doesn't anyone care about the perceived attractiveness of Jonathan Safran Foer, a writer quite similar to Pessl, or David Mitchell, a Booker winner who happens to be good-looking as well as talented? Oh, perhaps because they're men.

The Virginia Quarterly Review has more. It also notes an example where a male author's attractiveness is discussed in less-than-professional ways, but I believe that's an exception to the norm. I mean, not even one of the most talented, influential and popular female writers in history can get away with looking like herself.

Fiction and Gender

2009-03-14T12:55:00.003-04:00

Jennifer Weiner has a very interesting blog post up at the Huffington Post about female writers and how they're perceived to be "less serious" than male writers. If you've been paying attention at all you know it's an issue I feel strongly about, so go read. I will make one small critique: why, why, WHY do we refer to female writers as "women writers"? Woman is a noun, not an adjective. In this essay she uses the term repeatedly but never refers to male writers as "man writers." Just a small nitpick - I see it everywhere and it drives me nuts.

Also, inspired by the discussion a reader and I were having in the comments of this post on speed dating, I'm working on something about why the gendering of fiction as feminine and non-fiction as masculine is a bad idea. Stay tuned.

Roundup (the comeback edition)

2009-03-09T19:21:00.003-04:00

Archaeologists discover what may be Shakesepeare's first theatre.

The Washington Post thinks that university students don't read enough. (Please, please, PLEASE do not make me read more...)

The Egalitarian Bookworm takes down this piece of "insightful" commentary on Twilight.

The Guardian's Book Blog has an interesting post about translations of English-language novels vs. translations of novels in other languages, how that relates to parochialism, and some thoughts about a German novel that couldn't have been written in English.

Paper Cuts asks if Scarlett O'Hara is a feminist hero.

Bookslut writes about one of my favourites: Haruki Murakami.

Speed Dating for Bookish Beginners

2009-03-07T18:10:00.008-05:00

Here's an interesting article from the Guardian about reading and dating (reminds me of this old NYT blog post) - two things I don't often think about in concert, to be honest. Maybe it's because I'm an English major and really only associate with other English majors (barring the odd history/philosophy/poli sci acquaintance - no science kids, though), but almost everyone I know not only reads, but is obsessed with literature. If I'm interested in anyone in my small social circle it's pretty much a given that they've read some books.

The Guardian's Jenna Lang writes,

"According to a survey for the National Year of Reading, almost one in five people would read a book while waiting for their date to arrive in order to make a good impression."

Well, okay. See, I wouldn't choose to read just to make a good impression; I'd probably be reading anyway. So as a genuine lit-lover, should I be on the lookout for people who claim to read just to make a good impression? Do people really do that? If you don't read, just say so, right?

This is all because the British Library is hosting a speed book club, which seems to be like a literary version of speed dating. As Lang asks,

"The question is, how do you pick the perfect book to confer the desired air of intelligence and approachability, not to mention the combined sex appeal of Brad and Angelina?"

The responses she gets from men are hilarious - either highbrow, like Voltaire, or the supposedly "manly" trio of Dickens, Orwell and Hemingway. Dickens as a paragon of manly virtue? I have genuinely never thought of him in that way before.

And surprise surprise, women were less rigid in their answers. One suggests something current - which could be all manner of pop culture analyses or political tomes, maybe even Colbert's book or the latest Ann Coulter masterpiece (tongue firmly in cheek) - and another says that men who read fiction are "a bit girly." (Ugh.)

I would suggest reading something that you actually like and/or understand well enough to discuss, should the topic come up. New fiction is always good, because it means you pay attention to what's being published right now, but some people think that reading classics makes you look smarter, so that would work as well. If you're someone who doesn't normally read trying to woo people who do, read a novel that's a combination of fun and thoughtful - Austen would work, if you don't mind long sentences, or Tom Robbins, if you can handle a bit of wackiness.

Lang's conclusion sums it up nicely:

"So acquire a library resembling an Oxbridge English undergraduate's Christmas wishlist, ditch the chick-lit or macho reads, and potential mates will be beating down your door."

Heh. I'm not an Oxbridge English undergrad, but my Christmas wishlists do tend towards the esoteric. I've been asking for Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London for two years now, but strangely there are no "potential mates" accosting me in the streets.

But the article does raise some questions. Are there any books that would absolutely turn me off a guy? Yes, obviously. Mein Kampf, unless it was for a class or seminar or something. Bill O'Reilly, the aforementioned Ann Coulter, and other right wing blowhards. And if some guy was only into really misogynist writers and had never read a single book by a woman, I would be concerned. But then again, I once fell for someone obsessed with the Marquis de Sade (not to get too personal).

Ultimately, I'm just interested in men who read. If it's Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Bukowski, McCullers, Atwood, the Brontes or Gaskell, great, we'll have stuff to talk about. If not, we can learn from each other. As someone with a mix of Kierkegaard, YA lit, Shakespeare and The Devil Wears Prada on her bookshelf, I can safely say that I just like to meet other people who read.

(Via Jezebel.)

Famous First Words

2009-03-03T22:16:00.002-05:00

Over at Shakesville, the question of the day is: What's your favourite opening line from a novel? Naturally I felt the need to turn it into a blog post.

I'm partial to the first line of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is also my (current) favourite novel. "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together." I can quote it from memory, which is essential for a good opening line - thus disqualifying, for me anyway, some of Dickens' lengthier first paragraphs. McCullers' line is direct but is the perfect beginning for the story that's to come, which is in some senses as simple as that opening line but as complicated as anything involving the human heart.

I also love "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." That's from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It starts out so generic, and then the end of the sentence signifies that something's up.

And of course - of course - we need to talk Austen. What kind of fanatic would I be if I forgot the patron saint of the blog? Her opening lines are all so deliciously balanced between irony and sincerity that it is hard to chose. I love the completely sardonic "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" from Pride and Prejudice.

But the longish beginning to Emma is equally good, and technically brilliant, perfectly establishing Emma's character and the main drive of the plot with a few well-chosen adjectives: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. " Instantly you know the novel is going to be about vexing Emma right out of her happy disposition, perhaps into something more profound.

Brilliant takedown of the bildungsroman tradition (complete with bibliophile reference) comes from J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. "

And then there is my childhood favourite, Peter Pan: "All children, except one, grow up." Pitch-perfect.

The Feminist Novel

2009-03-02T17:05:00.004-05:00

A group of lovely (or should I say caterwauling?) Jezebel commenters started their own awesome blog a while ago, The Pursuit of Harpyness, and recently the discussion was about feminist books. I don't really remember my own feminist awakening. Growing up with a feminist mother, I was exposed to patriarchy-hating at a young age. While my sister and I have now become more radical than our mother, we are still a fairly feminist household.

But I do believe that reading voraciously as a young'un made me more feminist; perhaps this is even why I'm more radical than my mother today (or maybe that's just a natural generational gap). Growing up I devoured the Anne of Green Gables and Little House series - about spunky, plucky, talkative young girls who get into scrapes. Notably, both Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls are the "wild" young female characters in comparison to Anne's friend Diana and Laura's sister Mary - the good, quiet girls who are led into trouble by Anne and Laura. Needless to say I identified more with Anne and Laura: I was forever running my mouth off, volunteering an opinion to the room at large or playing make-believe.

Then, there is everything Madeleine L'Engle has ever written (minus her adult lit, which I'm going to read this summer as yet another project). Oh Vicky Austin, where do I begin: she is me, in so many ways, and she is so many other women as well. As L'Engle once noted, when asked to write new introductions for some of her classic YA novels, she identifies far more with Vicky than Mrs. Austin, because women are still just as insecure and confused as teenage girls. And Meg Murry: funny, brave, complex, smart, unsure, fiercely loyal to her family. LOVE. I'm only just realizing how much of an impact L'Engle's books had on me as a young girl. To this day they are books I can open and read at any page. I can even quote parts of A Ring of Endless Light.

I firmly believe it's possible to read Jane Austen as a feminist, even if you can't call her a feminist author. Her female protagonists are intelligent and relatable, and they always end up with an ending of their own choice, which is definitely a key element of a "feminist novel," whatever that means.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale had a huge impact on me (as did Cat's Eye, which blew my mind when I read it at the tender age of fifteen).

As far as non-fiction goes, I've never read any of the modern feminist tomes: no Betty Friedan, Naomi Klein, etc. I've read the requisite Mary Wollstonecraft, of course, and I highly recommend Virginia Woolf's non-fiction to everyone, men and women alike. There are some gaps I need to fill in - maybe another summer project?

In a weird way, though, as some of the commenters at Harpyness noted, the prevailing Dead White Male fiction I was forcefed in high school only strengthened my burgeoning feminism. I began to wonder why I really needed to read yet another Shakespeare play (and note, I love Shakespeare) and why the only female author of note seemed to be Margaret Atwood (and note, I love her too). There were exceptions, of course. I had one teacher who loved Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers and made me love them too, with the sheer force of his enthusiasm. But seriously, there are plenty of female-penned books out there besides To Kill a Mockingbird, and I wanted to read them in high school.

I've also written before about my appreciation of Bukowski and how it intersects with my idea of myself as a feminist. Love his writing, hate his ideas is too simplistic, but that's sort of what it is: a complex interplay between my knowledge of him, as a person with political leanings and a firm hatred of feminists, and him as author, sardonic and never quite serious, and him as character (Henry Chinaski), fundamentally insecure and self-loathing. Reading that kind of novel only forces me to etch out my own identity, perhaps in opposition to the Bukowskis and Chinaskis of the world or in defiance of them. I'm not sure, exactly. But would there be a need for feminism if there weren't inequality in the first place? No. So while I appreciate feminist novels and groan or feel sick or roll my eyes over misogynist ones, sometimes they can be eye-opening.

It always comes back to YA for me, though. I talk about it often but I truly feel as though YA is the best place to find heroes for girls, flaws and all.

Adaptation Fever

2009-02-22T15:06:00.006-05:00

Note: I started this post a while ago (hence the Academy Awards reference) and then forgot about it completely.

Just in time for tonight's Academy Awards, The Savvy Reader gives us ten books that should be made into movies. As we all know, I love adaptations of literary fiction, so I'll jump in. I am wholeheartedly in agreement with The Savvy Reader about Ann Patchett's beautifully-written Bel Canto. It has the potential to be an intimate, moving multicultural love story, the kind of movie Crash tried but failed to be. And the casting could be divine.

As for what I want to see immortalized on the silver screen? I've mentioned my desire for a new adaptation of Gatsby. How about A Fine Balance, a look at the unlikely friendship between three lonely people in Indira Gandhi's India? Keep in mind who's writing this blog post - yes, the book is horribly sad. But think of the movie sets! The slums and rural countrysides of India, the colourful clothing (the main characters embark upon a sewing scheme to make money), etc. It's the thoughtful, morally complex companion to Slumdog Millionaire.

And then there's Canadian novelist, playwright, actor and all-around awesome human being Ann-Marie Macdonald, whose two novels Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies are gorgeous, lush, multi-generational tales with complex female characters and intimate family dynamics. They would be tricky to film, as both leap in time and perspective, but the sets would be gorgeous - rural Cape Breton and New York in the Jazz Age for the former, southern Ontario farmland for the latter. I nominate Sarah Polley to direct an adaptation of at least one, fulfilling both the indie cinema and Canadian content requirements in one fell swoop.

As for casting, it would be exhausting to try and find young actors to play all of Macdonald's characters - many of whom age dramatically over the course of the novel - but the potential is there for a cast of young, talented, next-big-things. Only we would have to find a way to work in Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling somehow - two of my favourite talented young Canadians!

What work of fiction would you like to see on the silver screen?

Poetry for Valentine's Day

2009-02-14T16:20:00.004-05:00

My official title is Cynic-at-Large, but even I melt a bit when I read e.e. cummings' poetry (as you may have noticed, I'm a fan). So here, have one of his poems for Valentine's Day.

if i love You - e.e. cummings

if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

Melissa at Shakesville has a moving post on her preferred interpretation of Valentine's Day along with a few quotes from Aristophanes' speech from Plato's Symposium, which is a great read and very appropriate for this day. I really recommend reading Aristophanes' speech at least, if not the entire Symposium.

"And such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment." More here.

And finally, here is a sad love poem from Ezra Pound, from his difficult-to-find collection, Cathay, of poems inspired by ancient Chinese poetry.

The River Merchant's Wife: a Letter - Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you.
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

Dreamy Literary Men?

2009-01-30T19:36:00.003-05:00

OK, I'm not the only one who's thrown into a tizzy by fictional men. There's a fun discussion going on at Jezebel about sexy leading men in novels. The usual names are mentioned: Darcy, Rochester, Captain Wentworth (why do so many come from the 19th century?).

I submit: Henry Tilney, John Thornton (especially as played by Richard Armitage), Colonel Brandon, Gilbert Blythe, Almanzo Wilder (yes, he was a real person), Robbie from Atonement, Adam Eddington in Madeleine L'Engle's Austin family books, Faramir (I'm a nerd, guys), Ron Weasley (a pervy nerd), I could go on forever. My list seems generally composed of 19th century stoic types or quick-witted heros from YA novels. Could explain my sad love life... Anyway, contribute in comments if you feel so inspired!

Note: I, personally, loathe Heathcliff. I didn't just forget him, I purposely left him off the list. :)

Poetry Month makes a comeback!

2009-01-14T19:05:00.004-05:00

I have no idea if I've gone over a month or not in my sporadic posting of poetry. I do know that I stopped doing it around the holidays, and I apologize. I don't have time to check because I want to post this fantastic poem RIGHT NOW. Explanations later.

Scheherazade - Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

OK, so I don't read a lot of current poetry. I like my modernists and Victorians and occasionally some Shakespeare. I am far too busy (read: lazy) to keep up with what's going on in the poetry world, being as I don't even read the Times Book Review anymore and as such have no idea what's popular right now in fiction, let alone poetry. But I saw this on a someone's blog somewhere - apologies if whoever that person is makes their way here - and had one of those visceral, immediate reactions that the best kind of poetry provokes. The last three sentences destroy me.

Casting "The Great Gatsby"

2009-01-11T17:29:00.015-05:00

Here's an interesting, albeit two-weeks old, blog post at The Guardian about The Great Gatsby and Baz Lurhman's new film adaptation (first spotted at Romancing the Tome). Xan Brooks says Gatsby is unfilmable. It's one of my favourite novels, though I haven't read it in quite a while, but I'm inclined to agree. Robert Redford was not convincingly Gatsby enough - as Brooks notes, he's too immediately recognizable to play the role of a secretive, besotted social climber with a mysterious past.

In fact, in listing those character traits of Gatsby's I wonder if that's a fair analysis at all. He is certainly a hard character to describe; I feel pity for him rather than sympathy, and he isn't a character so much as a performer of strange, often obtuse actions. In fact, all of the characters are hard to cast: Daisy should be distaseful but not unlikable, because we have to understand why Gatsby wants her back so badly. Nick should be a shadowy presence - as our peripheral narrator - but also have some kind of charisma, because he's Gatsby's confidante, only friend, and route to Daisy. Tom - well that's easier, because Tom is heinous. Brooks asks who could play Gatsby but I wonder who could play the others as well. So I thought I'd devote an overly long post to some different options. (What can I say, I love adaptations and I love to cast them myself!)

It depends on the right combination of actors, obviously. Someone in the comments over at The Guardian suggests Casey Affleck for Gatsby, which is strangely brilliant. He has an oddly compelling screen presence but an almost awkward quality of movement which would convey both Gatsby's charismatic powers and his unease with the same society he willingly enters, I think. He's also not conventionally, movie-star attractive, and neither is Gatsby, which is where Redford doesn't really work in the role.

I'm tempted to suggest Cate Blanchett for every single film role, ever, as she is both luminous and mega-talented, but for a Daisy to match Affleck I pick Rachel McAdams. She can be prickly (The Family Stone) and dizzy/romantic (The Notebook), but is maybe too self-sufficient to be Daisy... hmm.

Casting a Nick who works well with Affleck and McAdams is a bit more difficult. Nick is often overlooked, as the unintrusive, kind of dull narrator, but he's really essential to the story. Not only is he the reader's eyes and ears, he's the link between Daisy and Gatsby. Without him none of the plot is possible. I really like Jim Sturgess - he does "young innocent" well, has played an American before, and has a captivating smile - but he looks younger than 27, and Nick is 30.

So for Option 1 we have Casey Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Jim Sturgess. Not a bad-looking bunch.

Now for Option 2, I again take a cue from someone's comment at The Guardian: Damian Lewis as Gatsby. He's British, but he's played American before in Band of Brothers, and is currently also affecting an accent for the TV series "Life." He's a wee bit old for the part but has done period work before and for some reason I can just picture it working. His Daisy would be Sophia Myles. Again, Nick is difficult to cast. How about Dan Stevens? That's an all-British cast (oops) but it might work!

Those options aside, my secret wish is for Edward Norton and Naomi Watts to reunite and play a variation on their characters from The Painted Veil. They were both so wonderful in that movie, and Gatsby is a similar story from the same period (a solidly American version, of course).

I think Ryan Gosling might be a good Gatsby, but I'm out of options for Daisy and Nick - truly, those two are harder for me to cast than the man himself. Gosling is an excellent actor (Half Nelson) and has done the pining lover bit, both restrained (Lars and the Real Girl) and impassioned (The Notebook). Wouldn't it be nice to see him and McAdams in another movie together?

In Order to Explain My Absence

2009-01-09T23:45:00.002-05:00

My life has been taken over by my re-read of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I don't want to do anything but read about Anna and Vronsky's passionate love (and Levin's stammering, awkward courting of Kitty) for days on end. So that's where I'll be for a while. (Oh, and doing some stuff called schoolwork and my part-time job...)

The amount of detail in the novel is astounding. It's really like everything is happening right before your eyes, but better, because Tolstoy makes sure to include all those tiny details that you might miss in real life. It's like an Impressionist painting in a way: up close you can see and appreciate all the brush strokes, and from far away you see a whole, beautiful picture. But either way, it's fascinating. [/pretentious]

I read the novel once, six years ago, and I am having a completely different and much deeper reaction to it now. More on that later. For now, I just want to read.

A Highly Subjective, Very Unliterary Year-End List

2008-12-30T15:23:00.009-05:00

Well, fellow bookish types, I made my goal of reading 60 books for the year (62, in fact, thanks to a few last-minute road trips). I remain firmly convinced that this only happened because I decided to start counting re-reads, and also because I had to read a boatload of 18th century novels this semester.

