evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Aphra Behn: The English Sappho by George Woodcock, another biography by a guy who isn't going to bother trying to hide his crush on his subject. Why should he? Aphra Behn is great. It's a lot of fun just to get a guided tour through the (to me) very weird world of late 17th century England, and to feel as if I can almost, sort of, barely tell the difference between the shoddy literary hackwork of the day and the genuine breath-of-fresh-air wit. Woodcock's a little too easily impressed at times, and too ready to jump to conclusions about which rumors would or wouldn't be in character for Behn, from whom we have acres of mostly fictional words, but hardly anything near a complete record. Sometimes it's clearly just his crush talking. He's also needlessly impressed by paradoxes that aren't really - for example, he expects his readers to be unable to reconcile Behn's commonsense feminism with her support of an absolute monarchy, and I can't see why he would.

First Book in Physiology and Hygiene is a 1908 elementary textbook about - well, just what it says. I fully expected the sermons on the evils of tobacco and alcohol, but the dire warning against corn syrup took me by surprise. I knew there was an anti-corn-syrup campaign, but I didn't expect it to have begun until sometime around 1965.

I'd like to say something about What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, a much newer book, but it'll have to wait until next week (or whenever I get around to catching up.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm really enjoying Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. I've been seeing it around for years and finally bought it at the library book sale, thinking it would be a good companion read for Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son. After two thousand-odd years as a corpse, Biff is unceremoniously resurrected by a dunderheaded angel and bundled off to a Ramada Inn to write a new gospel. It's earthy but not actually impious, if you care about the distinction. Some of the jokes haven't aged well at all and some of them are ageless, and then there's a lot in between that are half and half. Biff's a good buddy for all his teasing, and Josh is a touching and frustrating future messiah - a new Easter classic, only about a week too late.


What I Plan to Read Next

Other books I bought at the library sale: a beautiful first edition of Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, a three-novel Sue Grafton omnibus feat. menaces D through F, a Maigret novella, and a gigantic picture book about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald called The Romantic Egoists, which I shouldn't have bought at all except that I'm an unbelievably easy sucker for facsimiles of postcards with people's handwriting all over them. And the next batch of 99 Novels, which I haven't even started yet. (I was crushed to find that Goldfinger is missing, presumed lost, so my discovery of Ian Fleming will have to be delayed).

2017 was a long year with some books in it. I took on too many reading challenges and forgot about most of them. 2018 will be less ambitious and better organized (for a while). If you want to see a list of books I read, you'll find it under the cut.

( Check out that end-of-the-year depletion! )

bold: 99 Novels
italics: Mount TBR Challenge

I read and relinquished 77 books in fulfillment of the Mount TBR Challenge. That is 15 more than the number of books I bought, found on a free book shelf, or was given as gifts in 2017. Maybe this year I'll buy fewer books and use the library more! Maybe not, though. 2018 is the Year of Making No Promises.

126 fiction, 48 non-fiction, 18 other (mostly poetry), give or take some in the middle where I lost count.

A sluggish but well-meaning Reading Wednesday returns next week, when I'll tell you all about how delightful Circus Shoes was (though the eponymous shoes never showed up; they were metaphorical shoes I guess).

What I've Finished Reading

I enjoyed Doorways in the Sand all the way through. Fred receives mysterious instructions from a mysterious entity, gets himself reversed in an alien contraption (which saves his life, but causes everything to appear backwards including important written instructions) and is awarded a doctorate against his will. Eventually the mystery of what happened to the stone, which is also the mystery of what happened to Fred, is solved. Fred settles into his new life of slightly more responsibility, as the people of earth adjust to their new status as members of a galactic community. The message, I guess, is that everyone has to grow up sometime.

