I Was at the Beach

Days 167 through 173 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I was at the beach, where the basic answer to the "Why?" question is "because I wanted something to read at the beach." But there was great variety in what people were reading.

I saw everything from a MAD Magazine cartoon book to The Passion of the Western Mind, with Oprah and Michael Crichton in between. Oprah was represented by the biography by Kitty Kelley, and the Crichton was there via Next, which I have determined from the illustration, not from being able to read the title from my beach chair. Yes, I did scrutinize and eavesdrop. No, I did not intrude on people's reading, conversations, or family groups.

I saw more hardcovers than I expected to see, and one was a library book, right down at the water's edge. Egad! (My husband took a library book, too, but he left it back at the house when he was at the beach. It's still Last Call.)

One energetic girl swam and played the whole time, then, packing up, dropped her brand new clean hardcover with pristine dust jacket (as they say) on the sand. "Oops," she said, then quietly kept brushing it off with a corner of her towel, while keeping an eye on her dad, who never noticed.

I saw sudoku and crossword books, and many magazines. One woman studied an issue of Handyman for a long while, then turned to Star Magazine. A threesome brought a huge stack of magazines, with various titles, including Traveler.

I saw The Nine Rooms of Happiness, happily set aside by a mother when her young daughter wanted her to come dig in the sand with her. Digging in the sand at the beach has got to be the No. 1 room of happiness!

Overheard conversations included a reference to Nietzsche, a mock scolding--"You ought to be reading better literature than that, like what your husband is reading"--and, from the literary husband, "I'm going to meet this guy next week in Cincinnati at a book signing, not for this book, for another one. They're all short stories about himself...," and then, as if he sensed someone eavesdropping, he leaned over to whisper the rest into another man's ear. I have determined that this was a book by Tucker Max. Beach reading, indeed.

But I did have mini-conversations with a few individuals, including some family members and friends:

Kristi is reading Last Night in Twisted River "because John Irving is my favorite. It takes me a long time to get through books, though, because I read them in bed at night."

"Me, I stay up till one," said Maggie, who, in the summer, sleeps till noon. "I'm trying to read Othello." Maggie, a great reader, who, nonetheless, actually brought no books to the beach, has already read two things on her summer reading list: 1984 and Brave New World.

Judy is reading Blood Orange, by Drusilla Campbell, about an art historian (and Judy herself has a degree in art history) in a midlife crisis (don't know about that) who goes to Italy and then comes home to her husband and child, who goes missing.

Alex is reading Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, and reads Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett over and over in the summer, when he's not teaching.

My dad is reading Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, not because all the women in his family enjoy Alice Munro, but because he read and discussed her story "Boys and Girls," which is included in a Great Books Foundation anthology, and thought he'd like to read more.

Also brought to the beach, but already read by my mom, was Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Munro, which I have read and enjoyed, despite its awkward title. My mom was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which she finished early in the week, moving on to Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. "I can't believe this is written by a Japanese man," she said, then read a little about the author, and it made more sense, as he had moved to England as a child. She has the movie tie-in cover, and we had all seen the movie when it came out.

She was in the mood for To Kill a Mockingbird because of its 50th anniversary and because she hadn't read it for years, after teaching it to high schoolers for many. She had snapped up Remains of the Day and The Lovely Bones because there they were on the Select New Arrivals shelf by the door of Babbitt's when she was looking for 1) 1984 and Brave New World (which are always stored there and always hard to come by, as always popular) and 2) looking for beach reading. She's halfway through The Lovely Bones now, which my sister enjoyed (despite the difficult subject matter) for its sustained "realism" ("Realism?" asked my mom) in an imagined voice. None of us has seen the movie. I told them about Lucky, the author's memoir, and hearing about (and then reading) both books in an NPR interview, after having many college students recommend to me The Lovely Bones. I have not yet read The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's second novel.

My sister Chris was reading Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell, because they did not have Cloud Atlas at the bookstore when she went, and she thought it would be good to read his first novel, anyway. She was loving it, all week, stopping to read sentences to me. She knew she was interested at the very first sentence, "Who was breathing on the nape of my neck?" Then she noticed that each new voice somehow used the phrase "nape of the neck" and soon she was hooked and admiring. I will "inherit" the book when she goes back to Ohio after her high school reunion, in our hometown.

And I was reading Barbara Pym! I read Excellent Women and then started re-reading Some Tame Gazelle, both about funny church women involved in the life of the vicarage. There's much more than that going on, including a kind of wry, subtle feminism that co-exists with the prevailing values of a culture that is sort of pre-feminism, but is therefore a quiet and radical feminism in which, by all appearances, women are happily subservient to men. But not really.

