evelyn_b

What I Finally Gave Up on After Wasting Irreplacable Hours

Pride of Eden wasn't going anywhere I wanted to go and it was going there in a defective golf cart. I decided just to skip ahead to the last chapter. It's an ambitious book about big subjects, but either the author wasn't up to the task of writing it or I wasn't up to the task of reading it, plus I wound up missing the book club meeting due to miscellaneous committments, so the impetus was gone. I had it in my heart to mock the prose some more but then the new hybrid used-and-new bookstore opened up across the street so I just dropped it off there instead.

What I Read All At Once All Day Long Even Though I Had A Lot to Do

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of those "compulsively readable" books you keep hearing about. It satisfied nearly the same thirst for ecological mourning and apocalyptic climate crises that Pride of Eden failed to, though of course Pride of Eden is fiction and this one is about real life, or about the process of turning the painful confusion of real life into fiction and nostalgia, or about how a twentieth-century myth of agrarian self-sufficiency grew directly out of the fact that at no point in their combined lifetimes were Charles Ingalls or Almanzo Wilder able to make a living off the land. The myth was a badly-needed source of supplemental income. This book begins, more or less, with the Homestead Act and ends with the Koch brothers, and keeps a sense of lived-in continuity all the way through - every policy change has its unforseen consequences, every new disaster spawns a fresh policy scramble, in Washington as in the Ingalls and Wilder families.

Fraser has some understandably strong opinions on Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder's bossy, messy, difficult daughter and literary collaborator, and sometimes she packs more judgment into her phrasing than is strictly necessary. Lane is a fascinating character who makes her own gravy as far as reader judgment goes. I especially enjoyed her EXTREMELY unscrupulous unauthorized "autobiographies" of various famous people, all of whom she seemed determined to saddle with a drunken, abusive father whether there was any evidence for one or not. At one point, she invented a tragic miscarriage for Jack London's wife out of thin air, and when called on it, said she was only trying to make sense of her own baby's death. Which was real, unlike some of her other tragedies, but not exactly a straightforward answer to the question, "What the hell, Rose?"

One funny thing about the Wilder-Lane collaboration was that every time Laura wrote about being bored by a public speech, or about her father making fun of windy speeches, Rose would replace it with a "stirring" speech about liberty and make the violin crescendo of patriotism to swell in book-Laura's heart. Whenever you read a stirring speech about liberty in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, remember that it probably started life as a passage about a bored kid kicking the bench to mark time until she could go back to doing anything else.

Anyway, I read it too fast and now I'm sorry it's over - but I still have it, so I can always go back for more.

What I'm Reading Now

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball by Aster Glenn Gray, which is EXTREMELY cute and sweet without being sacchrine, in a way that keeps reminding me of My Neighbor Totoro. It's not hugely like Totoro on the surface - the sisters are older, the dad is more harried, and the mostly-gentle magic takes different forms - but it's got a similar leisurely and kind-hearted vibe. Is this AGG's best book yet? I don't now because I've only read a few of them, but it might be! It feels less rushed than The Wolf and the Girl and Ashlin and Olivia, possibly just because it's aimed at young readers so my expectations are different. The plot: Eleven-year-old Piper's only friend in this new town is Rosie, the girl who used to live in her new house fifty years ago. No one knows how they keep slipping in and out of each other's times, but they do figure out ways to partially control it, including "stop the clock in the living room" and "enchant some Kit-Kats to work as time-travel charms." The girls get along famously, even though Rosie's age keeps changing and Piper is always eleven - which worries her, because what's going to happen when she turns twelve? Since this is an AGG book, the friendship is heavy on favorite books, pop culture digressions, and unhurried conversational drift, and the kids are a lot like kids I knew or was back in the day, only nicer.

Also just started The Gown of Harmonies, a novella by Francesca Forrest, which poses the important question: What if fairy involvement in the dress trade led to RUNAWAY GLAMOUR INFLATION? The answer: Start a new trend with magical aural fabric (and get mixed up with the fair crowd even more, possibly). Very enjoyable so far.

