Category: Reading

What I’m reading, what I’ve read, what I hope to read.

Musing

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t blogged in over a week, for several reasons.

First, since I have to wait for the removal of the 1972 Mercedes Benz 250c in the back yard before I can bring in the topsoil with which I shall finish the labyrinth, work on that project is at a standstill. So no blogging there.

Second, we’re in the final throes push for Coriolanus. It’s amazing how trying to get a late Shakespeare play ready for an audience will consume your extra time, energy and thought.

Third, the idea that I could write during all of this about that stupid Quiet Strength stuff is not even worth exploring.

So, I am at loose ends this afternoon, as I sip my liquids in preparation for my first ever colonscopy in the morning. Yes, I’m sharing. And no, “loose ends” was not a pun. That’s later this evening.

I’m about to repair to the back yard where I will warm myself in the sun and do one of two things: a) redefine literacy assessment in the state of Georgia; and/or b) read more of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a lovely French novel I got last week after reading it reviewed in The Week.

If I finish both of those, then I have two other books that came yesterday that I’m quite excited about. The first is The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves, by M.T. Anderson. Anderson is one of my favorite writers. He seems to be able to do anything. Feed, a dystopian teen science fiction novel which will change your relationship with internet connectivity forever. Whales on Stilts and its sequels (collectively known as M.T. Anderson’s Thrilling Tales): Whales is a total and hysterical goof on the kids’ adventure series genre, but at the end of The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen it seems that Mr. Anderson is up to something odd. We await The Flame Pits of Delaware: a Jasper Dash Adventure with baited breath.

And of course, the first volume of Octavian Nothing was, as its title says, astonishing. Alternative historical fiction, if you will, set in the American Revolution. Journals, narrative, letters, other kinds of sources, pile up to tell us the story of Octavian Nothing, a young man raised in curious circumnstances by philosophers in Philadelphia in the 1760s.

The second book calling my name is Gregory Maguire’s A Lion Among Men, the third of the Wicked series. Now if all you know of Wicked is the insipid and saccharine musical, you are missing an astounding telling of tales. Maguire takes Frank L. Baum’s Oz and reimagines it as the setting of a grim political thriller. Conditioned as we are to see Baum’s characters in terms of the great 1939 movie, it’s more than a little shocking to discover a dark, dangerous, and coherent back story lurking beneath the cheerful map of Munchkinland.

Wicked itself covers the original story, giving us the life of Elpheba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West, and the desperate times she found herself in. The sequel, Son of a Witch, follows Liir, her son, as he finds himself continuing his mother’s journey. In both, and in the first three pages of Lion which I allowed myself to read, Maguire is a master prose stylist, amusing and astounding you in turns with his wit and imaginative power.

If you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, you’ll know where I am.

Literacy

Posted on by Dale

I was appointed to be a member of the State Literacy Task Force. We are charged with developing a proposal for a long-term plan to improve literacy across the board in Georgia.

Our first task, which we’re already behind on, is to define literacy.

I am not being flippant when I suggest as a definition the ability to find and use information. Yes, it’s totally colored by my day job as a media specialist, but think about it. If we charged schools and communities to make sure their students and citizens could find and use information, then we don’t have to get into reading and technology and blah blah blah. Do what it takes to make it happen.

In chatting about this with Kevin on Saturday morning, I allowed as how, despite what you might think, I was not interested in including padding like “self-enrichment” in the definition, because that’s not something the state has any control over, or vested interest in, if I were to turn all Antonin Scalia on us.

Then Kevin said something that I though was very important and I wrote it down immediately to steal: “Sort of like a Maslow’s hierarchy for literacy?”

Bingo!

So whattaya say, dear readers? Help me develop said hierarchy, and we shall be as gods.

A beautiful afternoon

Posted on by Dale

What a beautiful, beautiful afternoon! I hope you were able to sit in your green, cool, sun-drenched back yard as I was, and finish reading War & Peace, as I was.

What an odd, odd, enormous book. After the fall of Moscow, after (spoiler alert!) the death of Andrei and the capture of Pierre as a prisoner, the book just sort of dissolves into an essay on the necessity of historical events. Yes, we drag along with the French Armée as they try to flee Russia and are pursued by Russian partisans, and we do finally get back to Pierre and his rescue from the French, and he finally declares his love for the grieving Natasha and everyone’s going to be very happy.

But the book itself ends with Pierre leaving Natasha to go to Petersburg to settle his disgraced dead wife’s debts, and Natasha exclaiming:

“Only what’s he going to Petersburg for!” Natasha said suddenly, and hastily answered herself: “No, no it has to be so… Right, Marie? It has to be so…”

Boom. End of novel proper. There follows an 87-page epilogue, in which we catch up with Pierre/Natasha and Nicolai/Marya, but we just swoop in and out of their story while listening to Leo Tolstoy hold forth about historical imperatives. It doesn’t end so much as evaporate.

