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School and Reading Update

February 8, 2010 by Stefanie

Still managing, mostly, to hold onto my happiness from the weekend. It’s been snowing here since yesterday afternoon and is supposed to continue to snow until Tuesday afternoon leaving us with a total of ten inches. I know it could be worse, I could be in DC right now. The difference though is that we’ve had snow on the ground here since November and it will be hanging around until April. In spite of that I love Minnesota. Yeah, maybe I’m crazy.

Anywhoo, school this quarter is on its sixth of ten weeks. My how time flies. Things have settled down and my initial worries about being in a class of mostly computer engineers are all gone. It’s a really interesting class and the class discussions are the best I’ve had in any of my classes. There are 24 people in the class and regularly over 200 postings each week. There aren’t huge amounts of assigned reading, usually around 50 pages a week, so keeping up with the discussion isn’t that hard. The week’s readings aren’t post until Monday morning though which means my Monday and Tuesday nights are spent frantically reading and then making sense of the discussion questions. But it’s all good.

As for reading that is not school related, I finally finished reading The Tyranny of E-mail and will get a proper review up about it tomorrow. As a teaser, I had issues with the book.

I’m still chugging away through Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton biography and have some interesting Wharton / Proust tidbits to tell you about. It’s been an eye opener reading about Wharton within her historical milieu and realizing who else was writing at the same time (Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf just to name two). What a fertile period for literature. I wonder if in twenty years we will be able to look back at the early 2000s and say the same?

For my train commute/ work lunch break book I am reading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. It is not easy reading because of the slang and pidgin, but I am enjoying it and the pages are going by faster that I realized.

Last night I began reading Sophocles’ play Elektra. Hers is one of the largest female roles in all of Greek tragedy. I’m about halfway through and it is quite good.

I’ve been reading some Rumi poetry a poem or two at a time. Rumi is always a pleasure. His poems can frequently be read as religious and secular at the same time.

and in perusing the latest Bookforum I have discovered there is a new book on Emerson coming out called On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsic. It doesn’t come out until April 1st just before my birthday. That hasn’t stopped me from suggesting to my Bookman that is sure would make a fine present.

Time to get to the reading for class this week. I know I’m behind on comments and I’ll try to catch up in the next day or two as school reading allows.

Posted in Books, Library | 5 Comments »

Medicine for the Winter Blues

February 7, 2010 by Stefanie

My Bookman and I have been suffering from the winter blahs so he and I made it a point to do a few things this weekend to lift our blues. Friday night we thought we had a ballroom dance lesson and appeared promptly for it, wondering why there didn’t seem to be as many people at the studio as there usually are, in fact, the place was practically empty. When we got inside we were asked if we had come for salsa. Uh, no, we came for our usual lesson. At which point apologies began flying. Our teacher is currently in Cancun on the studio’s annual dance cruise. They had told us about it back in early January but we had completely forgotten. What creatures of habit we are.

Conveniently, our favorite Half Price Books store is nearby and we had put a bag of books to sell in the car on the off chance we felt like stopping after our dance lesson. There being no dance lesson at all, it was a no brainer that the evening was to be spent at HPB. They gave us a good price for our books this time and a 10% off our next purchase coupon. Bookman and I went off in different directions to begin the browsing. Inevitably we meet up downstairs in the fiction where we yell across the shelves at each other, “Hey did you see this one?” or “Do we have this already?”

After we are browsed out we spread our books out to see what we have. Sometimes we’ll grab a book that looks interesting and that we want if nothing else better is found. So we look the books over and decide which ones we want to take home. Then we add up the total. We always try to stay within the amount that we got as a credit for selling books we didn’t want so depending on the total we may decide a book or two doesn’t make the cut after all. Finally, we head to the cash register and depending on our success we either complain as we walk out to the car or chatter excitedly. This time we got to chatter excitedly. Here’s what I brought home:

  • Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis. The back cover describes the book as “Fifty-seven rule-breaking short stories, in which Lydia Davis proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, gets lost in a foreign city, and addresses common anxieties regarding etiquette, work, taste, the fourth grade, death, and conversation.” When I opened the book up, this is the story I read called “Tropical Storm” : “Like a tropical storm,/ I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.’ ” How could I resist this book?