I always have more or less coherent thoughts posted about the books I read at my reading journal, however slowly updated it may be, but here's a run down of the best books I read all year (not counting re-reads this time, as, although I technically did read Pride and Prejudice yet again this year, I've loved it since I was fourteen). I wrote a bit about the six that really stand out, but there are more listed at the end.

Note: I do not read a lot of new fiction, especially since I'm a university student with a deficit of free time. So a lot of the best books I read this year were by Dickens and other canon-approved white authors who really don't need any more exposure.

In no particular order, then...

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

It's no surprise that this makes my list; I still think it's the best thing I read all year. I can't even talk about it without gushing in no coherent order about all the things I love: Mr. Guppy, Allan and Esther's quiet longing for each other, the physical descriptions of Lady Dedlock, spontaneous combustion, etc. This is a huge book, both literally, over 800 pages, and metaphorically, with its dozens of characters, multiple interconnected plots and several different settings. It's ambitious, to be sure, but Dickens is always so good at getting you right where it hurts - in the heart, to speak metaphorically again - that the experience of reading the novel is rather like being punched in the same spot repeatedly. And yet you want more. If you have inexplicable affection for nineteenth century Britain, ridiculous characters who somehow worm right into your heart, and writing that is unsubtle but emotionally powerful, look no further.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

This novel is a different kind of emotional wallop than Bleak House - it's about tragic, inevitable loss, intertwined with war, and the attempt to correct mistakes through fiction. From the very beginning, when Briony misinterprets what she sees between Robbie and Cecilia, you know - because of the rules of Serious Literary Novels, especially those about wartime - that nothing is going to turn out all right. So the tragedy of the novel is unsurprising, but what is surprising is how affecting it still is, in the end. McEwan manages to build up this beautiful, artificial world in which Robbie and Cecilia somehow seem to be really connected - and then he gradually, carefully, almost lovingly shatters everything, the creator taking pleasure in destroying his masterpiece. The novel's opposing force, the creative rather than destructive angle, is Briony, whose obsession with order and tidiness naturally translates into the desire to write. And it's Briony who's still left in the end to finish the story, to write what should have happened. Absolutely beautiful.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Apparently this was the year I loved really sad novels (see this, Atonement, elements of Bleak House and A Very Long Engagement). I'm really attracted to plots which seem to careen towards inevitable disaster, and Ethan Frome does not disappoint. The bleak winter weather, the isolated small town setting, the ominous figure of Ethan's wife, and the frame device - the story is narrated by a visitor to the town after the actual events occur - all signal that some kind of disaster is imminent. Ethan, our title character, is struggling to make a living from his sawmill and deal with his invalid wife's unreasonable demands. The only bright spot in his lonely life is his wife's cousin, a pretty young girl living with them at their isolated farm. Everything - including a particularly obvious scene in which a red serving dish breaks (symbolism!) - seems set up for tragedy, and yet it's not quite the tragedy you're expecting.

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot

Heartbreaking. As with Atonement, you suspect the ending will not be happy: this is WWI in France, for crying out loud, and my readerly optimism was completely unjustified. But you will fall in love with Mathilde, the protagonist desperately searching for her soldier fiancé. He's been officially declared dead but there is something secretive about the situation. Mathilde is equal parts determined, perhaps deluded optimist and tough-minded realist. The element of suspense in the novel - it reads like a mystery, as Mathilde gradually uncovers what really happened to her fiancé one winter night in the trenches - keeps it moving briskly forward, and all of the characters are real people who are only trying to do the best with what they've been given. Japrisot also ups the heartbreak quotient by ending with a small twist instead of the straightforward tragedy I was expecting.

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

I know... a list of big names in classic fiction and current literary superstars and then one lonely YA book. But you know what, in a year where the Twilight series came to represent the entirety of teenage girlhood, reading a Sarah Dessen novel is like having a small square of dark chocolate after months of cheap candy bars. Or something. With precise and careful characterization and a great deal of emotional sympathy for her teenage characters, Dessen is the best writer of realistic YA fiction working today. Just Listen presents a romantic plot which, unlike the aforementioned vampire love story, actually helps a young girl find her voice instead of stifling it in obsessive love for another.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

I didn't read a lot of non-fiction this year, but I loved this funny, insightful, rather breathless account of Shakespeare's life, work and theatre. Bryson packs a lot of historical data into a slender volume; if you're detail-oriented, like me, and latch onto topics with the tenacity of a dog with a favourite bone, this book will appeal greatly. No, this isn't particularly scholarly, nor does it assume familiarity with Shakespeare's work, but it will make you want to read Shakespeare again and again in search of all the depth and complexity which Bryson finds in his plays. And that is the mark of any good biography or piece of pop history.

Other books I loved this year include: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, my favourite Bronte-penned novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne), the wonderful North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Ann Vanderhoof's travel memoir An Embarrassment of Mangoes, and, for sheer creepiness, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. You can visit my reading journal if you want to know what I thought of each, and everything else I read in 2008.

Poetry Month - Holiday Edition

2008-12-24T09:42:00.003-05:00

This is by Tennyson, and it's from his poem sequence In Memoriam A.H.H., which I highly recommend reading because it's beautiful. It was inspired by the death of Tennyson's close friend and the poems - over a hundred, I believe - cover something like a four year period. Happy holidays to everyone!

Ring out, wild bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Holiday Reading

2008-12-16T21:21:00.005-05:00

I've seen a fair few posts and columns in the book world about what to read over the holiday break, so I thought I'd take a time out from my last bit of studying (one more final tomorrow) to list what I hope to read over the next three weeks.

Now, my goal is to hit 60 books for the whole year, and I have read 53 so far. Seven more is completely possible, as I'm a fast reader (when I'm reading for fun, anyway) and I always get a huge stack of books for Christmas.

I'm almost done Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and I love it so far. Lahiri's writing is rich in detail and her characterization is nuanced. It's so nice to take a break from the "classics" one reads for school - not that I don't enjoy my classics - and get into a good piece of literary fiction.

That being said, I'm hoping to finish this novel before I head home on the train so that I can take some Dickens with me for the six hour trip. It'll probably end up being The Pickwick Papers, although A Tale of Two Cities is also kicking around here somewhere.

And then once I'm home, I want to re-read Northanger Abbey, thus completing my project of reading (or re-reading) all of Austen's completed novels in one calendar year. Aside from that, though, the field is wide open - whatever books I get for Christmas or unearth in my parents' basement are fair game. After a semester of highly structured reading, I'm looking forward to reading whatever catches my eye.

I must say, though, having written an exam on Shakespeare today, I am jonesing for some more of the Bard. Maybe I'll read one of his comedies while I'm on vacation...

Poetry Month - Rainer Maria Rilke

2008-12-15T23:32:00.003-05:00

I'm a big fan of Rilke's poetry. I love what he does with natural imagery and how he manages to evoke this kind of pristine, yet wild, emotion from such images. (Good lord this poetry month project is making me quite pretentious.) I think what I mean is that he manages to distill emotion into images of nature and animals, and thus conveys a lot without using too many words. I'm also fascinated by the idea that everything I read by him has been translated. I don't speak or read German, although I am hoping to begin studying the language next year (French has kept me occupied until now). Obviously it will be some time before I can begin to understand, and appreciate, his poems in German, but I look forward to the day.

Like Ezra Pound's "re-imaginings" of ancient Chinese poems, I find that many of the Rilke poems I've read in translation are precisely rendered, almost exact, in terms of description, but they provoke an emotional reaction that's much harder to define. The following poem was translated by Stephen Mitchell, who has done a lot of translation of Rilke specifically.

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down
there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial.-But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...

Every Unhappy Family

2008-12-12T22:02:00.005-05:00

For some reason (masochism? cynicism?) I love to read a novel about an unhappy marriage. Obviously Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, from which the title of this post is taken, fits that description. However, it's a big, sweeping, epic novel and I prefer intimacy in novels about unhappy marriage. In Anna Karenina I think we're supposed to side with Anna; her husband isn't a very compelling (or forgiving) character, and we don't get a lot of his perspective - although it's been at least four years since I read the novel, so the details are hazy. But in, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, are we Dick fans or Nicole fans? The jury's still out, and there are plenty of reasons to support either one over the other.

Maugham's The Painted Veil is, so far, my favourite novel about an unhappy marriage. It's intimate, beautifully layered and simply told, with compelling but fairly ordinary characters placed in extraordinary circumstances. It's also Brit lit from between the wars, which is my happy place.

Another good one is the aptly named The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler. A lot of her novels are about the dynamics of marriage, but this one specifically focuses on how, exactly, a marriage begins and then falls apart.

Any other recommendations?

Useless Post; Lincoln Fangirling

2008-12-12T01:05:00.002-05:00

How did I miss this?! Over at the NYTimes' "Reading Room" they're discussing "the cultural and historical legacy" of Abraham Lincoln. I seriously love Lincoln. I'm not even American, but I have this weird obsession with Honest Abe. I took a Civil War history class just for him. I have not one, not two, but THREE songs on my iPod that reference him (one is Sufjan Stevens' excellent "Decatur, or a Round of Applause for Your Stepmother," highly recommended). I do like where "Reading Room" is going with this.

I need an "(almost) nothing to do with books" tag for these special moments.

Poetry Month - e.e. cummings part 2

2008-12-12T00:56:00.002-05:00

This poem is sexy. That's really my only reason for posting it. We all need more sexy poetry in our lives. I told you I was on an e.e. cummings kick right now! I love love love the last two lines and the "eyes big love crumbs" and also the idea of electric fur although it kind of freaks me out.

i like my body

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Poetry Month - Special Double Feature!

2008-12-09T12:11:00.003-05:00

When times get tough, I turn to Emily Dickinson to get me through. So we have one poem from her today, a fairly short one. It reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop's wonderful poem "One Art," so here's that one, too, in all its villanelle-like goodness.

I love a lot of things about Dickinson, most notably her idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization (both of which seem to be missing from the following version of this poem, which I found somewhere on the Internet...). She's also so strict with herself, and can therefore be inscrutable, but there's great sympathy in her poetry as well, particularly for the other loners of the world.

As for the Bishop poem, it's just beautiful.

I Lost a World the Other Day (Emily Dickinson)

I LOST a world the other day.
Has anybody found?
You ’ll know it by the row of stars
Around its forehead bound.

A rich man might not notice it;
Yet to my frugal eye
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh, find it, sir, for me!

One Art (Elizabeth Bishop)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Poetry Month - George Herbert

2008-12-06T12:59:00.005-05:00

As a "recovering Catholic," I'm not overly fond of religious poetry. But since I've been posting a lot of 20th century modernist stuff of late, I thought I'd switch it up and head back to the seventeenth century for some Herbert. For some reason I can tolerate religious poetry a la Donne and Herbert (but keep Milton far, far away from me) because they mix mundane and divine imagery. Gotta love those metaphysical poets and their conceits. [/English major] Donne in particular does incredibly interesting things with his language and has a wacky (an anachronism, I know) relationship with his conception of God, but Herbert is more low-key, which is why I'm posting this poem!

Jordan (I)

WHO sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse ? Is there in truth no beautie ?
Is all good structure in a winding stair ?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair ?

Is it not verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines ?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves ?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes ?

Shepherds are honest people ; let them sing :
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime :
I envie no mans nightingale or spring ;
Nor let them punish me with losse of ryme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.

I like Herbert's insistence on plain speech here. The first stanza is particularly strong, for me. I like the image of the "winding stair" and what he implies with his rhetorical questions: that there is also good workmanship (workpersonship?) in something plain and direct.

Also, I'm sorry for the lack of actual posting lately, but I'm in the midst of finals and finding it difficult to be coherent. If anyone would like to hear about some general themes of novel writing in the 18th century, I will be happy to oblige, but otherwise I'll keep my studying separate from the blog.

Poetry Month - Ezra Pound

2008-12-03T00:19:00.003-05:00

I've been obsessed with this poem since I first read it in September. I go back to it at least once a week, read it again, and discover something new. I especially love the second line, with its seemingly out-of-place exclamatory tone, the bones/frost imagery, and the tension between the poem's timelessness and its use of historical setting. Beautiful.

Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

Poetry Month - Thomas Hardy

2008-11-30T19:21:00.004-05:00

Thomas Hardy often wrote poetry from a "female perspective" and I've always found those poems to be his most interesting. I've never read any of his novels, but I like how unselfconscious his poetry is and the variations in his meter and rhyming.

She, At His Funeral

They bear him to his resting place --
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger's space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I.
Unchanged my gown of garish dye,
Though sable-sad is their attire;
But they stand round with griefless eye,
Whilst my regret consumes like fire!

I also really like the word "whilst."

Poetry Month - e.e. cummings

2008-11-26T23:34:00.004-05:00

I've been studying a lot of modernist poetry this semester and I'm getting back into poetry in a big way, reading it for fun, thinking about it, essentially loving poetry in its many forms, modernist and otherwise. So I'm going to try to post maybe three poems a week for the next month. In the lead up to the new year, a stressful time of holidays or exams or just changing weather, I think this will be fun! I can't promise not to repeat poets because I'm going through an e.e. cummings phase right now, but my choices will be fairly spur-of-the-moment at any rate.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Food Porn

2008-11-26T23:16:00.004-05:00

There's a cute story on Jezebel today about meals in novels. What's your favourite literary description of food? I'm going to have to put in for Brian Jacques' YA series Redwall, about an abbey of talking, highly virtuous woodland creatures who fight off evil rodents. I loved that series hardcore when I was younger, and it always made me terribly hungry because the mice, otters and badgers had gigantic feasts. Jacques goes on for pages about the huge fish they catch in the abbey pond, the wheels of cheese the moles roll out of the cellars, and all the elderberry wine they drink. It's making me hungry just thinking about it.

Honourable mention extended to I Capture the Castle. As it's about a poor British family whose circumstances gradually improve, the characters get genuinely excited about having nice things to eat. One memorable scene involves the family eating one ham for a week. Awesome.

Also, Little Women is good - who doesn't love the description of the Christmas brunch that then gets given away to a poor(er) family? And I believe it's Phillippa in Anne of the Island (of the Anne of Green Gables series, obviously) who notes that Dickens' The Pickwick Papers features lots of good eats. The Anne books are good for food porn themselves. Who can forget when Diana gets drunk on raspberry (?) cordial and almost isn't allowed to be friends with Anne?

Share your favourites in comments!

Much Despised

2008-11-15T22:31:00.004-05:00

There's an interesting post at the Livejournal community Bookish right now about people's most hated books. Predictably, people have been nominating Twilight, the Harry Potter series, etc. - things that make it big despite some kind of perceived lack of "real literary merit." (For the record I have a fascination/repulsion relationship with Twilight and I adore Harry Potter.)

It got me thinking - what books do I absolutely despise? The very first thing that popped into my head was Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. As a catalogue of post-post-modernist literary fireworks, it's not bad; as a novel, it's pretentious and annoying. It's a shame because some phrases and characters indicate that Foer can actually write well, but he doesn't know how to restrain himself. His second novel, Exremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is slightly less annoying but he still comes off as a self-aggrandizing Brooklyn hipster.

Honestly, other than that I'm having a hard time thinking of novels I hate. I hated Frankenstein with a fiery passion but it's also a complex, important text which provides a wealth of things to say about the gothic and romanticism, so that's a toss-up. Then there are mediocre novels: Jodi Picoult, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, etc. Modern fiction that I feel isn't particularly special or exciting in any way, but certainly isn't offensive or bad either.

And Wuthering Heights. Oh, Wuthering Heights. It's one of those novels where I have to be in the mood for an abusive, tragic, deranged love story and wild moors. Otherwise, just no.

Oh, I hated The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, which I had to read for a class. Note to 18th-century authors: giving your characters personality traits for last names is not, in fact, characterization.

Any thoughts?

Better Late Than Never?

2008-11-14T17:41:00.005-05:00

I just realized that I have been MIA for way longer than I intended. I swear I was just going to take a blog break for two weeks or so. A month later and I'm busier than ever, but here I am anyway. Writing papers is not as fun as talking about the books I loved as a kid.

Jezebel's Fine Lines series, which I've waxed poetic about before, is taking some kind of hiatus right now, but way back in October Lizzie Skurnick did a beautiful post on one of my all-time favourites, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, of the epic Little House series. I haven't read the full series in a long time, but every time I'm struck with the urge to read about brave settlers grimly preparing for the second ice age (or so it seemed when I was a kid), I break out The Long Winter. It's a really interesting book because Wilder was so adept at keeping things light and entertaining (and ostensibly for kids) while directly focusing on the tough things about frontier life. Such as: the town of De Smet, South Dakota almost starves to death when the trains stop running during the winter, until Almanzo "Manly" Wilder (making my sister and me swoon to this day) decides to saddle up his Morgan horses and find some wheat. I mean, right? Skurnick finds some parallels between the novel and the current economic crisis.

As a Canadian, I also appreciated this novel because I know what those kinds of winters are all about. Really, though, it is so hard to explain why it's heartbreaking - in a good way - to re-read these novels once you're All Grown Up (or in my case, pretending to be so). I tried in my previous post on Jezebel and the women who comment there, but I'm not sure I got to the heart of the issue. Coming back to (good) YA lit from an adult perspective is simultaneously comforting and terrifying. Will you still love the books that used to mean so much to you? Or are you going to see flaws in the narrative, ham-handed writing, all the things you didn't notice when you were little?

For the most part I find the YA lit that I come back to is still emotionally powerful because I'm remembering my childhood reactions to it and finding new depth in everything with my more adult understanding of the text. The Anne of Green Gables series is particularly worthy of mention here, as are the novels of Madeleine L'Engle, Little House of course, and the three Louisa May Alcott books I've read. If you didn't read something as a kid and happen upon it later in life, it's of course still possible to appreciate all the subtlety of the text, but not in the same nostalgic, multi-layered way. And that in a nutshell is why I still re-read my YA favourites.

Anyway, that was kind of rambly, and not really relating to anything going on right now. I am working on a paper about Shakespeare's popularity in eighteenth century culture, and it's actually allowing me to come at literary analysis from a historical angle (it's not for an English class), a new and exciting experience. I've also been reading like a crazy person. I'm going to make my 60 books goal for sure this year... (she said with shifty eye movements). I might have to disappear again for a while now, but I am still alive despite university's best efforts.

