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Aah, to be stuck at home for a whole weekend. It seems like a dream come true for a homebody and bookworm like me. The second major snowstorm of the season has kept me home since Friday afternoon and will likely keep me in for another 24 hours or more. When I realized the storm was coming, I was thrilled to have a weekend of nothing to do but read and watch a movie or two. Bliss!

The Parking Lot Behind My Building

Alas, my moods and the weather do not always mesh, and by midday yesterday I had lost all interest in reading and couldn’t help but obsessively watch the annoying wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. Yes, it was repetitive; yes, it was sometimes silly; but no, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  Ennui—I have it.

Part of the problem is the book I’m reading, Family Britain by David Kynaston. It’s a social history that is sometimes fascinating but also rather disjointed, which makes it hard for me to get immersed. I considered switching to something different, but nothing appealed. I think it’s just reader’s block.

My To-Be-Mailed Pile

So what to do? How about a large misguided project? I decided to use the time to finally do a major bookshelf cull, posting most of the unread books I can get from the library to Bookmooch and Paperbackswap. As regular Shelf Love readers will know, I’ve been stressed by the overabundance of unread books in my house, and I think I’ll be glad to say good-bye to these books. What I didn’t consider is that when you post a bunch of books to book-swapping sites, you then end up having to package and mail a bunch of books. Almost immediately, I had 20 books requested. In a panic, I put my Paperbackswap bookshelf on hold, so I wouldn’t get more requests. Now I have lots of wrapping to do.

And for those of you who are wondering how “swapping” books will help me get my TBR pile under control, I only use swap sites these days to acquire books my library doesn’t carry or books I’ve read and want for my permanent collection. When I follow those rules, I tend not to get an overwhelming number of books.

So what do you do when you have a case of reading ennui?


Notes from a Reading Life

Books Read

  • The Reckoning by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. The 15th Morland Dynasty book. The series, which I’m now about halfway through, is getting better and better.

Currently Reading

  • Family Britain by David Kynaston. Social history of post-War Britain. From the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some interesting facts, but overly long with a disjointed structure.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien. For the LOTR Readalong.
  • The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud (audio). First in the Bartimaeous Trilogy, a YA series about a djinni and an apprentice magician.
  • The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry. Poetry lessons. I’m still managing about a lesson a week.

On Deck

  • Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor. From LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Will probably start this today to take a break from Family Britain.
  • The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud (audio). The second Bartimaeous book.

New Acquisitions
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been trying to add  more books by people of color to my shelves. This week was a great success on that score!

  • Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. A novel about multiple Chippewa characters living on a reservation.
  • The Dark Child by Camara Laye. Autobiography about growing up in Guinea.
  • The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore. A classic Bengali novel.

Big Fish

Daniel Wallace’s novel is subtitled, “A Novel of Mythic Proportions.” He doesn’t leave us sitting around wondering what he’s doing with the story of Edward Bloom, a dying man, and his son William. Instead, with such a subtitle, and with chapters such as “In Which He Speaks to Animals,” “How He Tamed the Giant” and “His Three Labors,” Wallace makes it clear from the beginning of Big Fish that he is working with myth, tall tales, stories we could never believe, or at any rate don’t know how to believe. I guess that’s a good thing, that he tells us this, right?

Edward Bloom is a successful businessman. He’s never been at home much: his main asset is his charm, his endless supply of jokes, his skill at making people agree to do what he says, and so he’s been a traveler most of his adult life. His son, William, has never had the chance to get to know his father. He doesn’t know the things that matter to him, doesn’t know whether Edward believes in God or whether he’s ever had an affair or what’s been difficult for him or whether he has any regrets. It’s just not the kind of thing they talk about. Edward keeps up a constant patter, a kind of nebulous mist that deflects such serious talk. Even now that Edward is dying, William can’t get him to answer any of his questions:

…if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.

So instead, William creates stories about his father. About the day he was born, ending the worst drought in the history of Alabama. About his childhood and his Great Promise. About the time he bought an entire town, just because he liked it. About his heroic escape from a strange and shadowy place full of menacing people and animals. About his powerful courtship of William’s mother. Some of these stories are tall tales; others are fables or legends or even allegories. All are odd, oblique ways of approaching the father William doesn’t know. The stories are punctuated by no fewer than four different takes on Edward’s death, as William tries and tries again to get it just right.