I didn’t expect The Book of Jane to get dark, or for Jane to get told off by the whirlwind, but I wasn't expecting it to pull quite as many punches as it does. Jane's dog gets sick, but then it gets better. Her boyfriend breaks up with her because she keeps willfully interpreting attempts to break up with her as proposals, and I can't really say I blame him. The roof of her Manhattan apartment caves in and she has to find a hotel for a few days, which is rough because she just lost her job due to a hilarious tabloid misunderstanding. Her non-explicitly gay best friend’s mother dies, but all of Jane’s immediate family are fine. She gets a rash on her face, but it's easily treatable and has no serious social consequences. Well, we do live in an age of medical marvels! There’s nothing wrong with lightening things up! And despite name-checking the Book of Job on the back cover, The Book of Jane never really purports to be anything but a sprightly comedy of temporary loss.

I’d like this book a lot more if the love interest were a little less repellent, or even if he were something else in addition to being repellent. He’s an asshole actuary (and convert to Christianity, though that doesn’t really come up except as an aside) whose first move is to confront Jane with a bunch of negging about her marriage prospects. When he was first introduced, I thought he was going to be the Satan of the story, which I think was a deliberate feint on the part of the author. They start dating after Jane's breakup and he needles her all the time about being too non-spontaneous, pushes her to burn her day planner, takes her on a surprise helicopter ride, and buys her a Blackberry because now “she’s ready to handle it.” Then he makes fun of her for not noticing that he programmed the date of their wedding into the Blackberry. Then: ostentatious public proposal on New Year’s Eve. The end! Dude doesn’t even apologize for the initial negging campaign, which he seems to think was totally justified because 1) he was so in love he couldn’t think straight! and 2) it worked, didn’t it? >:|

What I’m Reading Now

Back when the local used bookstore closed, I took home a lot of things. Probably the most ill-advised rescue of all was Library of the World’s Best Literature, a 27-volume set for the well-heeled autodidact, circa 1902. It’s in good condition and I was curious about what was included and what the editors had to say about it – that’s not a great excuse, but it’s the only one I have. At present, I don’t have room for it on my bookshelves, so it’s stacked up in two piles on the edge of a desk. I’ve decided to play Early Twentieth Century Autodidact and read a short section every day, starting with whichever volume happened to be on top, which was II: Aqui-Bag. Hence: Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian Nights. The Aquinas selections are pretty perfunctory, but there’s a long introduction to the Nights and more than one tale, including a portion of Sindbad the Sailor. We’ll see how this goes.

Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1860 about a forlorn young Romantic poet of 1960, tells a tale as old as time: no one wants to read poetry any more, and the forlorn Y. R., a spirit too delicate to work in a bank, is forced onto the streets - primarily by his own stubbornness, but oh well. I'm not a huge fan of No One Reads Anymore screeds, having attracted far too many when I worked at a used bookstore (usually while I was trying to read), but I have to give Verne credit for setting up the underlying causes much more convincingly than Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. Verne depicts an enormous centralized educational system tied directly to business and industry from which the French language and literature components have withered and dropped from undernourishment, so that anyone who wants to learn about Balzac or any of those guys has to do it on their own. Bookstore owners try to sell you the best-selling engineering manuals instead, librarians make faces at you or stare in confusion.

Like Trent's Last Case, this book has a Love Interest who goes around Pigpen-like in a perpetual cloud of microsermons about True Womanhood. The funny thing is that in these two books written fifty years apart, the complaints about Modern Girls are almost exactly the same.

What I Might Read Next

Any one of several random TBR selections. I’ve got a study on “swap clubs” from the 1970s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Greek myth retellings for children, among other things. And a long list of 99 Novels.

What I've Finished Reading

A Generation of Vipers:

It has been fairly fancy of me, I know, to write so long and noisy a book just to say that if we want a better world, we will have to be better people.

I can't tell if A Generation of Vipers is too sloppy to be dangerous or if I've just developed the illusion that it is as a defense mechanism against having my conventional worldview shaken to the core. I'm leaning toward the former, but you never know. It's essentially a screed against American hypocrisy, self-mythologizing, and carefully cultivated obliviousness that was on point in 1943 and would probably still be on point today, at least in sufficiently abstracted list form. The infamous chapter on "mom" is really (partly) just a standard second-wave feminist critique of the culturally enforced idleness and infantalization of middle-class American women, only gussied up in a lot of gleefully misogynist imagery because Wylie can't seem to help himself.

