I loved this story. And it's totally free online.
I want to read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears immediately.
On the docket
Tomorrow, I'm going to get my fall reading list for school, and then you'll get nothing but close, careful readings (not really) for like two months. I have so many books I'd planned to read before this happened. I think I have time to read at least one more thing before my books actually arrive in the mail, what with my procrastination and the USPS. Here are the books that I am considering maligning and misinterpreting before The Great Reading descends upon me:
"I Capture the Castle"
"At Swim-Two-Birds" (I started this, but I'm not fully committed)
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
A mystery, which might be either "The Terra-Cotta Dog" or "Death at La Fenice"
Oh, and I still need to read "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper"
This reminds me that I own a whole lot of stuff I haven't read. I think this begs the questions: why do I still buy books?
I don't have an answer, except to say that I'm definitely going to get to "The Charterhouse of Parma" someday. And "Magic Mountain". And if I don't own them how can I get to them? What am I, a list-making magician?
Berlin and "The Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood
1.
Ah, Berlin! My favorite European city of all. It rains all the time, the people can seem, um, brusque, and the airport may or may not be on fire when you visit. And yet, somehow, within the first day I was there it had totally won me over. How?
The answer is low expectations. Or none at all. I guess when I visited in 2008, Berlin hadn’t really been a part of my imaginative landscape. I had no idea at all what it would look like, or how I would feel there. I love how full of contrasts the city is, with its eastern and its western halves, with its blowzy old apartment blocks, drab communist-era offices, renovated 19th century museums, and hyper-modern new construction all jumbled up together. I love how gracious the parks are, and yet how casually maintained, so that you can almost picture the dark, Northern forests that must have existed long ago in the heart of the sprawling city. I love how you can spend an hour on the train to Potsdam and never leave the city. I love that stepping off the plane in November, you understand instantly how Germany gave us the word ‘angst’. I love that I didn’t eat one bad meal. I even like how you’re always aware of the long, awful history of the city, which is bizarrely highlighted and suppressed at once: the general awfulness brought out, the particulars tucked away, but always there.
When I travel, I like to have a solid place to stay and a really good guidebook, but beyond that, I prefer to make plans on the ground. I think it’s hard to predict what you’re going to want to do before you have a feel for a place’s public transport. Until you know whether you’re going to get lost every time you get on a train (this side-eye is for you, Paris*), or whether you’re going to be harassed by drunk people and singers (hi, New York), or whether repairs are going to turn your one-hour trip into a three-day ordeal that will find you walking out of a subway tunnel, covered in grime and despair like one of the mole people, you may want to hold off. I guess it’s a surprise to no one that Berlin has excellent public transport, that no one jaywalks, and that its bike-riders and pedestrians have a relationship that is almost (I mean, come on) not murderously hostile.
I found the food to be inexpensive and really, really good (try a donner kebab and some currywurst, street-food lovers), and our hostel was the Best Hostel I Have Ever Stayed At. I remember that at the time, I wished I had a blog so I could talk it to death on the internet. SO NOW I AM GOING TO. On my book blog. You know, whatever.
Here is a picture of my brother and I, not in front of the hostel. I didn't know I'd need one. What am I, psychic?
It is called the EastSeven Berlin Hostel, and it is in Mitte, which is part of what used to be East Berlin. I loved this part of town. Berlin is a real megamonster of a city, and I didn’t see it all, so I’m not going to make any claims like “it’s the BEST”, but it was great. And the hostel is literally two blocks from the subway. Stay there.
Also, if I had to pick one museum (but WHY?) to go see, it would probably be the Gemäldegalerie. It’s got a lot of late-Medieval/early-Renaissance art (the collection actually covers the 13th to the 18th centuries). Stay with me here. It’s small, so you can see it in an hour or two, it’s beautifully curated, with really good information on the audio tour, and it’s in a super-modern, cool building. The reason I recommend it is that I think they do a really good job explaining and creating an appreciation for Medieval art, which, I, for one, used to always breeze past while singing ‘boring, boring, boooring’. As much as I love a sprawling get-lost-for-days museum, there’s something really wonderful about a small museum that doesn’t overwhelm you, but instead makes you think deeply about a single thing in some way that you hadn’t before.
