evelyn_b

It's been a ridiculous week and a half for books. I was out of town visiting family for a little while, which also meant visiting local bookstores, which means I came home with a lot more books than I brought with me. It was less worse than it could have been because we didn't have time to visit John K. King (the Trantor of used bookstores) but the Library Bookstore in Ferndale did more than enough damage with its frankly beautiful selection and elegant pricing (used book pricing is an art, like everything else; not all stores do it exceptionally well). I'm allowing myself to pat myself on the back, in hopes that encouragement will lead to further strengthening of restraint, for only buying two issues of The New Yorker circa 1953 when I could easily have gotten ten. Then we came home just in time for a book sale at one of the local bookstores, at which I was able to limit myself to three only because the selection wasn't that great.

Anyway, the "get rid of books" project is suffering a small setback, but it's nothing to worry about yet! In the meantime, there are some new books on the TBR conveyor belt.

What I've Finished Reading

I've been swimming in periodicals lately, which is part of my plan (to shift the backreading-contemporaneous ratio a little further toward the present for a while) but also part of the problem getting-rid-of-bookswise. Ashley M. Jones' stint as editor of Poetry has been good. There was an article in last week's Sunday Times about a subscription box for parents who want to teach their children the importance of volunteering but can't be bothered to spend twenty minutes finding and contacting the nearest food bank. I thought it was mildly funny in a "let's enjoy feeling superior to professional writers" way, so I shared it with my brother, who got unexpectedly furious about this apparently harmless puff-piecer representing the end of civilization. If you would like to decide for yourself which one it is, it's here.

What I'm Reading Now

The Madwoman of Serrano is a pleasantly odd sort-of fableish novel about a village that keeps to its old ways (or tries to) and some of the people it damages, by Dina Salústio. I'm not sure what I think of it so far, but I'm still reading. A larger and slightly glossier bolus of oddness is Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is the book one of the founders of the sci-fi book club has been trying to get us all to read for years. It's not very sci-fi yet, but I do like the closed-in alley where the narrator goes to look for his cat, and the narrator's total lack of ambition and penchant for describing whatever sandwich he's making for himself when the assorted mysteries disrupt his non-schedule. Chances seem pretty good that this will be the first Murakami I don't forget shortly after reading, but we'll see what happens.

What I Plan to Read Next

Some of the books acquired in the Great Not Buying More Books Massacre of 2021: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen, Selected Poems of Mervyn Peake, With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, The Windfall by Diksha Basu, The Long Way to an Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by Irene Claremont de Castillejo. The latter is copyright 1973 by the C. G. Jung foundation and was brought over by one of my aunts because she knows I like books.

What's actually next on the conveyor belt: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

What I Technically Haven't Finished Reading

I started The Power of the Dead with all good intentions, but about a hundred pages in, a strange thing happened. A chunk of about 40 pages was duplicated, in place of the chunk that was supposed to be there. So instead of pages 129-160, pages 97-128 repeat themselves and then the book resumes with Page 160. I went on reading anyway, thinking that when I went to the library on Tuesday I would get another edition of the book and read the missing chapter. But in the meantime I finished the book, and by the time Tuesday rolled around I was so annoyed with Phillip Maddison and his author that I didn't feel like doubling back. So I've finished reading it in one sense and not in another.

Phil's parents are still the best and most memorable characters in this novel sequence, and it was moving, in a hopeless sort of way, to see how Phil and his dad - who really was unrelentingly awful to Phil, his sisters, and his mother - mellow toward one another. Phil wants to arrange it so that his father can live in the country when he retires, away from the ruined landscape of the suburbs which is like an insulting costume-party caricature of the country. They have a nice talk about it, and even though they don't really understand each other and never will, they understand this one thing, and it's enough to get by on, at least for a short visit.

Apart from it being just generally all over the place in much the same way as The Innocent Moon, there is a lot of business in which Phil wrestles with his lust for a young secretary and his guilty dissatisfaction with his wife Lucy, with narrative asides about the secretary's desperate love hunger and need for a father figure. It feels far too much like H.W. trying to explain a real-life affair at unwelcome length, which is exactly what it is.

