Word Blur

Literary court hound

When I lived in San Francisco, I attended part of Janet Malcolm’s trial re: In the Freud Archives, just as an interested audience member. Cause I’m crazy like that! I’d love now to be at Laura Alpert/JT Leroy’s trial at the hands of the disgruntled film company Antidote (who bought the rights to Sarah and want their money back because the author doesn't exist).

Swedish humor

Did you hear the one about the monk, the book, and the tech support?  Seriously funny stuff.

Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover

A recommendation for The Victorian Governess comes to me courtesy of my new favorite book blog.  It seems especially worthy of attention following a fantastically imaginative and unfaithful Jane Eyre adaptation.  Just what sort of behavior can we realistically expect of our nineteenth-century literary heroines?

Your heart on your sleeve...

...your book on your chest.  I'd like to see the entire world run this way.

Sentences and so on

When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a paper bemoaning what I saw as the over-analysis of literature. It was the late 1980’s, so there really was a fair amount of over-analysis to bemoan.  I asked why we couldn’t appreciate the story and the craft on a more basic level, than proceeded to quote extensively from all the assigned reading and lots of related things I had been reading on my own, and talk about why I liked them. My teacher was impressed by the paper, because he was more of a writer than an English professor at the end of the day. Everyone else in the class (we read these things out loud for some reason) was probably appalled by the crude authority with which I overstated my case and the lack of any coherent thesis. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them starts from a similar place, except it’s, you know, like, really, really good. I had heard/read a few interviews with Prose about this book and frankly I thought she sounded like a bit of a pill, with her call to read all the great works and so on, but now I’m a few chapters in and totally under her spell. The fact that she cites Jane Bowles as one of the writers she returns to again and again for instruction scored huge points with me. I love that she has a whole chapter on beautiful sentences and what it means to write them. It’s immensely gratifying to read her examples and when one thinks about the task of writing as the construction of such entities, it’s actually less daunting and more purely pleasurable.  In fact I'm considering diagramming sentences as a hobby.

Book Hustler

I just discovered BiblioOdyssey, which collects lush digital images from rare books and manuscripts.  It's pornography for book fetishists.  Thanks to Fearless Future for the heads up.

Library Thing

I like it here.

Obsessive Reading

My last really good bout of obsessive reading came when I had a severe back injury that left me more or less bed-ridden for a period of a few months.  I didn't read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, though.  I read (almost) all the works of Miss Read, pretty much identical stories about a teacher in a one-room school house in the British countryside.  I say they were identical, but every once in awhile a family of long-haired hippies moves to the village and causes trouble.  Still, these slight deviations aside, it was heaven.  I guess some people just have higher aspirations than I do.

Now I don't read at all anymore.  If I have free time, I just watch Veronica Mars on DVD.  Because I'm shallow.

Pulitzer Prize story: courtesy of bookslut

Selene Colburn's Secret

I have this weird thing that I like to do, that I've been honing and perfecting for about a decade.  I like to eat alone in family-style restaurants, while reading a book that seems (on the surface, at least) incongrous to that setting.  It's something about reveling in privacy, secrets, the enclosure of a good narrative, and a whole theory of Sad Foods that I'll save for some other time.  In my more extreme past, when this practice was still under development, I once found myself in a Denny's reading Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.  A lot of things have changed for me since then: I'm not quite so willing to experience such colossally bad food out of a missplaced committment to irony and I rarely read anything on which I can spend more than five minutes per page.  The basic premise is the same though.  So, it's with great pleasure that I report that over the weekend I managed to simultaneously consume the first few chapters of Lady Audley's Secret and a hot turkey sandwich, while occasionally listening in on the employment woes of the cousin of the Greek owner of my local restaurant.  There is nothing more tragi-romantic than the combination of Victorian sensation fiction and mashed potatoes.

Back in the Land of the Living

So I'm back from a week in Las Vegas, where I mostly read magazines, travel guides, and conference papers, and went without internet access.  The actual books I did manage to read were about dead people -- continuing on my John Dickson Carr-a-thon, which I think may actually be starting to wear a little thin.  I no longer vomit and hardly ever even feel like vomiting.  So things are looking up.  Especially with the whole not being in Vegas anymore aspect of things.  In the absence of having much that's interesting to say at present about what I've been reading, I will direct you instead to The Book You're Not Reading, a very witty blog by a guy who reads a lot of the same things I love -- gothic Victorian mysteries (Wilkie Collins and otherwise), Anthony Trollope, lesser-known works of the Brontes, etc.  This has become one of my daily reads.