This novel had a fascinating structure. Wallace took a theme that has been explored by authors in every place and time from ancient Greece to modern Australia, in poetry, plays, novels, and film, and managed to do something interesting with it. The idea that an idolized father could become an actual myth was both troubling and touching, and I liked some of the ways Wallace was playing with it, even if I thought he could have done it a little more subtly.

But in the end, I was disappointed in this book. Because in the end, William never does get to know his father. His father never reveals himself past that facade of jokes and charm, and whether there even is anything further to reveal is anyone’s guess. The father-son relationship remains at the level of the tall tale, an admiring little boy looking at the long shadow he once believed to be Paul Bunyan, unable to move into a deeper, warmer, more authentic place. Neither character develops. While the myths are entertaining to read — and sometimes more than entertaining, sometimes meaningful — the novel as a whole fell flat for me. Given the inventiveness of the structure, however, I would certainly try another book Wallace wrote, and see where he got with the characterization and relationships. It looked to me like he was going good places.

In my last post about the Morland Dynasty by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, I mentioned that the books are getting better and better. With The Reckoning, the 15th book in the 32-book (so far) series, the trend has continued. I’d have a hard time choosing between this one and #14, The Campaigners, as my favorite because they are both wonderful reads in different ways. The Campaigners was a terrific war novel, but The Reckoning shows that peace is not necessarily peaceful.

I’m going to keep this review brief, because I know a few of you are reading the series and don’t want to be spoiled, and if my monthly Morland posts haven’t convinced you to start the series, you’re probably also tired of hearing about it. So I’ll just give a brief overview.

The Reckoning begins in 1816, and England is suffering from an economic slump so dire that Morlands must consider selling off some of their property. Complicating the issue is the movement toward providing better working and living conditions for factory workers. Generational conflicts come into play here as the younger Morlands believe that the poor deserve a better life, and the older Morlands believe that the reform programs would be too intrusive, taking liberty away from both owners and workers. This is where one of Harrod-Eagles’s greatest strengths as a historical fiction author comes through.  Modern readers have never known a time when child labor was acceptable, but Harrod-Eagles allows some of the best, most appealing characters express support for child labor—and she doesn’t turn them into villains to do it. Their explanations actually make a certain amount of sense, and one can see why a kind, compassionate person would hold such a wrong-headed point of view.

The book includes a lovely romance as well as a soapy gothic melodrama, and both kept me in suspense. There’s also a story of marriage going awry, with a Morland woman making some shocking choices to remain free of domestic duties. I thought for a time that we were getting another Annunciata, who I thoroughly disliked for her selfishness, but Harrod-Eagles’s characterization is getting more complex as the books go on, and I sympathized even as I shuddered. I think the slower pace that she adopted after the first 10 or so novels has helped make this depth possible.

I’m already looking forward to seeing how the characters and their relationships develop in the next book, The Devil’s Horse, which I intend to read sometime in February.

February is the second month of the Lord of the Rings Readalong, and Clare is our host for this month’s focus on The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the main trilogy. She’s posted a few questions over at the Literary Omnivore.

When did you first hear of The Lord of the Rings?

I actually don’t remember when I first heard of The Lord of the Rings. I think it was just one of those books that I heard people talking about, although I don’t believe I knew any Tolkien fans growing up. I do remember people who liked the animated version of The Hobbit, which I didn’t see until after I read the book. (And it is charming, just like the book.)

Have you read The Fellowship of the Ring before?

I’ve read Fellowship several times, at least four times in print and once as an audiobook. I first read it in 9th grade, and the copy I have now is the very same copy I read then. It’s looking a little worse for the wear these days, but it has sentimental value. I loved The Hobbit when I read it earlier that same year, but Fellowship blew me away. I’m sure I drove my entire family crazy with my need to talk about it. And I remember at least one nearly sleepless night as the fellowship entered the mines of Moria. (The phrase “drums, drums in the deep” still sends a shiver down my spine.)

What’s your plan of attack, now that we’re dealing with more “mature” literature?

I’m continuing to read during lunch breaks at work, just as I did with The Hobbit. I actually started last month and am over 100 pages in. My main goal is to savor, savor, savor. I often tend to rush to get to my favorite parts, but I really want to take more in this time.

Have you ever seen the movies? If so, do you think they’ll influence your reading?