I Hate Midterms

2008-10-17T00:24:00.004-04:00

This is what I've been doing lately. I'll be back when I can see my desk again.

Nonsensical Rambling

2008-10-02T22:52:00.003-04:00

I just finished Atonement and am about to re-watch the adaptation starring the pretty people you see on the poster below:

I liked the movie a lot when I saw it last December, and I like it even more now that I've read the book and some of the ambiguity has been fleshed out, but the novel. Oh my god. It's fucking awesome. I'm still on a bit of a kick from finishing it. You know when you get sucked into a really good, gripping book and you can't do anything but read? Yeah. That's been my past few days.

I cried at the end. I am not a crier. I don't cry at sad movies about brave animals, or commercials featuring reuniting families, or at weddings. I barely cry at all. But I cried reading the end of Atonement. What does that mean? It means that you should also read the novel. :)

I'm going to tag this as a review even though it's more nonsensical rambling than review, as the title of the post suggests.

Banned Books Week

2008-09-30T10:11:00.002-04:00

In honour of Banned Books Week, I thought I would write something about a few of my favourite banned books. There are just so many to choose from, though, thanks to the censorship-happy crowd! Harry Potter, The Catcher in the Rye, Philip Pullman's excellent YA series His Dark Materials... There are the repeat offenders, of course. Judy Blume, for example, has had many of her books banned over and over again. Judy Blume, the wise and witty writer who practically raised a certain generation of girls (and boys too).

The ALA has a list of the most challenged books that also appeared on the Radcliffe Publishing Course's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. There are plenty of names on there familiar to all of us who took high school English. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird - one of the most beloved books in history, one that is often considered a gateway into serious, more adult reading. Someone once tried to ban The Lord of the Rings because he or she thought it was satanic.

Yes, there are a lot of books out there that have been banned. They form a special club of challenged books - meaning people will seek them out more than ever, to read again and again. Readers come for the controversy and stay for the writing and characterization. So what does banning a book actually do? Not what's intended, that's for sure. But censorship is always wrong. Just read Nineteen Eighty-Four, also banned, to find out why!

Book Questionnaire

2008-09-29T18:37:00.005-04:00

I found this somewhere or other and, because I don't want to do any more course-related reading or write the posts that I've been promising, decided to answer the questions here. Lucky you!

1. Do you remember how you developed a love for reading?

I've loved reading ever since I was very young. My parents, book lovers themselves, always read to me and I just grew up as a bookworm. I'm lucky that they encouraged my addiction.

2. What are some books you read as a child?

Oh boy, I read everything. Childhood/young adulthood is the BEST time for reading because everything feels so fresh and exciting, and you're just discovering that yes, there are people out there who understand you and wrote novels about it. Um, okay, topic. I read the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books until they fell apart. The Westing Game was a favourite. Madeleine L'Engle, of course - most of the Austin family books and all of the "Time" quartet. My fave was A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

I liked fantasy a lot as a child, though I don't really now: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Redwall series (talking animals! having feasts!), stuff by Tamora Pierce, etc. And then there are the "fluffier" series marketed to girls - Nancy Drew, Babysitters' Club, Sweet Valley. I read them all. And Lois Lowry's Anastasia series, too. Basically as a kid I would read anything. I'm actually a less adventurous reader now because I shy away from genre stuff.

3. What is your favorite genre?

Well, see last sentence above. If YA can be considered a special genre, I'll say that. If not, it's boring old literary fiction, which isn't actually a genre, so. Oh, I know! I love the kind of English whodunit murder mysteries perfected by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

4. Do you have a favourite novel?

Yes. For the past few years it's been The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I've actually only read it once because I found it so heartbreaking, but it had a profound impact. But what my "favourite" novel is changes every so often.

5. Where do you usually read?

Anywhere, everywhere. Car and train trips, on the bus, lying in bed both on a lazy morning and before I fall asleep, waiting in line, at the beach. I almost always have a book and whenever I have a few minutes free, out it comes.

6. When do you usually read?

See above answer.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?

Yes. Usually it's at least two. If school is in session it's more like seven. :)

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?

I have to be in the "mood" to read nonfiction, I find, unless it's particularly gripping or funny (Bill Bryson, as an example). Usually when I get sick of dense novels I break it up with some travel lit, a memoir, or a biography. I read nonfiction for school, but I don't really choose to do so. Usually it's sitting at my desk, wishing for better light.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library?

Like a true addict, I'll take it any way I can get it. The library is one of the finest inventions of humankind, in my humble opinion. Knowledge is free! Unless you keep the books for too long. I also like to buy books, though, because I like being able to re-read whenever I feel like it.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?

Yes. I have a lot of books I haven't yet read that I bought just because. I like to physically own books that I love or want to read.

11. If you have children, what are some of the favourite books you have shared with them?

I don't have children. If I ever do I will introduce them to all of the books I liked during childhood. I'd also like to make the case for letting kids read what they want, though. My parents gave me free reign in the library when I was a kid and it's my belief that I am a voracious reader today because of this.

12. What are you reading now?

I'm currently reading Tristram Shandy for a class, and I'm not very enthused with it just yet. Also re-reading Hamlet and skimming some British history books.

13. Do you keep a TBR (to be read) list?

Oh, yes. It's massively long.

14. What's next?

It's a struggle to keep up with school readings and read for pleasure on the side, but I try. I'd like to re-read Northanger Abbey soon, and there's a campus used book sale in October that I look forward to every year.

15. What books would you like to reread?

I love to re-read! I'll re-read almost anything that I like. See comment above. I would also like to go back to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter soon and see if my feelings for it have strengthened or waned at all. And I've been thinking about reading Norwegian Wood again.

16. Who are your favourite authors?

Novelists: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Haruki Murakami, Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yann Martel, Jeffrey Eugenides, Anne Tyler, Agatha Christie
"Writers" (encompassing short stories, non-fiction, and essays): Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf again, George Orwell, Flannery O'Connor, Bill Bryson, Dorothy Parker
Poets: Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Rilke, Browning, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound
Special Mention: Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World

2008-09-27T23:04:00.003-04:00

My devotion to the Bleak House miniseries (which is v. v. long) has been wavering of late because I've discovered Mad Men. Yes, only a season and a half after it first started airing.

You guys, it's so good. The level of detail is astounding. The constant haze of cigarette smoke, the drinking in the office, the cringe-inducing casual racism and misogyny (presented for our judgment as fact, not opinion) - all incredibly accurate. Or so I imagine.

Jon Hamm fully inhabits the main character, Don Draper. He's a suave ad exec with layers of secrecy obscuring his real personality, dissatisfied with the American Dream he's achieved but unwilling to admit this to his wife (or his mistress). Other cast standouts are Christina Hendricks as head secretary Joan and Elisabeth Moss as the naive new girl in the office. Oh, and Vincent Kartheiser plays a sexist power-hungry account exec. The last time I saw Kartheiser in anything was this little gem of a teen flick (also set in the 60s). I had no idea he could be so simultaneously creepy and needy.

Yeah, anyway, that's my current obsession. But never fear, we'll always have Bleak House to fall back on. I just can't stay away from Mr. Guppy.

Thoughts on Bukowski

2008-09-24T11:58:00.005-04:00

No snappy title today, alas, just some thoughts I've been turning over for a while. Charles Bukowski's name has been popping up in a few Internet discussions recently; on Jezebel, an editor said she wouldn't recommend his books as essential reading for men even though she herself enjoyed them.

I tend to agree with that because Bukowski was a misogynist, baldly put. I mean, there's no way around it. And novels laced with misogyny and misanthropy, no matter how sardonic and well-written, are not what I want all the men of the world to be reading. As this older article from The Boston Review notes, "I understood his attraction. Here was a detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free." Because white men have it so tough, right?

The article, a review by Michael Greenberg of Bukowski's last novel Pulp, goes on to discuss Bukowski's "impatience with trust funders, wannabes, feminists, bourgeois liberals, and almost every other writer in the world". It's pretty clear that Bukowski would have been impatient, to say the least, with my feminist ways. So why am I so drawn to him? It's pretty simple in some ways: his writing.

Whatever I may think of a writer's (or director's, musician's, etc.) political beliefs and, for lack of a better term, "lifestyle choices" (note that I am not using this term as a euphemism for sexual orientation), their art will always, always come first. And Bukowski is a great writer. Really.

His prose is simple with moments of shocking truth, his titles are fabulous, and his poetry is beautiful in the best way that pared-down, honest language can be: it's a direct hit that goes straight to your gut. In certain moments of Factotum or Ham on Rye I think, "Yes, that is exactly it."

Bukowski is perhaps the American writer who best understands an outsider's perspective. Not the teenage outsider posturing of Holden Caulfield or the drugs-sex-and-self-importance of On the Road, but the real outsiders, people who are born and live and die that way. It's a complicated mix of choice and fact for Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, the star of his novels. In Ham on Rye Chinaski has horrible acne, boils all over his face, which literally prevent him from interacting with the beautiful people of his high school world. But in some way the boils are also a gift, excuses that allow him to indulge his inner misanthrope. It's like he's saying, "If they don't want me, I'll make sure they really don't want me."

However miserable Chinaski might be making other people in the novels - his parents, the women he sleeps with, his few 'friends' - there's no way around the fact that he is the most miserable of all. Chinaski is a fascinating narrator because, really, the reader will simultaneously hate him and want to hug him by the end of the novel. Sure, life's not as bad as he makes it out to be - but he can also be hilariously funny, and observant, when he chooses.

And if Chinaski, as a thinly veiled version of the real Bukowski, has such a complicated appeal, it's no wonder that I feel conflicted about my love of Bukowski's writing. Notwithstanding my claim above that what matters is a writer's writing, not their personality, it's true that the misogyny and the alcoholism and a million other things make my relationship to Bukowski's work a kind of push-pull mix of repulsion and fascination. On the one hand, here's someone I never, ever want to encounter in real life. On the other, here's a great writer who can put complicated feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction on the page with very few words.

I think Bukowski should be read. His novels aren't required reading by any means, and maybe teenage boys should stay away from them, at least until a few years of real life experience (and perhaps some Feminism 101 classes) allow for more perspective. I understand why a lot of other female readers detest Bukowski - part of me does, too. But what he does with words, for the more aesthetically inclined among us, is worth reading.

And for better or worse, Bukowski has the same perspective that a lot of us anti-social bookworms did in high school, or later. We all feel like an outsider at some point. It's comforting when someone else can describe exactly what that's like.

My feelings about Bukowski connect to larger cultural issues. Is it possible in this society to be 100% feminist all the time? Of course not. The world is a sexist place and while we work to change that, we all have ways of submitting to cultural norms just to make life easier. I'm not necessarily proud of the times I laughed out loud while reading Post Office. I mean, there's cognitive dissonance involved.

But if I submitted every writer that I love to a rigorous inspection, well, that's not the purpose of literature. Literature is supposed to grab us and move us, make us question the world or take a closer look at something we've ignored. Bukowski does that for me, even though I'm aware of the sexism and the double standards and the male privilege.

It's interesting, and sad, that women have to exist in this precarious balance. It's not an issue with easy answers, because literature is of course always a product of its time, a record of cultural norms and attitudes asking for our judgment. My feelings are that Henry Chinaski hates himself just as much as the reader hates him. No, I can't really prove it in a blog post because I want to stop writing this soon, but that's the interpretation I'm sticking with.

So, listen. Read some of Bukowski's poems about music (yeah, his favourite composer is Wagner... cognitive dissonance is really helpful there). Read Post Office. Think about where Bukowski grew up and what environment shaped his beliefs. And then work to change those environments so that Bukowski remains a one of a kind writer. Because his writing is good enough to be one of a kind - and also because I don't want to still be reading misogynist literature in the 21st century.

You Should Read: Maybe a Miracle

2008-09-22T22:15:00.008-04:00

Novels with realistic teenage narrators only come along every so often. There's Holden Caulfield, Cassandra Mortmain, Vicky Austin, Jessica Darling and now Monroe Anderson. Monroe, of course, is the hero of Brian Strause's 2005 debut novel, Maybe a Miracle. When I worked as a bookseller, I was fortunate enough to grab a free galley at a book expo. I also have a signed hardcover copy (long story).

Basically, I stumbled into Monroe's story, and I'm grateful to have done so. Maybe a Miracle is funny, poignant, insightful, moving and witty. Monroe’s voice is that of a smart teenage boy observing everything around him with caustic wit and realistic insight.

The novel goes as follows: Monroe finds his 11-year-old sister Annika floating in their backyard pool on the day of his prom. She’s rushed to the hospital, where the doctors conclude that she must have hit her head while doing a backflip off the diving board. Annika’s in a coma and nothing can be done at the hospital, so Monroe’s family – led by his faithful mother – take her home. And that’s when things get really weird.

Annika’s accident prompts Monroe’s workaholic father to work even harder and sue everyone in sight until he finally faces his own flaws. Monroe's cruel older brother Ben, a golf star, slowly starts to change after the accident. Monroe is just trying to live through it. But his mother, a somewhat lapsed Catholic, has a resurgence of faith when strange things start happening around Annika. Statues of the Virgin Mary cry tears of blood, Annika experiences stigmata, and the sick and hopeless all over the country start writing letters to her in the hopes of being cured. Soon it’s a media circus around the Anderson household, and Monroe watches it all from a sarcastic distance.

This is a novel about faith, about family, about growing up in suburban America and trying to believe in something more. It sounds like an unrealistic premise, but Strause keeps it grounded in the characters. Monroe in particular sounds like someone I’d want to know, and his mother, rather than seeming like a crazy religious nut, is an incredibly sympathetic, complex character. No one escapes from Monroe’s sardonic eye – the Catholic Church, his Ohio suburb, the local police force, his own father and brother – but what makes the novel so unique is his reluctant willingness to believe in something, anything, despite the flawed society all around him.

If you like realistic YA voices, coming-of-age novels, sarcasm, flippant observations about Modern Life in America, non-condescending critiques of religious institutions, and stories about complex families, you should read Maybe a Miracle.

In Which I Link to Jezebel Some More

2008-09-19T17:39:00.004-04:00

I come bearing two awesome links from Jezebel (which, despite all its faults, remains one of the best places to discuss all aspects of pop and political culture with other women). They are, of course, book-related. The Fine Lines series that I've covered before takes on one of my absolute favourite YA books ever (EVER, people), A Ring of Endless Light. Soon I'm going to do a post on here about Madeleine L'Engle and how she basically shaped me into the person I am today, but more on that later.

My other Jezebel link is to this list they made of books every woman should read. It's in response to an Esquire article about books every man should read. As always, people are leaving great suggestions in the comments, so check it out.

Coming up in the next few days as I procrastinate my readings:

- the You Should Read post I've been promising on Maybe a Miracle
- something about Madeleine L'Engle, as promised above
- in-depth thoughts on the Bleak House miniseries and the Ciarin Hinds/Samantha Morton Jane Eyre
- yet another YA-related post about the plethora of blogs right now that recap beloved (or awful) YA series
- something short about Charles Bukowski

Lots to look forward to!

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

2008-09-16T23:40:00.004-04:00

Oh, why am I not surprised. The NYTBR tries to name the funniest novels of all time and completely ignores women! Here's Jennifer Weiner's take on it, as well as a post on Jezebel.

You know, I love Jennifer Weiner's smart, funny, insightful blog more every time something like this comes up.

Do I really need to explain why this is problematic? "Someone here mentioned Jane Austen, but only halfheartedly and only after I pointed out that not a single novel by a woman had been proposed. What gives?" First of all, one should never mention Jane Austen halfheartedly. But secondly (and seriously), "what gives" indeed. I would suggest that men are encouraged not to read books by women, thus significantly lowering the chances that many of the male NYTBR editors would name a woman-penned novel, that female writers are not featured as prominently in the book-prize-glowing-NYTBR-review world and write novels that are thought to be "less serious" than those penned by men, and that historically women in the publishing/writing world have been marginalized and voiceless.

But you know, let's try not to react in such a knee-jerk feminist way. I'll quell my immediate blaming of the patriarchy and think thoroughly here. If you're a woman who pays attention to these things, what you're feeling right now is not surprise. Just like the book list on how to be manly I discussed a while back, this is just another best-of list that ignores women. It's been happening since the beginning of time, and it's called the marginalization of women. (For a recent, real-life, non-book example of what I'm talking about, see here.)

Lists like these assume that the (usually) straight white male experience speaks for all of us: queer, black, Asian, female, transgender, Aboriginal, etc. Because so much of our dominant culture has been decided by straight white men, it becomes the norm for even self-proclaimed progressives to defer to those culturally sanctioned opinions when asked. Indeed, it's a really hard habit to break. At my university, people still use "he" when they mean "he or she," and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's sad that people still have a hard time remembering that "men" doesn't actually stand for "men and those other people with vaginas who tag along sometimes." It's pretty fucking annoying, to be quite frank, when your sex makes up at least half the world's population, to be continually thrust into the category of "other." Lists like these make me want to stand up and shout at the NYTBR, and the world in general, "My experience is valuable and deserves to be listened to!" And also, "women can be funny, you sexist assholes!"

I have a feeling things would be a lot more egalitarian if the people who wrote these lists actually stopped and thought, "Hey. Women are funny. Why don't we have more women here? Oh, because we deferred to the male experience yet again. Let's correct that." Not to toot my own horn, but my list of my favourite high school movies below has a few films directed by, written by and starring women, and it's not just 'cause I'm a feminist (I hope). You have to, you know, notice sexism in order to get rid of it.

ETA: Of course, as soon as I posted this I realized that my own list of movies below is incredibly white, which is another example of what I'm talking about - most of us have privilege that we need to recognize and overcome.

Something Completely Different

2008-09-15T18:30:00.012-04:00

I was watching Dazed and Confused for about the tenth time the other day, and thought to myself, "Self, I really wish you could write about your favourite high school movies on your blog." And then my self thought back, "No one's stopping you." So, in no particular order, here we go. I know, it's not book-related - not even marginally - but oh well.

Dazed and Confused (dir. Richard Linklater, 1993)

This movie is awesome for three main reasons: firstly, it features a host of actors who would later go on to be famous. Matthew McConaughey, in the only role I've ever liked him in, the delightful Parker Poser, Ben Affleck, Anthony Rapp, and a lot of others. Secondly, the soundtrack is amazing. It was shot in '93 but set in '76, and features all the music you might expect to come from that era.