Books Returned Largely Unread

My library allows me to check out books for the length of an academic year, which I am ashamed to admit often allows me to hang on to books that I keep thinking I'll get around to reading in full for way too long.  This week I'm clearing the clutter and bringing books back, books which I've only scratched the surface of.

Today I shall return:

Work 1961-73 by Yvonne Rainer
Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance by Ralph Lemon

Elven Sword of Jirtick

Honestly going to try harder.  Honestly.

Fantasy book title random generator; examples:
Curseِ Nightِ and Master
Demon and Conquest
Elven Sword of Jirtick
Emeraldِ Kingِ and Autumn
Goddess's Light
Master of Vengeance
Seed of the Island Keeper
The Pilnill Fire
The Quainope Dream
The Sea of the Mistress

Courtesy: the centered librarian

Resolved Reading

Now that it’s the new year, it’s interesting to note how many people are making noble resolutions to read more, better, or differently.  Or to actually read all the books they own.  I, for one, can never pass by Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, a work that graces my mother’s living room, without thinking how gratifying it would be to read my way through his list of all the most important works of literature.  Imagine how wise and erudite I would be!  Actually, what I could really sink my teeth into is that Vanity Fair interview with Lindsay Lohan about the drugs and bulimia.  I mean, come to think of it and everything.

Resolution links: 43 things.

Distance Reading

A great article in today's Inside Higher Ed about literaray historiographer Franco Moretti and his book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History.   It seems like this guy likes to provoke; he's argued that literary scholars should stop reading books and start counting them and that's precisely what he and his students at Stanford are doing (well, the counting part anyway -- I'm pretty sure they do read).  He's developed a concept of "distance reading" that, through scrupulous inventory of works published begins to reveal patterns that document the evolution of various genres of fiction or the growth of novel reading in different European countries.  I like reading about reading and, because I'm a librarian, I also like the hopeless task of organizing knowledge, so this works for me.

The Biggest Book Club

There was an interesting tiny article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about the practice that many colleges and universities have of assigning summer reading (I won't bother linking to it, because the Chronicle has really limited online access). It seems that Smith students were recently asked to read Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, a volume of poetry about West Virginia coal miners ca. 1920. Apparently poetry hardly ever makes these summer reading lists. I love the idea of large scale reading assignments. I’m fascinated by one-book community reading programs, in which a whole state or city forms a giant book club around a single work on an annual basis. Vermont READS  is promoting Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman for 2005, so I really ought to add that to my list.

The Invisible Library

Books that only exist in other books, cataloged:
http://www.invisiblelibrary.com/ILMaindesk.htm

Become a Secret Agent...

...of reading, at BookCrossing.

My Favorites

I joined a book club, in which I have yet to participate, but I was asked to compile a list of my favorite books.  This was hard.  Is a book your favorite because of how important the circumstances you read it in were (Moon Crossing Bridge, read it to my grandmother on her deathbed), because you remember really loving it at the time (Sentimental Education, can barely recall the plot now, May/December almost-romance?), because you read it more times than anything else as a kid (The Westing Game, although I think I read this about 100 times over the course of just a few short months or weeks), because it's an entirely guilty pleasure (Bridget Jones), or because the information therein somehow represents who you are/were at a critical stage in life (Terpsichore in Sneakers)?  Things I learned: a) I'm not that keen on poetry these days, b) I am a huge fan of children's fantasy literature, but won't tolerate the same genre for adults, and c) I really need to read some contemporary fiction.

Here's the list:

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume

His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis

The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

The Dark is Rising (series) by Susan Cooper

The Westing Game by Ellen Ranskin

Harry Potter (series) by J. K. Rowling

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding

Can You Forgive Her? By Anthony Trollope

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell it On the Mountain, & Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Mrs. Dalloway & To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Persuasion & Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

The Sound and the Fury & Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

Vanity Fair by William Thackery

Moon Crossing Bridge by Tess Gallagher

Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 by Alice Echols

Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull

Please Kill Me: An Uncensored History of Punk edited by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Terpsichore in Sneakers by Sally Bates