There is also the occasional passing reference to International Finance, but most of these are so clunky that it feels like they are being shoved into the dialogue out of a sense of obligation.

Next: The Phoenix Generation, a title that bodes probably about as well as you think it does. The back cover copy tells me this is the one where Phil Meets the Reichsparteitag. I can't wait?

What I Really Did Finish

I was planning to give away Things to Do With Your Apple Computer after I finished it, but found I couldn't. It's just too charming. I've already shared it with two separate social groups. BE PREPARED to have it imposed on you if you ever meet me in real life. Did you know that one of MANY magazines available for Apple enthusiasts in 1983 was called inCider? YES IT WAS. The Apple predilection for mixing up lowercase and title caps in wacky FUTURISTIC ways has been with us from the beginning. Other magazines in the market: NIBBLE (alluding both to "bits and bytes" and what you can do if you have a bunch of apple slices in front of you) and the comparatively straightforward Apple Orchard. I also learned that dial-up modems in 1983 1) existed, and 2) were really expensive! If you wanted to check your stock prices or scroll through the digital news during off hours, you could do it for $5.75-$7.75 an hour, but if you wanted to do anything during office hours, the price jumps to $20.75 an hour.

Also, Elsie's Girlhood.

Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, "Elsie, have you ever allowed him to touch your lips?" he asked almost sternly.

"No, papa, not even my cheek. I would not while we were not engaged, and that could not be without your consent."

"I am truly thankful for that!" he exclaimed in a tone of relief; "to know that he had-- that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact with his-- would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune." And lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and again.

This book is batshit insane. Horace Dinsmore will return to the subject of his daughter's lips being unpolluted several times during the course of it. Elsie will go from twelve to fifteen to eighteen to twenty-one with zero corresponding change in dialogue style, behavior, or outlook on life. The guy whose lips did not pollute Elsie's pure lips is an unscrupulous gambler hoping to marry her for her money. He sizes her up right away and decides to present himself as a reformed sinner who needs her love to stay on the straight and narrow, and of course Elsie eats it up. There is a wonderfully melodramatic series of coincidences by which Elsie's dad's best friend Travilla recognizes the falsely reformed real sinner from "a gambling hell" and the f.r.r.s. claims he has an identical cousin who looks just like him but isn't as reformed (Elsie eats this up, too). Her dad comes to get her (she has been visiting an aunt, but ELSIE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T BE LEFT ALONE) and makes her wear a veil so she can't even look at the man as they ride out of town. So she sits under the veil and weeps, crushed between her irresistible love for the first smooth-talking rando who comes sniffing around her money and her immovable obedience to her beloved Daddy Dinsmore.

There is a nice bit early on where Elsie is given, and happily loses herself in, an earlier Victorian weeper, The Wide, Wide World. It's nice when an author acknowledges her roots. Elsie herself is a clear spiritual foremother of Twilight's Bella Swan, a hopeless case who constantly has to be rescued from herself by imperious men with strong jaws.


What I'm Reading Now

The Tombs of Atuan is a nicely creepy story about a High Priestess who is really too young to be a High Priestess, just as A Wizard of Earthsea was about a wizard who was too young to be a wizard. Well, everyone's got to start somewhere.

I'm enjoying A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - a breezy, mildly wacky, very mildly trippy semi-adventure that bears its wackiness with lightness and aplomb. There's this guy, Our Narrator; he works in advertising. He's a regular guy, but life isn't regular; life is bizarre, so what's a regular guy to do? That's about the shape of things so far. There is a woman with preternaturally beautiful ears; there is a chauffeur with a direct phone line to God; there is ill-advised architecture and city planning against nature, and a mysterious sheep who is very important to the fabric of reality for some reason. These elements collide gently, like bubbles in a screen saver, except it's 1989 and screen savers may not have been invented yet. It reminds me a little of my memories of Tom Robbins before I made the mistake of rereading Tom Robbins.

What I Plan to Read Next

More Williamson, more Leguin. Probably something else.

ETA: What am I saying, of course screen savers have totally been invented.

I really need to stop procrastinating by checking up on the history of different inventions. :|