2.
Low expectations may also have been why I enjoyed the hell out of The Berlin Stories. I made a point not to read too much about it beforehand. People on the internet seem pretty divided about the book: it’s either one of the best books of the 20th century, or a boring, impersonal story that depends for its depth on what the Nazis ended up doing in Germany (the stories are all set in Berlin in the 30s).
The Berlin Stories is actually two books in one: The Last of Mr. Norris, which was a novella and my favorite, and Goodbye to Berlin which was a collection of short stories. I found the narrator (actually, there are two separate narrators, but they’re so similar that it’s almost pointless to separate them) really witty, and the prose sings. It’s true that both books are written in such a way as to be both highly personal (first person, written almost like a diary, and there’s a strong sense of the narrator’s voice) and oddly resistant to personal detail. We find out almost nothing about the narrator except that he’s English, fairly high-born but poor, that he’s an English teacher and an aspiring author, and that he’s (probably) gay. The narrator has no real stake in any of the stories he tells, and no expressed desires beyond the quotidian ones and capturing the things that happen to him in writing. He’s a foreigner, and can leave at any time. He’s a communist, but never gets into any real trouble. He’s mostly untouched by all the drama unfolding around him. At the same time, because the stories are in the first person, the other characters we read about remain inscrutable most of the time. The books work because these are stories that are less about a single character than about the character of the city. There’s this sparkling, frenetic, sexually-charged demi-monde that comes to life mostly at night, populated by charming, but also ghoulish people, and then underneath all this fizzy light-headed sensuality and partying there’s a sense of some awful doom descending very slowly. A sort of gradual suffocation.
On first reading, The Last of Mr. Norris was the more effective of the two books. Mr. Norris is a decadent, effete con-man with a penchant for S&M, collecting pornography, fine underwear, and hand-made jam. Excellent! The narrator meets him on a train from the Netherlands, and from the beginning, Mr. Norris is surrounded by a lot of mystery, and not many answers. His (somewhat ridiculous) intrigues serve mostly to transmit to the reader the persecution, paranoia, and tangled politics of the time: the sense that Mr. Norris is trapped like a gleefully oblivious insect on a spider’s web, each twitch towards freedom drawing his awful fate closer. The greater length of the novella gives Isherwood time to really build up a sense of foreboding and menace, and because we find out he’s a con-man early on, we expect for Mr. Norris’s actions and motivations to be something other than what they seem. Our lack of insight becomes an asset.
One of the things that I liked best about reading these two little books was that they provided a nice counterpoint to the stuff you’re always told in writing programs about how stories don’t work unless you have at least one character that you get really close to. I also like that the narrator has no strong desires and isn’t the source of conflict. I think if someone brought this in to a workshop, even I’d be like “oh, why are you telling it from this guy’s point of view?” Reading something from a critical place completely changes how you judge it. It’s always great to be reminded that some things that shouldn’t work still can.
There’s a wonderful write-up about The Berlin Stories on The Millions (I’m definitely going to be reading this book again), and an interesting piece about how what it captures of Berlin’s soul is still mostly true.
*This was actually just one time, but, I was only fifteen and instead of taking me to Versailles, the train took me to the Zombie Apocalypse. True story. I had to wait until I was 20 to see Versailles. OH, THE HUMANITY.
Looking at the Lyrics: "Hot Toddy"
You guys, I have been having a really hard time figuring out what the lyrics to that newish Jay-Z/Usher song are. Because as I was listening in my car for about the 44th time today, I thought, “Surely—SURELY—these men are not singing an ode to the traditional Scottish cold-remedy.” But they were. Except it’s a euphemism for sex. Of course it is. I cannot wait for the day that I am sick and when I try to google a cold remedy, I get a bunch of results like “Baby dancing to hot toddy” and “Dog drinking whiskey HOT TODDY!!1!!!” and “Hot Toddeez EXPOSED vol. 17”, which is a porn (you don’t say!). In the spirit of helping artists stay away from my colds, I have come up with a list of other things that are not currently metaphors for sex, but could be:
Typing her keys.
