Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. A woman I know refused to read it because her friends who read it no longer shop at chain grocery stores or eat at fast food restaurants. Scary, enlightening, compelling and well-written. It made me glad I already adjusted my life to (mostly) eschew fast food and grocery chains. One of the reasons I enjoy living in the twin cities is the abundance of whole-food cooperatives, one of which I can (and do) walk to.
So far, I’m on track to meet my 50-book challenge for 2005. Both of these were recommendations culled from some of the litblogs I read.
24. When the Messenger is Hot by Elizabeth Crane. Stories featuring women who are in recovery, have relationship troubles, and/or have dead/dying opera-singing mothers. Funny and well-written, I especially liked “Return to the Depot!” and “Intervention,” about a woman whose friends intervene to let her know that she’s NOT an alcoholic. I found Crane’s forays into second-person narration less successful than the rest, but not without merit.
25. Stop that Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie stopped being good when the main character in the interconnected stories, Ann Ransom, stopped being a girl. The stories from her childhood were funny and intriguing. Once she got to college, though, I found them boring and pathetic. Perhaps it is the author’s intent to show how smart, sassy heroines get swallowed up into boring lives, but I thought the last few stories took away from the charm of the earlier ones.
I found links to Kiernan Ryan’s Guardian article on Shakespeare both at Mental Multivitamin and at Arts & Letters Daily. I like that Ryan challenges the common theory for Shakespeare’s continued popularity.
The popular consensus is that his drama has defied obsolescence and triumphed in translation all over the globe because it expresses the timeless truths of the universal human condition. It’s a view that has secured powerful advocates, from Samuel Johnson in the 18th century to Harold Bloom in the 21st. But it’s a view whose platitudinous piety I’ve never found credible, not least because it’s been used so often to buttress the status quo.
Ryan’s conclusion, though, proved less compelling to me than the one he purported to denounce.
Shakespeare’s drama still thrills us because it allows us to see his world from the standpoint of a world that men and women are still struggling to create. Shakespeare’s gift to our time is an extraordinary one: the power to view the past that shaped the present as if we were already citizens of centuries to come.
I came to Shakespeare via Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Henry V. “I can understand this,” I thought exultantly, as I sat in the theater and waited to find out who won the battle, my enjoyment of the movie made more powerful by my spotty knowledge of history. Since then, I have read several of the plays, seen them performed on film or in the theater and read other books and seen other films that are homages to Shakespeare’s works. I enjoy Shakespeare, and I don’t think it has to do with the universality of the stories, or with what Ryan said.
For me, it’s the language. My brain has to work just a bit harder to process it. Once I have done, I feel I’ve had the mental equivalent of a good workout and a hearty meal. The language draws me in, then the stories keep me engaged.
Recently, a movie meme made the rounds. I ignored it because I am terrible at quoting movies. My ease at coming up with Shakespeare quotes, though, supports my theory on why I like Shakespeare.
Why do you like Shakespeare? The language, the stories, a combination? I propose a Shakespeare variation on the movie meme. If it goes ’round, perhaps I’ll see if I’m the only one who disagrees with Ryan. If you have a blog, post a link to your entry in the comments. If you don’t have a blog, answer in the comments.
1. Name the first five lines of Shakespeare that come into your head. (Don’t cheat–write the first five that you think of, then check for accuracy later.)
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
The quality of mercy is not strained
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players
Lead on, MacDuff (Oops, it’s actually Lay On, MacDuff)
To thine own self be true
2. The last Shakespeare play you went to see on stage.
Antony and Cleopatra
3. The last Shakespeare film homage or adaptation you watched at home or at the movies.
Titus (at home)
4. What Shakespeare homage/adaptation/plays are on your to be read/to be seen list?
Looking for Richard on Tivo
Richard II on DVD
Hamlet (read the play and watch the Branagh DVD, once I finish Don Quixote)
Gertrude and Claudius, by John Updike
5. Name a favorite Shakespeare-inspired work.
Issue #75 of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. It was a strong ending to a strong series. Good endings are hard to do. Gaiman pulled it off brilliantly. Close second, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.
