The Mill on the Floss (reread)

“Things out o’ nature niver thrive: God A’mighty doesn’t like ‘em.” So Maggie Tulliver is told in an early chapter of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Although the statement refers to lop-eared rabbits, it could just as easily apply to Maggie herself. From her childhood, Maggie is perceived as a “thing out o’ nature.” She’s far too clever for a girl, and she doesn’t hesitate to passionately express her feelings; even her hair won’t be controlled. As a little girl, Maggie gets into one scrape after another, and no one seems to approve of her. Even her brother Tom, who Maggie adores unconditionally, sees her as “a silly little thing.”

As Maggie grows older, her family loses the mill that has been its primary source of income. The loss drives her father to despair and raises in him a grudge against the Wakem family for being involved in his misfortune. Maggie is torn between her loyalty to her family and her burgeoning friendship with young Philip Wakem. For Maggie, however, the oldest loyalties are always the strongest, and she follows her brother’s directions in where to plant her affections. Her loyalties to her family, to friends, and to herself continue to be tested throughout the book, and the right choice becomes less and less clear, especially when the most principled path is the one that is likely to cause her the most pain and to draw the most scorn from the community. Maggie, in never choosing the expected path, is destined to be misunderstood.

I first read The Mill on the Floss in college and was deeply moved by Maggie’s plight. She is a likable heroine–independent, passionate, intelligent, curious, principled. At times, her principles and passions do lead her to make unwise choices, and Eliot does a brilliant job of showing how society can seem to conspire against the unconventional. Maggie can never find a comfortable way of being in the world. She tries everything from going off to live among the gypsies to denying herself all worldly pleasures. Her brother Tom calls her on her changability:

“I never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.”

There was a terrible cutting truth in Tom’s words—that hard rind of truth which is discerned by unimaginative, unsympathetic minds. Maggie always writhed under this judgment of Tom’s: she rebelled and was humiliated in the same moment: it seemed as if he held a glass before her to show her her own folly and weakness—as if he were a prophetic voice predicting her future failings—and yet, all the while, she judged him in return: she said inwardly that he was narrow and unjust, that he was below feeling those mental needs which were often the source of the wrong-doing or absurdity that made her life a planless riddle to him.

Although Tom himself is a determined, hard-working young man with strong feelings of his own, he cannot understand the scope of Maggie’s imagination, and his continual misunderstandings lead to Maggie’s heartbreak. Maggie may be passionate, but, unlike, say Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, she is not generally selfish or out of control. She loves unselfishly, but she does not choose to love as others expect her to, and so she cannot thrive as well as she might.

Although Maggie is the heart of the story, the other characters are well-drawn and interesting, and they develop and change over time. Although Tom consistently misunderstands Maggie, he does grow up in other ways—the once naive young man who expected to walk right into a fortune learns the value of hard work. The aunts and uncles provide commentary on the Tullivers that is sometimes comic and sometimes maddening, but then they come through for the family in surprising ways. Maggie’s cousin Lucy is depicted early on as nothing more than a physical beauty, but she shows a fondness for Maggie that encourages her to step out and act to ensure her cousin’s happiness as best she can, never knowing how her efforts might work against her. I didn’t like every character, but I don’t expect to. I did, however, believe in these characters, which is the most important thing.

The last few chapters of the book do feel rather rushed. After taking great care to meticulously record ordinary events of Maggie’s childhood, Eliot hurries through some of the most dramatic events in the story. And there are a few stretches of lengthy description that might seem overlong and pointless—although most of these are well-written and contain interesting nuggets about the worldview Eliot is expressing in the book. The story takes several turns that are unexpected but perhaps inevitable. In fact, there’s a sense of inevitability about the whole novel. The imagery of rivers and currents emphasize the impossibility of resistance, even if submitting to the flow means annihilation. It is a masterfully done work. It was my first Eliot many years ago, and it remains my favorite.

Sunday Salon: 2009’s Notable Reads

This being the last Sunday in 2009, it seems appropriate to look back over my reading year. I feel like I’m a little late to the party because so many have posted their year in review lists already, but I’m glad I waited because one book did squeak in.