Which is probably why the thing was decried as “not a novel” when it was published. I have to agree with Count Lev that it is what it is, and more than anything what it is, is amazing. A huge undertaking (which still took him only five years of writing: did you get that, J.K. Rowling?), it sprawls on a vast canvas, and we are invited to inspect it minutely. It is cinematic in both scope and treatment. One moment we’re overlooking a battlefield and only seeing tiny wisps of smoke in the distance; the next, we’re examining the irrational thoughts of one of our characters who is caught up in the thick of the violence. He zooms, he pans, he cuts, he fades. It’s pretty astounding.

Highly highly recommended.

Interlude

Posted on by Dale

So, I was up in the middle of the night, hoping that my kidney stones were on the move at last, mainly because I don’t want to be on painkillers instead of vodka on Saturday night; apparently one should not do both, and surfing the web while I made sure I didn’t need to take another Vicodin, and I Stumbled across this website. It’s OK to go peek; it’s not going to engross you. Just get a good feel for it.

Pretty nice site, no? Well written, if a little chatty, and cleanly put together. Very non-amateurish, I thought.

And then I thought, waitaminute: what about this site?

I’ll cut to the chase. When I first came across the Pioneer Woman site, I thought it was just a little too produced to be real. It was quite possible that it was a front for a food conglomerate. I was, however, too lazy to check.

Now the Noble Pig site comes along, and I’m really thinking the whole thing is fake. For one thing, it’s a chore even for me to change the header image in my blogs. And Pioneer Woman even has dropdown menus and rollover buttons. Again, not impossible, but a pain. The photos on both are lit and shot exceptionally well. The writing, in both style and tone, is flawless. The recipes are undeniably appealing. Both are just a bit too well done.

I checked the bottom of both sites; both are “copyrighted,” and yes, I know my blogs say the same thing, but they’re boilerplate. Pioneer Woman says it was designed by this person (whose website does not inspire confidence), but the whole thing could be a front. Noble Pig merely gives the date.

I’m still too lazy to check, i.e., doing a Whois number on them; instead, I’m wondering why I’m so suspicious and why it should matter. Do I have some kind of deepseated prejudice against women who cook, such that I don’t believe they could achieve such online slickness? Am I so cynical that I think only a corporation would put up such a site?

If so, where’s the hook? Is the product placement all there is?

What are they up to? This is how madness begins.

A bold move

Posted on by Dale

Yep, a bold move. That’s what I need all right.

Since we (the Lyles and the Honeas) are heading to north Georgia this afternoon, mostly because we like to drive in the heaviest rain this year, towards the freezing altitudes, and thence to Guilford to watch a lacrosse game for the weekend, I’ve decided to leave the computer behind. I’ll take my music paper Moleskine and probably work on III. Andante, which, if you will recall, is a concert waltz.

Then, when I re-encounter IV. Largo on Sunday evening, I will have some distance from it and can more easily slit my wrists upon realizing what utter drek it is.

Wish me luck.

P.S. I’m also taking War & Peace as my only reading.

The reading trap

Posted on by Dale

Before Christmas, I swore an oath, that I would buy no books until I had read the stack by my bed. This stack consists of about fifteen books which have mostly been in my possession for at least a year but which I have never gotten around to reading because there’s always a new book I’ve bought that jumps to the front of the line.

After I bought Tom Bedlam, by George Hagen, I decided enough was enough. I would buy no more books until I had finished Ethics for a New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama; The Keep, Jennifer Egan; A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth; Charles Ives: a life in music, Jan Swafford; etc., etc.

To quote Adolfo Pirelli in Sweeney Todd: “You hear dis-a foolish-a, foolish-a man. Watch and see how he will-a regret-a his folly!”

Since then, I have bought (or been given, it was Christmas, after all):

  • Henry Green: Loving • Living • Party Going (three novels in one volume; one of those British novelists no one but great writers have ever heard of but who is adored by them)
  • Meg Rosoff: What I Was (new young adult novel)
  • China Miéville: Un Lun Dun (new children’s fantasy novel)
  • Rick Yancey: Alfred Kropp: the Seal of Solomon (sequel to The Extraordinary Adventures of A. K.)
  • Pink Dandelion (no, really): An introduction to Quakerism
  • Marcel Kuisjten, ed.: Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness (essays and research following up on The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
  • Louis Auchincloss: East Side Story (novel of manners, by one of Them)
  • Max Barry: Company (a satirical novel)
  • Charles Nicholl: The Lodger Shakespeare (a look at the lawsuit in which our friend Bill was a deponent)
  • Gregroy Benford: Deep Time: how humanity communicates across millennia (bought back when we Lichtenbergians were futzing around with the buried nuclear waste)
  • Ellen Dissanayake: Art and Intimacy (the “prequel” to Homo Aestheticus)