I saw the movies only after reading the books several times. I was one of those Tolkien geeks who followed the news online about the production, casting, and so on. I remember fretting that the movie was going to turn into “Arwen and Some Short Dudes” when Liv Tyler’s face started showing up in every story about the movie. (Incidentally, I have no issues at all with the beefing up of her role; it was a needed change.) When the movie opened, I was at the theatre with friends, and we watched from the very back row. I used many, many tissues.

This will be the first time I’ve read the books in print since seeing the movies, and I’ve wondered how much my visions of the characters and locations will be changed based on the movies. So far, not much. The casting and set design were generally so good that my mental images were pretty close to the movie images all along. There are some characters, Legolas, for example, who never made a strong impression on me in the books, and I suspect they’ll stand out more now because of the movies. And the actors that played them will no doubt appear in my mind, which is not necessarily a bad thing :-)

I’ve also, incidentally, seen the stage musical, which is mostly based on Fellowship. The last two books were condensed down into one act, which meant committing what many Tolkien purists would consider criminal acts of adaptation. (Rohan? What’s Rohan?) But, well, omitting beloved characters bothers me less than including them and getting them wrong, and it’s hard for me to hate a show that bombarded the audience with the breath of a balrog at the end of the first act. It was exactly as scary as it should have been. I just can’t get mad about the other stuff. So with that, I’ll leave you with a tune from the musical. Enjoy!

The Souls of Black Folk

Today, the Classics Circuit Harlem Renaissance tour begins, and we are pleased to be the first tour stop. We’ll be discussing the seminal nonfiction work The Souls of Black Folk by the scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and was the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard University.

The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is a collection of 14 sociological essays on race in the United States, particularly the southern U.S. Du Bois touches on issues of poverty, education, post-Civil War reconstruction, black-white relations, and the black church. It includes personal stories of Du Bois’s own experiences teaching and traveling in the South and analysis of the root causes of black poverty.

Teresa: One of the things that struck me most as I was reading this was how relevant some of the discussions are for today. This was particularly true in the essays on education. In “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Du Bois talks about how important it is that education be about more than economic survival. He says that “the true college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end of that life which meat nourishes.” But he also says that

of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans … And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.

One common debate today in education has to do with whether an academic-oriented education is the right thing for every student. The general tendency is to want every child to go to college, but might there be some who would be happier if they were working in trades that don’t require a college degree? I hear that question asked often in my work as an education journal editor, but I was amazed to see that it was being asked more than 100 years ago.

Jenny: I couldn’t agree more. These essays had tremendous power, not only because they are so incisively and clearly written, but because what they have to say is still so applicable. While it is true that the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s (only about 50 years after this book was published, and only 50 years before we are reading it — think about that!) changed the civil status of African-Americans enormously for the better, we still have a practical cultural and economic segregation for many people that is the legacy of the conditions Du Bois is describing: slavery, sharecropping, ignorance, poverty, and an entirely justifiable lack of faith in the justice system. I kept thinking that these conditions today apply to more than just African-Americans, as well: think of immigrants, for example. I found the entire book both electrifying and heartbreaking.

Teresa: Yes! Although this book is clearly addressing racism—primarily institutional racism—it’s about so much more than that. Du Bois himself talks about how the economic system works against all the poor, not just the black poor. Granted, he quite rightly states that the color line makes the situation worse for African-Americans, but he shows genuine compassion for all workers who are caught in a system that will not allow them to get ahead. Frankly, I was surprised by that because I’d always heard Du Bois characterized as being radically anti-white, but he’s really anti-racism, which is an altogether different thing. He does an excellent job explaining how blacks and whites misunderstand each other and how the best of both races are kept apart.

Jenny: He was, in fact, far more measured and generous of spirit than I would have been in his place, given the blind racism that made his life a misery. He advocates change, but non-violent change; he wants careful, thoughtful education and the rule of law. In his place, I don’t think I could have done the same, especially in the light of the chapter that talks so painfully about the death of his baby son. How bitter — how impossibly bitter — for anyone to have to feel that such a death was perhaps better, so that racism couldn’t darken the child’s life!

The changes Du Bois advocates — education, training, economic understanding, education in citizenship — seem like common sense. I found it helpful to have the historical context that he himself provides in his essay on Booker T. Washington: for more than a decade, black leadership had been encouraging African-Americans to put aside their claims to civil rights and higher education in favor of forming a more solid, land-owning, artisanal economic “base.” But as Du Bois points out, what can you do with money or land if you have no governmental representation, judicial safety, civil voice, or higher notion of what to do with your wealth? Even wealth will disappear under these conditions. I found it fascinating to consider that the African-American heroes we learned about in school were not monolithically in agreement with one another.

