Mystery spot

This picture, taken August 1969, is presumably somewhere out West. I don't know where it is or the story behind the picture (family road trip?), but maybe I'll do a little painting or a pastel of the landscape. My obsession of the moment, the West or Wests or what have you, is manifesting itself in my reading habits: I reread Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, then devoured Marking the Sparrow's Fall (a collection of his essays), and now I'm wading into J. S. Holliday's The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experiment. So very much to read, and only finite hours in which one's eyes can stay fixed on the page!

The Deepening Stream

Some time ago, browsing the used-books shelves at the Center for Fiction, I saw a squat little Modern Library edition that, for reasons unknown (I didn’t recognize the title and had never heard of the author) I simply had to possess.

The weathered red hardcover sat on my shelf for a rather long time. It’s no secret that I went on a Maud Hart Lovelace bender, and I’ve also closely followed the saga of Downton Abbey; it’s all led to an incurable curiosity about life as it was lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s – say, from the turn of the century to the end of the Great War, when the world was full of great promise and great barbarism both. I reorganized my bookshelves in early January, and when I unearthed The Deepening Stream, I did a bit of research and learned that it charts the story of a girl growing up in just that period. It went to the top of my list.

Dorothy Canfield’s novel was first published as a serial in the Woman’s Home Companion in 1930. We meet Penelope “Matey” Gilbert as a child in the States and in France, jumping from town to town as her father pursues his career in academia, and then experience with her a number of milestones: her parents die, she falls in love and marries Adrian Fort, she bears two children, and when the war breaks out, she takes her family to France to help (Adrian drives an ambulance on the front, and Matey and the children stay in Paris to help support the Vinets, a family she had lived with for a time when she was young).

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Looking back: The books I read in 2011

Last year at this time, I decided it would be cool to see if I could read 100 books in 2011. And indeed, it was cool: so cool, in fact, that I couldn't stop reading once I started, and I ended up plowing through 118 books in all. Here's a rather unscientific exploration of what I encountered.

I. Gender studies

I've never put much stock in the claims of male writers who say no woman can be their equal (apologies, Mr. Naipaul), but I did not explicitly set out to read more books written by women than by men. Nonetheless, that's how it shook out: of the 118 books I read, 67 were penned by women -- that's about 57%. Undoubtedly the best of those was Middlemarch, which I put off reading for far too long; I suppose Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner and Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss are destined to figure in my 2012 list. Also quite memorable were two books that I suppose can be classed in the sub-genre of "girls behaving badly": The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Alina Bronsky) features the comically awful grandmother Rosa, and Harriet the horrid is unforgettable in After Claude (Iris Owens).

II. Nostalgia

I've mentioned it on the site a few times now, but one of the most important events in my reading life this year was rediscovering Maud Hart Lovelace and the Betsy-Tacy books. I read the first four books, now available as a treasury from Harper Perennial, as well as two books following The Crowd in their high school years. I've urged thrift-store copies on friends and family members, I've somehow acquired a Betsy-Tacy tote bag, and the July 2012 Betsy-Tacy Convention in Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota, is starting to look mighty tempting. Although not about Lovelaceiana, I found Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life an interesting exploration of rediscovering childhood favorites; she takes on the world of Little House on the Prairie with grace and humor (and there's even a brief mention of Mankata, Maud Hart Lovelace's hometown, which has an LHOP/Laura Ingalls Wilder connection of its own). And while we're on the subject of childhood favorites, for fans of Ramona and Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary's memoir A Girl from Yamhill was sublime.

III. Double duty

I try and vary my reading diet as much as possible, but a few authors figured more prominently in my list than did others. I read a few books by Colson Whitehead, a handful by Maureen Johnson, and two by Kevin Wilson. If you haven't read Wilson's short story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, you should.

IV. Out and about

It turns out I'm one of those people who likes themed reading: a creepy tale by Patricia Highsmith on Halloween, something with a good holiday scene for Christmas. And, of course, when I travel, I try to find stories about the places I'm going. While in Paris, I read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; on the way to Singapore, I made my way through a strange book of colonial travel, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (Isabella Bird); a far better read was Stella Kon's The Scholar and the Dragon, about a Chinese immigrant to Singapore in the early 20th century.

V. Ape for apes

Monkey-related similes and metaphors appeared in nearly every book I read in 2011, but only two explicitly focused on our primate friends. Benjamin Hale's The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a story of a chimp caught between the animal and human worlds, out of place, ultimately, in both. But Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape, a used-bookstore find, stands out here: it's about animal testing, sort of, but it's also a primate love story, and then there's a sidetrack into "top-secret government rocket research" that culminates in a scientist skinning an ape and donning its skin as he is blasted off into space. Truly, truly strange.

I could go on and on (other important categories include epics [Lonesome Dove, Middlemarch], books about books [The Professor and the Madman, Globish, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Mystery and Manners], and awesome literature in translation [Suicide, The Jokers, The Sleepwalker, The Clash of Images]). But instead, I'll turn back to my reading -- which for now is the second half of Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness and a bit more of Heidi Julavits' The Effect of Living Backward -- and we'll meet again in a year for another roundup.

An author by any other name ...