And thirdly, Linklater completely nails the high school experience. It takes place on one night - the last day of school - and is mostly about teenagers driving around and getting drunk, but that's pretty much what your high school years are like: aimless wandering and hanging out with friends. Linklater has always said that he didn't mean for the movie to be nostalgic in tone, but to me it brings back memories of days that seemed to last forever and social roles that were the most important constraints in the world but simultaneously something to rail against.

Plus, the wide cast of characters ensures that there's someone for everyone to relate to - brainy overthinkers like Anthony Rapp and Adam Goldberg, frustrated jock Jason London, uptight queen bee Parker Posey. I wasn't even alive in the 70s and this movie speaks to me on a profound level about one thing that most of us experience: high school, both wonderful and terrible.

Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters, 2004)

Mean Girls is, on the one hand, just a really funny movie. I've seen it more times than I care to count and always laugh out loud. It's ridiculous, it's over the top, it's silly - it's also a scathing satire of high school. Written by the inimitable Tina Fey, who really can do no wrong at this point, like Dazed and Confused it nails the strict hierarchy of the teenage world.

This is also Lindsay Lohan's best performance to date, and features an outstanding cast all around in the Plastics, the mean girl clique Lohan infiltrates, and the social outcasts Janis and Damien who befriended her first.

Bring It On (dir. Peyton Reed, 2000)

Like Mean Girls, this movie is awesomely silly - and while it lacks the biting satire of Fey's script, it isn't short on laughs. Kirsten Dunst brings a fine balance of loveable ditz and tough cookie to the role of Torrance - look at her face in the picture to the right and you see someone who is fully committed to her role. The cheerleading scenes will make you want to dance. And with such memorable lines as "Those aren't spirit fingers! These are spirit fingers!" and "I'm the poo, so take a big whiff", the movie embraces cheese while managing to make us sympathize with cheerleaders.

Election (dir. Alexander Payne, 1999)

This movie is definitely satire - almost none of the characters are likeable (except Chris Klein's Paul), they're all power hungry (again, except Paul), and no one ends up exactly happy in the end. But Payne captures the somewhat ridiculous spirit of a high school student council election. And Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick - a super motivated, borderline OCD girl running for president - is the best performance of her career.

Matthew Broderick as the teacher who can't help but get involved reminds us that sometimes we never leave high school behind - quite literally, in his case. And hey, this movie is based on Tom Perrotta's excellent novel! So it's kind of book related after all.

American Graffiti (dir. George Lucas, 1973)

Like Dazed and Confused, this is a movie about an earlier era which tries not to be nostalgic, but realistic. Also like D&C, it gives us a group of characters - some friends, all connected in some way - who spend the night cruising around. The difference here is that the stakes are higher - characters are deciding where to go to college, if they go at all. It's a movie that makes you remember when your whole life was still spread out in front of you.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (dir. John Hughes, 1986)

This is the only John Hughes film that makes it on my list. Though the man certainly understood high school, I'm not crazy about any of his Molly Ringwald movies. But Ferris Bueller is pure fun from start to finish. Haven't we all wished that we could skip school and sing "Twist and Shout" in a parade in downtown Chicago? The movie's also just funny - there's no doubt that Ferris and his best friend Cameron are a pair of oddballs, and there's some dirty humour with the singing telegram and Charlie Sheen's police station cameo. But most of all, this movie will make you cheer Ferris on as he outwits his annoyingly thorough principal.

Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995)

Let's round out the list with another book-related movie - Clueless is a loose adaptation of Emma, and like Austen before her, Heckerling manages to make the rich, beautiful Cher seem sympathetic. Alicia Silverstone has never been so spot-on: her Cher is equal parts ditzy and intelligent, if wayward, Beverly Hills princess. She may be clueless, but she's a character to root for. Plus, the movie introduced us all to Paul Rudd. It's fun, it's fashionable and it has a heart.

So my favourite on this list is definitely Dazed and Confused, but I love them all. There's just something about a high school movie that gets your attention. For better or worse, high school never seems to disappear from the cultural consciousness. There are other fun high school movies like 10 Things I Hate About You and Heathers that I love, but I figured the list would get too long. I promise to post about books next time!

Sexy English Miniseries

2008-09-14T21:30:00.006-04:00

I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall this summer (and loved it). (I mention this because I'm working on getting my reading journal up to date). Anyway, I went to Amazon to find a summary of the novel, and guess what the first search result was? An adaptation starring a bunch of sexy Brits. (Hello, James Purefoy!) I didn't even know this existed, but rest assured I'll be searching it out at some point.

I don't know why I'm surprised, because if there's one thing that the BBC knows how to do, it's make pretty, well-cast adaptations of classic novels.

Speaking of adaptations, I watched ITV's recent Mansfield Park today (with Billie Piper) and it was dreadful. They cut out Fanny's visit to Portsmouth, thus robbing the story of the momentum that only class anxiety and awkward social gatherings can bring. To make matters worse, they cast someone good-looking as Edmund, and now I'm having somewhat embarrassing thoughts about the least attractive Austen hero. His eyes were weirdly hypnotizing. And furthermore, what was with all the running? They must have shown Fanny flinging herself around Mansfield Park (and chasing things, at some points) like five times. How undignified.

I'm almost done Jane Eyre but it has really lost me. First of all, I object to this:

I don't know whose idea that moustache was, but... no. Secondly, it's worrying me that I'm almost done and Jane hasn't even left Thornfield yet. As much as I dislike St. John, it's kind of an important plot point, no? And then there's Samantha Morton. She certainly looks the part, but there's something about her portrayal of Jane that I just don't like. I'm not quite sure what it is. I think Jane is a bit too forward at the beginning - she's supposed to be quiet but honest.

Well, you would think with all this time I spend sitting around watching these things, I have no other commitments. That's not true, though. I've just chosen to ignore my responsibilities and pretend that I live in the 19th-century English countryside.

The first true installment of "You Should Read" is forthcoming!

Roundup (the boring edition)

2008-09-12T22:44:00.003-04:00

At The Guardian's Book Blog, Graeme Allister ponders the resurgence of literary satire.

Jennifer Weiner updates advice to aspiring writers on her blog A Moment of Jen.

A Bookslut column discusses Hans Christian Anderson's loneliness.

My Book The Movie is a fun blog where authors talk about who to cast in the movie version of their work.

The Man Booker 2008 Shortlist was announced this week.

The Dark Knight as if Jane Austen had written it, link thanks to AustenBlog. I have no words.

Not much that interested me this week...

Bits and Pieces

2008-09-11T22:46:00.006-04:00

OK, it's not Friday, and I don't have enough links for a true Roundup, but there is a really fun post over at Paper Cuts about "gifting" songs to writers using iTunes. Bob Harris suggests "Comfortably Numb" for Coleridge, to which I say - ha! There are no comments yet, but I'm sure some will come in. I would suggest Modest Mouse's "Bukowski" for Bukowski himself. Too meta? With lyrics like, "yeah, sure, he's a pretty good read / but who would want to be / who would want to be / such an asshole?" it's a pretty awesome song. And I like Bukowski, too.

I'm also slowly updating my reading journal. I finished a ton of books at the end of the summer, so I'm at 37/60 for the year, and I have some pretty freaking long novels in one of my classes to attend to. Will I make my goal? Stay tuned...

You know about some of my reading projects from entries on the subject. I have one Austen novel to go (Northanger Abbey) and I'll be done my re-read of her oeuvre except for the fragments/juvenalia. The Brontes project is on hold indefinitely, but 19th century realist fiction is ostensibly still in progress. I just don't have too much time at the moment for Madame Bovary.

I'm trying to get in bits and pieces of the Bleak House miniseries where I can - between work, school, and volunteer activities, it's a challenge - and I am LOVING it. Yes, only capslock expresses the strength of my emotion. Gillian Anderson is wonderful as Lady Dedlock, British actor Anna Maxwell Martin (Cassandra in Becoming Jane) is a perfect Esther, and when I first saw the actor playing Guppy I squealed aloud, he is so brilliant. The cinematography is great too - London and the Dedlock estate are so appropriately bleak, but the actual Bleak House of the title is warm and homey. Perfection. I keep having to tear myself away to attend to real life.

Did we know that they're making a new TV version of Wuthering Heights? With that and the Ellen Page Jane Eyre, it looks like my Bronte project just got a bit more cinematic. Someone named Tom Hardy is Heathcliff; I haven't heard of him but judging from his IMDb page he seems to have been on lots of British TV. Here are some pics from the Bronte Blog.

One final state-of-the-blog note: remember how I did that one post about Sarah Dessen novels that I claimed was going to be a series? Yeah. I'm going to still make that the jumping-off point into a series, but it's going to be called You Should Read and from now on will focus on one novel that I loved and you will too. My plan for the first installment is Maybe a Miracle, a great book by Brian Strause that I recently re-read. This should go up over the next few days.

And finally, I changed the template because the other one looked crowded to me. For some reason it soothes my minor OCD to have all the linky stuff on the right-hand side.

That's all for now, I'm going to squeeze in some more Bleak House before bed.

Roundup (the mopey edition)

2008-09-05T13:12:00.007-04:00

I figured that once school started, I would have something to blog about because, English major here. But... no. My reading lists are pretty typical for the classes that I'm taking, and it's still so hot and sticky outside that my brain just doesn't seem to function. I've spent most of this week wondering why I didn't bring any summer clothes back to school with me.

I am feeling the back to school blahs, to be honest. So what's a bookworm to do? Troll the internets for something to burst the ennui bubble, I guess. Yes, it's Roundup, and on a Friday, too!

From The Guardian's book blog comes a story about books left behind in hotels, motels, rental cottages, etc., once the vacation ends. I don't think I've ever left a book behind after a vacation, which is quite a feat because I usually take a lot of books on vacation with me. The blog post is a reaction to this story about what books are left behind in Travelodges in Britain. Cherie Blair's autobiography came in third; I'm not sure what to think about that.

A substantial amount of Stephenie Meyer's draft of a Twilight companion novel/sequel has been leaked. Interesting. My thoughts on Twilight are complex enough that I'm glad we won't be seeing more of emotionally abusive vampires made out to be awesome boyfriends anytime soon, but also a bit disappointed that she can't redeem herself after the boring and silly Breaking Dawn. Yes, I read it. I've written about the series on here before, so I'll link you to this older reaction on Shakesville (my favourite political/feminist blog) by a guest poster. There are spoilers.

Some further thoughts on Twilight, though: I certainly read enough silly, retro-themed novels when I was younger. The Sweet Valley series is all that plus hardcore materialism and racism. Not a lot of the books I devoured make the good-feminist-YA-lit list. So I'm certainly not arguing that Twilight is going to scar tweens (and girls in particular) forever; I think I'm a pretty good feminist in spite of the crap I read while younger.

But there are plenty of young girls who don't have parents to guide them, to discuss why these books are problematic and unrealistic, or who are not raised in a pro-feminist community. The reason we love books so much is that they contain powerful ideas and themes that do make an impact. Even relatively silly chick-lit-type books strongly reinforce cultural norms. So yeah, I have conflicting opinions about Twilight. To be honest, they are kind of a fun read - but once you get to the end you're horrified that you enjoyed the book so much. I can't imagine what young readers feel.

On a semi-related note, here is a post from the Times book blog about gateway literature. You know, you'll be checking out fluffy young adult stuff from the library and all of a sudden you read this one "grown-up" book and suddenly you're a reader with discriminating taste. I don't think this ever fully happened to me because I still read and enjoy YA :). I do remember very specifically reading White Oleander and The Virgin Suicides back-to-back and being enthralled. They had teenage protagonists but they were very obviously Adult Books with Issues. I bet To Kill a Mockingbird is a lot of readers' gateway book.

I wonder if Wuthering Heights will be what Twilight readers turn to now that the series is over. (For now.)

Bookslut has a piece up about summer road trip reading. Oh, I miss summer.

The BBC has a new Tess of the D'Urbervilles miniseries. Although I'm a big fan of Hardy's poetry, I have yet to make it more than three chapters into Tess.

And finally, here is a melancholy autumnal poem from Ms Emily Bronte:

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

In a House, Bleakly

2008-08-30T00:32:00.002-04:00

The best thing about finishing a mammoth novel like Bleak House is being able to watch the miniseries starring these very Dickensian-looking people.

Gillian Anderson's cheekbones are something else in that picture.

Anyway, I loved Bleak House. I just find Dickens enormously entertaining, and a splendid storyteller. Yes, he can be a bit ham-handed and he is not subtle, as Elizabeth McCracken notes in her beautiful afterword to the novel (seriously, I liked that afterword almost as much as the novel). Bleak House started well, as Dickens' novels always do - he is such a master at describing the scene and placing his characters, isn't he? Then he lost me for a while with some confusing narration, but I got right back into it by page 200.

Since Bleak House is almost 900 pages long, you can say things like that and sound only slightly ridiculous.

I will be reading it again in winter semester for a course, and will come back with more sophisticated thoughts at that time. Probably. I will definitely be back with thoughts on the miniseries and thoughts on my long-delayed viewing of Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton in Jane Eyre.

End of Summer Reading

2008-08-23T11:35:00.002-04:00

So, August is almost over and I've just remembered that I have a blog. Sorry. I've been working, obsessively watching the Olympics (including ALL of the men's triathalon and some 4 am fencing) and trying to read Bleak House before school starts. I think I should have started sooner.

In lieu of anything resembling intelligent thought, here is an article from some Boston-area paper I'm not familiar with on end-of-summer reads. As the world goes crazy this fall with American presidential elections, oil prices, continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions, let's try to remember the lazy hazy crazy days that seem to pass so quickly.

Some of the reading I've been doing lately would fill out a summer reading list admirably. Death in Venice is good reading for the vacation you never expected to take; An Embarassment of Mangoes will make you want to lie on a sailboat in the Caribbean and never return; Bleak House will make you long for foggy London evenings. Er, maybe that last one doesn't quite work. Anyway, I'm going away for a few days to lie on a beach and read. Just that, nothing more - maybe a drive-in movie if I have the energy. Hope everyone enjoys the last of their free time.

Roundup (the short, Thursday edition)

2008-07-31T13:00:00.008-04:00

A Huffington Post blogger tells book bloggers how to write better reviews. (She makes some good points, and if I did formal reviews on here, I would use some of them.)

An excellent post at the Guardian's book blog about chick lit covers by Diane Shipley, and some follow-up at GalleyCat, make me wonder just what is going on in the publishing world.

Here's an interesting blog post about Jane Austen novels, adaptations, and Bridget Jones (originally found via AustenBlog). Yeah, I don't like modern versions of Austen novels at all, either, but the Bridget Jones movie was actually funny. Although casting Colin Firth as Mark Darcy was blatantly meant to appeal to a world full of girls still swooning over his wet-pants-wearing Darcy in the BBC's P&P.

And one last Austen-related link - a satirical blog post about P&P as a "sexy summer read."

Great Adaptations

2008-07-31T12:21:00.010-04:00

Over at the IFC website, Maud Newton has an article up about novels and short stories she'd like to see adapted. I agree with her on No Country for Old Men, which I've just finished reading. Film suits McCarthy's style particularly well because it's so spare already, it seems like stage direction. Also, think about where his novels are set - the cinematography would have to be brilliant no matter how butchered the dialogue.

Still, it depends on getting the right person to adapt the novel, not necessarily getting the right novel to adapt. All the Pretty Horses was a bad movie despite its source material; Tristram Shandy is witty and amusing (with some problems) even though the book is often called unreadable AND "un-filmable".

I haven't read any of the books Newton picks, so I thought about my own preferences. I like adaptations, unlike many book lovers I know. I'd love to see a novel called Maybe a Miracle adapted. It's a sweetly sardonic story about a teenage boy whose sister falls into a coma, setting off some strange events. Or how about A Fine Balance? I frequently call it the most depressing novel I've ever read, which is still true, but it would make an epic movie with an opportunity for a great ensemble cast. There's also a novel by Canadian writer Helen Humphreys called The Lost Garden which is sad and full of longing and descriptions of the English countryside - a perfect candidate for adapting, right?

Then there are adaptations of movies that you wish had never happened, like the recent Love in the Time of Cholera. I mean, if you're going to adapt a beloved book, you better get it right, like Peter Jackson did. I'd like to see some novels given some new attention: The Great Gatsby, A Ring of Endless Light (it was made into a TV movie). I don't like the Harry Potter movies at all, and I hope that in a few decades they get remade into something that actually captures the magic of the books.

My favourite adaptations are usually those done by the BBC with impeccable attention to detail, like Pride and Prejudice. I also love The Painted Veil, produced by Edward Norton, and (obviously) The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind. Adaptations always have the power to be incredibly disappointing or uplifting - if they're done right, they make you see a novel in new ways. If not, they can ruin the source material forever. Not to get melodramatic or anything.

Final Thoughts on Jane Eyre

2008-07-30T15:48:00.007-04:00

I finished my re-read of Jane Eyre quite some time ago and have been stuck on what to make of it ever since. While my first post on the subject shows that I was enjoying the characters (particularly Mr. Rochester, heh), my second attempts to reconcile 21st century feminism with the character of Mrs. Rochester. Sort of.

So let's just focus for now on the experience of reading the book, shall we? I mentioned that I started this re-read because I thought I may have missed the finer elements of the book when I first read it, at a young age. That is still true. I thought Jane was boring that first time, not realizing that she was a more complex character than her odious aunt and cousins believed. She is quiet, but when she does speak her words matter. Her conversations with Mr. Rochester are interesting and spirited. And Jane learns the value of saying "no" over the course of the novel - sometimes the hardest thing is to say no to those we love, as she discovers when she refuses to marry St. John.

The first half of the novel is wonderful. Suspenseful, dark, surprising. Jane is a sympathetic character because she's placed in such hostile environments. Even when she becomes comfortable at school, her best friend dies and her favourite teacher gets married and moves on. So Jane moves on too, a bold thing to do at the time for a penniless girl with only one way to get by in the world - as a governess.

The most interesting part of the book is the time Jane spends at Thornfield, and it's entirely due to Mr. Rochester. He is the centre of the novel, and Jane orbits around him like a planet pulled by the weight of a sun. Enigmatic, observant, acerbic, generous with Jane - but hiding a "dark secret." Although I was reading the novel with the knowledge of what happens after the secret is revealed, it was still suspenseful, which says a lot for Bronte's atmosphere-building. Thornfield, as should be all old English houses found in novels, is wonderfully murky and gloomy.

