Girl Detective

‘Tis the season for end-of-year reading lists. They’re fun for comparison and contrast. But this was the only books-not-read list I saw (via Pages Turned), and I found it so funny I am compelled to follow suit. I could come up with any number of unread books. Instead, I’ll just note the obvious ones.

1. Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende. Bought (breaking my new I’m-only-buying-books-that-I’ve read-and-loved vow) on sale at Target after a friend invited me to see Allende speak. I read the first 50 pages, then stopped because I found out my friend was reading Zorro. I started Zorro (from library), took forever to finish it because I didn’t love it, then returned Ines.

2. Charmed Thirds by Megan McCafferty. I re-read the first two books in her trilogy, and didn’t like them as well as I remembered. I had to finish Middlesex for my book group, so I returned this to the library unread, since I couldn’t muster any excitment to read it.

3. Rash by Pete Hautman. I like Hautman’s books a lot. The Prop was one of my favorite books of last year. But Rash came in at the library in the midst of my summer reading challenge, and I could either read it, or the books on my shelf that I’d set as my goal, so I returned it unread.

4. One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson and 5. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marish Pessl. I was still slogging through Zorro when these came into the library at the same time. I knew I’d never have time to re-read Case Histories before OGT was due, and I had no idea that STiCP was so long. I returned them promptly to the library so someone else could get them quickly.

6. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; 7. Not Buying It by Judith Levine; and 8. The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susannah Clarke. I put these in my library queue before I made my young-adult-centered reading list for the summer. I knew I could either read them, or the books I’d set for myself. I gritted my teeth, and deleted them from my queue. I still want to read the first two, but my enthusiasm for the Clarke book has dimmed in the meantime.

9. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and 10. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I wanted to read these in the aftermath of my re-reading of Jane Eyre. Again, I knew if I did, I wouldn’t complete my summer reading list. I put them off for later, and never got to them.

And finally, because every list of 10 should have an 11. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. Because anytime I say to my husband that I don’t know what to read next, he says, “You know, there’s this great book…” Both he and I know that I’ll probably never read it. I’d have to go back and start the trilogy again from the beginning. I think I came to these books too late in life to love them.

Books recommended by my husband that I don’t read, though, and vice versa, is another topic, for another day.

#68 in my reading challenge was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I don’t know how long this slender volume has been sitting on my shelf. A while, I suspect, since it is a third edition, published in 1979. (A fourth edition was published in 1999, and an illustrated edition in 2005.) More than once, a writing instructor has said it’s worth reading, not only as reference, but also cover to cover. I found it by turns perceptive, funny, and irritating. An example of the latter:

The use of he as pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginning of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotation; it is never incorrect.

I disagree, for reasons detailed in the usage note on he from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:

Traditionally the pronouns he, him, and his have been used as generic or gender-neutral singular pronouns, as in A novelist should write about what he knows best and No one seems to take any pride in his work anymore. Since the early 20th century, however, this usage has come under increasing criticism for reflecting and perpetuating gender stereotyping. · Defenders of the traditional usage have argued that the masculine pronouns he, his, and him can be used generically to refer to men and women. This analysis of the generic use of he is linguistically doubtful. If he were truly a gender-neutral form, we would expect that it could be used to refer to the members of any group containing both men and women. But in fact the English masculine form is an odd choice when it refers to a female member of such a group. There is something plainly disconcerting about sentences such as Each of the stars of As Good As It Gets [i.e., Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt] won an Academy Award for his performance. In this case, the use of his forces the reader to envision a single male who stands as the representative member of the group, a picture that is at odds with the image that comes to mind when we picture the stars of As Good As It Gets. Thus he is not really a gender-neutral pronoun; rather, it refers to a male who is to be taken as the representative member of the group referred to by its antecedent. The traditional usage, then, is not simply a grammatical convention; it also suggests a particular pattern of thought. · It is clear that many people now routinely construct their remarks to avoid generic he, usually using one of two strategies: changing to the plural, so they is used (which is often the easiest solution) or using compound and coordinate forms such as he/she or he or she (which can be cumbersome in sustained use). In some cases, the generic pronoun can simply be dropped or changed to an article with no change in meaning. The sentence A writer who draws on personal experience for material should not be surprised if reviewers seize on that fact is complete as it stands and requires no pronoun before the word material. The sentence Every student handed in his assignment is just as clear when written Every student handed in the assignment. · Not surprisingly, the opinion of the Usage Panel in such matters is mixed. While 37 percent actually prefer the generic his in the sentence A taxpayer who fails to disclose the source of ______ income can be prosecuted under the new law, 46 percent prefer a coordinate form like his or her; 7 percent felt that no pronoun was needed in the sentence; 2 percent preferred an article, usually the; and another 2 percent overturned tradition by advocating the use of generic her, a strategy that brings the politics of language to the reader’s notice. Thus a clear majority of the Panel prefers something other than his. The writer who chooses to use generic he and its inflected forms in the face of the strong trend away from that usage may be viewed as deliberately calling attention to traditional gender roles or may simply appear to be insensitive.