  • The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt. I’ve never read her but she appears with general good reviews on blogs and Verbivore recently read and loved this book so when I saw a like-new copy I couldn’t resist.

  • After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The back of the book says it is “a gripping novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the hours between midnight and dawn.” I prefer to be asleep during those hours and can’t imagine why anyone would be awake if they didn’t have to be. And because it is Murakami it will probably be delightfully surreal too.

  • The Wise Virgins by Leonard Wolf. I always forget that Leonard was a writer too. I’ve never read anything of his. This is his second novel and it was published two years after he married Virginia. There are some rather autobiographical elements in it that distressed the Woolf family. Virginia also had her worst breakdown two weeks after reading it (there is probably no connection making that just a bit of salacious gossip). Hopefully my curiosity will keep this one from disappearing into the unread books piles.

  • My Bookman scored some books too but one he and I will both enjoy is a QPB 3-in-one Angela Carter containing The Magic Toyshop, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Wise Children. I think I have read Wise Children before but I know I haven’t read the other two so this should be fun.

That was our book shopping. Saturday night we watched the newest movie incarnation of Hairspray. It is so relentlessly chipper that you can’t help but feel better afterwards.

Today, ah today, we treated ourselves to a delicious breakfast at our favorite veg restaurant. Afterwards we went to Como Park Conservatory for some green therapy. The temperature outside was about 23 degrees F and inside a humid 72. It was heavenly. We’d walk a little, look a little, and sit down on a bench and sigh in happiness. At one point we were sitting on a bench by a little fountain and both of us wished we could curl up and take a nap. We satisfied ourselves by leaning against each other and drowsily watching the amateur photographers take pictures of the fountain. It was just the thing to help our winter blues.

For the rest of the day we have both felt really good and happy. And even when it started snowing we weren’t bothered. Now if we can only hold onto that until about the middle of April!

Posted in Books, New Acquisitions, Personal | 11 Comments »

Let’s Get Outta Town!

February 5, 2010 by Stefanie

I have the pleasure of offering up choices for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion. Maybe it is a symptom of cabin fever due to the winter doldrums that have descended, but all the books up for vote have some sort of journey at their center. It was hard to come up with a list of books that probably most haven’t read yet. One thing I can say though, there is a good diversity of style to choose from. I gleaned these titles from searching The Globe Corner Bookstore website a fantastic site if there ever was one and a bookstore I would love to visit should I ever find myself wandering around Harvard Square. Unfortunately their book descriptions aren’t always the best, so those I got from Amazon (click the title links for more complete book descriptions). Here’s the list:

  • Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. “This exquisitely composed work also undertakes a disorienting, if less somber, journey through historical and personal memory. The first-person narrator travels through Europe during the 1980s, spurred on by history’s ghosts and his own melancholic yearning for adventure. Having left his base in England to explore Vienna, Venice and Verona, he concludes with a bittersweet pilgrimage to his hometown in southwestern Germany”

  • The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. “Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Then a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother’s birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal that he is not quite spectator enough.”

  • The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic. “This novel poses some interesting philosophical questions–who are you, what are you, and what are your memories when your country has disintegrated and even your language has been politicized out of existence? That’s what has happened to the narrator and protagonist, Tanja Lucic, ethnically a Croatian, formerly a Yugoslav. Exiled by the Yugoslav ethnic wars of the 1990s and then abandoned by her husband in Berlin, Tanja lands a one-year post at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, with one exception, are fellow exiles enrolled to maintain their refugee status.”

  • A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. “Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, A Bend in the River chronicles both an internal journey and a physical trek into the heart of Africa as it explores the themes of personal exile and political and individual corruption.”

  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. ” ‘Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images.”

If you are not currently a Slave but would like to become one, we’d be glad to have you. Visit the blog to find out more and cast your vote if you want to participate. Discussion of the “winning” book will start March 31st.

Posted in Book Lists, Books, Slaves of Golconda | 6 Comments »

What Do Your Bookshelves Say About You Meme

February 3, 2010 by Stefanie

It seems like a good day for a meme. I scooped this one up from Ella and Dorothy.