According to LibraryThing, I read a total of 116 books in 2009, 25 of which were on audio and 9 of which were rereads. I tried to come up with a top 10 list, but how does one choose? There are books that I had a strong emotional response to and books that challenged me intellectually. There were books that took a lot of effort and books that were pleasant diversions. What exactly constitutes the “best”? So I decided to make a list of books that made a strong impression on me this year, whether for a remarkable character or a great scene or sheer annoyance.

Most Successful Attempt at Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Narrative: Summertime by J.M. Coetzee. My pick for the Booker prize. Coetzee’s fictionalized autobiography isn’t really about Coetzee; it’s about the difficulty of understanding a person’s life. It’s experimental, yet readable.

The Character I Cared Most About: Isabel Archer of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Isabel’s desire to choose her own fate and her struggles navigating relationships felt real to me. My reaction was visceral because her struggles are my struggles.

Best “Holy Crap” Ending: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Waters kept me guessing until very near the end, but then closes the novel with a series of master strokes that made me feel like a knucklehead for not figuring it out from the start (except it turns out that plenty of people didn’t figure it out at all, so I don’t feel so bad).

Best Evocation of an Era: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín. This lovely old-fashioned story evokes its period beautifully by looking solely through the eyes of one character.

Best Love Story: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. When I say this is the best love story of the year, I don’t mean it was the most romantic, I mean that it was the best story about love in all its many facets—romantic love, carnal love, marital love.

Best Mention of Gravy: The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins. I still can’t help but laugh anytime I see Samuel Johnson’s name, thanks to Paul Collins’s observation that his Shakespeare folio showed evidence of a fondess for gravy.

Best Villianess: Miss Gwilt from Armadale by Wilkie Collins. She’s just so deliciously eeeevil.

Most Disturbing Character: Undine Spragg from Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (review coming January 5). I loved this book, but I’m not sure I can come up with a single redeeming quality in its central character. She’s not deliciously evil like Miss Gwilt; she’s just … I have no words.

Best Austen Remix: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell practically retells the Lizzie/Darcy story, but she sets it in a world of industrialization and class conflict.

Most On-the-Nose Title: The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope. Even though it was written over 100 years ago, this story of corporate greed and family relationships is still relevant. (And it gets a second prize for “best shotgun totin’ American“—Mrs. Hurtle.)

Most Moving Scene: Scobie’s final prayer in The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. Profound and heart-breaking.

Book That Freaked Me Out: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist. I’m a bit too close to being “dispensable” in the world of this book. Eek!

Bleakest Book That I Loved: The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. No one in this book is likable, and they mostly do unpleasant things, but Yates’s writing is amazing. (And I’m not sure a book exists that’s too bleak for me.)

Most Overrated: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. If you want something trashy, you could do worse. But why do people care soooo much about such a trashy book?

Take That, Dan Brown! Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Eco was making fun of Dan Brown before Dan Brown was writing anything worth making fun of him for.

Book That Generated the Most Amusing Comments in the Office Lunchroom: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Try carrying around a book the size of several Bibles for lunchtime reading and see what kinds of comments you get.

The Characters Who Most Needed to Buy a Clue: Every single character in The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan who didn’t at least jokingly mention vampires after finding exsanguinated bodies and coffin-shaped boxes of dirt.

Most appalling yet popular hegemonic disaster of a book (category stolen from Jenny): OK, the book itself wasn’t a hegemonic disaster, but imagine with me how you would react to a book in which Elizabeth I, before becoming queen, was forced to get married to, say, Thomas More. Years later, she escapes the Tower of London, where she has been imprisoned by her evil sister Mary. She then spends several years wandering Europe with her lover, William Shakespeare, only to vanish into obscurity. And this book is not couched as alternate history. Appalling revisionism, right? But John Shors apparently could get away with playing that fast and loose with the facts because Beneath a Marble Sky is about Mughal India, and his Western readers might not know any better. (Thank heavens for Wikipedia!)

So that’s my reading year in a nutshell. Lots of great books, lots of not-so-great books, and a lot on both sides to stir my passions and excite my mind.