The Elements of Style is a classic, and deservedly so. Much of it details the kind of common sense that is easily forgotten or confused. It is limited, though, both in scope and adaptability. I recommend The Chicago Manual of Style for the former, and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language for the latter.

#67 in my book challenge for the year was Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. She chronicles the mysterious illness of her daughter and the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. It’s beautifully written, and Didion uses repetition masterfully to illustrate the waves of grief. In the end, though, I felt her skill at writing blurred the emotional impact she was purporting to reveal. A hospital worker called her “a pretty cool customer”, and that coolness permeates the book. Her daughter’s serious illness was included primarily as it related to the husband’s death. I was left with many questions about the daughter, though. I kept returning to the image on the dust jacket, in which Didion stands alone, looking sidewise at her husband and daughter. Her narrative echoed the observing isolation of the photo.

#66 in my reading challenge for the year, Diane Setterfield’s Thirteenth Tale rescued me from my reading slump. A friend called it something like a ripping-good read, and I agree. It’s full of juicy passages ripe for quoting about the love of reading and stories. This is a literary mystery that proudly displays its gothic roots. Setterfield isn’t coy about the books to which she’s paying tribute; she mentions Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White several times. The book is rendered timeless by the sparing use of modern detail, and the complete lack of brand display that many authors use as a shorthand for characterization. I was loath to put it down, and kept telling my husband “I MUST finish my book.” I don’t believe it is in the same class as its forebears, but it is an engaging and compelling book that earned one of my top compliments: I bought it for our home library after returning the library’s copy.

#65 in my book challenge for the year was this Dickens collection of Christmas stories. I find it interesting how thoroughly the tale has pervaded our lives that it was completely familiar to me though I’d never read it before. I found it well worth reading. The main points of the story are well known, but I was glad to experience the writing and the details. And though I generally avoid them, I found the introduction by the late Frederick Busch–a writer I admire a great deal–to be insightful and helpful. Marley’s ghost starts scary, then becomes sympathetic. A scene from Christmas yet to come echoes Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth. On the surface, it’s more about the culture of the holiday than its religion. Yet there is a steady tension throughout between the joy of children and the inevitability of death that mirrors the bittersweet note in the joy of Christmas, that the death of Good Friday is not far off.

Why am I so tired today? Because I have a cold, and have been caring for my two sons who also have colds? Because baby Guppy woke before 4 a.m., wanting to be fed?

No, it’s because yesterday was new-comic day, and my husband G. Grod and I stayed up late reading comic books in bed.

No wonder we can’t get Drake to turn out the lights and stop reading. It’s his birthright.

My husband and I have done such a good job of imparting a love of books to our 3yo Drake, we have trouble getting him to put them down. This becomes a problem when he needs to go to sleep. G. Grod and I will turn out the light and leave the room. When we get downstairs, we’ll hear the sound of turning pages, so ten to fifteen minutes later one of us will go up, turn off the light and tell him to get in bed, and we’ll repeat till it works. Kinda like letting him cry it out, but with books. During one of our many recent viruses, though, I decided to lock his book closet again to encourage him to get rest. The books were away, but unfortunately, the Aquaphor was not. I found Drake in his room with petroleum jelly product in his hair, on his chair, and on his bed. He was asleep in his chair, with his hands clutched around the jar of Aquaphor. Since then, the tub of Aquaphor is out of reach, and the books are always available. I’d like to say that if he chooses not to nap, that’s his problem, but of course it’s not. His irritability and meltdowns become all our problems. But I think I’d rather deal with those than with petroleum jelly smeared hither and yon.