6. Why do you think Shakespeare’s plays are still popular?
My toddler Drake likes to hear the same books over and over. My husband G. Grod and I have “disappeared” a few of Drake’s more tedious choices. Fortunately, most of Drake’s favorite books have passages I enjoy with each reading.
From Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne.
Then, suddenly, [Pooh] was dreaming. He was at the East Pole, and it was a very cold pole with the coldest sort of snow and ice all over it. He had found a beehive to sleep in, but there wasn’t room for his legs, so he had left them outside. And Wild Woozles, such as inhabit the East Pole, came and nibbled all the fur off his legs to make nests for their Young. And the more they nibbled, the colder his legs got, until suddenly he woke up with an Ow!–and there he was, sitting in his chair with his feet in the water and water all round him!
From Best Friends for Frances by Russell Hoban.
When Frances got to Albert’s house, he was just coming out, and he was carrying a large, heavy-looking brown paper bag.
“Let’s play baseball,” said Frances.
“I can’t,” said Albert. “Today is my wandering day.”
“Where do you wander?” said Frances.
“I don’t know,” said Albert. “I just go around until I get hungry and then I eat my lunch.”
“That looks like a big lunch,” said Frances.
“It’s nothing much,” said Albert. “Four or five sandwiches and some apples and bananas and two packages of cupcakes and a quart of chocolate milk.”
“Can I wander with you?” asked Frances.
“I only have one lunch,” said Albert…”I think I better go by myself. The things I do on my wandering days aren’t things you can do.”
“Like what?” said Frances.
“Catching snakes,” said Albert. “Throwing stones at telephone poles. A little frog work maybe. Walking on fences. Whistling with grass blades. Looking for crow feathers.”
From Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer.
“Was that true?” Olivia’s teacher asks.
“Pretty true,” says Olivia.
“All true?”
“Pretty all true.”
“Are you sure, Olivia?”
“To the best of my recollection.”
While my son Drake napped today, I took to bed, and snuggled up with a short story and a chunk of Don Quixote. Sometimes Drake can sleep through cacophony; other times he wakes at an inopportune creak of the floorboards. To increase my chances of a long nap, I try to do just one thing. Today it was reading, and lots of it.
What is your definition of luxury?
Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta. I found this book on a blog dedicated not only to YA literature, but to portrayals of sexuality that are real, balanced, and specifically about girls and women who are responsible for their own sexual actions. While I commend that ideal, I’m not loving the book recommendations on the blog. Saving Francesca had good elements, but overall I can’t recommend it unreservedly. It is a teen problem novel, in that the main character starts off the school year with a problem–her mother is depressed and won’t get out of bed–and then solves the problem in the course of a school year. Parts of this book are funny, well-written, and true to life. It contains some great supporting characters. But the problem feels contrived; no one even asks if the mother has seen a doctor for the depression until halfway through the book. Also, Marchetta has an aggravating tendency to over-write. Countless paragraphs that ended a scene had ending sentences that lessened the impact of whatever decent writing came before it.
And being that happy makes me feel guilty. Because I shouldn’t be. Not while my mum is feeling the way she is. How I can dare to be happy is beyond me, and I hate my guts for it.
I hate myself so much that it makes my head spin.
Finally, I thought the issue of sex was largely avoided. The main character talks about it, but only kisses the boy she has a crush on. One of her friends may be having problems, but it isn’t discussed. The parents’ sex life is discussed, which I applaud, but the teens themselves are suspiciously abstinent.
Most happy and fortunate were the days when the bold knight Don Quixote of La Mancha sallied forth into the world, since, because of his honorable resolve to resuscitate and return to the world the lost and dying order of knight errantry, we can now enjoy in our own time, which is so in need of joyful entertainment, not only the sweetness of his true history, but also the stories and episodes that appear in it and are, in some ways, no less agreeable and artful and true than the history itself… (p. 227)
I am reading Don Quixote. Charmed by the editor’s preface and undaunted by the needlessly pendantic introduction by Harold Bloom, I read a little bit each day. I am about a quarter of the way through. Don Quixote is easier for me to read early in the day. Like Shakespeare’s, the prose requires a bit more attention than that of modern authors, but just a bit. Grossman’s translation is quite accessible.
