A Return to Dick Lit + Poisonous Berries

Day 151 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and the women's book group is reading The Wishbones, by Tom Perrotta, because Suzie had the excellent idea of reading the first sentence from each of a stack of books under consideration, and Tom won.

So we return to dick lit.

Here is the first line: "Buzzy, the bass player, had a suspended license, so Dave swung by his house on the way to the Wednesday-night showcase."

That was definitely more appealing as a quick summer read, if the group is to meet again in July, on a pontoon boat, than this:

"The Ettrick Valley lies about fifty miles due south of Edinburgh, and thirty or so miles north of the English border, which runs close to the wall Hadrian built to keep out the wild people from the north."

Sorry, Alice Munro, but I promise I will get back to The View from Castle Rock eventually. Likewise, Marilynne Robinson, I will read Home, which we didn't pick because Kim has already read it. You too, Carol Shields, and Unless, which Kim and Janet had both already read.

Most of us want to read something we haven't read before, unless 1) we tend to fall asleep reading at night, and find it hard to finish a book in the time allotted and/or 2) we are a very, very busy pastor off at a big wheely-deal, telling the Presbyterians to ordain gays and allow clergy to perform gay marriages. (The pastor is reading my old, used copy, which was at hand, and I am reading her new, orange copy, which arrived miraculously quickly from Amazon, in a small bulk order, and was left, by Kim, at my front door, between the glass and wood doors, on the 4th of July! So I am reading it now, cringing and laughing.)

Hmm, I wonder if I will think of us now as the "small bulk" book group, the way I think of the local men's book group as the SOBs, because that's what they call themselves. One of the SOBs, conveniently named Dick, came into the bookshop yesterday, but he was not looking for dick lit. He was not looking for anything. He was waiting for his Polish sausages to cook down the street. But he bought a cool book on symbols.

Anyway, Dick asked if I had read Olive Kitteridge yet because he wanted to discuss it with me, having just read it with the SOBs. I said I'd been waiting for a copy to come in, and he said a bunch would come in now, now that the SOBs are done with it. He's right!

And Mary tells us, in a comment here (on perimenopause), that she has "just started reading Jim Harrison's new collection of novellas called The Farmer's Daughter and it's wonderful. I read a review that described his protagonists as 'lusty' and that's exactly right! They are smart and capable and sexually charged. And the rural western landscape is lovely to imagine. Great summer read." (The SOBs also recently read some Harrison.)

As I was telling Kim the other day, I like the idea of short stories or novellas for book group summer reading. People can read what pulls them, turn away from what doesn't, and we can discuss the one(s) we all have in common! Maybe in August!

And now, since you are all waiting, my lantana is blooming and making its tiny blue-black poisonous berries, and re-blooming, thanks to the early rain, the long, hot week without rain, and its own life cycle. Don't worry, I am not going to make any tiny poisonous lantana berry pies.

These are not my lantanas, by the way, but mine look a lot like them. So do the lantana along Linden Street, which used to have a lot of linden trees, including the one I grew up climbing, out on Linden Street Road, the rural extension of Linden Street, now, unromantically given an impossible-to-remember number, for emergency-services reasons. Linden trees are called lime trees in Isak Dinesen....

No links today. I am cranky and lazy, thanks to terminal perimenopause.

Dark Towers

Day 41 of the "What are you reading, and why?" series.

Today I put together two completely different kinds of writers, as one aspect of American literature these days is to have battered on any barrier between "high" and "low" culture. I know people still do categorize and label--there is "serious fiction" or "literary fiction," and there is "genre fiction," and these things are still organized in bookstores in various ways that keep them apart from each other. But college classrooms put things together, study everything, and have "elevated" certain kinds of writing that were dismissed before. The "comic book" is now the "graphic novel"--or "Graphic Illustration" in Babbitt's--and people are respecting each other's art in new ways that are less hierarchical than when I was growing up.