Angela’s Ashes

I remember when Frank McCourt’s memoir of his impoverished Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes, came out in 1996. I was working at a Barnes and Noble at the time, and it absolutely sold like hotcakes. It seemed like everyone was reading it, from every walk of life. It had something for everyone: men, women, Catholics, Jews, the Irish, the Yanks God bless em, the rich and the poor. I got a lot of gushing recommendations of it from customers, too, people who had read it and adored it and were buying more copies to give as gifts. Personally, I avoided it. I don’t mind reading the occasional misery memoir — my favorite brand is the addiction memoir — but certain kinds of misery memoir are very hard for me to read and they make me unhappy when I do read them. The worst, for me, are the stories of cruelty to children, children at the mercy of life, children cold and hungry and abused, children sick and dying and dead. I had a premonition that, as wonderful as Angela’s Ashes might be, I probably wouldn’t like it much.

Almost fifteen years later, on recommendations from my mother, my sister, and several other people whose taste I trust, I finally read Angela’s Ashes. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a glorious piece of writing. McCourt begins when he is about four years old and ends when he comes to the United States at about the age of nineteen, and his language throughout is absolutely stunning. You can hear the turn of phrase everywhere he goes, from the streets of New York where he begins, with Italian and Jewish neighbors, to the streets of Limerick where his family emigrates after his baby sister dies. The phrases are never heavy-handed, never a brogue you have to decipher. Instead, it’s a lilt, a twist of the tongue that you can hear in your head as you read, and it’s splendidly done.

Another thing that was lightly done, and such beautiful writing it was worth the price of admission, was the child’s-eye viewpoint of the book. Never did it falter, never once did it seem out of true. I know that in every good memoir, there is editing and mature reflection from the adult point of view, on religion, on fate, on the role parents ought to play in a child’s life — but McCourt makes it seem as if all these thoughts come flowing pure and unadulterated straight from little Frank’s mind, at four, six, eight: his love-hate for his alcoholic father, his confusion about the Faith, his fear of illness, his constant hunger for material and intellectual substance.

But despite the wonderful writing, this book was terribly hard for me to read. I read it with my eyes averted, as it were. The father, who takes the dole money that would scarcely be enough to feed his family in the first place, and drinks it all at the pub, made me speechlessly angry. The mother who can’t feed or diaper her children but can always find money for cigarettes? I know it’s an addiction and one of her few pleasures, I don’t mean to be judgmental, but three of her children died, two of pneumonia, you’d think she could lay off the Woodbines. The society that won’t allow the mother to take the father’s paycheck for him, or better yet, get a job herself? The people in charge of “charity” (what a mockery of a word) who publicly shame those receiving aid? All of it, all of it made me writhe. I couldn’t see any humor or forgiveness in it. I did see power and beauty in the writing, and was grateful for the few who show kindness in the book, and I found (again, like almost every time I read about the past in the West) a renewed thankfulness for feminism, but no. No, I didn’t like Angela’s Ashes much.

But then, I think I was doomed from the start. Are there sorts of books that are hard for you to read, and that you don’t get on with even if you know they’re good?

Merry Christmas to All!

Yes, even the most unbearable Christmas song ever is delightful when the Muppets are involved! Ba-dum-bum-bum!

Shutter Island (audio)

I’m not sure I want to say anything at all about Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane because someone made an offhand remark to me about it a couple of years ago, and that was enough to spoil the ending. The remark itself was really innocuous, intended to encourage me to read the book, but it was enough to set my mind a-ticking. Then, I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie version, and that trailer, without actually giving away the ending, provided just enough information to confirm my thinking. So mostly, this audiobook was a series of confirmations. With every clue, I was nodding my head, thinking “I know what that’s about,” and I was almost always right. So I’m hesitant to say much of anything because I suspect that by knowing what was going on, I missed out on one of the great pleasures of this book. But I will give you a basic idea of the premise—and strongly encourage you to avert your eyes if you see the movie trailer.

As the novel opens, U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule are on a boat to Shutter Island, the site of a mental hospital for the criminally insane. A patient, Rachel Solando, has gone missing, and the hospital personnel are stymied. Patients are monitored 24/7, and there is simply no way she could have vanished so completely. On assessing the situation, Teddy agrees—and goes on to decide that it had to be an inside job. Before he’s able to get to the bottom of it, a hurricane comes and traps him and Chuck on the island in a facility filled with people they believe cannot be trusted. They are cut off and vulnerable.