Taking the snooze off the alarm.
Lunchbox full of goodies.
Making a deposit in the piggybank. (Piggybanking it).
These are just the things I have come up with looking around my room for 15 seconds. Are they all winners? Absolutely.
To recap, if anyone writes a catchy song about vaporub or Kleenex and it is a euphemism for sex, I will be extremely disappointed in all of you.
Also, for those of you who are nerds like me, the chorus from “Hot Toddy”:
I’m like oh Kimosabe
Your body is my hobby
We’re freakin’
This ain’t cheatin’ as long as we tell nobody
Tell your girls you’re leaving
I’ll meet you in the lobby
I’m so cold, yeah I need that hot toddy
Hot toddy (hot toddy)
Hot toddy (thought I’d never fall in love, thought I’d never fall in love)
Reading Rory Maclean's "Stalin's Nose"
It’s strange to read a book that makes you feel repelled by and nostalgic for its subject matter all at once. Especially one that features a pet pig.* If I had to pick a single word to describe Stalin’s Nose it would be probably be ‘melancholy’. It’s always been marketed as a travel book, but it isn’t really. Or it is, but that’s not the point. It’s barely even factual. Instead, it’s a meditation on the political hysteria of the 20th century in Europe: the way different ideologies swallowed up perfectly nice people and turned them into….Nazis, among other things. The people in this book are like a Baskin Robbins of extremism: 31 flavors or more. Not that that tendency is unique to the 20th century, or Europe. We’re all such joiners.
I’ve been wanting to take a trip to Eastern Europe for a long time, preferably in a really shitty car, preferably starting in Berlin, so you can imagine that a book about a car trip that begins in Berlin and ends in Moscow, and features multiple car-breakdowns, would be ALL up my alley. But of course, this book was written in 1991, and Maclean may as well have visited the surface of Mars, as far as replicating his journey today goes. Not that you’d necessarily want to. He transports a corpse and an eccentric aunt named Zita through the blasted landscape of late-Soviet industrialism. Really, it sounds like the apocalypse. And yet, can you imagine visiting a place that had been essentially closed off to Westerners for two generations? There’s such ambivalence towards democracy and capitalism from the people Maclean meets. Maybe because in so many of the places he visits, nothing has really changed with the retreat of communism. At least not yet. We tend to stay the same even when our ideologies, or names, or homes change. Wherever you go, there you are. It’s interesting, in the age of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and self-actualization, to read a travel book that reminds you that that’s still mostly true.
Which reminds me: I have been craving a chicken finger sub with provolone cheese, mayonnaise, and sautéed onions for eight years. Why hasn’t this delicious assault on your circulatory system ever made it out of the Northeast? I WILL WRITE A TRAVEL BOOK WHERE I GO THERE AND FIND OUT.
*I lied.
Molly Recommends
I could hardly believe it when I realized that it's been a whole month since my dog made some book recommendations. Since it's almost my birthday, Molly would like you all to read Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I see that she’s trying to bring me down during my b-day week, and I guess all I can say is that if my breath smelled like a corpse all the time, I’d be a bitter, old bitch too. Why not “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, Molly, or “Death in the Andes”? I mean, Mann over Tolstoy? Really?
But let's be real for a second: mortality is depressing to think about. When I feel sad, I like to just look at Molly and think "You'll probably die first." It's all about perspective, you know?
Bonus: I tried to think of a way to celebrate my birthday, pictorially, by pimping out Molly's picture, but I didn't want to do something banal like put her in a birthday hat. My original idea, which I shared with my brother and with Chandler, was to stick some bunny ears and baby legs on her with Paint, because in real life, if I had a baby with a dog's head and bunny ears, I would be totally into that and think it was cute squared until the scientists took it away from me and put it in an institution where they later developed a dog-human hybrid slave-species (the Anubians) that eventually takes over the world. No one that was sober agreed.
So then I started having this dream of dressing her up as something better than a dog that likes to eat its own butt all the time continually every minute of the day. I have decided that every year from now on (read: never again) I will dress her as a literary character. And so, I present a photo shoot with Shermoll Holmes.
Happy birthday to me.