So I'll tell you that Kim has been reading The Gunslinger, the first in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and that Charlie is embarking on Point Omega, the new novel just out in hardcover from Don DeLillo. (Earlier in this blog we heard a bit about Falling Man, a DeLillo novel about the man falling from the dark towers of 9/11..., and the cover pictured here is from Libra, different towers altogether in DeLillo's book about the Kennedy assassination.)

A guy who runs a business down the street came in for another stack of the books he likes to read and was saying the last book in the Dark Tower series was a huge disappointment, and made him feel he had wasted his time reading everything building up to it. But the series was recommended to Kim by Bob, who said the last book made the whole reading adventure worth it, and to definitely start at the beginning! The link above is to a revised edition of The Gunslinger, as King was writing other works simultaneously (the way we read books simultaneously, or the way painters works on numerous paintings simultaneously, etc.) and realized by the end that the beginning needed some adjustment. So Kim might want to figure out which edition she has, and perhaps that's why the guy from down the street was so disappointed. He read the original work, and things didn't add up?!

I'm pretty sure the only thing I've read by Stephen King is On Writing, and, to my mind, he was right on about writing.

Don DeLillo is a writer I've not yet read. I have read excerpts and essays by him, but not a whole novel. I almost took home White Noise the other day, but instead got The Wishbones by Tom Perotta. I'm pretty sure this is "dick lit."

Killer Bees

Day 24 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Jo is reading Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner, the first in a series of Victor Legris mysteries. It’s a historical mystery, taking place in Paris in 1889, during the World Exposition.

Reminds me of Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, taking place in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This one is not a novel but speculative non-fiction based on historical facts, looking closely at the architecture.

Bees play a key part in Murder on the Eiffel Tower as the victims appear to die from bee stings.

I loved the book Bee Season by Myla Goldberg! It is not about actual bees. Instead, spelling bees. Since I love words and word origins, this was a great book for me, as letters and roots and languages and meanings whirl around in the main character’s head…

Which reminds me of Woman in Mind (December Bee), a play by Alan Ayckbourn. I just told you I can’t read plays, but I am reading this one because Julie wants me to. (Perhaps she wants me to be in it, as she is on the play reading committee for a local theatre.) Which reminds me of Trouble in Mind, a movie, and a Johnny Cash song. It’s used a lot as a title, in fact, for music, books, even a book of poems by Lucie Brock-Boido, whose name sort of bounces off the walls like words and letters in Bee Season.

Which was also made into a movie, not to be confused with Spellbound, a documentary about spelling bees, which I watched at the home of Lizabeth, from whom I have borrowed many excellent books! And isn't there also a play, maybe even a musical comedy, about spelling bees?

Of course, Spellbound is also a Hitchcock movie with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (my heart throb, Atticus Finch), a psychological thriller murder mystery. I don’t think there are bees in it. But there are bees in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and of course there is also a movie of that. I am not even going to attempt free association with killer bee movies and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

But I will say that Secret Life of Bees and Bee Season are books that came out close enough together that people got confused…as I am now…and that I sometimes find them near each other on the floor at Babbitt’s, waiting to be shelved, or to be picked up by people browsing. I don’t dare walk down the fiction aisle at Babbitt’s, or I will, as I did Tuesday, pick something up and put a yellow post-it on it, “Hold for Kathleen,” and then buy it, when I can rummage up the $6-8. Post-it-ed at the moment: The Wishbones by Tom Perotta and White Noise by Don DeLillo. These, though by men, and contemporary, and no doubt containing some humor and/or irony, are probably not “dick lit,” as defined earlier (via Internet searches), just as the bee books by women are not “chick lit.”

And now I should reveal that Victor Legris of the historical mystery series is a bookseller. So far people have told me they like mysteries for the suspense, the puzzle, the psychological insights, the great research into place and time period, the escapes into a world evil confronted by justice, etc., but if anything would draw me in to a mystery series, it would be this! The bookstore connection!

Keep those comments and book insights & recommendations coming!