Here is what my bookcases say about me:

  • “I’m immortal!” I must be, right? Because why else would I own what might be more books than can be read in a normal human lifetime? And not only that, but I keep adding to them!

  • “I need help choosing books to read!” At least that’s what someone might think looking at the entire shelf I have dedicated to books like Book Lust by Nancy Pearl, 1001 Books to Read Before you Die and The New Lifetime Reading Plan. In reality I have no trouble finding books to read but this one ties in to the fact that I am immortal so really, all I want to do is make sure I never run out of ideas.

  • “I’m self-centered!” This one was suggested by my Bookman due to the quantity of books I own about journal keeping. These fill a portion of a shelf and above that shelf are close to 30 journals that I have filled over the years. Does that make me self-centered or just an adherent to the ancient Greek aphorism to “know thyself?”

  • “I’m pretentious!” That’s the only reason to have three bookcases in the living room filled only with poetry and classics. That’s not the only reason but someone who didn’t know me well might think that. When our basement library shelves were full to bursting and we bought three bookcases to fit into the living room, given our organizational scheme, it only made sense to move all our poetry and most of our classics to these shelves since they are the smallest distinct “collections” in our library. The good thing about this move was that we now read more poetry, both Bookman and I will pull a book from the shelf to regale the other with a poem or two. And our classics are no longer lost amongst the rest of the fiction so we can be frequently reminded by seeing the books, “oh yes I should get around to reading that one!”

  • “I like poetry by 20th century women!” A good deal of the poetry on the shelves in the living room is by women authors from the 20th century. This is probably a result of my taking several graduate school classes on both poetry and women writers. Adrienne Rich is best represented since I wrote my thesis on her work and have all her books. There is also H.D., Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Anna Ahkmatova, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Edna St. Vincent Millay and many others.

  • “I have a secret desire to be a scientist!” When I was a mere college freshman my declared major was biology. I was going to be a vet. Then I was going to be a biology teacher. Then when the full impact of the animals that I could look forward to dissecting hit me, I changed my mind and my major to English. Dissecting texts was much less disturbing than dissecting cats and piglets. I flirted briefly with trying botany but my allergies told me it wasn’t a good idea. So now I just like to read books about neuroscience and quantum physics and animals.

  • “I’m also a wanna be philosopher!” I’ve not read a lot of philosophy but that hasn’t stopped me from accumulating philosophy books. Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Plato, Foucault, Nietzsche, several “history of” survey-type books. Oh, and of course there was my wonderful tour through all of Emerson. I’ve read enough philosophy to find it fascinating and challenging and always thought provoking and I think even though philosophy has been shuffled to the sidelines in our current culture, it is just as relevant, maybe more so, than ever.

  • “I’m a witch!” Not really, but I have a little more than a shelf of history and psychology books on the European witchcraft craze, specifically in Germany. I’ve read almost all of them and have taken copious notes. You see, one day I plan on writing a novel. There is a small village near Trier (I have yet to discover the name of the village in spite of numerous references to it) that after a year of the witch craze had only one surviving woman in it. Don’t you think her story would be an interesting one?

Anyone else want to play?

Posted in Memes | 16 Comments »

Blankets

February 2, 2010 by Stefanie

What a beautiful book Blankets by Craig Thompson turned out to be! I’ve read his first graphic novel, Good-Bye Chunky Rice and liked it so I was expecting I would like Blankets too but I didn’t expect so much complexity in the story. I should have known better.

The cover of Blankets calls it an illustrated novel but the main character’s name is Craig and he looks a little like the author so it was hard to think of this as a novel instead of autobiography.

The story: Craig lives in a small Wisconsin town with his parents and younger brother. Craig’s family is poor and he gets picked on a lot at school. His only escape is his love of drawing and church. Craig’s parents are devout Christians and Craig wraps himself up in Christianity in an attempt to keep the ugliness of the world away. But as Craig gets older he begins to have doubts. The people who pick on him at school also attend church and call themselves Christians, how can that be? Even the kids at church camp don’t behave very Christianly.