The Imagined Conversations of Ill-Conceived Characters: Anthropologie Edition
Ijust got the newest Anthropologie catalog! It's super-exciting! Because I really enjoyed imagining a conversation between Ikea ghosts last week, this is going to keep happening to you, reader!
(Click on a panel to make it bigger.)
A Haitian Reading List
Relatedto my post on Alejo Carpentier's book, I've lately been making an effort to read some books about Haiti and its people. It's part of my goal to better understand the Dominican Republic's history. My reading list is pretty incomplete, and suggestions are always welcome, but here it is as it stands:
-Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World
-Hubert Cole's Christophe: King of Haiti
-Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse
-Michelle Wucker's Why the Cocks Fight
-John W. Vandercook's Black Majesty (a racist book from 1930! no, RACIST. I didn't know when I bought it.)
-Edwige Danticat's The Farming of Bones
Pretty slight, no? One thing I'd love to have is a really comprehensive history of Haiti. I can get a little early history from my Dominican history text, and a little from Zora Neale Hurston's book, but I'd really benefit from a Haitian history primer.
200 Word Book Review: Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World
The good: This classic of Caribbean literature is set before, during, and after Haiti’s independence. It’s an early example of magical realism, somewhere between historical fiction and voodoo-inflected myth*. I found the whole thing pretty interesting in terms of understanding the Haitian national identity.
The bad: I decided to read this in Spanish, and about two pages in I thought: I’ve made a huge mistake.
The problem is that the book is in Cuban Spanish from before 1950, and I only speak Dominican Spanish from the mid-90s. Even though Alejo Carpentier died in 1980, he really should have worked this out. Also, the skips in time can be confusing on first read.
Carpentier works at creating a sense that shifts in power and the passage of time mean little to the always replaceable, and always exploited, Haitian peasant. It can all become wearying**. That the main character, Ti Noel, is going to end up in basically the same place he started is a foregone conclusion. Plus, Carpentier emphasizes the crushing oppression of the colony and later the Republic by stripping him of a lot of his individuality, which can also make the novella hard to stick with. Still, it’s a beautiful book, and well worth the effort. VOODOO!!!
*I feel like putting voodoo in a book is like putting a chase sequence in a movie or hot pepper flakes on pizza. Instead of being a Historical Novel it’s a Historical! Novel! Goat sacrifice on page six! Someone will definitely turn into a lizard!
Obviously, I read this book for the man-lizard.
**I mean who wants to read a tragedy that just stays that way!? Ew! I hoped there was going to be a party and everyone was going to pull a goat out from under their seat, like on Oprah. And then they would be like MOVE THIS BUS! and the Citadelle Laferriere was going to be a swiss chalet with a hot tub. But I digress.
Ikea and a food memoir that I didn't actually read: my week in Florida.
Last week, I drove down to Miami to help my boyfriendmove into his new apartment. While I was there, I took Molly for 18 walks a day, and the only thing I read were Ikea instructions. Actually, there was no reading involved, because in the interest of saving money and confusing the hell out of everyone, Ikea manuals are basically furniture-making manga starring some ghost people. Because I was in their company (so to speak) so often, the Ikeapeople really started coming to life for me, and now I sort of think Ikea should hire me to think up and illustrate some of the Ikeapeople's stories. I actually put together a little something, based on the glorious day Chandler and I brought home a modular shelving unit for his pots and pans, just to show the people at Ikea exactly what I’m talking about:
Right before I left, I received Fuschia Dunlop’s memoir of eating in China, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper”. Before I got it in the mail, I kept thinking ‘aaaaaaw shit, this better arrive before I go down to Florida for the week, or I'm gonna bust some heads*.’ I’m so glad it came in time for me to entirely neglect it.
In July, I was in Shanghai and I had a sort of awakening vis a vis Chinese food. The principal agent of that awakening: Sichuan dan dan noodles. Coming home from the restaurant where I ate them (Crystal Jade at Xintiandi, holla!**), still sort of dazed by what had just gone on in my mouth (also, because it was really spicy and my mouth was burning), I had this idea that I’d heard of dan dan noodles before, and it turns out I had, on The Wednesday Chef. That’s how I found out about Fuschia Dunlop.