This was my first Lehane novel, and I was impressed with the writing. Lehane has great skill at description and characterization, which is just what I want in a thriller writer. I can’t bring myself to care about the plot if there’s no sense of place or character, and Lehane delivers on that score. As far as the plotting goes, Lehane plays fair—everything you need to know to figure out what’s going on is provided, as long as you know what to look for. To me, the solution seemed obvious, but I’m not sure if that’s because it is obvious or because I happened to have a good hunch that turned out to be accurate. I think Lehane might have piled on a few too many clues, mostly because of one pair of huge coincidences that, on their own, make perfect sense, but, when combined, add up to way too much. (Highlight for vague spoiler: It has to do with the characters’ names, specifically Edward, Daniel, and Andrew Laeddis.)

Because of the unintentional spoiling, I’m having a hard time assessing this book. I have a feeling I would have loved it had I not known anything much about it. It’s dark and strange and disorienting—just my kind of thing. The audio version, narrated by Tom Stechschulte, is well done. And even knowing what was going on, I enjoyed seeing the plot unfold, but knowing made me much too aware of the author’s cleverness and less invested in the story. I wish I’d gone into it totally ignorant. If you have any inclination to read this book, go do it now before the movie becomes a regular topic of conversation so you can enjoy the full effect. (Or just go see the movie. With Scorsese at the helm, it’s bound to be worth seeing.)

North and South

Today we welcome Elizabeth Gaskell to Shelf Love as part of the Classics Circuit. Between us, we’ve read all of Gaskell’s most well-known novels, and it was a great pleasure to finally read North and South.

Shortly after the book opens, Margaret Hale’s father, a minister, is having a crisis of faith that causes him to leave the church and move his wife and daughter from their comfortable country home in Hampshire to the industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Margaret gets to know both mill workers and mill owners in her new home, and when the mill workers strike, she finds herself in the middle. She has befriended the daughter of a worker and wants to see their situation improve, but she can’t quite break her ties with factory owner John Thornton.

As the story develops, there are deaths, romantic misunderstandings, an exiled mutineer, long discussions of workers’ rights and the consequences of strikes. Characters have cause to reconsider long-held beliefs about each other and about the world in which they live.

Teresa: I’ve always seen Gaskell as novelist for social justice, having first read Ruth and Mary Barton, both of which offer close-up looks at the plight of the poor. But what struck me about this novel was that by having middle-class protagonist, she was able to step back and look at the situation from multiple angles. Margaret is close enough to see what was going on but not so close as to have a personal stake in the labor conflict. I liked that aspect of the book quite a lot, and I thought it presented much more food for thought than a simple story about the suffering poor might do. How did this compare to your previous experiences with Gaskell?

Jenny: I had previously read Cranford and Wives and Daughters. Those novels are lovely — delicate, witty, and keenly observed — but they felt minor to me. I could understand why they aren’t on every undergraduate syllabus, for instance. North and South, however, with its themes of power and dominance (whether over weavers in the mill, sailors in the Navy, or women in the home), education, suffering at every level of society, and the capacity of human contact to effect change, completely blew me out of the water. (Plus, it was so romantic!)

Teresa: Yes, there’s so much going on here, but it doesn’t feel overstuffed, just complex. It did take me a while to warm up to the love story, though. I didn’t dislike John Thornton when he first appeared, but I was worried that the strike would turn him into an autocratic sort of man who wouldn’t be a suitable lover for anyone. He could easily have gone in either direction. The love story did bear some strong resemblances to Pride and Prejudice, but (dare I say it?) Gaskell’s story had slightly more heft. Because the romance is her central focus, Austen explores it with more depth than Gaskell, but Gaskell’s characters have so much further to go to be right for each other. They have to rethink all their loyalties and attitudes, and at the end of the book, they’re transformed.

Jenny: Oh, Teresa, I’m so glad you said that, because I thought exactly the same thing. Thornton isn’t just proud of a “superior understanding,” he believes he has the right to toy with human lives. There’s a long way for him to go to meet Margaret Hale. And Margaret, a gentleman’s daughter, isn’t merely prejudiced against someone’s unpleasant manners, she is prejudiced against an entire class of “tradespeople,” as she puts it. She, too, has a lot to learn, and we along with her.