But after Jane discovers Mrs. Rochester is alive and runs away, the novel loses a lot of its driving force. Mr. Rochester isn't around to spark Jane into conversation, so she retreats into her own head, where she most bores the reader. We learn to love Jane as she learns to speak her mind around Rochester - but when he's gone she seems to forget those lessons.

The plot suffers, too, mostly from the incredible coincidence that Jane runs off into a random part of the country and manages to accidentally find three of her cousins without even looking for them. That kind of coincidence is a bit ridiculous in a novel where we're already being asked to sympathize with the love interest who keeps his first wife locked in the attic. The sections where Jane argues and studies with St. John are tedious. While Jane is struggling to develop a morality for herself which isn't ascetic, like St. John's, or hedonistic, like Rochester's, I was just wondering what was going on at Thornfield.

Her reunion with Rochester is lovely, yes, but what is her motivation for finally going back to him? St. John's proposal of marriage, perhaps, but it seems as though Jane just decides to head back to Thornfield to find out what's happened to everyone. The fire is a convenient way to get rid of Mrs. Rochester, but it would have been more interesting if the reader - and Jane - could have witnessed it.

Jane finally agrees to marry Rochester because his insane first wife is dead, yes, but also because their relationship will at last be equal. She inherits money from her uncle's death (why isn't he in the novel more?) and he is dependent on her because of injuries sustained in the fire at Thornfield. It's a satisfying conclusion because we like Jane and Rochester together, after all they've been through (especially separately, which is interesting), but I still get tripped up over the question of Rochester's first wife. I wish that their marriage had been explored more.

Overall, I did enjoy most of my re-read. I think that what I like best about the Bronte works I've read so far (am I being unfair in grouping them all together?) is the atmosphere each sister manages to create. In Jane Eyre, Thornfield Hall is a gloomy old home which is both the site of Jane and Rochester's love and the place where his insane wife destroys their happiness. In Wuthering Heights, the wild beauty of English moors is a fitting backdrop for Cathy and Heathcliff's wild, consuming passion for each other. And in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (my favourite so far), Anne Bronte manages to make us feel what it would be like to live under the thumb of an oppressive, selfish, cruel and alcoholic husband, even in the lap of luxury.

Inked

2008-07-30T12:51:00.006-04:00

The Telegraph asks if bibliophiles would be brave enough to tattoo themselves with literary quotes and images. I'm not sure if I could ever get a tattoo, but if I did it would probably have to relate to books in some way. Books (and music) are the only things I really feel strongly enough about to permanently ink onto my skin. I don't know what my hypothetical tattoo would be, though. An open book? A quote from Emily Dickinson or Carson McCullers? A quill? (Okay, definitely not a quill.) There are many possibilities, and as with most things, I would be unable to choose just one.

Further Thoughts on Jezebel and Smart Women

2008-07-21T16:28:00.008-04:00

So some of the Jezebel staff saw my post the other day about their series Fine Lines and posted about it over there. As always, the comments are interesting and funny; check them out. I feel slightly awkward now, as I didn't really realize so many people might read a post which hypothesizes that their jobs are unfulfilling, but hey, mine is too, and I comment at Jezebel when I can. It's somewhat of a catch-22 because I love reading the comments on Jezebel, but it's also sad that so many women feel underutilized. At least Jez is around to facilitate a vibrant online community, right?

Edited to add: A Jezebel commenter provided me with the link to her original comment from a few months back - it looks like she's the person behind the idea. (I'm also fairly sure I saw something similar on Shakesville not long ago, but I can't find it.)

A Perfect Novel

2008-07-18T22:54:00.003-04:00

No time to do a roundup today, but Paper Cuts has a short post, with interesting comments pouring in, about perfect novels.

I feel uneasy suggesting that any novels are perfect. I'm biased towards the novels I love already. For example, I think Emma is perfectly plotted - but my love of Austen could be blinding me to its faults. What are your thoughts? Are there any perfect novels?

Feminists on Twilight

2008-07-13T20:42:00.006-04:00

This caught my eye over at Feministing: website founder/executive editor Jessica Valenti and books editor Courtney Martin have a chat with NYT columnist Gail Collins about Stephenie Meyer's YA series Twilight.

They speak mostly about one troubling aspect of the series. Edward, the vampire love interest, refuses to have sex with Bella, the narrator, because he's afraid he will hurt her. He resembles the perfect fantasy boyfriend who never pressures a girl into sex, or makes her do more than she's ready for.

Bella, naturally, is head-over-heels in love. Valenti, Martin and Collins argue that this is a problem because it only perpetuates the Madonna/whore double standard, a larger theme going on in YA right now. As they put it, teenage girls are torn between reading about chaste vampire-chasers and the casual-sex-having gossip girls. Really, what do we want our teens reading about? I know there should be more than two options on the table. Some YA authors do talk about sex frankly - Meg Cabot, Ann Brashares, Melvin Burgess - or at least mention it - Sarah Dessen - but it's a tough thing to do.

It reminds me of how Buffy the Vampire handled the same issue so deftly: after Buffy sleeps with good-vampire Angel, he loses his soul and reverts to evil, a pitch-perfect metaphor for what happens sometimes when teens have sex.

One other aspect of Twilight, though, that grates on me is Edward's complete control of Bella. First he's characterized as the perfect boyfriend, but he's also with Bella every second of the day, prevents her from spending time with other boys and even female friends, and basically plans her life for her. It's weird, to say the very least. And this is a male character we're supposed to like and root for? Icky is the only word I can think of.

I've read the Twilight series and as much as they are mostly harmless fun, some things do trouble me about them, much as the sexism in most romance novels prevents me from enjoying an escape into fantasy-land. Meyer's retro attitudes towards sex and female independence are somewhat understandable in YA, but Bella's utter dependence on Edward's good opinion is something else altogether. It all seems too close to an abusive relationship to me.

On Jezebel's Fine Lines Series and Spunky Female Protagonists

2008-07-12T11:47:00.004-04:00

My favourite feature at the blog-for-women behemoth Jezebel is their Friday series called Fine Lines, in which contributor Lizzie Sturnick re-reads and reviews a YA book and the commenters go crazy over it. I’m sometimes there, also going crazy over such YA books as A Wrinkle in Time and The Westing Game, two of my absolute favourites from my youth. Both feature strong female protagonists (and are written by women, in fact) and have been discussed in Fine Lines.

I also love to read Jezebel’s comment section and hear stories from other women about how they were book nerds in grade school who read everything in their school library and skipped ahead during read-aloud time in class. I, too, was one of those book nerds. Books were my best friends for a long time when I didn’t quite fit in at my Catholic, upper-middle-class elementary school, and whenever I was feeling lonely in high school, even though I had plenty of friends and fun in both cases. Books, in some measure, will hopefully always be there for me and for everyone who remembers reading with joy at a younger age.

I can’t remember where I read this, but on a blog recently someone hypothesized that the reason Jezebel is so popular is because smart women are underutilized in their jobs. The editors at Jezebel post during the workweek and usually during traditional work hours, but commenters still manage to generate thousands of hits per post, and hundreds of comments on controversial items of news, such as the Elliot Spitzer saga, for example. Every Friday instalment of Fine Lines also gets a lot of responses. It’s interesting, because Fine Lines isn’t a series about “chick lit” or modern fiction – it’s about nostalgia. Many of the commenters, myself included, think they would have been different people if they hadn’t idolized Jo March, Anne Shirley or Vicky Austin in childhood.

Every time I read Fine Lines I wonder what it is about YA fiction that gets women so excited. I don’t read blogs geared specifically towards men, but I would be surprised if such a blog had a similar feature where men talked about Phineas and Gene’s complicated relationship in A Separate Peace, or shared stories about how Huckleberry Finn changed their lives. And then, there was a post on Jezebel about the series Anne of Green Gables, which, being Canadian, a girl, and an aspiring writer, I read dozens of times when I was in grade school. I identified so strongly with Anne that I started to talk like her and write overblown descriptions of natural scenes. (And I've decided to re-read the complete series this summer, because I don't have enough "reading projects" to hold my attention!)

And it wasn’t just Anne, either – like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, I thought I was ugly and awkward, and I could never control my emotions. Like Vicky, my family was a complex and sometimes annoying entity. And like Katy in What Katy Did, sometimes I was too wild, or said harsh things that I didn’t mean.

I am still a voracious reader now, but I don’t identify with the female characters I encounter in nearly the same way. YA lit is rife with strong girls, dreamy girls, shy girls, awkward girls – girls who encompass all aspects of traditional femininity AND masculinity, girls who learn how to be themselves painfully and truthfully.

While part of my enduring love for YA fiction is because I read most of it while I was growing up – a vulnerable time, where things stick with you – it’s also a question of supply and demand. I want to read about complicated female characters, and YA is still the best place to find those characters. The Sarah Dessens and Joan Bauers of today's YA world are doing their best to follow in the footsteps of L.M. Montgomery and Madeleine L'Engle. There are more materialistic, less well-written books on the periphery of the YA world - the Gossip Girl series, which is like a more expensive East Coast version of Sweet Valley High - but they remain just there: on the periphery. Unlike chick lit marketed towards grown up women, which sometimes seems to be all we women are supposed to be reading, girls can still proudly choose meaningful literature. Lucky them.

YA fiction, especially older books like the Anne series, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the Little House books, feature strong, vibrant female narrators (or protagonists) who practically leap off the page with the force of their personalities. Jo in Little Women, Cassandra in I Capture the Castle – YA books marketed towards girls encourage those girls to be everything that they can, like those protagonists. Jo and Cassandra aren’t perfect; they make mistakes, they lose their tempers and want to be left alone sometimes, just like real people.

So when asking why so many smart women spend their days commenting on Jezebel instead of doing work at their boring nine-to-fives, maybe we should also consider the enduring popularity of young adult fiction and the Fine Lines series. It’s difficult to be a woman these days. Undervalued at work, courted by publishing execs who still think that all women want to read books with pink covers and brand-name titles – is it any wonder that women are turning to fiction where girls, at least, are still allowed to believe that they can grow up to be whoever they want?

Roundup (the almost-Saturday edition)

2008-07-11T23:24:00.004-04:00

I can't believe I found time in this insane day to do this, but I did!

A Jezebel blogger bemoans the lack of female authors and writers in the New York Times Book Review.

The Guardian's blog tells us that Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children deserves its new status as "best Booker winner."

Also at the Guardian's blog, John Sutherland says goodbye to lit crit.

The NYTBR reviews David Gilmour's The Film Club, which I've been dying to read.

The Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere discusses Exiles by Ron Hansen, a non-fiction look at the writing process behind Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel, a thinly veiled imagining of Laura Bush's life, provokes mixed reactions.

An old quiz on literary adaptations at the Guardian is a fun diversion.

And finally, Salon's analysis of Barack Obama's reading list officially makes me sick of the damn election.

I got this in just under the wire.

Can Someone Think of a Better Name Than Reading Projects?

2008-07-09T12:20:00.005-04:00

I was speaking of reading projects in the entry below, and I realized that I've become the type of person who talks like that now. It sounds pretentious and I don't like it.

I regard this blog (and moreso my reading journal) as a sort of record of myself as a reader, amateur critic and English student, so my long "essays" on Austen and the Brontes, and other things of course, are for my own amusement. But I've actually been warming to the idea of creating reading projects for myself, if only to organize my scattered reading list into something with coherence. To that end, my projects for the summer are: A. a study of sorts of the Brontes, B. a re-read of all Austen novels, and C. a foray into 19th-century realism.

Project A came out of nowhere and started with my random desire to re-read Jane Eyre. Plans so far include a re-read of Wuthering Heights as well as a foray into Bronte lit crit. On the list are The Madwoman in the Attic and The Bronte Myth. To round it off, I thought I'd read Wide Sargasso Sea as well. And then I thought I should probably read an Anne Bronte, so I'm in the middle of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall right now and enjoying it immensely, I must say. It remains to be seen whether I'll read other novels penned by Charlotte and Emily. Probably. My real goal here is sort of a showdown between Austen and the Brontes. I've always been an Austen girl, without having read much Bronte, and I'm wondering whether a clear preference will still exist once I've done my homework. So far Austen is winning, but I've been pleasantly surprised by Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

Project B is always on-going, because I love Austen and have read Pride and Prejudice cover-to-cover probably five times now. However, this specific goal (all six Austen novels in one year) came out of my recent re-read of P&P for a course. I've recently read Mansfield Park for the first time and re-read Emma (blog post pending). I'm taking a wee break before I get into Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, and I'll round out the year with Northanger Abbey, because I just read it last summer. If I had thought about this in advance I would have created a more interesting time-line, like first-published to last-published, or first-written to last-written, but it didn't occur to me until right now.

And as for Project C, I'm taking a course in 19th century realism in novels and I want to be really prepared because I know the professor. We'll be reading (and I will be reading ahead of time) Middlemarch, Bleak House, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, so I thought I would expand a bit and add a critical selection, Adventures in Realism. I'm looking for more novels to add. Would Thomas Hardy be appropriate? Should I finally crack open War and Peace? I'm also toying with just reading a ton of Dickens since I love him, but I want to sample more authors.

It's pretty obvious that my main interest is the 19th-century novel from these three projects, yes? Anyway, this post is mainly for me to keep track. My summer is half over, but for non university students it's just started, so I'll try to make use of all the time I have left. If you have suggestions for projects A or C, leave them in comments. I may add more to project B - Austen's unfinished works and biographies - but it's yet to be decided.

All Along the Western Front

2008-07-09T11:47:00.007-04:00

I'm sitting here listening to MGMT's "Electric Feel", hence the title of this post. I'm so hip. [/self-deprecating irony] But this title is actually relevant, because this blog post is about... literary fiction set during the World Wars. Yes, I disappear for two weeks and come back with that. Sorry. I started working two jobs and suddenly had no time for anything else. But I have money!

Anyway. Blog news first, and then on to the substance: I am still working on my final thoughts about Jane Eyre. I swear I finished it, and a host of other novels (to be discussed on my reading journal), but it's taking me some time to sort out my thoughts. Also, I am going to watch the Ciaran Hinds (yum) & Samantha Morton film version soon, and report back. Other blog news: I'll still be doing Roundup on any Friday I can. I work twice on Fridays and fall into bed exhausted, so we'll see how that goes.

I recommend everyone listen to Stars' "In Our Bedroom After the War" as they read this post.

I recently read Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, which I really enjoyed. She died in a concentration camp during WWII, and obviously never finished her planned "suite" of five (I think) novels to be set in France during the Nazi occupation. She was writing it as she lived it, which I find quite remarkable. It lent a sense of immediacy and urgency to the plot. In her notes, included as appendices at the back of the novel, she writes about being inspired by Tolstoy. Being that Tolstoy's (arguably) most famous work, War and Peace (which I have not read), is about wartime as well, I started thinking about war-era fiction and what it captures.

I did your basic Google search for "WWI/II literary fiction" and discovered that I actually haven't read much. There's Atonement (seen the movie), All Quiet on the Western Front, Schindler's List (not technically fiction), Sophie's Choice, etc. What have I read? Everything is Illuminated, which I hated, and a host of YA fiction set during WWII. A pretty poor showing.

Please recommend me some novels set during either war, if you would.

But then I started thinking about novels (and novelists) crafted, if not set, during war. Would we have F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maugham, Hemingway and the other members of the "Lost Generation" without the misery and shock of WWI? Years from now, will there be a group of writers whose defining moment as a generation was September 11? What will fiction look like then? (We are already seeing some possibilities with Cormac McCarthy's The Road and writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith.)

It's usually impossible to judge how these things will be viewed until years have passed and future generations have learnt the history in textbooks, but when you live through something like a world war, you must have a sense that the world will never be the same again. That is what I like in a "war novel." In fact, that is the very attraction of a war novel. If fiction helps us make sense of the world around us, war novels help us make sense of explosive historical moments that somehow don't feel real, maybe not even to those who lived through them.

So this was a bit random and inconclusive, but just something I've been thinking about. I think I have enough reading projects going at the moment, but perhaps sometime in the future I'll make a list of WWI- and II-era novels and actually come up with some coherent answers to these questions.

Roundup (the Why I Love Joyce Carol Oates edition)

2008-06-20T16:13:00.007-04:00

Who else would write a novel about JonBenet Ramsey called My Sister, My Love?

The NYTBR finally reviews Barbara Walters' memoir. I'm wondering if I want to grab a copy myself.

Entertainment Weekly interviews David Sedaris, who is great to listen to on long car rides.

According to the NYT book blog Paper Cuts, EW also has a list of the ten best books of the past quarter century. I can't find it on EW.com, so the link takes you to Paper Cuts.

What Writers Read asks Elizabeth Wurtzel what she reads.

And Jezebel's Fine Lines series tackles Julie of the Wolves, a YA book I don't remember liking much.

This is the first in what will hopefully become a weekly roundup of Internet stuff that I find interesting.

Some Thoughts on Mansfield Park

2008-06-20T15:57:00.003-04:00

Warning: very long, spoilers.

I finished this so quickly. I expected to take at least a week to read it (I don’t have much else going on right now!) because I’ve heard from many other Austen fans that it’s their least favourite, it’s boring, it’s not as funny as her other novels, the ending is problematic, etc. Some of that is true, but bored I was not. Mansfield Park is a really interesting departure for Austen as a novelist, and it’s too bad that she died relatively young, because what Mansfield Park demonstrates is that Austen was at the height of her powers at the time.

Okay, so it’s not as funny as Pride and Prejudice or Emma. Even Sense and Sensibility, which is now my least favourite Austen (yes, I preferred Mansfield Park, more on that later), has its comic relief. And the love story between Fanny and Edmund is disappointing, or it was for me. Fanny is in love with Edmund for much of the novel, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks of her as a sister, and when they finally get together at the end, Austen tells us about it in one of her classic “summing up” sequences, rather than allowing the reader to witness Edmund’s change of heart. It’s a letdown, especially since Edmund has been in love with Mary Crawford for so long. I felt cheated.