I’d like to try making the dan dan noodles, but I also feel like every time I try to cook Chinese (or Mexican) food it ends up tasting not great. I live in a little city though, so I guess it’s bully for me, otherwise. 200-word-review to come!
*read: think about leaving a moderately snippy review on Amazon.
**I feel like I always misuse holla, but I refuse to look it up, because then my use of it would be so limited.
Molly Recommends
A regular feature in which my dog recommends a book or two. What's that? Oh, how can a dog recommend a book (that's ridiculous!)?
I'm glad you asked, so I can tell you that you ask too many goddamn questions. Suffice it to say that Molly's overwhelming cuteness, her shnugglewussity if you will, deserves an outlet. And this is the least creepy one I could think of. The last thing any of us want is for my dog to have to wear a bunny costume in this hot, hot weather.
And I'M SORRY I don't have Photoshop.
This time around Molly is recommending Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a novel which she considers to be a mean, hilarious classic, and Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, which is a melancholy meditation on wasted love. She thinks these are two flavors that would taste better together. She's probably wrong. She once ate a box of cookies.
No...the actual box.
A recommendation
Iwish I could have Danny Chun's twitter-feed downloaded directly to my brain. Also, Mindy Kaling’s.
Surprisingly, comedy writers make the best comedy writers.
200-Word Book Review: Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
Yes. I am reading an enormous, déclassé fantasy series. These books are probably, on average, 700 pages long, and there’s fourteen of them, and when I first noticed I thought ‘Whatever, I read A Suitable Boy. I read Tolstoy. I can handle this nonsense.’ I was wrong, because I’m on book five now, and I’m exhausted.
The good: A fully realized world very much in the spirit of Lord of the Rings, so it’s perfect if you’re looking to relive your childhood. You should probably not attempt to relive your childhood.
The bad: I’ve read about 3000 pages and one measly year has passed in the story. The characters are flat. SO flat. And dense to the point of stupidity. That’s ok for the first book, but by book four, you wonder why these people can’t seem to have more than about five different thoughts, which are:
-“Is Rand going mad?”
-“Light, no! [description of something already described 57 times before in the exact same words]”
-“Who understands women/men?”
-“I will keep this vital fact a secret from everyone, thereby extending the plot by a completely unnecessary 300 pages.”
-“I am tired.”
Me too, guys! Me. Too.
10 Great Children’s Books
In the spirit of Lizzie Skurknick’s dearly departed Fine Lines feature on Jezebel, a list of 10 great books I loved before I turned 13:
I still love this book. I own it and reread it every time I get sick or sad. I loved, as a little girl, that the heroine starts out being extremely plain, intelligent, and bookish, and that those are the reasons people like her. Everyone appreciates irony! I can’t actually remember the first time I read this, but I do remember that afterwards I wanted every book I read to be exactly like it. Cynthia Voigt’s On Fortune’s Wheel came close. And maybe Catherine, Called Birdy.
Although the character is interesting and independent, she isn’t sassy. There’s no you-go-girl thing getting shoved down your throat, maybe because no one ever tells Beauty what to do or not do because she’s a girl. There’s not much of anyone telling her what to do, period. By and large, she quietly keeps her own counsel. The story isn’t about empowering little girls; it’s about a good, brave person becoming heroic in the face of some tough circumstances (of course, in this case, those circumstances are: hairy monster extorts father…but still).
I mean, if I have to pick only one Roald Dahl book, it’s obviously going to be the mean-spirited one.
Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Montecristo
Is this a children’s book? No. Should children read it? Hell yeah. Why? VENGEANCE. Ok, so maybe this book is not made of sunshine and rainbows, but whatever. It’s important to learn when it’s appropriate to hit people back. My parents let me read pretty much whatever I wanted (I read the largely-inappropriate Baltasar and Blimunda when I was 14, to the consternation of my poor aunt, who was like, “uuuummm, guys, you know there’s a lot of sex in that right?”) and I turned out fine.
Anyway, The Count of Montecristo isn’t about sex. It is about Edmund Dantes being a BAMF and Fernand Mondego being driven to suicide for our cathartic entertainment. It’s totally wholesome.