Then he meets Raina at camp. She is the first girl he has ever liked and who liked him back. They become friends. After camp they write each other letters (Raina lives in Michigan). Finally both sets of parents agree to allow Craig to visit Raina for two weeks. There is much more but I don’t want to give anything away.

Blankets is both title and theme. There are many blankets in the book both real and metaphorical and all of them serve different purposes. We think of a blanket as comfort but sometimes a blanket is a way to hide from or cover up the things we don’t want to face. Then there is the blanket of snow that pretty much covers the entire story and it too, serves a purpose.

Not only did I love the complex story but the art is fantastic too. The whole book is composed of black and white drawings that carry and support the story. They are marvelously expressive and interact with the text so well I often forgot I was reading both words and pictures.

Whether you are already a reader of graphic novels or are thinking about trying one, I highly recommend giving Blankets a go. I got my copy from Emily who chose it for me after she drew my name in a giveaway a year or so ago. And let me just say, if you ever have the opportunity for Emily to choose a book for you, let her. She’s very good at it!

Posted in Books, Graphic Novels, Reviews | 13 Comments »

Reading in Bed

February 1, 2010 by Stefanie

A book being a finite object must come to an end eventually. Sometimes the last page of a book is a relief, other times it is a sad parting because you were enjoying its company so much. This weekend I had a sad final parting with Reading in Bed edited by Steven Gilbar. It was a marvelous book that inspired some great blog discussion about reading and rereading. It was a comforting and fun yet thought provoking book.

The essays in the book are often short, no more than five pages which make them perfect to read in bed before going to sleep, which I did. Glorious luxury. The only unfortunate aspect of the book is that there are only two women – Elizabeth Bowen and Lynne Sharon Schwartz – amongst the essayists.

I’ve got lots of passages marked that I plan on copying out to keep in my commonplace book. Here’s a sampling:

I feel certain that if I could read my way back, analytically, through the books of my childhood, the clues to everything could be found. /The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child. ~Elizabeth Bowen

Pre-slumber reading should be a kind of small private devotion during which we beat a quiet retreat from the practical. ~Clifton Fadiman

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~Italo Calvino

If the reader is not at risk, he is not reading. And if the writer is not at risk, he is not writing. ~Harold Brodkey

If a book’s any good we never read the page number. ~Stanley Elkin

There are many more gems but you’ll just have to find a copy of this book and discover them for yourself.

Posted in Books, Essays, Reviews | 11 Comments »

Novel on Yellow Paper

January 31, 2010 by Stefanie

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith was first published in 1936. Supposedly the novel was written as a result of Smith being told by a publisher when she submitted a book of poetry that she should go and write a novel instead.

Pompey Casmilus works as the secretary of Sir Phoebus at a magazine publishing company. She is frequently bored and so decides to write a novel. She writes it on yellow paper so as not to get it confused with the correspondence she types up and sends out for Sir Phoebus. We are warned by Pompey from the get go that this is not going to be regular novel for she is a “foot-off-the-ground” person and her novel will follow suit. So we can’t say she didn’t warn us.

The novel has no true plot. Things happen to be sure. Pompey visits a boy she likes, Karl, in Germany and is appalled by what she sees there. She decides later that she can’t marry her boyfriend Freddy only to agree to marry him when he proposes and then ends up depressed when Freddy decides he can’t marry her and breaks off the engagement. There are stories about girlfriends and a horse named Kismet that she rode once. There are loads and loads of literary references and Pompey has a particular passion for Racine’s play Phedre. I thought at first there might be some connection between the novel and Phedre but as far as I can tell there isn’t.

The novel is also liberally sprinkled with untranslated French and German and I kept thinking I should look up at least some of it but never did. I’m not sure in the end that it would really have made that much of a difference.

Pompey is both a charming and frustrating character. Sometimes she makes me laugh, like when she is telling about her friend, Harriet, and Harriet’s boyfriend:

And Harriet is a darling and listens to him and comforts him for the sins of the whole world, which he must have upon his shoulders. But which were never meant for his shoulders at all. And he is suffering from this development-arrested-at-the-university. But Harriet is very adult, and is suffering from no arrestment in development.

And other times she just goes on and on and I got tired of her incessant voice however charming it is.