From Fact to Fiction, a creative-writing how-to from 1946, by Edmund Ware and Robeson Bailey, dissecting ten short stories for the benefit of would-be writers with a special focus on how the authors adapted details or anecdotes from real life into fiction. "Craft" books from a few decades ago are always fascinating because usually at least a third of the stories in them won't have held up, in spite of the advice being mostly the same from year to year. What do I mean when I say they "haven't held up"? Just that they're perfectly functional examples of "a story that might win an award in 1946" but have lost something along the way. A similar book called Narrative Design had the same issue, though it was published only in 1997, practically last year if you're me. There were two or three really good stories that haven't lost their glow of youth, one totally useless one that probably seemed groundbreaking at the time, and several more that were clearly perfectly functional and of their lost moment and are now completely forgettable. It's not a problem or a miscalculation or anything; it's just something that happens. As for what makes the difference between a fresh story and a perennial one, these books can't tell you and neither can I.

What I Bought And Will Probably Read Soon

The newest bookstore in town has a pretty weak selection of books (they are leaning much harder on the "beverage and chill with your pals, the books" end of the market) EXCEPT that they have every book by Hanif Abdurraqib, because the owner likes him. So I bought Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes on a Tribe Called Quest, though it might be a while before I read it.

What I've Finished Reading

I actually finished Ashlin and Olivia on the plane several weeks ago - better late than never? It's a "second-chance" love story between two young women who are so young that their "second chance" comes when they are college sophomores (the first chance was when they were all-consuming middle-school best friends for a year before having a painful falling out). ( cut for spoilers just in case you like your romances suspenseful )

The big draw here is the characters and their conversations - Aster Glenn Gray has a real gift for, and a willingness to indulge in, earnest, funny, meandering conversations between likeable characters. Ashlin and Olivia have passionate, youthful, totally believable opinions on art and movies, The Patriarchy and fanworks, and it's a pleasure to listen to them spitball and pontificate, both as highly invested thirteen-year-olds and as young adults in Europe. Gray is as unfettered as any actual thirteen-year-old by notions of What Kids Really Talk Like - her conversations always feel like they were based on conversations and not on other books, but not to the the point that you can't follow them.


What I'm Reading Now

Shakespeare's sonnets, all of them from the beginning. You probably knew that one of the major themes of the collection is "Golden youth, have some damn babies; your mom wants grandkids!" but did you know HOW MUCH?

( give it a rest mom i'm almost forty )

Eventually the message shifts, but there's A LOT of this in the beginning.

I warmed briefly to Giles Goat-Boy when the Goat-Boy sat down to an entire uni-verse parody of Oedipus Rex in heroic couplets, and later, even more briefly when the hypertext tape machine showed up, but mostly it's been the same old ironically racist American Hollywood Literature Archetypes cleverness slog and plenty of it. On the plus side, it's written so as to have a mild forward motion even as I think I'm completely out of patience with it, like a very slow amusement park boat ride.

The Image Men is a regular novel about some con men who start an Institute of Social Imagistics at a brand-new redbrick university, and it's much more fun, though it too is getting a little bogged down and repetitive. Pavane takes place in an alt-history 1968, where technology and social development has been arrested and warped by a powerful Catholic Church since the assassination of Elizabeth I in 1588. It's richly imagined even if it's not always totally convincing, and Keith Roberts is having a ton of fun describing the hard but high calling of the semaphore operators' guild. I wouldn't be shocked out of my mind if I found out Terry Pratchett had never read it, but I would be pretty surprised.

And I finally got back on the Kirstin Lavransdatter train: ( Cut for Kristin Lavransdatter ) It's a good book about how damned uncomfortable everything is all the time. Maybe being a 14th-century Norwegian makes it a little better, maybe a little worse - on the evidence of this book, it's hard to say.

What I Plan to Read Next

I still have a medium-sized stack of books left over from my trip, and one more 99 Novels book out from the library - Cocksure by Mordecai Richler - plus I keep "accidentally" picking up New Yorkers from the free shelf because I like the covers. Coming soon, if I get my act together: some scans? That's a big if.