My mind works by analogy. Also, I am rather obsessed with food. I was pleased to see that the featured cheese for May of the Twin Cities food co-ops is Manchego.
Originally made from the milk of sheep on the plains of La Mancha, it is a rich, golden, semi-firm cheese with a full, mellow flavor. It is excellent as a table cheese and melts well.
Try it:
*Melted on an open-faced sandwich of rare beef, a slice of hearty, toasted sourdough bread, au jus and a little garlic aioli.
*Serve with smoky Idiazabol, Cabrales, Mahon, fresh figs and Marcona almonds as a Spanish party tray.
*Wrap small chunks of Manchego with thinly sliced prosciutto or serrano ham as an appetizer.
–from Mix, a Twin Cities Natural Good Co-ops Publication (www.mwnaturalfoods.coop)
Most of these items are available at Twin Cities Co-ops. If you don’t feel up to making them yourself, Twin Citians can also visit Solera in downtown Minneapolis, for a stunning selection of lovely, delicious tapas.
Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl was Book 22 in my 50 book challenge for 2005. I’ve had this sitting on my TBR pile for years, having picked it up along with her second memoir, Comfort Me with Apples, which is a quote from the bible’s “Song of Solomon.” Reichl’s third memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, was just released, reminding me that the first two memoirs languished on my shelves. Reichl is a strong writer, and intersperses her personal history of her relationship with food with recipes that relate to the tale. Like her writing, the recipes are clear and inviting. In the end, though, I felt something was lacking. I consciously admired the book, but it did not move me to affection. Must all memoirists have crazy mothers, I wondered as I read, in this case a manic-depressive whom Reichl dubbed “The Queen of Mold” for her tendency to use outdated food. Reichl found what humor she could in their relationship over the years, but eventually it becomes too painful, and the quick redemption she finds at the end seems like a small bandage on a gaping wound. Another reason for my perceived lack of closure might be the two other memoirs that carry on the narrative. I’ll read Comfort Me with Apples, certainly, since I already own it, and use that as the litmus to decide whether to read Garlic and Sapphires. My hope is that the reading of Reichl’s second memoir will stand on its own, as well as retroactively enhance my reading of the first.
What were you thinking, asked people when I exclaimed over how huge the Sistine Chapel was.
“A little room, 20 feet square maybe, with a six foot ceiling. You know, a ceiling that you can actually imagine someone painting.”
How big did you think he was going to be, asked people when I stared up and up at David’s statue in the Accademia in Florence.
“Seven feet, tops. Bigger than life, sure, but not more than double!”
As I mentioned in my oil-change story, there are a lot of things that I simply don’t know until I experience them myself.
I was reminded of these gaffes when I went to the library yesterday. Over the past several months, references to Don Quixote have been accumulating in my mind, making me ever more aware of this gap in my cultural literacy. Terry Gilliam made “Lost in La Mancha,” a documentary that detailed his failed attempt to make Don Quixote into a movie. A new translation of Don Quixote was published to much acclaim, and a weblog was created in response. My friend Duff recommended The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters in spite of its cover; it features a fictional attempt to commit Don Quixote to film.
It’s time, I thought. I reserved it from the library, and was bursting with excitement when I went to pick it up. Then I literally picked up the Neal Stephenson”•sized* volume. I had NO IDEA that Don Quixote was such a long book. My enthusiasm evaporated.
Until I read the translator’s note, that is.
The extraordinary significance and influence of this novel were reaffirmed, once again, in 2002, when one hundred major writers from fifty-four countries voted Don Quixote the best work of fiction in the world….
And his writing is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey. Cervantes’s sytle is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous. If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.
My enthusiasm returned, more cautiously this time. Maybe, I thought, just maybe I can read Don Quixote. I can give up my “one book at a time” rule while I do, so it isn’t the only thing I’m reading. And if I read 50 pages a day, I can finish in three weeks.