My grandpa bought this for me when I was 11, along with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. I guess he figured that since I’d been watching telenovelas with my Abuela since birth, a little pregnancy-faking lover-having spouse-murdering drama was hardly going to shock me. He would have been right, except for Mrs. Danvers: the human equivalent of a large spider crawling out from under your pillow. I didn’t sleep soundly for a month. My parents were…grateful.
Sob. That is all.
Well, not really. Lois Lowry won the Newberry Medal twice. Once for this, and once for Number the Stars and I remember staying up way, way late to finish both books. I used to sleep in an overly air-conditioned room and I have this memory of laying there flipping pages, in my cold, cold pink sheets, trying to move as little as possible so I would stay warm. And my bedside lamp gave off only a small orb of light, so it always felt like night and sleep were pressing in on you. Still, I stayed up reading. They’re not even adventure books! Lois Lowry can have my first-born.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Yeah, there’s Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and whathaveyou, but it was Sherlock Holmes who made me into a lifelong mystery reader. I used to take the most awkward train ride possible on the MTA (that’s a lot to say) in order to visit the Mysterious Bookshop when I lived in NY. I loved Sherlock before Hercule Poirot, who, I’ll be honest, I loved more. It’s funny that both of these characters got killed off at some point. I was so devastated when I read Curtain, that I could never enjoy a Poirot mystery again.
Bonus: Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes is the best TV you've never seen or heard of.
L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables
There is absolutely nothing anyone can say about Anne that hasn’t already been said. I wish I had red hair. I’m sorry. Auburn.
Scott O'Dell's Black Star, Bright Dawn
I think I have the distinction of having read every novel Scott O’Dell ever wrote. I should probably list my favorite as Island of the Blue Dolphins, because I absolutely ganked that whole plot when I was 9 for writing class (oooh, plagiarism), but I’m going to go with the one about the girl who competes in the Iditarod. Grueling! Plus, being from a tropical island, the setting was more novel.
Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials Trilogy)
Look: I like a sort of heartbreaking ending in a children’s book. Life is heartbreaking. Things don’t work out all the time. On this alone, The Golden Compass has Harry Potter soundly beaten. But, this isn’t a competition between children’s fantasy novels. I loved Harry and I loved Lyra, and I loved the Pevensies. I was so disappointed with the lack of success the movie adaptation of this book found. It’s a beautiful piece of writing at any age: it takes on serious ideas without condescending to its audience or becoming leaden and clumsy (I’m looking at you, Sophie’s World).
And, as with most of my favorite kid-friendly books, women be havin’ adventures. There’s flying and witches and warrior bears. Lyra is as unflinching a girl as you’ll ever find in fiction. And she has, basically, an animal familiar. I have always wanted an animal familiar. It would probably be a hedgehog, though. That would be embarrassing.
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
Remember how much you loved Wrinkle, and how increasingly weird things got in the sequels until suddenly we were talking about Noah, and WHAT?
LOVED IT. Don’t you ever say anything bad about Madeleine L’Engle. She’s crazy. She’ll do anything.
I think it’s important to note that I totally had a crush on Sandy and Dennis. From the book jacket of Many Waters. I looked at it just now though and I was like, “ugh, totally not my type”. I bet they grew up to look like Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Not good.
Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game
This is a puzzle-book. One that I was totally bewildered by. I’m not smart that way, so I was lost right there with the characters at all times. What makes this novel great is those characters. And there’s so many of them! Turtle is the only one I remember clearly, because she was a habitual shin-kicker. I think I took this up for a while? But my little brother was already too big to put up with it? Maybe that’s why he tried to stab me with that pen that time?
If you didn’t nearly kill your sibling, you probably don’t really like him.
Here are 45 more books you should have read as a child/teenager, but now you won't because you're OLD.
P.D. James at 90
I love P.D.James, the British mystery writer. I know Adam Dalgliesh is everyone's favorite, but I wish she'd written more than just the two Cordelia Gray mysteries (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin). Cordelia Gray is like Nancy Drew, with sordid sex crimes. That sounds unpleasant, but it's actually a really good combination.