It's an interesting book, but every paragraph and every chapter is such a clogged drain of clauses that it's difficult to parse. I'm not sure yet if I want to try to parse it a little more, or if I should just let it go. Certainly there are better-written screeds against American hypocrisy to be found. Here, have a sample paragraph (or rather, sentence-paragraph):

Since society is founded upon lies, and since all men are, in countless ways, exponents of the most groveling forms of intellectual and moral crookedness, the psychoanalytical method is slow, mentally painful to the deluded patient, at least at first, and likely, instead of rendering him whole, to spring upon his startled fellows in the overweaning and enlightened possession of some corner or giblet of eternal truth which, isolated in a still unclear mind and hatched autonomous in a still prejudiced company of persons, makes his behavior seem so bizarre that his friends avoid him, and he is liable to become disappointed not only with psychiatry but with himself all over again and develop a new set of stigmata.

From this distance, its pungency can feel a little forced, even when it hasn't aged as badly as, e.g., Wylie's many drive-by references to the deleterious influence of "nances" and "sissies." But I'm a classic American prig with a low pungency threshold, so who knows for sure? It probably read a little better in 1943, when the vernacular portion of the vernacular-prophetic hybrid was closer to fresh. I haven't decided whether I should keep this around on the off chance that I need a reference book for gritty suburban realism and/or "opinions it was possible to have in 1940s America."

On the one hand, it's pretty small! On the other, it was a little more of a slog, on a sentence level, than I like my books to be, and as a former Explosive Best-Seller it shouldn't be too hard to come by again.

I do like the Wyliean epithet "prickamouse," though I probably wouldn't use it myself.

What I'm Reading Now

Another Mount TBR selection, Between You, Me, and the Gatepost by Pat Boone (1959). If Philip Wylie's prose style is cluttered, Pat Boone's is downright excruciating. His Heart-to-Heart Message for Teen-Agers is just the sort of thing Wylie would set on fire for the sake of men's souls, and can you blame him? "Verily I say unto thee, . . . woweeWOOwow!" Boone exclaims, after listing the questions that inspired the book.

You think my work's not cut out for me? And these weren't adults asking the questions; no sir . . . these were bonafide, picked-at-random TWEEN-AGERS!

Now here's what we'll do. First, we'll talk about YOU; Second, about you and your friends (including parents!): and Third, about the ways you, Egbert Z. Twixt, can meet the challenge of changing the world!

Gag me, as the ancients said, with a spoon. But despite the heavy awfulness of the youth-group-leaderese, I find myself kind of liking Pat Boone here. He hasn't taken any really awful positions yet and he seems to genuinely like and sympathize with the young people he's blasting with the full force of his superpowered cringe ray. At the very least, he's fond of his memory of himself as a teenager.

(If I were a Real Teen in 1959, I'm sure I'd feel differently, and would probably be handing Wylie the gas can and matches).

This book is lavishly illustrated, but instead of having anything to do with the putative subject of teenagers sorting out their lives, the photos are all generic promotional images of Boone - posing with his cute daughters and slightly freakish small dog, posing in the studio, posing at European landmarks on a world tour.

I could complain about the prose style of Hidden Figures, but it's a masterpiece compared to Pat Boone, so I'll let it go until next week.

What I Plan to Read Next

Am I going to post about A Single Man? Maybe! Am I going to get back on track with the 99 Novels? Probably! Will I spend a lot of time getting distracted by other things first? Almost definitely!

(Mount TBR is a yearly challenge to read and relinquish books I've owned for a while but haven't read yet; current count is 49 toward my goal of 60).

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

Mockingjay! When I first started reading The Hunger Games I got some warnings that the second two books weren't as good as the first, and that's probably objectively true, but I'm so glad that I read them that I barely even noticed. I didn't really believe in the rebellion as it was happening, which undermined things a little, but not as much as you might expect. This has never been a series where seamless plotting and economic feasibility were the point. I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks making fun of/trying to make sense of the worldbuilding, but I've also been consistently impressed by Collins' achievement here: these books were totally addictive, totally memorable, smart and humane.