The book is very much like a conversation but it is a one-sided conversation where the reader, even though often addressed, is not allowed to get a word in edgewise. We are meant to sit and listen and keep our mouths shut as Pompey rattles on about whatever seems to come to her mind. She is one of those people who always has something to say about everything and keeps going on no matter what because silence would be unbearable.

I wonder if keeping the silence at bay might be the point? In spite of the incessant cheerfulness of Pompey’s voice she speaks of being sad, of tragic occurrences, and very often of death. Maybe for Pompey silence equals death so she talks and talks and talks to fill the void because she is terrified of the void. I’m not sure, just a thought.

Novel on Yellow Paper is definitely a book like no other I have ever read. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Even an old New York Times book review didn’t help. The book is not exactly a comfortable experience so I can’t say I liked it. But I did like it in many respects and those outweigh the overall frustration and confusion.

This book is up for discussion amongst the Slaves. Check out the blog to see what everyone else thought of the book and feel free to join in or follow the discussion in the Slaves forum.

Posted in Books, Reviews, Slaves of Golconda | 7 Comments »

Library Linky-ness

January 29, 2010 by Stefanie

Friday seems like a good day for a linky post about libraries.

I know I have seen photos of many of these libraries before, but really, can any book and library lover ever tire of looking at photos of amazing world libraries? Be sure to have a cup or towel ready to catch the drool.

Turn up your speakers for 10 Best Songs About Libraries and Librarians. I think my favorite one is “Library Rap” by MC Poindexter & The Study Crew. Prepare to get your groove on!

Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) comes out with a short list every year of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Get your pencils sharpened because here is the 2010 Notable Books List for adults.

This is not library related, but close enough. Menifee Union School District in California is reviewing whether they should ban dictionaries that have definitions of sexual terms from classrooms. The ban is being discussed after a parent of an elementary school child complained that her child found a definition for “oral sex” in the dictionary. I think this is one of the more ridiculous book challenges I have ever heard. And I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid my friends and I would regularly search dictionaries for “dirty words.” That’s what kids do. Besides, kids have to have somewhere to go to find out what the words they hear on the playground mean without having to ask an adult who will, inevitably, be shocked and appalled and the poor kid will end up confused and ashamed. Looking the words up in a dictionary is much better than looking them up on the internet where, no doubt, you can get plenty of visuals to go along with them.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Posted in Library, Links | 13 Comments »

The Gates

January 28, 2010 by Stefanie

Between working on school and watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address last night there wasn’t much room for blogging or reading or doing much else (I’ll try to catch up on the great comments from my last post tomorrow). But today, today I need to gush about The Gates by John Connolly.

The story takes place in the small British town of Bibblecombe (is this a real town does anyone know? Google was not helpful) and is about an eleven-year-old boy named Samuel Johnson. Samuel has a daschund name – wait for it – Boswell – who doesn’t have the best eyesight in the world but loves Samuel immensely and is brave when Samuel is threatened. And Samuel is threatened.

Samuel decided to get a jump on Halloween and dressed up as a ghost and went out trick-or-treating two days early. He stops at the Abernathy house on 666 Crowley Road and is turned away. He is loitering outside the garden when something funny happens at the Abernathy’s. He sneaks up to the basement window that is partly open to watch in horror as the Abernathys and their guests, the Renfields, who had just performed a demonic summoning in the basement for kicks, are consumed by demons who then take over their bodies. Turns out The Great Malevolence has been waiting a very long time for the opportunity to open the Gates of Hell and destroy the world. And now there is a very small portal to Hell in the Abernathy basement.

Now Samuel is the kind of boy who no one can figure out if he is really smart or a smart-aleck. He asks adults questions that make them uncomfortable. For show-and-tell he brought a pin to class and suggested there were many angels dancing on the head of it. At which point Samuel and his teacher, Mr. Hume, had a short theological discussion which Mr. Hume lost.