Am I brave or foolhardy to take on this tome? Will I fail? Readers, I will let you know.
Works mentioned here:
*Copyeditor’s note. To be precise, I am using an en dash in an adjectival phrase consisting of an open compound (here, a proper name) to another word. The Chicago Manual of Style only mentions this use with prefixes, though. As the CMS notes, this is a bit fussy, but I’ve spent so much time looking it up that I’ve included it.
Economist Steven Levitt discovered a connection between legalized abortion and a reduced crime rate. He writes about this and more in his new book Freakonomics, link from Arts and Letters Daily, a collection of links from The Chronicle of Higher Education, recommended by my friend Blogenheimer.
Freakonomics is not published yet, but the queue for the first copy from our library was already fifteen by the time I put in a request. I’m not sure my math-geek husband G. Grod is going to be able to wait that long. He just finished Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace, and is in the midst of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel by Rebecca Goldstein, whose first novel was The Mind-Body Problem, a book I very much enjoyed. It centers on a philosophy student who marries a math prodigy, as Goldstein did herself.
Friday afternoon, and concentration is hard to come by. I know that a list seems like the LCD (lowest common denomiator) of blog entries, but I wouldn’t post on reading and watching lists if I didn’t think they had merit. When I read weblogs over time, I am able to determine similarities in media likes and dislikes. I pay attention to those people whose tastes run similarly to mine, especially those people who have more time and money than do I to more thoroughly explore what’s out there. I also have (mostly) stopped making to-do lists of books and movies, and instead rely upon an accumulation of recommendations to make something stand out in my memory unaided.
Is anyone out there besides me doing a 50 book or 50 movie challenge for a year, or am I talking to myself? I know that for many of you, 50 isn’t much. For me, though, as my son Drake approaches his second birthday, it’s meant reclaiming and re-integrating into my life things I love, like books and movies. I hope that I’ll trounce both goals handily, but even if I squeak in close, it will be a vast improvement over last year.
19. What You Wear Can Change Your Life by Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. I’m a fan of both the BBC and TLC versions of this show. This is an easy, breezy book that nonetheless contains a lot of practical advice on beauty and fashion. Woodall and Constantine are the sometimes fearless models of what not to wear, though they are vindicated in the more flattering “do” shots as well. It includes photos of them pregnant, and post-baby with soft tummies. I was reminded that looking after one’s appearance is a supreme form of self-validation. Letting things go on the outside usually means that one’s esteem is low on the inside. With canny advice like theirs, dressing and looking well can be a rewarding challenge. I noticed a few oopsies in the book, like the repeated misspelling of the word “fuchsia,” and one photo that was used to illustrate both do and don’t for blush. An additional quibble I have is that the book limits its fashion advice to the particular foibles of Woodall and Constantine. Together they do have most of the common body complaints that women try to dress around, yet Woodall’s physique is far from common. She has short legs and a cushy bum, but she’s 5′10″, so while a dress over pants looks well on her, those of us of average height can’t carry it off.
20. Lying Awake by Mark Salzman. An absolute gem of a book, whose story is made more beautiful still by the addition of several woodcut illustrations. A cloistered nun takes strength and inspiration from her spiritual visions. When she learns what might be causing them, she must wrestle with whether to give them up. Spare, moving and lovely.
21. Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson. This is a travel journal of Thompson’s three-month trek through Europe. The drawings are compelling, and Thompson is a self-aware and modest narrator, apologizing more than once for the slight nature of the work. It cannot compare to the strength and power of his two previous graphic novels, but it’s not meant to. This is an enjoyable and beautiful travel memoir, but if you haven’t read either of his previous novels, I urge you to seek out Goodbye, Chunky Rice and Blankets.
I followed a Bookslut entry link today about teen chicklit. This seems strangely familiar, I thought, even before getting to the damning quote by Sarah Mlynowski about wanting to be in the same company as Christopher Pike and the Sweet Valley books.
Oh, yeah, I have read this before, and linked to it in this entry on crossover books, but the Houston Chronicle no longer has the earlier article available. The original link came from Bookslut, here.