Teresa: Most of what I had learned about Du Bois was actually about his disagreements with Booker T. Washington, whose life I’m much more familiar with, having visited his birthplace many times and having read Up from Slavery years ago. I’ve been brought up admiring Washington, and it was interesting to read about the flaws Du Bois saw in Washington’s philosophy. Washington was a man with tremendous personal determination. The story of how he got his education through sheer grit and determination is incredibly inspiring, and I think he expected others to be willing to work as hard as he did.  What I think Washington didn’t recognize, and which Du Bois does, is that not everyone is willing to work that hard for that long, especially when there’s no guarantee of a return.

I wondered if some of the differences in opinion had to do with their differing backgrounds. For Washington, born into slavery in the south, economic independence was a matter of survival; civic equality might seem like a frill to come later. Du Bois, born into freedom in the north, started out with some economic independence and not even much direct experience with racism, so he could see beyond mere survival. For Washington, racism and, sad to say, submission to whites, was a fact of life. Du Bois could see that it didn’t have to be that way.

Jenny: That kind of vision — seeing that although the world is as it is, it doesn’t have to be that way — is the mark of a great thinker, in my opinion. Du Bois had a dream, too, don’t you think? One thing that occurred to me as I was reading, though, was that Du Bois has his blind spots, too. Though this book was published in 1903, a mere 17 years before the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote, and right in the middle of rhetoric from powerful speakers and writers like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, Du Bois seems completely unconcerned with the state of African-American women. His only concern for them is their chastity: are they promiscuous, or can this be explained away sociologically? Are they ”decent” women? Are they regularly raped by white people, and what is the effect of this on the color line? Other than this one issue, he has virtually none of the compassion he has for men who are trapped by poverty, hungering for education, and longing for a voice. While I’m sure this attitude is historically very common, it was interesting to me to see that “universal suffrage” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, even to people who themselves are being oppressed.

Teresa: Certainly Du Bois, like everyone, has his blind spots, and men seem to be his main concern, but in “Of the Meaning of Progress” he does write with sympathy of Josie, the young woman who so wanted an education but who ended up having to carry her family’s burdens. It’s true, though, that he does not take the next step and show how her plight is an issue of inequality of the sexes and not just an example of the consequences of racism.

I really appreciated the stories of people like Josie, partly because Du Bois lets the stories speak for themselves. We learn about the need for education from Josie, and we learn about the inadequacy of education in a stacked system from John in “On the Coming of John.” Those stories, I think, carry tremendous power. To be honest, I would have liked a few more of those stories and a little less history and analysis. But overall, this is a remarkable collection of writings. I’m glad I finally read Du Bois for myself.

Jenny: I am, too! But I had the opposite reaction: I felt that Du Bois was a better analyst and essayist than a storyteller. I thought he had less sense of narrative arc than a fiction-writer would, but an incisive and effective blend of rhetoric, fact, and personal experience in his sociological pieces. I cheered aloud several times as I was reading, and in some ways I think I’ve found a new hero. Now the question becomes: what can I do, in my own day and time, to fight racism? I feel grateful to have many resources, including the rest of Du Bois’s writings, to help me.


The Harlem Renaissance continues through the month of February. For more information, visit the Classics Circuit Web site.

At the end of 2009, I set for myself the goal of reading mostly from my shelves in 2010. The main reason for this is that I have so many unread books in my house. The only way to keep myself from drowning in a sea of unread books is to read them and then give away the ones that I don’t think I’ll want to reread. I had plans to avoid the library because I can’t leave with just one book, and every library book I check out means another unread book on my shelf. I’m still interested in reading almost every book I’ve acquired in the last few years, so I was content to confine myself to those, Classics Circuit books, any Early Review books I might get from Library Thing, and whatever audiobooks I might rent from Booksfree. I did decide to keep my Bookmooch and Paperbackswap accounts but to only request books that I had already read and wanted for my permanent collection or books that my library doesn’t carry.