One thing I just loved about this story was Margaret as the strong protagonist. She was everything I love in a main character and so rarely find in Victorian (fictional) women: level-headed, strong, kind, open and eager to learn, and even possessed of a sense of humor. I was slightly worried that each crisis was going to prove to be Margaret Saves the Day, but it turned out to be more complicated than that, didn’t it?

Teresa: Yes! Margaret is a great character, and I loved that she’s not a paragon. She makes mistakes—and is needlessly hard on herself about them. She wants to be a better person, but she doesn’t quite know how. She feels passionately, but she isn’t driven by her passions. And in the one instance where she does save the day, her action gets wildly misinterpreted.

But my very favorite aspect of the book was the theme of connection. As I was reading, I kept thinking of Howard’s End, particularly its epigraph, “Only connect.” It seems to me that this book is all about connections—not just becoming aware of those who are different but really becoming wrapped up in their lives, seeing them as equals, gathering over a meal, accepting a gift from them. Whenever people do that in this book, barriers fall. It’s a lovely point, and an interesting one coming from an author who was heavily involved in charitable work among the poor in industrial Manchester.

Jenny: I agree. Margaret isn’t highly educated or perfect in any other respect, and she doesn’t know much about industry. She doesn’t know much about the lives of the poor people she wants to help, either, and she blunders in both places. The only thing she does right, time and again, is to put a human face on matters. This isn’t an infidel weaver, it’s Nicholas Higgins. This isn’t a striker, it’s a man with hungry children. This isn’t a despot, it’s a human being whose life you’re about to take. The theme is echoed in Margaret’s brother’s mutiny: the Navy must punish mutiny and establish its authority. But when you know the people involved, it’s a different matter.

And that comes back to the whole issue of power and dominance. North versus south, Helstone versus Milton, masters versus workers, gentlemen versus tradespeople, men versus women. Who has the power, and who should? Can it ever be shared?

Teresa: It seems to me that it’s never entirely clear who has the power. Men, masters, and ships’ captains may be given official power, but those “below” them can and do take that power, whether by banding together and taking it by force or by being strong when the “powerful” one is weak. So, in a sense, the power is shared because the powerful can only rule with the consent of the governed. Perhaps the governed are consenting because they see no other choice, but once they see they have a choice, then the master has to earn the power and the right to retain it.

Jenny: And in the end, Gaskell shows both masters and men beginning to understand the benefits of shared rule. Thornton voluntarily gives up some of his autocracy; Margaret concedes that the busy North has some advantages; love comes to Milton, and to two intelligent, stubborn, tender-hearted people. I thought it was an amazing novel. I found it powerful and touching, as complex and substantial as nearly any 19th-century novel I’ve ever read, and more modern than I had expected, with a vein of humor running through it. I’m so glad the Classics Circuit brought it to our door.

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For more on Elizabeth Gaskell, be sure to visit the other stops on the Classics Circuit. Watch the Classics Circuit blog for information on upcoming tours and opportunities to suggest and vote on future featured authors and themes. Upcoming tours will feature Edith Wharton and the Harlem Renaissance. (Sign-ups for the Harlem Renaissance tour close December 30.)

Sunday Salon: Making a Plan

So this is the time of year when people are making their plans for next year’s reading. Bloggers are posting challenge lists right and left, and the lists are fascinating. I love looking at them and imagining what I might read to complete the challenge. As Eva said yesterday, reading challenge lists are all about possibilities, and it is fun to dream of what we would read if we had unlimited time.

As for me, I pretty much swore off challenges in the middle of last year. It’s not because I don’t enjoy them. I love making lists of challenge books. I love reading (many of) the books that complete the challenge. I don’t really mind posting a link on a challenge blog (if I remember—and I don’t sweat it much if I don’t). And many challenges cover books and types of books that I really do want to read.

But I don’t enjoy the other challenge maintenance. I don’t like adding challenge blurbs to my posts (because I usually forget). I don’t like going back and updating my lists or linking to the updates, and so on. Those tasks make the challenge feel too much like a chore. (Readalongs, by the way, are in a different category since they usually just involve one book. No lists to update, very little linking back, and I only join if I wanted to read the book anyway.)