#64 in my book challenge for the year was Isabel Allende’s Zorro. A kind friend had an extra ticket to see Allende last month, so I moved Zorro to the top of my reading list. Allende was intelligent, political, and funny in person, so I’m glad I went. But not only could I not finish the book in time for the event, but it took me nearly three weeks to read. I’m not sure if it took so long because of life circumstances (holiday, family visit, nearly constant family viruses) or because I didn’t love the book. Reviews say it’s a page turner with great characterization. I didn’t find it to be either. It’s clear that Allende did a lot of research into the history of the Zorro legend and the time period. While I found the historical details interesting, especially about Spain and the Spanish treatment of the native Americans, I never felt very engaged with the characters. Is it history or coincidence that the clever girl in the story is named Isabel? Additionally, what struck me at the end was how much the character of Batman owes to the legend of Zorro.

The new favorite picture book in our house is AlphaOops! by Alethea Kontis, illustrated by Bob Kolar. (If you follow the link to amazon, be sure to check out the reviews by Alethea’s father and grandmother. They endeared this book even more to me.) It is the kind of book that editors talk about at writing conferences when they say they would never take an alphabet book, unless it were by an established author (like Betsy Cronin’s Click, Clack, Quackity, Quack) or were something fresh and different. This is a great example of taking a completely saturated type (alphabet book) and turning it on its head. The subtitle is “The Day Z Went First” but the book doesn’t simply go backward. The letters have differently personalities and get in fights that are remarkably similar to those of toddlers, especially re: turns and fairness. There is a band along the bottom keeping track of which letters went in the revised order, and many of the example props take an active role in the visual storytelling. The art is clear and engaging, but also so detailed that it compels one to go slowly to read all the visual jokes. This book is funny and clever, and the text and art are a joy to read. For more AlphaOops!, go to the author’s website.

Chowder, by Peter Brown, is another recent favorite. Chowder is an iconoclastic bulldog, who acts more like a person than a dog. When he tries to befriend the animals in a petting zoo, he fails initially but goes on to save the day. Brown’s art is distinctive and well executed, and the typesetting is varied and skillfully done. It’s a good story about finding friends and making family.

Helen Oxenbury’s Tom and Pippo books are out of print! As a lifelong fan of children’s books, I know I should be accustomed to the out-of-print thing, One of my family’s favorite holiday tales, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, has long been out of print even though it was turned into a quite decent holiday special by Jim Hensen. Even so I haven’t become sufficiently inured to learning that a book I want isn’t easy to buy.

The Tom and Pippo books were recommended by a reader, who said that she had an entire collection. Lucky reader! The copies at our library are quite ragged, but they’ll have to suffice for now. I can hope that they come back into print, as sometimes happens with popular authors and illustrators. The simple text coupled with the charming drawings, and the sweet relationship between the boy and his toy monkey should have a wider audience than those of us that comb library shelves and used-book stores.

I gave myself reading challenges last year and this year because I felt like I was not making enough time for one of my favorite pursuits. I demonstrated, at least to myself, that having one small child, and then another, did not mean I had to stop reading. I kept reading, though I did have to make changes, like lowering my expectations on how clean my house was, how frequently laundry was done, how many magazines I subscribed to, how much time I spent on other hobbies, and how much television I watched.

But after a year and a half of devouring books at a healthy clip, I’ve been brought up short. It’s discouraging and humbling. I returned two books from my library request list unread, and am probably going to return an unread new purchase to the store as well. I’ve been plodding through the same book for over two weeks now, and probably only read one book before that this month.