And then last week I hit a snag. All the conversation about reading books by people of color got me thinking. When I looked at my shelves, I didn’t find a single book by an author of color. I’ve since realized that there were a few that I hadn’t noticed, but my shelves are still pretty close to lily white. I knew that reading from my shelves would mean reading white, so I purchased a few new books and added a bunch of books to my “someday” list. I took most of these from the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list, and I also added a few from authors I’ve wanted to explore. If any of those weren’t available at the library, I also added them to my lists at my book swapping sites. So my shelves will get more diverse, but the inflow of books might not slow down as much as I had hoped.

So now I’m in a bit of a pickle. My goals, to read from my shelves and to read in color, are in tension with each other. And who knows what other goals I might develop over the year that are in tension with these two? What if I join another book club? What if all my favorite authors release books I must read right now? What if I suddenly decide I must finally finish reading the complete works of Thomas Hardy? What if I get a craving for graphic novels? Moods come and go, and I’m just not leaving myself much room to read according to my mood. I have enough on my shelves to suit most moods, but, as my revelation about authors of color suggests, I don’t have a book for every situation.

I’m still sticking with my basic plan for now, but I’m looking at doing some culling of my shelves. If I can get some of these books out of the house, I think I’ll feel less pressure. A lot of the books I own are in fact available at the library, so I might get rid of some of those books and add them to my “someday” list. If, upon reading them someday, I decide they are keepers, I can always get new copies. We’ll see how that goes.

Is this kind of thing a problem for you? How do you balance planned reading with new whims and changing goals?

In other news: The launch of Diversify Your Reading was a great success. In less than a week, we’ve had over 30 bloggers add review links, and almost every category has a least a few authors listed. (The handful that don’t are ones that I thought might not be viable because the populations represented are so small.) Thanks to all who joined in by adding links, linking to the site on your own blogs, and volunteering to help. More help, links, and publicity would be welcome. It occurred to me this week that it might be nice to have a button that participants can display on their blogs if they link, so if any of you are button whizzes who’d like to create something that fits with our colored pencil theme, please let me know.


Notes from a Reading Life

Books Read

  • The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. For the Classics Circuit. Review posting tomorrow.
  • The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. For the LOTR Readalong.

Currently Reading

  • The Reckoning by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. The 15th Morland Dynasty book.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien. For the LOTR Readalong.
  • The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud (audio). First in the Bartimaeous Trilogy, a YA series about a djinni and an apprentice magician.
  • The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry. Poetry lessons. I’m still managing about a lesson a week.

On Deck

  • Family Britain by David Kynastan. Social history of post-War Britain. From the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
  • The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud (audio). The second Bartimaeous book.

New Acquisitions

  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I liked After Dark on audio pretty well, so I’d like to try more Murakami.
  • A Mercy by Toni Morrison. Beloved is the only Morrison I’ve read, and I’ve been meaning to read more for years.
  • A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee. Lee has been on my mental list of authors to try for a while.
  • Silence by Shusako Endo. One of my all-time favorite books. I got this from Bookmooch to add to my permanent collection.
  • Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School: We the Children by Andrew Clements. An unsolicited review copy. A kids’ book that looks kind of cute by an author I’ve heard good things about. I don’t know yet if I’ll read it, but I do enjoy a kids’ book now and then, so I’m holding onto it for now.

On My Someday List

As I mentioned above, I added tons of books by authors of color to my someday list, but I’m not going to list all of those because there are too many. A few are in the mail from Bookmooch and Paperbackswap, and I’ll mention them when they come in. The books below are just ones that I saw mentioned on blogs this week.

  • Thursday Night Widows. A mystery/thriller from South America that Danielle said reminded her of the works of Barbara Vine.
  • The Lie by Petra Hammesfahr. Another thriller mentioned by Danielle. This one is from a German author and involves doppelgängers.
  • The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. This review at Fleur Fisher Reads reminded me that I’ve been wanting to read more Tey, and this one was one of the inspirations for Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, which I loved.
  • The Gates by John Connolly. Stefanie made this book about a boy named Samuel Johnson and his dog Boswell sound just delightful.
  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Steph’s review reminded me that I’ve wanted to read more Fitzgerald since I read and enjoyed Offshore.

The Hobbit

As many of you know, Eva, Maree, Clare, and I are co-hosting a readalong of The Lord of the Rings this year. January was Hobbit month. I’ve been reading a chapter or two each day during lunch and finally finished this week. Although my most ardent Tolkien-y passions are reserved for the main trilogy, The Hobbit has its own special charms.