200 Word Review: Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange
The good: I’m glad Horwitz took this trip for me, because boy was it unpleasant. I learned all kinds of things about 16th century America, though! I immediately forgot them all, as one does. Oh, except:
Syphilis! Did you know it came from America?
Horwitz is a sharp, funny observer, with a great ear for irony and idiosyncratic voices.
The bad: Let me start by saying that I wanted to read “Confederates in the Attic”, but it’s not available on Kindle. This book was a good refresher on some of the stuff I’ve been studying for my novel, but it’s not very detailed. The book could easily have been twice as long (and twice as alienating to normal people). It’s not a history of stuff that was happening on the American continent between 1492 and 1620; it’s a history of the Europeans in America during that time. I guess that’s pretty much what’s promised on the book jacket though? Also Horwitz is easily depressed by pretty much everything that isn’t air-conditioned (but, like most people, he’s funnier that way).
200 Word Review: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower
The good: This book made me want to move to 18th century Germany and contract consumption, because it was that good. The writing was some of the most crisp and refreshing I can remember reading. That’s right: The Blue Flower is the cucumber of books. It’s a perfect summer read. Also, on one level, it’s about romantic love, and People Like That.
The bad: It ends.
Well…fine, it’s not really a book for people who enjoy heavy plotting, or consistent point-of-view, or who dislike a little high-brow, old-fashioned philosophizing about the nature of reality. But it’s only a little bit!
200 Word Movie Review: The Secret in Their Eyes
The good: Great acting, and by people who are not alienating in their attractiveness. One of the best things about foreign movies is that so often the people on screen are not OHMYGOD THESE WHITE TEETH. They’re just people. The story is super-twisty, but in a way that is easy to follow. Also, it incorporates Argentine history with a really light touch. The more you know, I suspect, about what happened during the Peron years, the richer the movie becomes, but it’s hardly a prerequisite. The movie is funny. Especially if you speak Spanish.
The bad: The subtitles are…inadequate. The ending is operatic where the rest of the movie is sort of subtle, so there’s a shift in tone that’s a little jarring. But, it’s a well-earned ending. Even my boyfriend liked it, though I think he would want me to mention that going to the movies is a completely pointless and expensive experience generally. I do not share this opinion, but I respect it in the sense that I am constantly working against it. If his disdain were a river, I would be paddling upstream towards some village called “Let’s Put Beer in the Side-Pocket of My Purse*”.
*We should do this next time.
My MFA reading list for May Residency 2010
Longer Works: The Blue Flower
(Penelope Fitzgerald) From Where We Dream
(Robert Olen Butler) Loss of Face (Charles
Baxter) Mao II (Don DeLillo) Toni Morrison’s Nobel
Lecture in Literature, 1993 The Great Gatsby (F.
Scott Fitzgerald) Stop-Time (Frank
Conroy) I Could Tell You
Stories (Patricia Hampl) Sound and Sense
(Perrine) Spreading the Word:
Editors on Poetry (Corey and Slesinger) The Sweet Hereafter
(screenplay) (Atom Egoyan) Doubt (screenplay)
(John Patrick Stanley) Short Stories: Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been? (Joyce Carol Oates) A Good Man is Hard to
Find (Flannery O’Connor) Sonny’s Blues (James
Baldwin) The Magic Barrel
(Bernard Malemud) From “Sudden Fiction”: Five Ives (Roy Blount
Jr.) The Moving (James
Still) Yours (Mary Robinson) Popular Mechanics
(Raymond Carver) Say Yes (Tobias Wolff) The Hit Man (TC Boyle) I See You Never (Ray
Bradbury) Dinner Time (Russell
Edson) The Anatomy of Desire
(John L’Heureux) Class Notes (Lucas
Cooper) Tickits (Paul
Milenski) The Sock (Lydia Davis) Any Minute… (David
Ordan) Blind Girls (Jayne
Anne Phillips) I feel sometimes like
my lack of love for/ memory of The Great Gatsby is some sort of moral failure.
I feel guilty just thinking about it. Obviously I am extremely excited about
re-purchasing and re-reading it. Obviously.