But as I watched people putting together their challenge lists for the year, I started to waver. And then I decided I would do the fun part and let the rest happen—or not—as it will. I made a couple of lists and planned a post, but just looking at the lists made me feel overwhelmed. And then I see other challenges get posted that I could also join, and it just gets overwhelming. How to choose? How to set limits? Do I just join every challenge that interests me, even though I know that time and other commitments will keep me from completing them? And what’s the point of generating and posting lists if I’m just going to ignore them anyway? Too much work.

A lot of bloggers lately have been talking about “reading deliberately” a phrase which means something different for each reader but that essentially involves being careful about reading choices, not just reading “any old thing.” I like the idea of making a plan, even though any reading plan comes with the caveat that moods and inclinations change. So what’s my plan?

1. Climbing Mt. TBR. Because my TBR pile is out of control, I want to make a real dent in it in 2010. My plan is to read only books I own, with a few exceptions: (a) books for the Classics Circuit, (b) books that I receive from LibraryThing Early Reviewers and perhaps an occasional irresistible review copy, (c) audiobooks, (d) book club books, should I join another book club (and if I do my suggestions for book club reads will come from my own shelves).
2. No More Bad Books. When a book isn’t floating my boat, I want to feel entirely free to put it down, perhaps to return to it later, perhaps not. I’m much better about that than I used to be, but book club foiled me here. If I join another book club, I’m not going to feel obligated to finish a book that isn’t working for me. (If a club requires it, I won’t join.)
3. Giving Every Book Its Due. Priscilla at the Evening Reader had an excellent post this week about speed reading, and Frances’s review of Howard’s End is on the Landing a few weeks ago included a great quote the value of slow reading. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, especially since the Read-a-Thon, when my book choice required more concentration than other readers’ lighter choices. When contemplating challenges, I started to fear that committing to a number would encourage me to go for quantity over quality—to read the short books first or to read too quickly and not really experience the book. I want to read each book at the pace that suits it—and that suits my level of concentration at the time. A fast read may be enough to get the basic idea of a book into my head, but if I’m reading for enjoyment, shouldn’t I try to get the fullest pleasure possible out of each book I read?
4. Revisit Old Favorites. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve started rereading favorites over lunch at work, and it has been wonderful. I want to continue that, and I’ve started using some of my Bookmooch and Paperbackswap points to get copies of favorites that I want to revisit. (These acquisitions also help with my craving for new books.) The Lord of the Rings readalong is part of this effort.
5. Enjoy! I think this is self-explanatory. If meeting the above goals keeps me from achieving this goal, those goals go out the window. 

So what are your reading plans? Do you have any specific goals in mind for 2010?

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Notes from a Reading Life (December 13-20)

Books Completed

• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. For the Classics Circuit. Review to come tomorrow.
• Crossed Wires by Rosy Thornton. Nice, light romance that looks like chick lit but lacks everything that annoys me about the genre.

Currently Reading

• The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. For the January Classics Circuit.
• The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry. Lessons in writing poetry. I’ve reached the chapter on odes. Now that classes are over, I want to get back into this.
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (reread). Reading at work over lunch. Now about ¾ done.
• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane (audio). Two U.S. Marshalls are investigating a woman’s escape from an institute for the criminally insane. I’m on the last disc.

On Deck

• The Campaigners by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. The 14th book in the Morland Dynasty series.
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (audio). I loved Easter Parade, so I’m looking forward to this!

New Acquisitions

All of my acquisitions are books I loved and consider worthy of my permanent collection. A great use of Bookmooch and PBS points without adding to the TBR pile.

• The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. Read this 10 or 12 years ago and remember nothing much about it, except that I loved it.
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The first Atwood I ever read, but I’ve only read it once.
• Books from the Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper: The Dark is Rising, Over Sea Under Stone, Greenwitch.

Books on My Radar

• Man in the Dark by Paul Auster. Auster is one of those authors I keep thinking I should try, and this review at Everyday Reads prompted me to add this book to my list.
• Love Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur. This book sounds heart-wrenching but lovely. Reviewed at Vulpes Libris.

Crossed Wires

Yes, the cover is pink. Yes, the v in the word love is in the shape of a heart. No, I would never pick up this book in a bookstore. But I’d seen several bloggers say good things  about Crossed Wires (one of those things being that the cover doesn’t suit it), so when author Rosy Thornton offered me a copy, I couldn’t say no. I had a feeling it might be just the thing for the end of the semester, when my brain is slightly fried. And I was right.