The Star Tribune piece notes that there is a growing market for teen chicklit. What it fails to note is that while it’s popular and selling well, it’s complete crap, following a formula that teen-fiction expert Michael Cart nailed about ten years ago in his excellent critical analysis From Romance to Realism: 50 years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature, 1996, which also happens to be book #18 in my 50 Book Challenge for the year.
Take one teenage protagonist (fifteen or younger–usually younger); give her/him a story to tell in her/his first-person voice. Keep the number of other characters to a bare minimum and develop their identities sketchily (no room for complexity, you know). Limit the story’s time span to a year or less. Fold in an undistinguished setting in a sentence or two and don’t refer to it thereafter. Add a lot of pop culture references and brand names. Stir briskly–no time for reflection or introspection–using lots of dialogue and a simple, unadorned, straightforward, colloquial style. Keep it short–no more than 200 pages; kids have short attention spans, you know. Hang the plot on a problem that can–after lots of hints of impending doom–be resolved satisfactorily by the protagonist without adult interference. The experience will change the protagonist forever–and for the better, please. Because downbeat endings are definitely not welcome. Cook until half-baked. (p. 243-4).
If you’re interested in teen fiction, ignore those books cited in the Star Tribune article and instead pick up any of Michael Cart’s anthologies, three of which I wrote about here. They contain well-written, provocative works that eschew the above formula.
Jessa Crispin at Blog of a Bookslut makes an impassioned plea to end the sloppy referential blurbing, although she previously linked to this piece on Charlotte Bronte in The Guardian with this:
This entry at litblog Collected Miscellany draws an interesting and, I think, quite valid distinction between book reviews, written for newspapers and amazon.com, and book criticism, written for academic or scholarly purposes. Describing the latter, he uses that quintessential grad school word “unpack”.
I’ve been reading Collected Miscellany for some time, and have been remiss in not adding it to my list of links yet. There are a handful of contributors, all of whom write on specific books and other book-related commentary. It’s quite well done.
I find Collected Miscellany a good companion to Conversational Reading, which has a good intro posted today. Conversational Reading is a single-author litblog, recommended to me by Blogenheimer.
And while I’m on the topic of litblogs, I will mention again how much I enjoy Blog of a Bookslut. The short, bantering entries are informative and fun to read.
Lots of folks were picking what I thought of as smarty-pants, hyperliterate stuff. I kinda shook my head. I mean, what’s the point of trying to write a short story based on a Dylan song? (I always thought Dylan songs were short stories, only better.) Anyway, for me, “Rio” came up right away. For one, I fucking love the song, it usually makes people smile, even if they’re shaking their heads in the process. I sort of think you can divide the world into people who appreciate Duran Duran, and people who don’t, and I’d rather vacation with the people who do. To me, Duran Duran in general, and “Rio” in particular, shimmer with the absolute brain-freeze purity of pop-rock’s trascendent ridiculousness, whatever that means. And I like the drums and guitar. And, good Lord, the lyrics, to “Rio” especially, are an L.A. sunset, a hot breath of everything and nothing all at once. I love shit like that.
Duff sent me a copy of Lit Riffs, a collection of short stories based on songs. This is exactly the kind of book you want to be lent; it’s got some great things, but it’s wildly uneven. The above quote is by Zev Borow. I think it encapsulates a lot of what’s wrong with most of the stories in the collection, but also with short stories in general, and perhaps even with pretentious people at large.
First, about Lit Riffs. It opens with a “lost” story by Lester Bangs. We’re all less fortunate for its having been found. As with many collections, reading the more famous name authors isn’t the best strategy. I was disappointed by Jonathan Lethem’s piece, and didn’t even bother to finish Aimee Bender’s. I did, however, enjoy Neal Pollack’s “Death in the Alt Country,” which reminded me of Robbie Fulks’s “Roots Rock Weirdos”, Heidi Julavits’s “The Eternal Helen”, Judy Budnitz’s “The System, and Borow’s “Rio”. While I’d heard of all the artists whose songs were chosen as inspiration, and even own CDs by most of them, I found most of the chosen lyrics to be obscure, and the stories based on them to be even more tenuously connected. Borow’s was the refreshing exception to this.