Apparently the real Samuel Johnson and David Hume were not agreeable on such matters either. According to Philosopedia:

Samuel Johnson thought it impossible to believe that Hume was actually dying a non-believer and informed Boswell, “He lies, Sir.” Meanwhile, according to Boswell, Johnson, who never attacked Hume in print, wrote in his journal that “Hume and other infidels…destroyed our principles and put nothing firm in their place.” Knowing he was disliked by Johnson and others for his provocative views, Hume had written that, after all, such English critics were “relapsing into the deepest Stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance.”

Back to the story. So Samuel knows about the portal and the demonic advance guard that will be coming through it to prepare the way in just four days and he has to try and convince the adults so someone can stop it. Of course no one believes him. So he tells his two friends, Tom and Maria who do believe him because it is obvious Samuel is really scared (the demons in the Abernathy basement saw him at the window and keep trying to kill him).

I will stop there so you can be surprised and there are lots of surprises. I will say though that Samuel makes the demons so worried that he might actually foil their plans, they decide to start the demonic invasion early, on Halloween. The book is funny, clever and very tongue-in-cheek. There is also lots of science in the book because the Large Hadron Collider is involved. Connolly explains the science and pokes lots of fun at the scientists in some hilarious footnotes. And what I found very delightful is the character of Maria, Samuel’s friend. She is a very smart little girl and figures things out faster than the CERN scientists.

The book is like sitting on a sled at the top of a big hill. Someone gives you a good shove and whoosh! all you can do is hold on and enjoy the ride. And it is a very enjoyable ride.

Posted in Books, Reviews | 10 Comments »

More Reading and Rereading

January 26, 2010 by Stefanie

Imagine my surprise last night when I am reading an article for class about mental models and not only is Mikhail Bakhtin invoked but so is Michel Foucault! These are the last people I expected to run into in library school especially in a class on human-computer interaction. But the article had an interesting section discussing sense-making and cognitive frameworks. We form mental models of all kinds of things based on what sense we can make of the world (this dovetails so wonderfully with Litlove’s recent posts on stories that I briefly felt faint from hyperventilating from so much excitement). These two gents making an appearance therefore wasn’t such a left field event after all.

There were a few folk who were curious about Nabokov’s quiz on what makes a good reader after I posted about it last week. The quiz is not online and if I had been clever I would have created a little quiz that you could take online but that idea came much too late. Here is what Nabokov gave his students:

Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader.

  1. The reader should belong to a book club
  2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine
  3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle
  4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none
  5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie
  6. The reader should be a budding author
  7. The reader should have imagination
  8. The reader should have memory
  9. The reader should have a dictionary
  10. The reader should have some artistic sense

Obviously something designed to provoke discussion and thought.

As I continue to read the essays in Reading in Bed I am continually struck by how much the importance of rereading is invoked by the various essayists. I am beginning to suspect that there is a cult involved. It does seem that those who extol the glories and importance of rereading are also the ones who would be likely to claim their contemporaries were not producing great writing worth reading even once. This, I think, is an unfortunate viewpoint to have because while there may be lots of fluff and very poorly written books published in any era, there is also plenty of wheat among the chaff. Sometimes you mistake chaff for wheat but you don’t condemn a whole era based on the mistake.

Besides, as I have been mulling over this whole rereading thing, I am beginning to wonder if those who claim rereading supreme aren’t really cowards when it comes to reading. Because you know the books they are advocating for reading and rereading are the classics that have already been vetted by previous generations which makes them safe because they are as close to a sure thing as you can get. There is no doubt, for instance, that Madame Bovary is a great book. Even if you end up not really liking it or feeling passionately about it you still have to appreciate it. For Madame Bovary to become a classic in the first place a whole bunch of people had to read it and talk about it and champion it and exclaim what a great book it is and the first to do so were likely to be contemporaries of Flaubert.

I’m not knocking the classics or rereading. I very much enjoy both. I’m just thinking that before a person gets to rereading there has to be the initial act of reading and isn’t that a courageous act? It is particularly courageous if the reader has chosen a book off the beaten path, a first novel by a contemporary or an older novel not much known. For what adventurous reader would not love to be the discoverer of the next great author or classic?

Does this moment call for a little Tennyson?

                   Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Okay, that was both sappy and silly. I think I’ll stop before it gets worse.

Posted in Books, Essays, Reading | 20 Comments »

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