But that’s because I sympathized with Fanny, which is obviously Austen’s intention – but that intention doesn’t always succeed. I know plenty of people who hate Fanny – she’s timid, she’s shy, she’s not as witty or charming as Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse or even Mary Crawford, and she’s principled. Principled is a nice way of saying she’s a prig. However, I liked her in spite of all that. The situation reminds me of Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations – Dickens sets up Pip as a helpless orphan surrounded by mostly terrible people and a hostile environment, and that manages to keep us sympathetic to Pip even as he becomes a snob. Fanny is also surrounded by, if not terrible people, then foolish people. Lady Bertram has good intentions, but is indolent and silly. Sir Thomas is very kind to Fanny eventually, but his formality of language and behaviour is off-putting, and he allows himself to be influenced too much by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Norris. Mrs. Norris herself is odious – I don’t think Austen was trying to make her a humorous character. I hope she wasn’t, because it didn’t succeed. And the Bertram children, except Edmund, are only interested in themselves. (Tom’s change of heart was unrealistic to me).

Mansfield Park is a complicated book, in terms of morality and its structure and characterization. Morally, Austen is asking us, like Fanny, to make a choice between Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram. Henry seems on the verge of improving before he runs off with Maria (after she’s married, I might add, which is highly scandalous for an Austen novel. I was shocked!). He’s charming, good with the witty repartee, adequately wealthy for Fanny’s purposes, and seems quite persistent in his pursuit of her. Everyone is convinced that they’re perfect for each other. But like Fanny, the reader can never quite forget that he’s flirted with both of her cousins in the past. Something seems not right. However, something also seems not right with Edmund. He never notices Fanny as a love interest, only as a cousin and confidante. Setting aside my modern, uneasy feelings about first cousins marrying each other (my one complaint about 19^th-century literature), Edmund seems, well, boring and a bit slow. He doesn’t have Fanny’s powers of observation, he doesn’t see Henry Crawford’s real nature, and he certainly allows Mary Crawford far more leeway than she deserves. (I found both the Crawfords highly irritating, which I don’t think was Austen’s intention).

So the moral choice is difficult – it’s between Edmund, the principled but dull clergyman, and Henry, the exciting but rakish man-at-leisure. As Margaret Drabble notes in her introduction, perhaps Austen is telling us that we can never be truly satisfied with our choices. In choosing one thing, we inevitably give up something else that might be just as worthy, or at least have different reasons to recommend it. I can see Fanny with both Edmund and Henry, but I am satisfied with neither choice.

In a related way, the novel is also an indictment against the idle rich, or at least I read it that way. The patriarchal structure of the Bertram family and the indolence that their wealth creates means that the girls grow up silly and idle, and Tom (if not Edmund) becomes a spendthrift. The two Bertram girls rarely speak to their father honestly or show him their real emotions because they have been raised so unevenly – indulgently by their aunt and strictly by their father. So Sir Thomas never knows what’s really going on and can’t parent his children accordingly. In a lot of passages Austen reminds me of Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing for education for girls. If Maria and Julia had something to do other than giggle, put on plays and discuss their suitors, perhaps neither would have been “ruined.” But it’s not really their fault, just like Lydia in Pride and Prejudice is also something of a victim. Both families live in the country and don’t interact much with society. So they naturally pin their hopes upon the first eligible young men who arrive. The Bertrams, of course, are rich, which takes away the very real possibility of poverty that the Bennet girls face. But the message is the same: girls left to their own devices, with no education and an unstable family, will become silly and indolent, especially if naturally inclined that way.

This is getting a lot longer than I intended, but there is a LOT to say about Mansfield Park. It lacks some of Austen’s signatures: not a lot of comic relief, a somewhat boring female protagonist, no rakish but charming bad boys (Henry Crawford is no Wickham or Willoughby), and no real attractive male love interest (Edmund is NOT a Darcy or even an Edward Ferrars). It does have, however, some of her other signatures, developed in a more mature and morally complex way: commentary on class issues and social structure, young people falling in love, and the theme which runs throughout all of her novels, “nothing is what it seems.” I thoroughly enjoyed Mansfield Park. It’s not Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey or Persuasion, but it’s more complex and interesting than Sense and Sensibility. I plan to re-read all of Austen’s novels this year (already done P&P), so I will probably have more to say on them all later.

Epic Thoughts

2008-06-08T17:55:00.006-04:00

I meant to point out this rather sweet essay in last week's NYT Book Review (yes, sometimes I like them). It's about the huge novels we read to avoid reality. I must admit, since I'm not getting many hours at my summer job just yet, I've been doing a lot of reading to avoid the gym, the heat, housework, etc. I'm just finishing up Jane Eyre - thoughts on that will come soon - and I'm also engrossed in Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World, which is a nice, long novel.

But Joe Queenan's article for the Book Review is about epics, the novels we may spend weeks or months with. He references Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, an Austrian novel I've never heard of before. Queenan makes it sounds so fascinating that it's been added to my reading list.

I'm not in the habit of finding one book to read for the entire summer - I'm a fast reader and I like variety - but some novels are so epic, so detailed, so involved, that they just pull you in. I've had experiences like Queenan describes with Anna Karenina, but I haven't read a genuine epic in quite some time. I have a few on my bookshelf, though they are hard to carry around and read on buses. What's your favourite epic novel?

Quick Hit: The NYTBR is as Female-Friendly as Always

2008-06-03T18:18:00.009-04:00

This is just so darn amusing. The New York Times Book Review asked a few notable writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates - Obama, McCain, and Clinton. Regardless of how anyone feels about Clinton, she is still actually a candidate at this point. So this suggestion by some commenter on the Times' book blog, Paper Cuts, is a) stupid, and b) annoying.

Update: Okay, so Obama is apparently the official nominee, but I stand by my response to that comment at Paper Cuts. After all, when it was written Clinton still was in the race, and the people who have suggested for weeks now that she just drop out when she has a lot of support and influence on voters smacks of "take your boobs and get back to the kitchen," at least to me.

But I have more important things to rail against. Somewhat unsurprisingly, one suggestion came up over and over for Clinton - Shakespeare's "Macbeth," that timeless tale of an ambitious woman and the men she manipulates. I swear, I read the premise of the article and then thought to myself, "Macbeth's gonna come up for sure." It was in the first blurb (by Lorrie Moore).

Clinton is often castigated as ambitious, power-hungry, manipulative, etc. In fact, ambitious is an adjective almost always used to describe female politicians, which handily ignores the fact that all politicians are ambitious. When you are running to be the President of the damn United States, you better be ambitious. Would Americans like a slacker for a president? (Oh, wait.)

To the NYT Book Review, I say: edit the contributions you receive for these things a bit more carefully. To the contributors themselves, some of them women, I say: realize that all politicians are ambitious, and get beyond the all-powerful-women-are-evil trope. Also, do some new reading. Women's roles have changed since Shakespeare's time, in case none of you noticed.

What's so bad about Lady Macbeth, anyway? She's by far the most interesting character in the play.

Disclaimer: I'm not American and don't support any particular Democrat. I do, however, loathe John McCain, as we all should.

~~~~~~

You may have seen a new link in my "Reading List" box over on the left. I've started a reading journal and all are welcome to drop by. It's basically just a catalogue of whatever I read. I always set myself a goal for the year but I don't post about it here because it would clutter things up, I think.

~~~~~~
I had another idea for who could play Rochester opposite Ellen Page's Jane in the new adaptation of Jane Eyre: the always sexy Ioan Gruffudd, aka Horatio Hornblower. He might be a bit young, but I think he could pull off brooding and sarcasm quite nicely.

The Books I'll Never Read

2008-05-24T17:16:00.008-04:00

I came across this article in the New York Times the other day about a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Hmm. Interesting. I'm a sucker for any list which attempts to organize the most important books ever AND guilt-trip you for reading so much Jodi Picoult when you should have been focusing on Proust and Paul Auster.

NYT writer William Grimes does a good takedown of the list, noting that editor Peter Boxall, a professor, included some decidedly untraditional books to get a dialogue going. As Grimes says, while Paul Auster has six novels on the list, Balzac has three. (True confession: never heard of Paul Auster. Take away my bibliophile card now.)

Ann Rice's Interview with the Vampire also makes it on the list. I will not be reading that before I die, let me tell you right now.

The article is interesting and I recommend taking a look at it. I would love to pick up a copy of 1001 Books just to see what made the cut. But then I started to wonder about the purpose of such a list, and what might make it on my own list. For one thing, I doubt that I could recommend 1001 books to anyone, let alone books that you absolutely "must" read. For another, no matter how well read you are - as Grimes points out - the sheer number of novels in the world means that there is always something you haven't read.

Grimes brings up yet another interesting argument when he writes that often, the point of these lists is to show off. My own list would look comparatively tame because I haven't read anything worth showing off. I have a basic grounding in the British giants, I've flirted with early-20th century Americans, and I can sum up Canadian lit in ten words. (Survival attempted in hostile environments; Natives, immigrants, and Americans appear.) These skills are not likely to get me anywhere, and as such, lists of books you "must" read are likely to make us all feel like failures.

Grimes ends his article by recounting the literary game "Humiliation," apparently an invention of novelist David Lodge. The point of the game is to outdo each other by listing all the famous literary works you've never read. Well, here are a few of mine: King Lear. Don Quixote. The Brothers Karamazov. Vanity Fair. Moby Dick. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Les Miserables. The Canterbury Tales (in their entirety).

Will I ever read any of these? I'll probably get to some, and I'm young, with years of reading ahead of me. But I've also read a lot of "no-name" modern fiction I might have missed if I'd spent all my time locked up with the classics (links to Amazon.ca): Maybe a Miracle. Monkey Beach. Coal Run. The Girls. All highly recommended, and given some time, I could think of a lot more.

And anyway, what's the final point of this list? What if you hate a book on there? Should you suffer through because you "must" read it before you die? Similar to "Humiliation," I think a fun game might be to own up to all of those classics that we had to struggle through, all those works hailed as visionary and genius that we hated. I'll start: Frankenstein. Everything is Illuminated. The Secret History. The English Patient.

So, these lists that we make to scare ourselves into reading a bunch of books we don't really want to read? Ultimately pointless. I like to trust my gut more than anything. Sure, there are those books out there that I read because I feel like I have to - see my ongoing re-read of Jane Eyre, for instance. But I'm not going to sit down and read everything that anyone ever recommended to me. Life is too short.

The Madwoman in the Attic

2008-05-22T19:44:00.004-04:00

Hilariously, this is the first image that came up when I did a Google Image Search for "Bertha Mason," otherwise known as the original Mrs. Rochester. She spends much of Jane Eyre locked in the attic - because she's insane!

Today I read the part where [spoiler alert!] Jane and Rochester are about to get married when some dude shows up at the church and reveals that Rochester is already married. Gasp, shock, horror! Naturally, Jane doesn't want to commit bigamy or live in sin with her beloved, so she hightails it out of Thornfield.

Whole books can - and have - been written on the problematic character of Bertha. Is she really mad, or did Rochester drive her mad? I haven't read The Madwoman in the Attic, which I understand is an excellent piece of lit crit about nineteenth century female writers. I also haven't read Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that follows Bertha before she marries Rochester and brings in some post-colonial themes (according to my cursory Wikipedia search). Both are on my list, and I suspect both are interesting.

Personally, I've always seen Bertha as an example of the book's subtle sexism. I have never seen either of the Brontes as very feminist writers. I mean, Wuthering Heights is just brutal for women to read, from start to finish, or so I thought. However, I am not at all well-versed in the Brontes, so if you think I'm wrong, feel free to point it out.

But anyway. In Bertha we have a woman who refuses to conform to the demands placed on women - be a good wife by submitting to your husband, bear his children, look after the house, etc. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that she gets locked in the attic by Rochester because she fails to please him as a wife, and slowly turns legitimately mad from the terrible treatment she receives. We only have his word to go on, after all, when he says that she inherited both insanity and alcoholism from her parents. And look at who he wants to replace her with - Jane, who is meeker by far, more traditional, and half his age.

The whole idea of locking away a wife in an attic is what has always soured me on Jane Eyre. It just seems so unrealistic - that Jane wouldn't notice; that none of the servants, all in on the secret, would tell her; that Mrs. Fairfax would remain silent even when hearing about the impending nuptials. And the new knowledge that Jane gleans doesn't change her feelings for Mr. Rochester - but it changes mine. What are we supposed to think about a male love interest who locked up his first wife? If she had legitimate mental health problems, why not send her to an institution? If she didn't, what does that say about Mr. Rochester and his attitude toward women?

These are all questions that I can't answer because I haven't finished the book yet. I know I've read it before, but to be quite honest my memory is failing me on the finer details. The thoughts in this post have been sketched rather hastily. If someone out there can do a five-minute feminist analysis of Jane Eyre in the comments, I'd be happy to hear from you.

And now, to continue reading!

You Should Read: Sarah Dessen

2008-05-21T22:16:00.018-04:00

This is really long. I apologize in advance.

I know a lot of bookish people shy away from the amorphous category known as Young Adult Literature, which encompasses everything from vampire love stories (the Twilight series) to beloved classics that happen to be about children (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). When I was a young adult – well, when I fit into the marketing group that term identifies, which is generally readers in high school – I didn’t read a lot of YA fiction, either. But one author I did love was Sarah Dessen. And I continue to seek out her new novels.

Sarah Dessen writes realistic, modern teen fiction. There are no vampires warring with werewolves and no scenes set at the Boston Tea Party. Her novels take place in the same North Carolina town – this is never explicitly stated, but can be gleaned from her background and a few places which feature in more than one book.

Each of her eight novels is about a young girl, usually set over a defined time period like a summer vacation or a year of high school. Dessen focuses on topics like family relationships, friendships, young love, peer pressure, and the general mess of high school. Here’s a brief breakdown of the seven of her books I’ve read with some brief thoughts on each. Number eight, Lock and Key, came out a month ago and I’m still waiting for my library to get a copy.

The great thing about Dessen is that she’s a young writer and she’s getting better as she publishes more. The last novels on this list really stand out from the first three or so. That’s not to say that the first few aren’t great, but those last ones have a more confident author behind them, one who knows exactly what she wants to say and how to get there. The following list is in publication order from earliest to most recent, barring Lock and Key:

That Summer – as Dessen’s first novel, this one is fairly short and will seem different to readers of the later novels. It’s the only one I can think of that does not feature a love interest for the main character. That main character, Haven, struggles to fit in – her height, almost 6 feet, literally sets her apart from the crowd. And then there’s her fractured family, her father’s remarriage and her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Sumner, who Haven continues to think about even when her sister is engaged to someone else.

The book is deceptively simply but contains a lot that will appeal to YA readers. Questions of fitting in and how to move on from the past are explored, but none of the answers are trite or condescending. Not a lot happens in terms of plot, especially compared to the later novels, but it's truthful that way. It reminds me of my own teenage years, where not a lot of Shocking Things ever happened to me, but every small moment and memory seemed weighed down with significance.

Someone Like You – According to Dessen’s website this remains one of her most popular books. It’s probably because of the close friendship between Halley and Scarlett, which I would imagine is particularly appealing to young female readers. For teens who feel like their parents don’t understand them, friendship is often a refuge. Halley is the quiet narrator to Scarlett’s outspoken, flamboyant best friend.

The book starts with the death of a classmate – Scarlett’s boyfriend – and moves on from there, covering more heavy issues: teen pregnancy, being pressured into having sex, and parents who seem impossible. For what it’s worth, this is actually my least favourite Dessen novel – I do like it, but not as much the others – which continues my trend of automatically disliking whatever’s popular.

Keeping the Moon – I just re-read this, so it’s pretty clear in my memory. Colie, our narrator, has been overweight all her life. Once her mother discovers exercise, though, they both lose a lot of weight and Colie’s mom goes on to become something of a fad diet phenomenon. She goes on tour for the summer, leaving Colie with eccentric Aunt Mira in a small beach town. Colie gets a job at the Last Chance Café, working with sweet Norman and confident best friends Morgan and Isabel. All three teach Colie something about confidence, friendship, and learning to love yourself.

It sounds like a lot happens in this novel, but much of it occurs before the book begins. Dessen does this frequently – creates a back-story and plops the narrator right down in the middle, so the way we get to know a character is through gradual revelations. It’s an interesting technique and it works pretty well for YA, because teenagers aren’t usually the most communicative, direct bunch.

Dreamland – as Dessen’s fourth novel, this marks a change for her as a writer. While in the early three books there are difficult lessons to be learned – of acceptance, confidence, and sticking up for yourself – Dreamland is what we former bookstore employees like to call an Issues Book. I worked in the children and YA section, where I recommended Dessen frequently. Anyway, Dreamland is basically about an abusive relationship. Narrator Caitlin is emotionally vulnerable after her older sister Cass, the favourite, runs away from home, and Rogerson steps right in to fill the void. Caitlin comes to rely on him more and more and feels herself living in a sort of dreamland.

I call this an Issues Book but it has so much more depth than one of those Teen Problem Novels. Dessen asks why girls are so susceptible to charming strangers, and why we stay in abusive relationships. Cass, the perfect older sister, is something of a trope in YA, but in this novel she’s an effective foil for Caitlin. In the end, no one is perfect, and putting such pressure on yourself will only break you down. Dessen explores this theme in later novels as well.

This Lullaby – in this book we have something a bit uncommon for Dessen: a more confident perspective. Remy, who has seen her mother go through five marriages, is convinced that love is just a lie. Where Halley, Colie and Caitlin are struggling to figure out how to say what they feel, Remy isn’t afraid of confrontation. It’s the summer before college and she’s just trying to plan her mother’s latest wedding, work as a salon receptionist, and spend time with her friends before moving to California for school.

Dexter, a disorganized musician who is everything Remy hates, throws a wrench in her plans. It sounds like a typical story – bitter girl meets adorable boy, learns the value of love – but Dessen’s characterization is spot on. We can see why Remy feels the way she does. Her mother, a romance novelist, hasn’t provided a great example of stability, and her older brother seems to have changed completely since he fell in love with the kind of girl Remy likes to mock. The conclusion of this novel is obvious from the moment Remy and Dexter meet, but how they get there takes the reader on a few unexpected turns.

The Truth About Forever – this is my favourite of Dessen’s novels, with the next one on the list coming in at a close second. It’s an examination of grief, the idea of ‘perfection,’ and complicated family relationships. Before the novel begins, Macy watches her father die of a heart attack, and the reader is plunked right into the head of a teenage girl with no idea how to grieve. When the book starts Macy is trying to convince everyone that she’s fine: she has the perfect smart boyfriend, perfect clothes, and the perfect summer job at the local library. But her mom is working too hard on a real estate project, the perfect boyfriend is emotionally unavailable, and only her older sister seems to want to mourn.