I know I just said "memorable," but actually, a few days after finishing the book, the details of the plot have already blurred together into a haze of impressions. I'm not sure that's actually a contradiction: the events are mostly just carriers for the imagery, the emotional beats and Collins' meticulous and unsentimental depictions of trauma.

( Some things that happen in Mockingjay )

Technically there's still kind of a half-hearted love triangle knocking around the edges, but it hardly ever comes up and there's never any real uncertainty about Katniss ditching her childhood buddy Stormy McVengeance in favor of Literal Breadname the steady and nurturing rock biscuit (with extra cinnamon). I don't think it was really necessary to have Gale hanging around representing The Fighter in this dilemma of how to live in response to oppression, because Katniss is already The Fighter and knows perfectly well from experience how exhausting it gets after the first ten minutes.

The epilogue makes the series, in my opinion.

( The questions are just beginning. )

I finished I Capture the Castle in no time, not because it's a fast-paced book (it's leisurely even when the emotional drama is at its peak) but because I liked the narrator so much and wanted to spend as much time with her and her family as possible. The joke was on me, because I got to the end of the book and then it was over.

I veered between hating the romance plot(s) and being indifferently tolerant toward them. Mostly I just wanted to buy Cassandra a chocolate with some brandy in it and maybe take her to a party where she can meet more than two people. Simon and Neil are the only really uninteresting characters in a gallery of wonderfully even-handed, funny and tolerant portraits - though I don't know if I would have found them as uninteresting if they hadn't been so pointedly the only love interest game in town. I did very much appreciate that [SPOILER] we did not go with a Childhood Sweethearts Forever ending - I was glad for that even though I liked Stephen about a billion times better than the Bros. Netherfield. Anyway, the romance plot was saved by its inconclusiveness: we don't know by the end if she's going to marry anyone, but we do know that she's writing a lot and getting better at it, or at least getting accustomed to the difficulty of making sentences out of feelings, and that's exactly as it should be.

I wished there were a little more about her dad and Topaz, because I loved them (Cassandra's dad is a nicely unsentimentalized Troubled Writer who doesn't write anything; Topaz is just the best) but they were treated at a level of detail that was realistic for Cassandra, so I won't complain.

( Marmion )

What I'm Reading Now

I started True Pretenses by Rose Lerner, but I'm thinking I might not finish it. These guys are appealing character outlines, but they had a whole chapter of dialogue to convince me they were characters and nothing came of it. And what's the point of an allegedly historical novel with no atmosphere, if the language isn't interesting? I'm going to assume I'm just being grumpy because I'm tired and give it another 50 pages to turn itself around.

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton is a wonderfully unassuming Space TV Adventure (minus the TV). Dane's asshole friends make fun of him when he gets assigned to the lowest class of space trading ship, but he's determined to make the best of it, and the crew of the Solar Queen are friendlier and more interesting than those jerks, anyway. Almost as soon as they're underway, they gamble their salaries on a risky venture: buying sight-unseen trading rights to a Class D planet, which could have intelligent life but could just as easily be a bunch of fish in a bucket or nothing at all. What will they find? Probably something interesting, or there wouldn't be a book here - right? Clunky but earnest Circa 1955 racial diversity and lots of breezy worldbuilding.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan, maybe Cotillion. Probably other things.

I need to make an adjustment to my Mount TBR Challenge: I'm going to count books as read if I make an attempt but have to give up after 100 pages. Otherwise I may end up spending a lot of time reading books I don't care about, and I'd rather avoid that for now. No books in this DNF category yet, but I'm sure I'll need it eventually. My Mount TBR count is now 11 books, 1/6 of my total goal, which means I'm about where I should be.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is coming up, one of these days, for the "two books from Australia" portion of my reading challenge. What else is a book from Australia? Has anyone read Carpentaria?