One is not only forsworn, but one despairs. This list is not counting the books I am reading:

  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: The Waste Books (bedside book)
  • Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (more about which in a moment)
  • Ellen Dissanayake: Homo Aestheticus (which I’m discovering is hard to pick up after an extended absence)
  • Patrice Hannon: 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen (bathroom reading)

What is one to do? It is ridiculous to think that I will clear out these thirty books soon, if ever. And always, always, there are new books. And bookstores. (While waiting for Ginny to finish worshipping at the new DSW shoe store the other night, I picked up the Austen and Shakespeare books at Barnes & Noble.)

So do I have a plan? No. I already had a plan: buy no new books. It failed.

Part of the problem is of course that I’m devoting all my free brain time to the symphony. I wish I could say that reading these books could provide a break from that, but that’s not realistic. Writing this blog post is taking a break, clearing out thoughts and worries from my brain; reading is an entirely additional commitment for the brain power/time continuum. So until the symphony is finished, or at least turned over to Stephen in 110 days, there will be no concerted effort at clearing out this stack.

I can and will take a stack with me to GHP to read. That is assuming of course I don’t get sucked up into finishing another movement or two of the symphony (which is, you will notice, already assuming that I’m not going to finish all four movements in the next 110 days) or the piano piece for Maila, or even the songs for Day in the Moonlight, which would be a kindness on my part. But I have been able to find time at GHP to read, believe it or not.

After the summer, I might have time to plow through some of these. But I am fooling no one, am I? This stack will never disappear. There will always be new books and new projects to keep me from reading them. I will die with a huge stack by my bed. I will probably die crushed by the huge stack by my bed.

War and Peace is a marvel. I’m halfway through it now, and it no longer feels like I’m scaling some virtuous mountain. Now when I open it, it feels like being in a warm, limitless ocean. I feel like the kids opening the wardrobe door to Narnia, returning once again to a complete world that is not my own, not without its dangers, but one that is strong and fresh and fascinating.

I’m at a curious point in the book, where all the themes and characters have been laid out like pieces on a chess board. It’s most like the end of The Two Towers, I think, where everyone is dispersed and heading off in different directions, seemingly. No one’s choices have worked out for the best, and it’s been so long since I read it before (35 years, maybe?) that, embarrassingly, I cannot remember who gets to be happy at the end. Other than Kutuzov, obviously.

Right, then. I’m going to update my reading pages, and then I’ve got a symphony to write.

Word of the day: womblety-cropt

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday’s word, from my desk calendar, is womblety-cropt, “the indisposition of a drunkard after a debauch,” Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (Halliwell, 1855.)

I see where this is going. Feh.

In the paragraph loosely connected to the word, we learn of the Feast Eve of St. Vincent of Saragossa, the patron of drunkards. In the western islands of Scotland (of course), the men celebrated by sitting in a circle and drinking for 24 hours. Two men served as designated barrow-pushers, loading up those who passed out and trundling them to their beds.

Good times.

Read this!

Posted on by Dale

Stop what you are doing right now, I’ll wait, and go buy The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett.

One has just finished this wonderful bagatelle in about an hour or so, and one must say that it’s an exhilarating little romp through the meaning of reading, writing, and life.

The Queen, unnamed, but one knows who is meant, is led by her ill-bred pack of Corgis to a bookmobile at the edge of the gardens, and having blundered into it, checks out a book out of sheer politeness.

Hilarity ensues:

There was a sadness to her reading, too, and for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed. She had been reading one of the several lives of Sylvia Plath and was actually quite happy to have missed most of that, but reading the memoirs of Lauren Bacall she could not help feeling that Ms Bacall had had a much better bit at the carrot and, slightly to her surprise, found herself envying her for it.

The Others do not know quite how to take Her Majesty. There are difficulties. Growth occurs; changes are made. And there’s a killer ending that is breathtaking in its cheekiness, and Mr Bennett is as cheeky as they come.

War & Peace, Part 2, ch. 7-21

Posted on by Dale

War: battle and retreat from Vienna.

I’ve picked up War & Peace again in a quiet moment during lunch today. I had, like an idiot, carried it with me to Munich, but if travel does anything, it robs the mind of the sharpness necessary to read a book like this.

It is brought home to me again how incredibly remarkable this book is. We observe in minute detail the personal stories of the battle and how senseless it all is, senseless in the fact that no one in their right mind could believe anyone was controlling the outcome.

Again and again, the movements of the French and the Russians are actually blunders. No one understands what’s going on, and whole battalions of men turn and flee without really knowing why, or, conversely, turn and save the day without meaning to.