When Macy starts working for a disorganized catering company, she meets a cast of memorable characters: Delia, the frazzled owner and chef, Kristy and Monica, sisters who are as different as night and day, Bert, an eccentric sci-fi fan, and Wes, a complicated, reformed artist who teaches Macy the value of imperfections. The characters in this book are just great. Kristy stands out in particular, as a confident, optimistic go-getter. It’s also a pleasure to follow Macy as she learns how to say what she feels and not apologize for it.

Just Listen – this may pass The Truth About Forever if I have a chance to read it again soon. They are quite similar, I think, because both focus on big issues – death in Forever, sexual assault in Just Listen – but the characterization makes both more than just a Problem Novel. Just Listen’s Annabel seems to have it all: she’s a part-time model, with two gorgeous older sisters and supportive parents, and an exciting best friend. But really, one of those sisters is anorexic, and that exciting best friend is mean and taunting.

As the novel begins Annabel has been ostracised from her group of friends and we don’t know why. There are several run-ins with mean ex-friend Sophie’s boyfriend, and if you’ve read Laurie Halse Anderson’s excellent YA novel Speak, you’ll know what’s coming next. Annabel has pushed aside what happened to her and focuses instead on her new friendship with Owen, a music lover with anger management issues.

Watching their relationship develop and deepen will bring back a lot of high school memories for the more mature readers among us. For teens, the novel says: it’s okay to get angry. It’s okay to stand up for yourself. And finally, we all deserve love and attention. It’s a complicated book with a lot of flashbacks where we learn about important events. The structure could seem cloying but it works pretty well. As in Keeping the Moon, the gradual revelations make sense for Annabel’s character. She’s not used to speaking up and has literally blocked out the memory of what happened to her.

So those are my ‘brief’ thoughts on seven Dessen novels. I’m excited to read Lock and Key, if the library ever orders a copy or two. There’s a lot more I could say, because Dessen is above all a nuanced writer. The themes of each book overlap and reading her entire oeuvre is fun because familiar characters and places often make guest appearances. As I said, I also love that she’s getting better as she goes on. Sometimes writers make a splash and never really follow through on that early promise, but Dessen’s writing becomes more mature, more confident and better paced with every book. Yes, her female characters usually have some kind of revelatory moment, but it’s never gratuitous or silly. Sometimes you can feel the ending coming, but it’s always satisfying, because the characters are so realistic.

Dessen also has a blog where she writes about her daily life, the writing process, and pop culture, among other things. It's a fun read and she updates regularly.

OMG Mr. Rochester!!!11!!

2008-05-17T22:00:00.008-04:00

OK so this is not a post of any substance whatsoever except to bring anyone who reads this up to speed on my Jane Eyre progress. Holy crap, you guys, I love Jane Eyre. I can't believe I waited all this time to re-read it, thinking that I hated it. I'll never again read a classic when I'm too young to understand it, that's for sure.

I still stand by my dislike for Wuthering Heights, but Jane Eyre is fucking awesome. First of all, Jane. She is such a great heroine. I don't even know how to describe her as a character. The only words that come to mind are superlatives. I've heard the news that Ellen Page is going to play Jane in a new film adaptation, and I have to say, I think that will work perfectly.

Romancing the Tome asks: who should play Mr. Rochester opposite Page? I have no idea, though I am partial to Amy's suggestion of Richard Armitage. But let's talk about Mr. Rochester for a second. Possibly the best 19th-century love interest since Mr. Darcy? (Actually, I prefer Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey, though I of course love Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and all the rest.) Rochester is sarcastic, brooding, prickly, intelligent, lively... If I have one criticism of Austen, it's that her male characters are usually less well-drawn than their female counterparts. Charlotte Bronte, however, gives us Jane AND Rochester, both masterpieces of characterization, to be sure. Actually, Emily Bronte does so as well in Wuthering Heights - Heathcliff and Cathy are equally loathsome.

I knew this was going to come down to an Austen-vs-Bronte argument in the end, which is why I feel slightly guilty for enjoying Jane Eyre so much. Even though I know Rochester's secret, and how the novel ends, I'm still on the edge of my seat with suspense. However, Austen is in no danger of being unseated by this Bronte, at least. (Maybe I will have a new opinion of Wuthering Heights in a few years.) Jane Eyre is excellent and I'm happy to be liking it so much on this re-read, but I am more of an Austen girl, in the end. I always prefer satire to melodrama.

As they say, sometimes you need life experience to appreciate great art, and though I don't have any experience as an orphan or a penniless governess in love with her employer, the years since I last read Jane Eyre have definitely made me better able to appreciate its genius.

Real Men Don't Read Books by Women

2008-05-14T20:29:00.009-04:00

Sometimes I happen to be sitting around, wondering what to blog about, and a story or article comes along that makes me go, "Huh. That is exactly the type of thing I should write about on my book blog!" And here we are. Via the Livejournal community Bookish comes word of the The Essential Man's Library.

Now before you go asking if there's a similar list for women, this is from a website called The Art of Manliness, so I suspect not. But I'm not quibbling with the idea behind such a list. I'm sure it's worthwhile to compile a list of books that truly do teach men something. The books on this list cover such topics as dreams vs. reality (The Great Gatsby), how to be a dictator (The Prince), the life of Theodore Roosevelt, how to survive on a desert island (The Swiss Family Robinson), libertarianism (Ayn Rand), and to no one's surprise, a ton of books about war, guns, and all that other manly stuff.

Wait. What's that you're thinking? Why aren't there any female writers on this list except for a conservative philosopher who can't actually write? Well, actually, there is one book which, according to the editors, was chosen because it brings a "female perspective" to the list. It's Christine De Pizan's The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry. In case you're scratching your head, trying to remember if that was the last Oprah's pick, don't bother. De Pizan wrote that in the 15th century. I'm sure it's a great primer on how to treat women in 2008. Here's what they say about that:

"She wrote this classic in the 15th Century, a time period not known as the peak of gender equality. Of course, we can project this into our work and not use the text as the foundation to build a neighborhood militia group."

Oh, well, thanks. As long as you're going to project that into your work and all.

But wait! Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also makes the list. Maybe because it's about monsters and stuff? Or perhaps because it's narrated by a man. The only book on the entire list written by a woman in the 20th century is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and that makes it on pretty much every book list anywhere.

Look, I like a lot of the novels on this list. Alone in my grade 12 English class, I defended Holden Caulfield when everyone else called him whiny. I enjoyed reading Nietzsche in spite of what he says about women! And Cormac McCarthy is one of my writing role models. But this list displays a pretty typical level of ignorance in that it absolutely omits female writers, and anything interesting they might have to say, in the name of manliness. What I take from this list is that men think they have nothing to learn from female writers.

The female writers they do pick focus on typically "male" topics. Rand is every white college-aged male libertarian's favourite author. Frankenstein is about men and features some of the most uninspired female characters in 19th century prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story about a young girl, yes, but the true hero is her devoted, intelligent father. And the De Pizan book is just a slap in the face. "We'll include women, but only if they're long dead, wrote about manly stuff, or believed in chivalry!"

But before anyone says, "This is a list for men! Why don't you make a similar list for women, with only female authors, if you're so upset?", let me tell you why that's not an acceptable solution to the problem. Women have been reading books by men for centuries. It's a little thing called male privilege - men have had voices, and opportunities to publish, and people willing to listen, since the beginning of time. Women have had to fight to go to school and educate themselves, have had to fight to be respected and heard.

And even now, when we have unprecedented numbers of intelligent, talented female writers, none of them are on the damn list. This list is telling me that these men don't care about the female perspective or the injustices caused by centuries of male privilege. In fact, these men are clearly not even aware of their own privilege. There are plenty of female writers who could be on this list because they have something to say to everyone, not just men or women. Where are Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Doris Lessing? Where are our great, revolutionary writers of the past - the Virginia Woolfs, the George Eliots?

There is a clear double-standard in the world of modern fiction. I've worked in a bookstore and seen this first hand. Books that are by women and about women are slapped with pink covers and labelled "chick lit." They're relegated to the romance section and women are made to feel ashamed to be reading them in public. But books by men about things exploding and secret government plots - not traditionally deemed "quality" literature - are shelved next to Dickens and Shakespeare. No one calls those books "dick lit." Male is the default position, after all. Books by women are for special interest groups.

Furthermore, as a woman, I don't want to read books only by women. I believe that both male and female writers have something to teach me. So when men create a list of essential books for other men to read, overwhelmingly populated with books by men, it screams privilege to me. Yes, men have the privilege of not needing to care about the marginalization of female writers. But you know, maybe someone who really displays "manliness", whatever that means, would be willing to hear the other side of the story.

This list immediately made me think of that well-worn trope that boys won't read books about girls, but girls will read books about both. Is it true? Well, I have no idea, and no statistics other than my own anecdotal experience. Growing up I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, and I continue to do so now. Male or female authors, classics or modern novels, I'll read it all. I doubt, however, that you could pay my younger brother to read Little House on the Prairie or Little Women, two books I loved at his age (he's significantly younger than I am). When I was that age, I read the Hardy Boys, Gordan Korman, and Roald Dahl (yes, some of his books are about girls) as well as the more traditional "girly" options.

And you know what? Lists like this, which proclaim "manliness" as the goal and books by men as the way to get there, are not helping any. Well-rounded readers make well-rounded people. And to be a well-rounded reader, you need to read something by a woman that wasn't written in the 15th century.

Adventures in the 19th Century

2008-05-14T00:18:00.007-04:00

What have I been doing with myself recently? Recovering from this past semester and looking for a job! Now that I've had some time off, I'm starting to go a bit craaazy from lack of stimulation. Luckily my new job at a big department store starts this weekend, and I have a few new projects: painting some furniture I'm taking back to school with me, teaching myself to knit, getting a driver's license, and.... endless amounts of reading, naturally!

This summer I am going to be smart about my upcoming school year and read some things from my courses in advance. This will include re-reading Anna Karenina, which I read once about five years ago. I'm eager to see how I feel about it now that I'm (hopefully) more mature, and a better reader.

Isn't it interesting to re-read things you first picked up when you were younger and realize how you feel about a book depends on where you are in your life? For example, I didn't like The Bell Jar overly much when I first read it. I re-read it recently and was able to relate to Plath and the narrator much more. I still don't really like the novel, exactly, but I understand it a lot better. Some of the things she describes hit so close to home that the re-read was a bit unsettling.

Getting ready for next year will also mean reading three huge novels that I've never touched before: Madame Bovary, Bleak House and Middlemarch. I've never read any Eliot but have been told I'll love her, so I'm looking forward to that. I already love Dickens and have been waiting for an excuse to get to Bleak House. Madame Bovary I'm less thrilled about but we'll see how it goes. Those three and Anna Karenina are all for one course in 19th century realist fiction, and I think it'll be great.

I'm going to try to fit in some Shakespeare plays because I'm taking a Shakespeare course as well. But there's plenty of time for pleasure reading... in the next few days (or weeks, depending upon how long it takes), I'll be re-reading Jane Eyre. Now, I am not a big Bronte girl. It seems - at least to many of my literary friends - that one cannot be a devoted fan of both Austen and the Brontes, and we all know how I feel about Austen. To be honest, I did. not. enjoy Wuthering Heights.

I first read Jane Eyre when I was quite young, and I think it went entirely over my head, so I want to give it another chance. I remember liking it less than Wuthering Heights, but it's been too long for me to make a fair assessment. I will be updating with my thoughts during the re-read.

So yes, there is quite a lot of 19th century reading going on right now. And if I make it through all of that, I want to re-read Emma and finally make it to the one Austen I haven't read: Mansfield Park.

I haven't read a big long classic for fun in a long time, and I'm glad to be sinking my teeth into something with a little more meat than YA. Not that I don't love YA. I'll be doing a post about Sarah Dessen soon. Lots to come in the weeks ahead. I love a busy summer!

Movie Review - The Jane Austen Book Club

2008-04-27T22:33:00.004-04:00

I found this movie to be charming. I haven’t read the book, but I suspect I will be searching it out, as I do with anything that even remotely references Jane Austen. Even those things that look dreadful (see: Becoming Jane). So, a few quick thoughts on the movie, with a SPOILER WARNING for whoever wants one:

The cast was uniformly excellent. I love Emily Blunt in particular, and she did not disappoint. I have a slight fascination with novels, films, what have you, about unhappy marriages, so the Prudie and Dean storyline was my favourite. I was slightly displeased with the slapped-on ending – all of them together at the next year’s library dinner – but the scene where Prudie and Dean reconnect through the text of Persuasion was understated and lovely. (I love Persuasion.)

Hugh Dancy was hilarious as Grigg – he really is becoming one of my favourite up-and-coming actors, between this and Evening. Jimmy Smits was another standout. He was sympathetic but added just the touch of requisite jerk to the role.

I think the thing about this movie that any Austen fan will enjoy is the clear love that all the characters have for the novels themselves. This is a movie where people appear to read books for the love of it, something I can always relate to. You won’t learn anything new about Austen, especially if you are one of the hardcore Janeites, but it is so pleasant – I can’t think of another word – to hear people discuss her work reverently and affectionately. I can almost see myself getting into the habit of referring to her as “Jane,” as Blunt’s character does. Except everyone would mock me mercilessly, as they do Prudie in the movie.

Although I don’t quite agree with one character’s assessment that Jane Austen is the perfect antidote to life, I will say: smart, funny little movies about Austen are indeed wonderful. And with a leading cast of mostly women who aren’t hookers, doormats or villains to boot! That shouldn’t excite me – good roles for women should not be so few – but if I have to take what I can get, I will be quite happy to take The Jane Austen Book Club.

What's On Your Bookshelf?

2008-03-22T19:34:00.009-04:00

There was an interesting post the other day at the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts. Jennifer Schuessler wrote a great post in response to Time's Matt Selman (you can see his original thoughts here, also an interesting read). So I started thinking, what would my bookshelves say about me?

note: not my actual bookshelf (I wish!)

I tend to agree with Schuessler more than Selman - who cares if the books on your shelf have all been read? As far as I know, homes and apartments are not "public spaces", and the only person who's going to judge you by your bookshelves is someone you invite in. Or the plumber. And while I like to glance at a friend's bookshelf to see what they're reading or planning to read, it's not in judgement. It's born of the urge to talk about what we both happen to be reading. Plunging into a novel, after all, is quite the solitary activity. I love to find someone to talk to after (guess that's why I'm an English major).

I am somewhat neurotic, and have an obsessive habit of alphabetizing thanks to my time spent working in a bookstore and then, a library. Thus, my bookshelves are indeed organized alphabetically, for the most part. I used to group them by subject matter, but that fell apart as soon as I started enjoying nonfiction.

Also thanks to my time in the bookstore, I have an enormous amount of unread books. Those, too, are on my bookshelves. Why? Well, I need somewhere to keep them. Also, books are pretty and I like to look at those I have and haven't read. In the case of the read, it's to fondly remember characters and plots. In the case of the unread books (almost universally thick classics, or pop culture tracts I just don't have time for) it's to imagine what lies ahead for me.

I'm a compulsive re-reader too, so I like to buy things even if I've read them. I love the library, but if I absolutely love something, I have to own it. This explains why I have two copies of Peter Pan - one small paperback for portable readings, and one beautifully illustrated hardcover for cozy bedtime reading.

My habit of impulse buying results in some books that I hate but can't get rid of. I actually own Everything is Illuminated, which is probably one of my least favourite books from the past ten years. And I own a lot (I mean A LOT) of YA fiction and children's stuff from my younger days.

Rounding it out, I also have some books from the library's discard pile, which I was allowed to take home when I worked there. They are beat up and in terrible shape - but they were free and, oftentimes, wonderful reads. This whole idea of "displaying" your book collection is a mystery to me. Sure, I'm proud of what I've managed to read thus far in my short life, but those creepily immaculate collections filled with first editions are just silly. My books are dog-eared, both paperback and hardcover, and they look like what they are (when they've been read): well-loved. They're certainly not a unified collection. For all my obsessive talk about Jane Austen, I do like to read other things! I suspect a visitor would be surprised by my prized collection of Nancy Drew hardcovers.

Anyway, I think a brightly coloured, motley assortment of books both read and unread says a lot about who put them on the shelf. What does my bookshelf say about me? I like English novels and mysteries, aspire to read more non-fiction, and always have room on my shelf for a stray book that needs a home.

On a completely different note, I just watched The Jane Austen Book Club (movie of Karen Joy Fowler's novel, which I haven't read), and I feel a movie review coming on. Stay tuned.

On Making Second Impressions

2008-03-19T15:34:00.006-04:00

So I've finally done what I've been threatening for a few weeks: a (very lengthy) post on what I gained from my recent re-read of Pride and Prejudice. This post is self-indulgent even to me, but hey, it's my blog. It does amaze me that I can crank out 1,300 words on Miss Austen in about an hour, but I can't manage to start the 10 page paper I need to finish for tomorrow. I'm off to do that now!

By now, I’m fairly sure that my love for the novels of Jane Austen has been made apparent. After all, I manage to mention it in almost every post I make. Watching classmates read Pride and Prejudice for the first time in one of my classes this semester, I was jealous. I’ll never have that experience again: the reader’s first glimpse of Darcy, haughty and bored at a country dance; the quickening of my heart, along with Lizzy’s, as she learns of his real feelings; the outrage at

Lydia

’s indiscretion; and that satisfying closure that comes from reaching the end of a perfectly structured and paced novel.

It’s a widely-known fact, at least to lovers of literary trivia, that Austen’s youthful first version of Pride and Prejudice was titled First Impressions. As titles go, it’s not bad at all. Much of the novel’s humanity, after all, comes from Elizabeth Bennet’s maturation into a forgiving adult who is able to recognize her errors in judgement. The novel’s comedy, too, lays in unforgettable first impressions of classic characters. Mr. Collins, that obsequious flatterer, is introduced by way of his own absurdly long letter to Mr. Bennet. In quick succession, we have the letter as a frame device, Mr. Bennet’s ironic opinion of Mr. Collins’ “conscientious nature”, and only then, Mr. Collins himself. Throughout the novel, Austen leads us – and Elizabeth – in an elaborate guessing game. Which character is not who he or she appears to be? Can anyone be taken at face value?