The Hobbit opens with a well-to-do, comfortable hobbit named Bilbo Baggins receiving an unexpected visit from Gandalf the wizard. Before long, he finds himself hosting a dozen dwarves for tea and fretting over whether there’ll be enough cakes for him to be able to both serve his guests and have some left for himself. Soon, this homebody of a hobbit is roped into coming along on an adventure in which he will meet elves, trolls, giant spiders, a shapeshifter, and a dragon. He’ll wander through mountain caves, float down a river on a barrel, and become embroiled in a battle of five armies. And all the while he’ll be fretting over when he can get his next good meal.

The Hobbit, unlike the later trilogy, is a good old-fashioned adventure story for children. The narrative voice is like that of a kindly old grandpa. He makes jokes, injects little lessons, and talks directly to the reader. Because I’ve read Lord of the Rings a couple more times than The Hobbit, the charming voice had mostly escaped my memory, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The story also doesn’t have the weight of Lord of the Rings. It’s not a story of a world-changing adventure; what happens to Bilbo and the dwarves does affect others, but the whole of Middle-earth is never in jeopardy. For most of the side characters in the book, things will go on much as they did before, regardless of what happens to Bilbo and his friends.

Despite the light touch Tolkien takes in this book, there is a sense of greater things going on beyond the events of this tale. There’s talk of the Necromancer in the south and long-held resentments between goblins and dwarves, and the songs give a sense of the history of the complex world Tolkien has built. And of course, readers who know the basic plot of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are well aware that the events of this book, one event in particular, did end up having great, world-changing consequences.

I can’t really write objectively about The Hobbit because I love Tolkien’s Middle-earth so much, and this book is such a lovely introduction to this wonderful country. It does have an episodic sort of structure, with each chapter or two recounting a different adventure, all of which lead up to the climactic showdown. For me, the little adventures along the way are the real pleasures of The Hobbit. The epic battle at the end feels like something out of a different kind of book altogether. In fact, it feels a bit too Lord of the Rings-ish to really belong to The Hobbit. Every time I’ve read this book, I’ve told myself to pay attention to the battle so that I can appreciate its significance, but honestly, that part of the story just doesn’t work for me. But the rest—the trolls, Gollum, Beorn, the spiders, the woodland elves, even Smaug—bring a smile to my face every time.

And now for the true confession: I’m terribly worried about the film adaptation, scheduled to be released in two parts starting in 2011. Guillermo del Toro is directing with Peter Jackson and his team from the Lord of the Rings films writing the screenplay. Jackson’s team did a reasonably good job on the previous films (I have my issues with them, but I was generally impressed), and del Toro is a fantastic director, so it should be a dream come true, right?

Well, my worry is that they’ll try to make this the same kind of movie as the LOTR trilogy when the book is an altogether different sort of book. It requires a lighter touch. The books take place in the same world and have some of the same characters, but the similarities end there. I hope that’s true of the films as well.

Note: The images in this post are all photos of the beautiful edition of The Hobbit that I got as a gift from one of my sisters years ago. The art is by Tolkien himself. It’s almost too pretty to read, but it makes me happy to read this great story in such a gorgeous book.

Traveling With Books

In a week and a half, I’m headed to France for a month. I’m taking students on a study-abroad tour sponsored by my university: the students will be in France for a whole semester, and I am with them for the first leg of the trip, in Alsace. During my part of the trip, the students stay with families for two weeks while I stay in a small apartment, and then we move into a hostel. I have my afternoons and weekends mostly free.

I say this not to make you jealous, but to ask: what should I read? I don’t have an e-reader (and am not sure I want one — I have serious problems with DRM and proprietary technology when it comes to books), so my usual mantra to pack light is in terrible jeopardy when I need to pack books for an entire month, including two transatlantic flights. Of course I can (and will) buy books in France, but again, that’s weight and cost I should try to be careful of if I can, considering that I’ll be carrying all my own luggage, hoisting it up to train racks myself, and so forth.

Here’s my current, tentative list. Tell me what you think — and what you would read on such a trip!

two dense books, not to be sped through too quickly: The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy, and The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin.

two spy novels, to be left in France or wherever I finish them: Shelley’s Heart and The Better Angels, both by Charles McCarry.

two books of literary fiction I’ve been wanting to read for some time: Love and Sleep, by John Crowley, and The Age of Dreaming, by Nina Revoyr.

one thick book I haven’t yet read, by a favorite author: Green Dolphin Country, by Elizabeth Goudge.