I also finished Level Green, a book of poems by Judith Vollmer, with a more "out there" feminist impulse, and Houdini Pie, a novel by Paul Michel, who is a wonderful storyteller. There is more to say about these, but I will say it 1) tomorrow and/or 2) elsewhere as 3) my hair is sandy.

Two for One

Days 74 & 75 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. I've been off at a women's retreat, asking women what they are reading.

Peg is reading Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. Why?

1) She loves Alice Munro, and has read her stories over the years in books and journals and has given them to her daughters. I know because I am one of her daughters!

2) She was in Barnes & Noble and saw it on the shelf, realized she still had $ on her gift card from her son and daughter-in-law from Christmas, and thought, "Oh! I'll get a hardback!"

Right after I had this little discussion with Peg aka Mom, Susan sat down near us, the same Susan who has decided to pronounce Zooey as ZO-ee, and who was a little put out that I had not yet put her in this blog as being someone who was reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

"I will now," I said.

"Well, I'm not reading it now," she said. (I almost said "she pouted" but you are only supposed to say "said" when rendering dialogue.) "I'm done."

"Well, I hadn't really had a chance to ask you why you were reading it," I said. "Why were you?"

"I was in Barnes & Noble," she said, "and I had a gift card, so I went ahead and got it in hardback."

Twilight Zone music.

Susan had been waiting for The Help to come out in paperback, and had even asked the bookseller about the likely date, but there isn't one, not as long as it selling so well in hardback. That's how the industry works, causing a lot of hardbacks to be remaindered, as people hold out for the paperbacks, due to cost and convenience (easier/lighter to carry around). But then there's a hardback like The Help that everybody wants to read now. It's out in Kindle and audio formats, and available to pre-order in large-print paperback...but no regular trade paperback yet.

Next morning I learned that Mary Beth and Pam had also recently read The Help and really enjoyed and learned a lot from it. The "help" are the black maids raising white children in homes and communities where they are subjected to routine disrespect and indignities. Mary Beth, interested from a young age in politics and current events, vividly remembered the civil rights issues so crucial to this novel, and, of course, the assassinations of Medgar Evars and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pam felt she led a more sheltered young life and realized she was as unaware as some of the white women depicted in the novel of the important events going on all around her. I'll tell you more about what Pam and Mary Beth are reading tomorrow...or the next day.

For now, I want to say that Susan is currently reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen, a memoir, because her mom picked it up at Borders with a sale coupon and because Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love liked it.

So mothers and daughters are reading and sharing books about women here, not the chick lit sort, but the coping with real life sort. The Lives of Girls and Women sort. My book group read that novel by Alice Munro, and my mom says the stories in Too Much Happiness (which I can now borrow from her, in hardback!) are rich and complicated indeed.

"There's one I've read through twice already, and I'm still not sure I got it," she said.

And I'm not sure I get what happened when I passed through the room and found a woman dangling a pendulum over another woman flat on the floor at the retreat. She explained it was part of her work with energy and healing touch. In some spots the pendulum was still, in some spinning in gentle circles, and in others moving side to side.

After the woman on the floor got up, I said, "Can I try it?" and she dangled the pendulum over me. It went crazy, spinning everywhere in wild dancing circles and apparently I have wide open chakras! That, or I read too much.

Committed

Day 38 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Mary is reading Committed, the new book by Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.

I just met Mary recently, over dinner, and learned she brought 3 books with her on vacation--this one, a book on Stoic philosophy, and something called Wolf Hall. She can't remember why she picked up that last one. (Maybe because it won the Man Booker Prize, Mary! It's historical fiction, by Hilary Mantel, about Henry VIII and the behind-the-scenes religious and class conflicts of the times.)

And she has Too Much Happiness, the new book of short stories by Alice Munro, waiting on the bedstand for her when she gets home.

I'm so glad I met Mary! (Yes, there's something about her!) She reads books simultaneously, as do several of us here. She reads books in hardback! (Though I just realized Too Much Happiness is indeed out in paperback! Making it fair game as book-group material! Yay!)

Like me, she gets a little embarrassed when she reads a bestseller "self help" or trendy book like Committed or Eat, Pray, Love, but, hey, I loved the latter. It was funny, revealed the author's vulnerabilities, and had great pizza. Plus, it reassured me. My current house number happens to be a really cool number of meditation beads.

And Mary keeps an Excel spreadsheet on the books she reads.

I hope my local book group will also read Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. Some of us are married, some of us are not, and some of us are skeptical about the institution of marriage, even if we are in it. And even if we are committed to the ones we love.