Crossed Wires is a light romance that isn’t quite chick lit. It has a lot of what I want in chick lit and none of what annoys me. It’s easy to read and has a straightforward plot that you pretty much know is going to end well. It has characters who would obviously be good for each other if they could just find a way to get together. There’s just enough dramatic tension to keep you reading and wondering what’s going to happen. It’s a lovely comfort read. There are perhaps not as many laughs as I’d expect when reading chick lit, but there are plenty of smiles—and frankly, I’d rather the characters keep their dignity than become slapsticky messes just to elicit a laugh.

Thornton manages to entertain while avoiding the familiar, obnoxious tropes of so much chick lit. The leading characters are not overly neurotic, although they do have problems and worries. When they go into crisis mode, they have a good reason to. The main characters, Mina and Peter, are depicted as equals—not in social status but certainly in desire for a partner.  And they get roughly the same amount of “page time,” which keeps this from being a book about the needy woman finding her prince (or “earning” her prince by finding herself or some such nonsense). Peter and Mina’s friends and family members feel like authentic people with inner lives of their own. I liked them.

So what’s the story? Well, it begins with Peter, a Cambridge geography professor, calling his insurance company to file a claim for a car accident in which he hit the stump of a tree while swerving to avoid the neighbors’ cat. Mina takes the call. She appreciates his self-deprecating sense of humor, even if his jokes aren’t very good. He appreciates her reassuring tone, so much so that when he gets into another accident not long after, he asks for her when filing his claim. Before long, they’re exchanging calls regularly—a ritual that gives them each a brief respite from the stresses of their daily lives that comprise most of the book. They commiserate about being single parents and share what’s going on, never talking about what’s happening between them and where these conversations might lead. There are other threads involving Peter and Mina’s friends and family that explore the connections we make and the ones we sever, whether we choose to travel as ones or twos or threes or in a pack. And it’s all very well done.

I do want to make one point that is not actually a complaint about this book but about chick lit/contemporary romantic fiction in general. I kind of wished as I was reading that Peter and Mina weren’t parents—or rather I wish someone out there would write a romance like this about singles who aren’t parents. You see, so much chick lit seems to make fun of the single women it purportedly celebrates. They’re neurotic, filled with self-loathing, and have problems that are either all of their own doing or that are just petty problems that aren’t worth worrying about. Litlove sounded off about some of this a while back, and I whole-heartedly agree with her. Thornton avoids some of this by making Peter and Mina parents. It’s easy to take their worries seriously when they’re worrying about their children. It gives them and their concerns heft that you don’t find in a lot of chick lit. But must our problems involve children in order to be real?

This bothers me for a couple of reasons. Obviously, I want to see women I can relate to in literature. As it happens, I can to some extent relate to women—and men—that I encounter who are married, parents, and from other times and places, but there are times when I long to find what a friend once called a “companion on the page”—someone whose place in life is similar to my own. But also, and more seriously, I don’t like the message that gets sent when practically every single childless female in contemporary literature is depicted as a comic figure who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously (or else as a cold, heartless career woman, but that’s a rant for another day). It sends the message that we aren’t quite grown up, that we need to straighten ourselves out, that we need rescuing. That’s not a good message for us to hear, and it’s not a good message for others to hear about us. Because it’s a lie, and it’s time we called it that.

Note, however, this rant has little to do with Thornton’s book, which is delightful! See other reviews at Tales from the Reading Room, Vulpes Libris, Unruly Reader, She Reads and Reads, Rhapsody in Books, The Biblio Blogazine, Bookstack, As Usual I Need More Bookshelves, and The Zen Leaf.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

I was interested in reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century businessman who helped turn the Royal Navy into the great institution it became, for a few different reasons. First, of course, it is One Of Those Things One Ought To Read. It’ s a classic. People quote from it, and read it in school, and so forth. And then, too, it’s Historically Important. He lived at a critical time in British history, and his personal diary tells us a lot about what people ate and wore and said to their servants. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to read the complete eight-volume diaries, and I knew I’d never get around to it if I set myself that goal, so I thought I’d read the one-volume version, abridged by Roger Le Gallienne, and see how much Historical Importance I could glean from it.

I didn’t expect to fall in love with it.