I am still considering adding something like Don Quixote, but am wavering. What’s your advice? How do you travel with, or without, books?

Family Matters

In beautiful, diverse, tumultuous, striving Bombay, the three children of Nariman Vakeel live in two homes. Chateau Felicity, a large, rambling apartment, houses Nariman himself, as well as his middle-aged stepchildren Jal and Coomy. Pleasant Villa, a few miles away, is the tiny and crowded apartment home of Nariman’s daughter Roxanne, her husband Yezaad, and their sons Murad and Jehangir. The dynamic between the two families is friendly but fragile; Coomy harbors resentments from her childhood, but can keep them in check for the brief times the families meet, and the loving Roxie knows not to overstep her bounds.

This delicate balance is spoiled, however, when Nariman goes for his regular evening stroll one day and breaks an ankle. After a brief, sullen, painful time at Chateau Felicity, with Coomy caring for his physical needs with increasing resentment, Coomy hires an ambulance and delivers Nariman to Pleasant Villa, depositing him on the settee in the living room without a word. Roxanne and Yezaad, who have no space, no extra money for medications, and an already-busy schedule with two children, must struggle with this additional physical and emotional burden. Even their love for Nariman (who, in addition to his broken ankle, has Parkinson’s disease) cannot obliterate the day-to-day difficulties of caring for him.

This is the basic premise of Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters. As the book develops, each character has a strain, like a piece of music: we learn about Nariman’s past, when he loved a girl who was outside of the Parsi community and so was not permitted to marry her, and the tragic consequences of that affair; we learn about the stresses of Yezaad’s employment, and the lengths he will go to in order to get a raise; we follow Jehangir to school and watch his strategies to use his talents to get money. Even the neighbors have voices and histories. The best thing about the novel is the characterization, and the second best is the voice: Mistry uses beautiful, evocative English with a mix of words that (I assume) have no good English equivalent, so we hear Hindi and other languages. Mistry was born in Bombay, and lived there until he was about 23 years old, and it’s clear that he has a strong, living sense of the city and its individuals, as well as its competing communities. The Vakeel “family matters” touch on religion, politics, love, medicine, despair, education, immigration, music, and the lottery, and that’s not half of this complex and intricate novel.

The primary theme in Family Matters is rigid traditionalism and religious fundamentalism. The consequences of Nariman’s abandonment of his first love and his forced marriage to a more “appropriate” (Parsi) girl blight his family for decades, as shown in Coomy’s resentment and Nariman’s own unhappiness. Out in the larger world, this same fundamentalism — Hindu, this time, not Parsi – appears in Shiv Sena thugs who burn houses and murder families. By the end, this spiritual poisoning has turned every peaceful religious impulse into a tool of prejudice and exclusion.

I struggled with reading Family Matters. I picked it up and put it down several times, because some of the suffering in this book is quite painful. But in the end, the characters are too strong and their voices are too important not to read. And it’s not all suffering, either: Mistry has a keen sense of the absurd, and there’s laughter in every chapter. I ended the book knowing I had read something wonderful. I recommend you do the same.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had something on my mind. It’s been there, in the back of my head, something I’ve been musing about, but a couple of recent events put it in the forefront. First, I’ve just completed a course of Global Perspectives in Missions and Ministry at the seminary where I take my master’s in theology classes. One of the themes of that class was the importance of listening to people of other cultures, really getting to know and understand them and working together as a team to solve problems. So I’ve been thinking about listening, particularly about listening to people who are from other cultures and backgrounds.

Then, Litlove posted this piece that discussed how men often don’t want to be seen reading books that look like they’re for women. And that got me thinking about how marketers design covers and about how society leads us to read certain books and ignore others. Good idea for a Sunday Salon, I thought.

And then the scandal regarding the whitewashing of the cover of Magic Under Glass broke. (For those of you who don’t know, Bloomsbury published a YA fantasy novel about a young woman of color but put a young white woman on the cover. See this Salon.com article for details. Bloomsbury has since pulled the book from distribution and is having a new edition produced with a different cover.) That scandal brought out some great discussion in the blogosphere about race, reading, and how we choose the books we read. I came across great posts by Aarti, Amy, Eva, Rachel, Rebecca and Vasilly, just to name a few. And I was provoked—in a good way.