I once had a friend who was a fierce champion of short stories. I could never echo his appetite for them. Too often, I felt short story authors were trying to out-creepify each other. Thom Jones’s “I Want to Live!” exemplified this for me, and I found some of this tendency in Julavits’s story, though it had a self-aware humor that transcended the creep factor.
This creepification implies that art should be separate from enjoyment. I attended a class with the film director Peter Greenaway once, and he made an interesting distinction between enjoyment and pleasure. Enjoyment, he said, was simple fun. Pleasure, though, was more complicated, even didactic. Too often, I think, short story writers and other people of so-called taste valorize works of art that are complex over those that are fun. But either extreme would be unhealthy. Too much enjoyment produces vapidity, yet too much complicated pleasure leads to pretension. A balance of both, however, allows for learning and humor. I think Borow’s story and endnote capture this perfectly.
As an example of a non-pretentious, highly enjoyable collection of pop music, I highly recommend Music from The O.C. Mix 1, especially track 9, “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols. Brain-freeze purity, indeed.
I am just busting out of a prolonged (nearly four weeks) writing block on my novel, which I have to present to my group next week, so blogging may get short shrift for a while. It is HARD not to spend time blogging, because it goes so much faster than work on the novel.
My 19-month-old son Drake is up to fascinating stuff. Earlier in the week he climbed to the slide in the jungle gym by walking up the steps holding onto the rail, rather than by crawling. At home, he stood up while going down our front steps holding the rail, rather than waiting for my help.
Drake has a little dance of excitement, in which he stays in one place and hops his feet up and down and laughs. It is very like a Snoopy dance.
And during our readings of Edward Gorey’s The Epiplectic Bicycle, my husband G. Grod and I read the story, and Drake is able to say the word bubbles, like “Ho!” and “Whee!” Last week my husband G. Grod and I did a tag team reading of Bread and Jam for Frances, in which G. read the story and I sang the songs (for all of which I’ve made up tunes.) The three of us enjoyed that reading very much.
Over the past several years, I’ve scaled back, and scaled back again the number of comics that I read. Right now I’m reading about ten a month*. This usually means that there are one or two Wednesdays a month that my titles don’t come out. I like the ritual of going to the comic store every week, but it’s hard to justify when I know nothing new has come in.
I’m going to pick up Grant Morrison’s new project Seven Soldiers, though, and that will pretty much ensure at least one book a week for quite some time. Seven Soldiers started off with a #0, and then is followed by seven four-issue mini series, followed by a concluding issue. Morrison is working with a different artist on each of the seven titles. I haven’t liked a lot of what Grant Morrison has been doing in the past several years, but I did enjoy the whacked-out Sea Guy, and in this interview at Suicide Girls, Morrison references both Animal Man and Doom Patrol; I enjoyed the beginning of his run on both of those series.
For each week’s list of new releases, visit the New Comic Release List.
*Here are the ongoing titles I read: 100 Bullets, Daredevil, Ex Machina, Fables, Finder, Girl Genius, Gotham Central, Planetary, The Pulse, Queen & Country, and Y the Last Man. Not all of these titles are published monthly.
I wrote before about whether I wanted to make the shift from individual comic book issues to graphic novel collections. Lisa Schmeiser at the Rage Diaries recently noted her frustration at the ending of the series Rising Stars. Waiting for graphic novel collections is one way to avoid the heartbreak of investing time in a series that ends with a whimper, not a bang. Last week, I participated in an email volley with two friends who have strongly held views at opposite ends of the spectrum.
NPC is a proponent of the graphic novel option, for the following reasons:
the GNs don’t have ads, the physical product is of a noticably higher quality, and (most important) the GNs often contain additional material (for example, character sketches, retrospective introductions, and sample scripts) that is not included in the single issues…those factors would make me prefer GNs even if they cost more than the sum of the single issues. that they actually cost less is a bonus.
NPC does note that sometimes individual issues contain material that doesn’t get collected. He still thinks GN collections are the way to go.