Samuel Pepys is the most utterly charming rogue of a diarist it has ever been my good fortune to meet. And it does feel like meeting him, personally, possibly in his nightgown: he is so vividly alive, breathing on the page, completely sincere in his opinions, emotions, and desires. He is just the kind of person you’d like to know. He’s interested in everything: astronomy, mechanics, music, literature, farming, fashion, food, wine, medicine, politics, gossip — and he takes delight in it all. The word used most often in these diaries is pleasure. He sees pretty women with pleasure, he gets a new watch and consults it a hundred times the first day with childlike pleasure, he eats a good dinner with great pleasure, he takes pleasure in dancing and in seeing a good play, and in a hundred other tiny details of life. His is a nature of joy. Despite his obvious affection for his pretty French wife, he can’t keep from kissing every woman he meets, from the bookseller’s wife to the servant of the woman who rules paper for him. (This tendency is eventually his downfall, in a scene that is partly wrenching and partly extremely funny.)

And this irrepressible nature is surrounded by one of the most interesting times imaginable. “Went to see The Merry Wives of Windsor, first time it ever was played,” he says. He didn’t enjoy it much. He liked Hamlet better. He knew the King, Charles II, and Nell Gwynne; he lived through the Great Fire of London, and the Great Plague, and saw grass growing in the streets of London because no one was alive to keep it down. He saw ships burned in the Medway in a battle with the Dutch.

This diary is so bright! Every moment is crammed with life. He doesn’t leave a moment idle. He learned the recorder, the flageolet, the spinet, the harpsichord, dancing, drawing, singing. He bought books, and laid aside the ones that were of lesser quality because he didn’t have enough space in his bookcases — does that sound familiar? He bought a periwig, and found it full of nits, and had it returned for a better one; he was vain about clothes, and about how his wife was dressed. Samuel Pepys was so much himself that even today he leaps off the page to be introduced. He is witty, and also unintentionally funny; he lays himself naked, to himself, and now to our eyes as well.

One thing this book made me think of is that every person he mentions had a story like this. Every servant girl he kissed, every actor on stage, every sailor in the Navy had a life that was full of interest, full of anecdotes, full of days of business “and so to bed.” But those voices are lost. Only through this diary do we know the joyful, pleasure-loving Samuel Pepys. It’s our loss and our gain.

Teresa reassures me that I don’t need to feel guilty about reading an abridged version of the diaries — that many entries are repetitive, and a well-chosen abridgment is a perfectly good way to approach the work. I do plan to read Claire Tomalin’s biography, though: The Unequalled Self. Has anyone read the entire diary? As you can see, I loved what I read and couldn’t recommend it more highly. Should I venture on the other seven volumes?

Best Books of 2009

Wuthering Expectations and Litlove over at Tales from the Reading Room have reminded me that it’s time to round up a few of the very best things I read this year. I have to say that 2009 has been one of my very best reading years since I started keeping track, along with the golden aura that surrounds 2002. I discovered many wonderful new authors, and read works I loved by authors I already knew. I got to participate in the Classics Circuit and do a few posts in conversation with Teresa about books we both loved. In making a list like this, I feel as if I’m taking my jewels out of my box and spreading them on black velvet. Look, my preciousssss.

Best literary fiction: Home, Marilynne Robinson; The Puttermesser Papers, Cynthia Ozick; The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters; The Solitudes, John Crowley.

Best book in translation: All the Names, Jose Saramago; The Story of the Stone, Cao Xuequin; War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy; The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon.

Best crime novel: When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson; The Language of Bees, Laurie R. King.

Best 19th century novel: Bleak House, Charles Dickens; War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (sorry, but I had to mention this at least twice!); North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell.

Best children’s or young adult novel: Surrender, Sonya Hartnett.

Best speculative fiction: Fledgling, Octavia Butler.

Best book that made me laugh: The Writing Class, Jincy Willett; Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount, Jr.; Remake, Connie Willis.

Best travel or exploration memoir: The Lost City of Z, David Grann; Travels in Alaska, John Muir.

Most appalling and yet extremely popular hegemonic disaster of a book: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett.

Weirdest children: A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes.

Worst sex: Rabbit, Run, John Updike.

Please link in the comments if you have your own list. I love reading them!