Our family has been hard hit by viruses and sleep deprivation, plus there was a business trip and family visit. I’m hoping the sudden downturn is circumstantial, and will pass. There are too many books I want to read for one book a month to feel like it’s much better than nothing.

This quote by Zadie Smith was excerpted at Boing Boing.

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

It’s a lovely reminder that reading is a skill, and one to be practiced over a lifetime. I frequently heard a dismissive “I didn’t like it” when I taught college composition and asked my students to read an essay. This often meant “I didn’t understand it.” But I’ve heard the same phrase and the same dismissal in disappointing book discussions, when the other readers don’t engage with the text. I heard Cold Mountain called too long, and The God of Small Things too depressing.

When I don’t like a book, I often engage MORE with the text, not less. (See this at Chicklit for an example.) I struggle to ascertain what it is that disappointed me. As I’ve grown as a reader, my criticism has become more complex, just as my interaction with the text has.

I can’t help the uncharitable part of me, though, that wonders if I’m reading too much into the quote. I think it implies Smith thinks she is an artist of great skill who can’t be comprehended entirely by readers. But I’ll squash the part of me that thinks so, and just appreciate her insight into reading.

#63 in my book challenge for the year was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Learn from my experience: do not re-read your high-school copy. Read an unmarked copy as an adult, and see how your experience of the book is different (or the same) from what you remember. My initial feeling as I read the book was that it was good, but obvious, and that’s why it’s taught in high school. At the end and after discussion, though, I did find the book had more depth than I’d seen at first. It’s overtly about race, but less obviously about class, gender, and the unpleasant, all-too-human tendencies most people harbor under the surface. It’s an indictment of public school education, and of conventional parenting. Its characters change and grow. This book was well worth revisiting, especially after re-reading In Cold Blood.

Is parenting one long string of “I swore I’d never do/say that”? Sometimes it feels like it. Yesterday I locked up the books in Drake’s room. He stopped napping a while back, and instead would page through many of his books. But he’s been sick and slow to recover, and I suspected that he needed the rest more than the reading. So I locked his book closet and removed other distractions from his room. Lo and behold, he slept. I know better, though, than to exult over a one-time occurrence. I did it again today, and he has been singing for 25 minutes.

I mentioned in one of my last posts that I wouldn’t be getting to books on my shelf for a while. Pages Turned lists authors on her shelf that she has two books by, but hasn’t yet read. While I’ve got two, and sometimes even three, unread books by certain authors, I have usually read something else by them.

Authors I haven’t read with two or more on the TBR pile :

Peter Ackroyd
Patricia Highsmith (an omnibus of three Ripley novels)
Vernor Vinge

Authors I’ve read with two or more books on the TBR pile:

Julian Barnes
Lois McMaster Bujold
Angela Carter
Paula Fox
Mary Gaitskill
Ernest Hemingway
Iris Murdoch
Philip Pullman
Neal Stephenson
David Foster Wallace
P. G. Wodehouse

Additionally, I have six books (of eight) from Persephone that I haven’t yet read.

Well, I must admit, I’m full of it. For all my passionate protest that I was going to limit my library request queue and instead read books on the shelf, I have one library book (One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, so I’d like to re-read Case Histories, which I read from the library and then bought because I loved) at home, another in at the library that I AM going to pick up and read (Special Topics in Calamity Physics, because I don’t want to miss all the discussion, and everyone’s reading it), plus I’m going to see Isabel Allende, so I got one of her books from the library and bought her newest from Target because it was on sale. A friend just lent me a book. Plus there’s Siblings Without Rivalry, that I got from the library since Drake has finally figured out that whomping on Guppy bothers G. Grod and me, or Dickens A Christmas Carol, which my book group is reading for December.

I’m full of it because I’m (mostly) unrepentant. I’m going to read my library books. More damning, I went to my queue, intending to delete all forthcoming books, but I could only delete one. I found myself incapable of deleting The Thirteenth Tale, since I’ve read that it’s such fun, and I’m 25th on the list. I also didn’t delete Mockingbird, since I just finished To Kill a Mockingbird, and want to know more.