Last night, I finished Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. A cool topic, and interesting to consider in an age where some are calling for more transparency and less anonymity on the Internet.

I read novels most of the time, and this was a good reminder of all the cool STUFF that nonfiction can teach you. I mean, did you know:

• Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson) was an early proponent of the standing desk ("He wrote most of his books, include Alice, while standing up," according to Ciuraru, and supposedly could stand at his desk for 10 hours a day). Carroll also had strange tea rituals -- he steeped it for exactly 10 minutes, and paced, swinging the teapot, for those 10 minutes -- and walked, sometimes as much as 20 miles a day, to solve problems or reflect on life (though it's anyone's guess as to why he made notes about his feet and how they held up post-walk).
• Georges Simenon, what a whacko! Ciuraru notes, "He owned a gold watch that a reporter described as 'the size and shape of a brioche.'" [yum!] "This was a man as intoxicated by himself as others are by fine wine ... On the advice of his doctor, he restricted himself to two bottles of red Bordeaux daily. (He did got through periods of renouncing alcohol for Coca-Cola.) One friend recalled a common sight: Simenon throwing up a bottle's worth of cognac in the garden, 'two fingers down his throat, after he finished a chapter.'" (Drunkenness, many a writer's friend/foe.) Also? "... he weighed himself before and after completing each new book, so as to measure how much sweat the project had cost him."
• Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Strangers on a Train, was altogether unpleasant, but had a strange affection for snails: "Her fondness for snails was such that she kept three hundred of them in her garden in Suffolk and insisted on traveling with them. When she moved to France in 1967, she smuggled snails into the country by hiding them under her breasts -- and she made several trips back and forth to smuggle them all."

Read it. The Bronte bits and the Mark Twain chapter felt somewhat familiar, but now I'm raring to read some Henry Greene (Henry Yorke) and learn more about the sad end of James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon).

The Information

I had something of a hard time hanging with the entirety of James Gleick's The Information (one-line Janet Maslin review, extracted from the Times: "The Information is to the nature, history, and significance of data what the beach is to sand.").That said, the book's final paragraph is a thing of real beauty:

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Perhaps this is indecipherable denuded of the context of the 500-odd page tome, but I found it striking. Lots of provocative ideas and little bits of history and culture; tons to unpack and meditate on.

The words, the words

I'm only about 50 pages into Blake Butler's There Is No Year, and progress is impeded again and again as I flip back to reread sentences and passages I can't stop thinking about. The rhythm, the weight, is entrancing:

They purred secret sentences in silent rising spiral until the sky at last had drunk so much it sunk to night---the night not out of cycle but in insistence, demanded in the skin, the unseen smoke of body after body sewn surrounding until the mother, at least could not see---could not feel the air even around her, or her other---could not feel anything at all---and in the dark the mother stuttered---and in the dark again the mother walked.

It reads almost like poetry (dark, haunted stanzas):

He pressed his flesh against the grate's face's metal tines---a mazemap pressed around his eyes. Through the gaps a lukewarm air blew, moist like raindamp, stunk like rice.

The giving tree

I desperately want to laze under the branches of these book trees (from Kostas Syrtariotis of Kostas Designs), perhaps with a weathered copy of Jane Eyre in my hands.

And, while we're on a home-decor kick, I also wouldn't mind curling up to finish Lonesome Dove in the fluffy pages of this book bed, a piece by Japanese artist Yusuke Suzuki.

The Clash of Images

I just finished Abdelfattah Kilito's The Clash of Images, a series of thirteen stories about a boy named Abdallah growing up in urban Morocco.

The Quarterly Conversation has a great review of this lovely, slender book, and I'm afraid I can't quite do the same justice. I can say, however, that "Pleiades" might be one of the most perfect little pieces I've read this year, and "Cinedays," which follows it, is a stunning observation on how people a world away from America take the same cultural touchstone (in this case, a Western) and dissect, remix, and reimagine the object into a wholly new vision.

How to rebuff a suitor

Simply shout, "Unhand me, greybeard loon!" This was Beverly Cleary's course of action when her first boyfriend got a little aggressive. She explains, "He obeyed, but he must have been mystified by the words from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

I just finished A Girl From Yamhill, and I don't know that I could have enjoyed it more. Cleary, who you know as the mind behind Ramona Quimby, recounts her girlhood in Depression-era Oregon; the language is simple and the stories nothing outrageous, but her high spirits and quiet intelligence shine through on every page.

(An unrelated factoid: we went to the same summer camp (Namanu!), though I swam in the Sandy River about sixty-five years after she did.)

The beauty in Bovary

There was something of a stir last year when Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary came out, but I was more or less content with the single dog-eared copy of it on my shelf. Until, that is, we stopped at Argosy Books and found an old edition, concealed in a cover dappled with pink roses; with its lovely thick paper and a spate of cool illustrations, old Emma was practically begging me to purchase it.

It's a little unclear when this edition was published, though the Internet suggests perhaps sometime in the 1940s. (This would fit with the era Richard Lindner was working.)

This translation is Eleanor Marx Aveling's, the first English version of Bovary. (Eleanor was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, poisoned herself with prussic acid when she discovered her lover had married another woman.)