We return again and again to the little artillery captain Tushin, who holds the center of the Russian line with his four cannons, setting a village on fire and bedevilling the French, or stopping their charges altogether. He never receives two orders to retreat, and in fact the French react to his insistent cannonade as if that is where the main Russian force must be.

Finally Prince Andrei arrives and stays with him until he understands that the order to retreat has been given. Then we get an incredible passage: as night falls, Tushin and his men are swept into “an invisible, gloomy river… flowing in the darkness, all in one direction, with a hum of whispers, talk, and the sounds of hooves and wheels.”

Tushin, after the adrenalin of battle, is in a daze, but still looking after his men and anyone else who shows up at the campfire, including young Nikolai Rostov. Tolstoy shows us men who are utterly drained, who cannot yet register the events of the day. Random snapshots of men, officers, wounded, horses, life, death.

Tushin is called to Prince Bagration’s tent, where for a moment it looks as if the day’s defeat is going to be pegged on his failure to retreat. Tushin is unable to speak clearly in his defense, and finally Andrei, sick of the whole business, tells what he saw and stands up for the captain.

The section closes with Nikolai Rostov nursing a severely bruised shoulder and deliriously wondering why he’s not at home where he’s loved.

Tolstoy’s ability to depict both the confusion of battle in all its panoramic horror and the inner confusions of his characters is mind-blowing. He uses his camera like an auteur, and we are swept along with it. He’ll pull the soundtrack as we hear someone’s thoughts, then cut to a totally different part of the battlefield, even introducing a brand new character in the midst of the excitement, expecting us to follow the action without pause. It’s amazing.

The question on the floor

Posted on by Dale

The question we failed to answer at last night’s colloquium: “Z*/Tolstoy: Do we have a choice?” continues to bug me.

I hope everyone felt that the topic was asking not only the flippant surface question, “What should we choose to read?” but also challenging us as creators: “Do we have control over our own creative output?”

This is a question with some girth. Clearly, the works of Z and Tolstoy are at opposite ends of the scale, and without a doubt our works are somewhere in between. It would hard indeed to create something beyond Z’s work, even deliberately; that is his special gift. But where do our works fall and how much control do we have over that?

I don’t think I’m talking here about posterity’s evaluation of our works. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is at base a level of quality that I will dare to call objective. In other words, I think we can posit that each work has a base line of quality from which posterity will not stray very far in its assessment.

Our two goalposts can illustrate that point. No one is ever going to proclaim Z’s two novels as anything other than what they are, which is one human being’s noble attempt to fulfill that inborn urge to create. Likewise, Tolstoy’s War & Peace is not likely to fall very far from its current heavyweight status. The fact that there cannot be any serious argument about placing these works at opposite ends of any scale you want to devise is further evidence for my argument.

My not so secret fear then is that the stuff I produce will fall into Z’s range. I know the songs I’m writing for Moonlight, for example, are not really going to be that bad, but I am afraid that they will be at best insipid and at worst banal. And I am wounded by the knowledge that they will never approach the other end of the scale, either.

And here’s our question again: Do we have a choice? I know enough to keep my stuff from being bad, but is my inability to create a work of genius dependent on my knowledge? Was Tolstoy’s work a direct result of his artistic control, or is there something else going on?

This is getting into Tolstoy’s “man of destiny” territory, and it would be ironic indeed if his creative output is as great as it is simply because of the dictates of his own will. For those of us stranded below, it makes more sense, and is certainly more comforting to think, that there was some happenstance, some inborn-genius-thing that he could not control, and which we do not possess, that made War & Peace the staggering work of art that it is.

So, do we have a choice?

We’ve mentioned before the idea that a creative work is “abandoned not completed,” and nowhere is this more true than in the last five or six chapters of Z’s latest novel. There were misspellings, typos, repeated paragraphs/sentences, and an overall sloppiness that was actually distracting instead of just being a part of the delightful mise en scene. I don’t understand that. It cannot have been the case that his publishers were breathing down his neck like J. K. Rowling’s were for Goblet of Fire, causing her to slip up in the crucial graveyard duel scene. I cannot imagine that he was being rushed in any way to complete the thing.

At any rate, I finally put my finger on what is wrong with much of the dialog in this book. Almost all of it consists of the characters stating what they’re doing, have done, or are going to do. It is pretty much the way 8-11-year-olds play: “Come on, we have to fight the Balrog.” “You can’t defeat us, Balrog, we have Gandalf on our side.” “Oh no, Gandalf has joined forces with the Balrog.” “We have to run away.”

The rest of the dialog is made up of flat descriptions of the characters’ emotional status: “I’m so happy/scared/worried/in love.” Or agreements: “You are so right.”

It’s entertaining something awful.

—-

*Names changed to shelter the innocent