So that’s ten books, none of which are shelf sitters. Worse, there are only six weeks left in the year, and my reading rate has slowed considerably with fall tv and changes in Guppy’s nursing patterns. I may not get to a shelf book till well into the new year.

Years ago, I was having dinner at a friend’s house, when I saw a flyer on her refrigerator for a book group. I thought the list of books looked good, and I was excited at the idea of getting together with people to discuss them. “Hey,” I asked, “Can I join this?” Another woman standing behind me, not yet my good friend, said, “Yes, I’d like to as well.” We were both invited to join, but we had to read Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits in a few days. The other woman managed to finish; I did not. But both of us were members of that group until we moved. It was a good book group, not the kind people make fun of. We always discussed the book. One of the standards for choosing books was that they be challenging. There was good food and drink. And it was a good community of support made up of women from different disciplines.

This week a friend said she had an extra ticket to go see Allende at the Fitzgerald on Friday night. I’m not sure if I’m just going to the reading, or to my friend’s book group meeting too, but they’re on two different books. Allende is speaking for the Talking Volumes group on her newest novel, Ines of my Soul. But my friend’s book group read Zorro. So once again I find myself trying to cram in a lot of Allende in just a few days.

So far, my 3yo son Drake enjoys preschool. I appreciate that he’s meeting other kids and making cute crafts. But I exclaimed in excitement when I picked him up last week. Book club order forms! While I’ve enacted draconian cutbacks in book purchases for me and the husband, I am beside myself with excitement as I page through the options. I am overcome by nostalgia for one of the few things I remember fondly about school–these book order forms.

So many books! So cheap! How will I decide?

Years ago, when I was in grad school, an erudite English friend lent me her copy of the Arden Hamlet, with her notes from her secondary-school Shakespeare class. The Arden editions have useful and copious footnotes, but I found my friend’s notes even more helpful. It was very hard for me to give her back her book, since I felt I learned so much from it. Buying my own Arden copy helped. A bit.

Currently, I’m reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I still have the copy I read in 9th grade English class. My notes are in hot-pink ink, in a rounded script that is sufficiently different from my current one that I didn’t immediately recognize it as my own. But what’s most disconcerting is the pedestrian tenor of the notations and underlinings. They probably were quotes from my English teacher, a very nice man who also happened to farm hogs. When I re-read comments such as “shows Jem’s maturation” or “themes: empathy, prejudice,” I cringe. I very much wish my 9th-grade self had been more sophisticated, and not just in pen-color choice and script style. It’s humbling to compare these glaringly obvious notes with the memory of my friend’s more complex ones in her Hamlet.

I am familiar with the disappointment that my education was not what I wish it had been, and envy of my friend’s experience. Yet I console myself with a few things. One, I have taken responsibility for my own ongoing education, and have progressed at least enough to have moved beyond my 9th-grade understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird. And two, To Kill a Mockingbird, while a very good book, is no Hamlet. It’s a book that’s easy to teach, with clear themes and language. Hamlet is complex enough that scholars are still arguing over it centuries later. To Kill a Mockingbird might be appreciated in the coming centuries, I don’t think it has the subtlety to inspire similar debate.

Michelle at Overdue Books (found via Pages Turned) has issued the From the Stacks Winter Reading Challenge:

If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven’t read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.

The bonus would be that we would finally get to some of those titles (you know you picked them for a reason!) and we wouldn’t be spending any extra money over the holidays.

While it’s a laudable goal, I don’t think I’ll be officially participating in the challenge. Time is particularly crunchy lately, and I’m trying to counteract my tendency to do one more thing. I’ll certainly attempt to do it on my site, since it coincides with what I’ve been trying to do anyway, which is read old stuff and not buy new stuff. But I’m not sure I want to commit to a list of 5. The last reading challenge I did showed me how restrictive reading lists quickly become. I’ve got so many candidates vying for my attention that there are probably no wrong answers. But I think I may have a glance over my mass market paperbacks, which have been temporarily exiled to the porch off baby Guppy’s room. They don’t get the same face time and consideration as the HCs and TPs do, so I think I’ll give them some equal opportunity.