While this makes for a truly captivating second half of the novel – we read Pride and Prejudice in an increasing fit of nerves, sure that Elizabeth will have realized her errors too late – Austen is always improved upon by a re-read. Reading Pride and Prejudice straight through for the fourth time two months ago, I was struck by something that I hadn’t noticed before. Austen’s dialogue, specifically the lengthy conversations between Darcy and Elizabeth on a variety of subjects, is delightful. Quick, witty and intelligent, these moments between Darcy and Elizabeth propel the plot – as they learn to tolerate, and then enjoy, each other’s company – and set a standard for writers to come which has never quite been met.

Much fuss is made of Austen’s insistence on a happy ending, her focus on marriage as the end of a woman’s life, and her ignorance of the politics of her time. But I suggest that Austen’s characters “earn” their happy endings. Elizabeth and Darcy undergo profound change in their attitudes to not only each other, but the outside world. Elizabeth learns to judge less quickly, while Darcy begins to check his pride. At the end of the novel, their mutual understanding feels organic and necessary. We have been waiting for them to realize their compatibility, after all. Even in their early conversations at Netherfield, it shines through; no other woman provokes Darcy into speech, and no other man is able to flummox Elizabeth.

Moreover, Austen displays an intricate knowledge of sexual politics and social mores that is just as important, and a great deal more interesting, than twenty treatises on the Napoleonic wars. Isn’t history made up of far more of the average than the extraordinary? Don’t we find these small-scale social intrigues just as fascinating as an epic battle – especially when written with such humour? In Pride and Prejudice, all you need to know about country clergymen is contained in Mr. Collins. (And to those who suggest that Austen is not quite fair, she features less revolting members of the clergy in her other novels.) The complicated relationship between the new middle class and the aristocracy – well, that’s here too. Witness the Miss Bingleys and their unwillingness to accept Jane as sister-in-law.

The examples of Lydia and Charlotte Lucas, too, illustrate just how precarious it was to be female in Austen’s world. Lydia runs away on a whim and very nearly ruins her family’s reputation. In today’s society, this would not be quite so shocking – but that’s what life was like for women in Regency England.

One of my favourite characters, Charlotte Lucas, is a woman past her prime who settles with Mr. Collins rather than remain a burden to her parents. She’s twenty-seven. Austen treats the situation in such a matter-of-fact way that modern readers are outraged. And while Lizzy is appalled, her friend Charlotte is most pragmatic. Like it or not, that’s the way it often happened. While we are obviously supposed to agree with Lizzy, Austen sympathizes with Charlotte as well. The reader can’t help but feel terribly sad for the new Mrs. Collins.

These intricacies are easy to appreciate while rereading. You know where the book is going, you are freed of anxiety about the future of Lizzy and Darcy’s relationship, and you are able to enjoy Austen’s dextrous wordplay. The contrast between Lizzy and Charlotte, for example, is more forceful than ever once we know that Lizzy is destined for happiness with Darcy, while Charlotte will be only satisfied at best.

On this fourth reread, I was surprised by the sympathy I felt for Lydia. Generally she is portrayed as a flighty, irresponsible girl, which is generally how she behaves for most of the novel. But frame it another way – bring in what you know about her eventual unhappy marriage to Wickham – and her adventures seem pathetic. She’s only a silly teenage girl desperate for happiness. Perhaps today she would attend university and have her illusions about the world shattered. In Austen’s world, however, girls out of their teens are middle-aged spinsters, and Lydia never manages to finish growing up.

The Bennet parents also come under attack. Why doesn’t Mr. Bennet take an interest in someone besides Elizabeth? Knowing that the estate cannot pass to them, why is there no effort at education, no talk of becoming a governess or lady’s companion – two of the only options available to working women? In a conversation with Lady Catherine de Bourgh midway through the novel, Elizabeth reveals that she and her sisters had little formal education. Surely Lydia and Kitty were not born idiots, and Mary was not an insufferable moralist from girlhood. Perhaps their indifferent parents are to blame.

On a lighter note, every time I reread Pride and Prejudice or see one of the movie adaptations, I am left to ponder why Mary and Mr. Collins don’t end up together. Of course, Mr. Collins’ marriage to Charlotte allows Austen to make her point about the limited options available to women. But one just senses that he and Mary would delight in trying to out-compliment one another. It would be a marriage at least as entertaining as the Eltons’ in Emma.

So yes, Pride and Prejudice only improves when read again and again. As surprising, funny and satisfying as it is the first time around, the characters’ complexities and the rather dark urgency behind all this talk of marriage is only noticed on closer inspection. Isn’t there something desperate about marrying off fifteen-year-old girls? Why exactly does Charlotte have to settle for Mr. Collins when she is evidently superior in intelligence? And is the middle class so uncomfortable in their expanding role that they must cling to the aristocracy to feel superior? Austen leaves us with these compelling questions about her era. Yes, they are grounded in a specific time and place, but they translate well. Clueless, the film loosely based on Emma, is an excellent example.

One feels that the 21^st-century version of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy could be warring partners in a law firm, or students in a university, or even an observant journalist and her hot-headed editor. Lydia is a leggings-wearing, High-School-Musical-loving pop culture whore, while Mary is a self-righteous environmentalist. Mr. Bennet could be a retired academic, and Mr. Collins his cousin, the religious scholar. My point is that once you pick a small milieu – be it a modern high school or a small country town in Regency England – Austen’s characters begin to feel familiar and realistic. Her points about thinking for ourselves, revising hasty opinions, and admitting our mistakes apply to people in every society.

Pride, prejudice, and the error of our first impressions – these are concepts which transcend time, and engage readers of all backgrounds and interests.

Quick Dose of Feminism

2008-03-18T19:57:00.005-04:00

Unfortunately I don't have time just now to write a thoughtful post on this, but there was a fascinating discussion at Jezebel today about sexism in the world of book prizes. I actually have lots to say on this topic, but it will have to wait for another time. I will say that I pretty much agree with Jezebel blogger Jessica in her analysis.

It sparked a bigger issue for me - sexism in the literary world at large. The New York Times Book Review is massively guilty of this, at least in my opinion. Their best-of lists are almost always chock-full of white male writers. And we all see how romance novels and "chick lit" are looked down upon as silly, fluffy and unrealistic, while such important and ground-breaking male writers as Clive Cussler and Dan Brown easily escape this classification. Romance has its own section at the bookstore, but the Cusslers of this world are mixed in with the "real" fiction. What does that say about the devaluing of what is stereotypically feminine?

I would like to direct everyone to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a great and snarky site which features reviews of romance novels and musings on such books written by two hilarious women. I'll be adding them to my links bar shortly. And I'll be back for more thoughts on this later.

The Long Winter and the Never-Ending Novel

2008-03-09T14:51:00.011-04:00

It's been snowing for about three years here in Montreal, so I figured it was as good a time as anyto think about books and update ye olde blogge. By the way, no, that picture isn't my street - I found it on Google. And actually, I think we have more snow than that right now. Look, I like snow - I am Canadian, after all - but this is getting out of control. I wouldn't object to some sun and a beach right about now.

In any case, This Winter That Won't End got me to thinking about books that never seem to end. Specifically, books that are so boring I stop reading them. Even more specifically, John Irving's The Cider House Rules. I know people love this book (and Irving, which has always confused me), but it remains the only book I've ever given up on after getting more than halfway through.

Some books I abandon after a few pages or chapters - The Name of the Rose, for example - but plan to go back to once I have time. (So far that has not happened.) Cider House, though, I read for a long time. I started that thing one August a few years ago and read pretty diligently until about January. I never seemed to get anywhere. I took it to my part-time job with me three or four times a week. I worked in a big chain bookstore where the managers checked our bags before we left (making sure we hadn't stolen any of the precious self-help section). Every time I showed them my bag, with my hardcover copy of the book from 1987, someone would note that I was still reading that "really thick yellow book". Yes, yes I was.

It wasn't a book that I had planned to read. My parents have a truly astonishing library - old university textbooks, cookbooks, my dad's history and sports collections, a frightening amount of English novels, and those books that you somehow acquire but never really read, like that Emily Post manners book. I call it a library, but these books are scattered throughout the house, lined up on pretty much any available surface with bookends. I found The Cider House Rules and decided to give it a go.

You know, it is a really boring book. It may be long, but I'm a fast reader, and it doesn't generally take me six months to get two thirds of the way through a novel. I've read a few other Irving novels since then, and mostly enjoyed them (with the huge, gaping exception of A Widow for One Year - don't read that.) I finally gave up on Cider House because I couldn't take it anymore. It haunts me still, and I have no doubt that someday I will have to start it again from the beginning.

You see, I am an obssessive-compulsive book finisher. I can't stop reading something, even if I hate it, even if it's offensive, even if I only read one chapter every three months and can't actually remember who the characters are. This skill (or curse) is how I managed to finish Everything is Illuminated while simultaneously wishing that something heavy would hit me on the head. It's the reason that I am still struggling through David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise, even though I would rather read the nutritional information on a pop can.

I'm an addict. A book-finishing addict. Is there anything more satisfying than slogging through a terrible novel for the majority of your summer vacation, only to get to the end and raise your arms in triumph? (An accompanying "Steve Holt!" shout is optional.) I have yet to find a comparable feeling.

And I'll admit it: finishing books that I hate makes me feel morally superior. There, I said it. Now I'm off for another round with the Bobos.

My Vagina Makes Me Stupid

2008-03-03T12:32:00.007-05:00

So, the Washington Post has published an "article" by a "writer" named Charlotte Allen about just how dumb we women really are. There are some good takedowns of the piece on various feminist blogs; I direct you to two pieces at Shakespeare's Sister, as well as Jezebel's take on it and the wonderful Jessica at Feministing.

All of the above links debunk some of the "facts" - more like pretty little fantasies - that Ms Allen uses to "prove" her "thesis". She claims that because women drive less agressively than men and cause fewer accidents, they are dumb. I don't quite get the logic of that, so maybe I am stupid. She also mentions evolutionary psychology, perhaps because her estrogen-addled brain doesn't understand that real science disproved that theory a while back. All that Ms Allen has successfully proved in this article is that she, herself, is an idiot.

She also comes to the truly inspired conclusion that because some women love Grey's Anatomy and chick lit, they are only interested in shiny, pretty, vapid things. I'm no fan of chick lit, but what about men who like 24 and Clive Cussler novels? Are those any more real than the "girly" versions? Futhermore, why are we gendering pop culture this way? MAKE IT STOP. Why can't people be free to watch and read whatever the hell they feel like without being made to feel as though personal preference depends on what they have between their legs?

You know, as the daughter of two responsible and ethical journalists, this shit just makes me sad for the future. Scratch that. As a human being, it makes me sad - not to mention incredibly angry. Send protests to letters@washpost.com or the ombudsman at ombudsman@washpost.com. I assure you that I have already sent two e-mails their way.

I don't generally comment on sexism unless it's related to books (especially if it's related to my beloved Jane A.), but this is just too ridiculous to pass up. Also, is it me, or is there more rampant misogyny than usual out there? I'm optimistically hoping that it's not related to the whole first truly viable female presidential candidate thing, but it probably is. Doesn't it get tiring hearing all this crap day after day? I wish I had a bunker somewhere.

Full disclosure: I'm not an American and I don't generally read the Washington Post, but as a feminist, I feel that I have the right to get upset about sexism wherever it occurs.

The Obligatory Valentine's Day Post

2008-02-14T19:36:00.006-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day! Any other haters out there? I feel your pain. Normally I would curl up with some Jane A., but I have too much work to do tonight. So, before I get friendly with my French grammar textbook I bring you... my favourite literary love stories. Because romance is better when accompanied by sparkling prose and philosophical musings on the meaning of life!

No, don't worry, The Notebook isn't on the list. Although let's all admit it: Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams had some hot chemistry.

Ahem. Item the first: the Jane Austen oeuvre. Well, aside from the fact that I am an obsessive Janeite, no one does romance-with-wit quite better, am I right? You certainly don't need to persuade me to sensibly give up my pride and tuck in! Ha ha ha. No more puns, I promise.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is another favourite of mine. I find it compulsively readable, and the love story bit still feels fresh even after however many years the story takes to get going.

Anna Karenina, for the bitter cynics in the bunch (no, you're not alone), is a classic of the doomed love variety.

For the love-lasts-forever crowd, I recommend Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, far more enjoyable than anything her husband Jonathan Safran Foer has to offer.

If you're looking for a meta love story for a fellow lit-a-holic (let's make that a word, shall we?), Possession by A.S. Byatt is a solid choice.

The weird, possessive, possibly abusive love story: Wuthering Heights.

For the teen take on it, I like I Capture the Castle, but it's not strictly a love story, so those looking for more of an endorphin rush might try Sarah Dessen's This Lullaby.

I love, love, love Brokeback Mountain because it's sensitive, complex, moving, and absolutely beautifully written, but let's face it: gay cowboys are definitely an added bonus.

All right, I'm done. If I get enough studying done, I'll pop in my Amelie DVD as a festive V-Day treat. Feel free to rec other thoughtful and well-written love stories in the comments.

Poetry Corner

2008-01-28T21:16:00.002-05:00

Let's take a moment to celebrate the genius of Robert Browning:

My Last Duchess

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her?
I said "Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart---how shall I say?---too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace---all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,---good! but thanked
Somehow---I know not how---as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech---(which I have not)---to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark"---and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
---E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Ah, Browning. So clever, so meticulous, so creepy... I love this poem.

Holiday Book Wrap-Up

2008-01-15T00:07:00.001-05:00

Here's a wee update on what I read over my holiday break. Yes, I know - just getting around to it now? Isn't it practically St. Patrick's Day already?

I always seem to get a ridiculous amount of books for Christmas. I ask for them, but I also get surprised, too, as I did this year. Over the break I unwrapped Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare, Suite Francaise, Megan McCafferty's Fourth Comings, the latest Alice Hoffman book, and - finally! - the new edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, which I've been wanting for a long time. (All links go to Amazon.ca.)

I finished the McCafferty book right away - it's better than her third, which you may recall from this blog post I wrote about it a while back. More on that later. I got through the Alice Hoffman as well. With the unfortunate title Skylight Confessions, it's about an impulsive marriage and its consequences for three generations of people. Anne Tyler it is not, although I enjoyed reading it. That's the problem. I always do enjoy Alice Hoffman's writing - her style is fluid, if a little overly lyrical, and her characters are always entertaining. It's comforting to read a Hoffman novel. I always know it will be about whether fate exists, or an unhappy marriage, or troubled siblings, or rocky romance. At eighteen (possibly nineteen, I can't remember offhand) novels, she definitely knows what she's doing. My favourite is probably still Practical Magic, which happens to be the first novel of hers I ever read, but each one is enjoyable in its own way. We're not talking Tolstoy here, but isn't there something to be said for writers of thick, compulsively readable novels?

Okay, so: Fourth Comings. Not excellent, not McCafferty's best effort, but a welcome change from Jessica Darling's boring navel-gazing in the third book. The action takes place over just one week, and it does seem like a rather long book for such a short time period, with too many Life Changing Events packed in, but we get new glimpses of some old characters, which is always nice. Specifically, Jessica's parents go from caricature-esque to real people, and even Manda appears to be less annoying than usual. McCafferty isn't revolutionizing teen fiction - indeed, the continual and deceptive marketing of this series as adult fiction seems to indicate that - but she's writing an honest, unapologetic, smart female character who's matured incredibly over the course of four novels, and I appreciate that.

Of course, McCafferty is now writing one more book, a fifth one to tie things up. I'll reserve judgment until I read it, though. How uncharacteristic of me. I've already covered my reaction to the Shakespeare bio, and I don't have the time to start anything new just yet. I want to touch on Heather O'Neill's debut Lullabies for Little Criminals, which I finished long before the holidays. Something interesting popped into my head when I read an interview with her, included at the back of the novel. More on that and how it relates to Harry Potter soon, and also look for my twice-promised entry on Jane Austen and realistic romancing.

Odds and Ends

2008-01-14T22:12:00.002-05:00

So we're two weeks into a new semester and already I'm dead on my feet. Luckily my reading load right now is very poetry-centric, but I'm gearing up for some Austen and a couple of obscure philosophers. Anyway, I have a few interesting things to briefly mention before I return to Browning.

Continuing my life-long fascination with children's and young adult books of all kinds, here's a great post from a fellow blogger describing why it's okay for teens to read what they want. Bottom line: at least they're reading. I couldn't agree more.

I'm going to throw some feminist and political links up in a new sidebar soon, but I wanted to once again plug someone who combines feminism and Jane Austen in a delightful combo: The Egalitarian Bookworm, who is liveblogging the PBS airing of ITV's "Jane Austen Season" over the next few weeks. That link goes to her take on Persuasion. I watched Northanger Abbey recently and was pretty satisfied. I thought Felicity Jones did a great job of capturing Catherine's innocence, and she was still able to sell the love story AND some weird dream sequences. I'm sure Fellowette (follow that link!) will have more insightful commentary once Northanger Abbey airs next week.

And now for something a bit more insightful from me: I just finished Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: the World as Stage (link goes to Amazon), which was thoroughly enjoyable. It's quite short, which Bryson explains is a result of our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare the man. It's also very readable. This is not really a book for academics or the Shakespeare-obsessed - I only knew the bare bones before I read it, but Bryson is funny, and that goes a long way for me. For a short book, he packs in quite a bit of info about the theatres of the day, other famous playwrights, and most interestingly, a history of Shakespeare scholarship. He also weighs in on the debate over whether Shakespeare was a real author at all. He certainly convinced me, but read it and decide for yourselves.

I do hope that I get a chance to write a proper review of something in the days to come - perhaps some of the last books I read in 2007, as well as what I'm learning on my umpteenth re-read of Pride and Prejudice. Expect something about Austen's gift for dialogue and believable love stories when I return later this week.

Ephemera

2008-01-03T11:34:00.001-05:00

Happy 2008! I'm ringing in the New Year in books by re-reading an old favourite (Pride and Prejudice, in preparation for my class this semester) and speeding through Bill Bryson's Shakespeare biography. It's fascinating just how little we actually know about Shakespeare the man. I don't buy into the theory that he didn't write the plays. I can see that there's a lot of evidence to support it, but I like to believe that Shakespeare was this genius from Stratford who revolutionized literature all on his own. I guess I'm a literary romantic. Ah well.

I'll be back in a few days with an entry about something or other, probably something that strikes my fancy from one of my many English courses this semester. Victorian poetry, anyone? I got a truckload of interesting-looking books for Christmas, some of which I've already finished, so I'll report on those at some point as well.