Blogenheimer says that he’ll still buy individual issues for two reasons.
First, I enjoy the process of getting something new and interesting each week. No matter what’s going on in my life, I have something to look forward to on Wednesday. Second, comics are quicker to read than graphic novels. I can find time to read a comic on all but the busiest days. It is harder to find the time to read most graphic novels. While I’m mostly caught up on comics, graphic novels tend to pile up like my unread books.
Because of the ads and the cost I was leaning toward the GN option that NPC champions. But I think Blogenheimer’s two points are quite strong. I enjoy going into the comic shop on Wednesdays, and I’m disappointed on weeks when I don’t have any books to buy. Additionally, even individual issues are piling up, so graphic novels are literally gathering dust before I read them.
While Blogenheimer and NPC make good points for each side, I don’t think it has to be either/or. I think it was Kierkegaard who offered us the option of both/and, and Hegel who championed the synthesis of two seemingly opposing viewpoints. In an ideal world, I’d buy the individual issues as they came out, then the GN collection later to re-read the story line in its entirety. At that point I could re-sell the original issues to defray the cost of the collection, or keep them if they contain uncollected material that I like. Right now, buying both single issues and GNs isn’t fiscally responsible. Since I have to choose, I’m going to stick with individual issues. Yes, they have annoying ads, and I can get burned when a series heads south. But part of the joy I find in comics is both the serial nature of the narratives as well as the serial nature of comic store visits.
13: Empire Falls by Richard Russo. Boy, they don’t just hand the Pulitzer out to hacks, do they? This 483-dense-paged book took me a whopping twenty days to read, but was well worth it. Russo’s characterizations are so lifelike they’re almost spooky. He skillfully juggles a huge panoply of characters, all of whom are complex, intriguing and believable. There are many jumps back and forth in time, but his narrative is so firmly anchored that I never felt a jot of confusion, even when reading at my most fatigued and distracted. Utterly satisfying and highly recommended.
The library is like a good friend, with whom I occasionally fall out of touch. As a child, I was a faithful library patron until I ran afoul of some mean librarians in middle and high school. Curiously, the mean high-school librarian had also been the very nice fifth-grade librarian, who always helped me to pick out books. By the time I hit ninth-grade, there was no evidence of her former solicitude. The mean librarians conjuncted badly with a string of ineffective English teachers, and my love of reading got shunted down unfortunate roads. It was years later, in college, that I stumbled back into the public library in search of non-crappy books.
Soon, though, I was seduced by non-crappy books with pretty covers in bookstores. My favorite stores, in D.C. circa 1990, were Ohlsson’s Books on Wisconsin Ave. in Georgetown, and a place near DuPont Circle or Adams Morgan, the name of which I’ve forgotten. (It was an indie that had a coffee shop way before this became the norm. I’ve been trying to recall the name for some time; I think it might be well and truly lost.)
The middle of the decade found me with high debt and lots of unread books. Upon reflection, it is quite likely that my periodic re-engagements with the public library coincide with dips in my personal fortune. Once again, then, I find myself patronizing my local library.
The Minneapolis Public Library has an extensive collection, and a wonderful online catalog. It is easy to search and to reserve items, which can then be sent to the branch nearest to me. I can run in, grab my items from the hold shelf, use the self-serve check out, and I’m done in a trice. I reserve books, CDs and DVDs. The library sends me an email when my items are in, and a reminder before they are due. Renewals can be done online or by phone. Minneapolis also has reciprocity with the more affluent suburban libraries, so even in the rare instance that an item I want isn’t in the city system, I can usually still get it.
I’ve long thought that cookbooks and CDs are items best tried before buying. I now think this holds true for most books. With limited funds and storage space, I only want to house books that I love, and that I am likely to read, or at least refer to, again. The library, for free, allows me to try a book, movie, CD or magazine. If I love it, I can seek it out for purchase. Even if I discover that my reading reach exceeds my grasp, I can return the item with no penalty by its due date, and attend to it at some later date. All of this allows for more room on my shelves, and less in my wallet.