First, a bit of background about me. I am a white, straight, middle-class woman from a rural working-class background. I grew up on a farm in Southwest Virginia and did not fly in an airplane until I was in my mid-20s and did not visit another country until I was in my mid-30s (unless you count Niagara Falls, Canada, which I don’t, because I could actually see the U.S. the whole time I was there). For me, books were the only way I could learn about other parts of the world, about people who weren’t like me. And my extensive reading has apparently paid off. Years ago, a friend who has lived all over the world called me one of her more worldly friends. (I say this not to pat myself on the back but to illustrate the powerful influence of reading.)

It’s a wonderful and amazing thing to find ourselves in books, and there are times when what I really want is a companion on the page that I can relate to. But for me, reading has always been about enlarging my world. Sometimes I read books by and about people who have nothing in common in me. Sometimes I read books where I expect that to be the case and soon discover that this person who seemed so alien at first is in fact a companion on the page. It’s a beautiful thing to realize.

Most of the time, the voices I seek out are voices from the past. I love old books, always have. C. S. Lewis explained the value of old books better than I ever could when he said,

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means old books.

I love this idea. Every period has its own blind spots, and when we read books by people from other times, we become better able to see our own blind spots. That’s why, as much as I love historical fiction, I generally prefer books written in the period, if I can find them.

Might not the same hold true for books by people from other races, nations, and cultures? I think so. And I think it also illustrates why it’s so important to read books by people of color and not just about them. Now I like to think that I read authors of many different races and nations. I’ve read Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri and many of the other usual suspects. In most cases, I’ve read and enjoyed one representative work and then moved on. And when I look at my overall reading, it’s overwhelming white, American, and European. Last year, I read only nine books (out of 118) by people of color, and none of the books in my massive TBR pile are by people of color. Not a single one (until yesterday, that is). So I have to ask myself, Am I missing opportunities to “correct the characteristic mistakes” of my own race and culture?

Yesterday I went to Books-a-Million, just to see if I could find some promising books by people of color, so I could add them to my TBR mix. The store had one of those irresistible “buy two, get one free” deals going, and I decided that if I could find three books by people of color, I would allow myself to break my usual book-purchasing rules and buy them. The store had two display cases full of books eligible for this deal and a few other books scattered around the store. I found only four by people of color.

To put this in perspective, the United States is 75 percent white. My guess is that there were roughly 50 books eligible for that deal, which means a deal that was representative of national demographics would have about 12 books by people of color. Now, my city is only 60 percent white, so a local bookstore with an offer representing local demographics might want to include 20 books.

Before you start railing against quotas, please understand that I am not advocating reading or publishing books by people of color just because of the author’s race. I’m merely offering this anecdote to show one way in which publishers and/or book-sellers might be subtely and entirely unintentionally pushing readers toward white authors. This also explains the importance of being intentional and actively seeking out the best writers of color we can find, buying their books, recommending them to friends, and helping redress the imbalance.

So that’s a lot of talk. And talk is good—talk is vital. It’s talk in the blogosphere that got Bloomsbury to change the cover of Magic Under Glass. But talk just isn’t enough. I decided I needed to do something. I thought about what would help me find authors traditionally underrepresented in libraries and bookshops—that would be recommendations from readers. I thought about where I get my reading ideas—that would be blogs. And I decided that I would love to have a way to collect all those reviews of books by POC authors in one place. I didn’t want a challenge because challenges stress me out. And I didn’t want to add lots of specialty blogs to my reader. What I wanted was a clearinghouse—a one-stop shop. So I built one. And now I’m sharing it with you and inviting you to help me furnish it.

Diversify Your Reading is a blog that will catalog reviews of books by underrepresented authors. Bloggers can contribute links to their reviews in the comments sections of relevant posts (organized by nationality, ethnic group, sexuality, and more), and the site editors (currently me, Jenny, Eva, and Nymeth—although we’d love more help) will add those reviews to the posts as time allows. Thanks to RSS feeds and options to subscribe to comments by e-mail, interested readers can have review links sent to them as they are added to the comments. As I’m scheduling this post, the site only includes reviews from Eva, Nymeth, Jenny, and me. So my blogging friends, please take a look at your past posts and see what you can add. I’d love to be able to announce next week that every category has at least one review. So go help me make it so.

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