What People Said They Would Be Reading

Day 116 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Phyllis, who (Day 114, at the end) is reading I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, and who had just finished Hester when I asked the question at Facebook, said she had True Blue, by David Baldacci, waiting in the wings.

I see there's a Hester with a snowy mountain on the cover by Margaret Oliphant Oliphant (yes, that's what it says, aka Mrs. Oliphant) at Amazon, a reproduction of a historical work, but I'm thinking Phyllis read Hester: The Missing Years of the Scarlet Letter, by Paula Reed, an intertextual re-seeing kind of novel (like Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which re-sees Jane Eyre by way of a prequel with Bertha in the West Indies).

In this Hester, we follow Hester back to England, with her daughter Pearl, and they get mixed up in the lives of Oliver Cromwell. (Having read The Scarlet Letter again recently, for Great Books Chicago, I am imagining a different life for Hester and Pearl....)

True Blue is a cop mystery, with female protagonists, set in D. C.

Bob, who had just finished Everything Must Change, by Brian McLaren, previously mentioned in this blog, was about to begin Reaching the Animal Mind, by Karen Pryor. This is, as the subtitle tells us, about Clicker Training and What it Teaches Us About All Animals. I am afraid to ask what a "clicker" is.

Upstairs, on a bookshelf, I have The Buccaneers, by Edith Wharton, an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, finished by Marion Mainwaring. I think that ties in here because of the intertextuality and because I'm sure I said I would be reading that someday. And writers who are rewriting, re-seeing, or finishing the works of other writers are somehow also "reaching the animal mind," though without the help of clickers? Help!

Night and Day, You are the One

Day 115 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Judy is reading Night, by Elie Wiesel, because she has read other of his works and admired them for their visual imagery. Judy is a visual artist and was a fine arts teacher; she taught high school for 30 years and also at the college level. Now, retired, she has more time to read.

Judy is brave to want to see everything Wiesel has seen in his accounts of the Holocaust and its survivors. I've linked you, above, to the Oprah Book Club edition of Night, which is the one Judy saw in the window at Babbitt's and bought, and here pictured is his trilogy of Night, Dawn, and Day (previously titled The Accident), published at separate times and now gathered in one volume. I first read Night in high school and have read it other times since, in that perennial way I do, to remind me.... Sigh.

Meanwhile, the McSweeney's keep going off the shelves and the Believers were given away before I had a chance to peruse them. How am I ever going to read everything the world has to offer?

A man was made happy finding a Jimmy Buffet autobiography and some books for his young daughter. I bought The Elegance of the Hedgehog for my daughter, then put it back, thinking she had already received it as a Christmas present, but now I think that was my niece. And yesterday, I entered into the database the original French language version, L'Elegance du Herisson, by Muriel Barbery. Ah, if only I could remember enough French to read the original!

Night and day, my head is full of books. I read to remember, and still I forget.

Cemetery of Forgotten Books

Day 114 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and David, with whom I will be swimming soon in the early mornings, is reading "the next Zafon novel." Because David is a Spanish teacher, he may be reading it in the original Spanish, but I would need to read these novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the translations by Lucia Graves.*

And it looks like I will need to, because they are about books! Or this one is, anyway:

The Shadow of the Wind is about a boy named Daniel whose father is a bookseller. He takes Daniel to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (were Barbara Pym's books there for those 20 years she went out of style?!--see yesterday's entry...), where he chooses, yes, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax. And now I know I will get confused by the many character names, and lost in the "Borgesian labyrinth" as Richard Eder calls it in his New York Times review. Let's just say the Devil makes an appearance.

(Which reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. Anybody reading that right now?)

The Shadow of the Wind takes place just after the Spanish Civil War, in Barcelona. And now the lovely, funny song "Barcelona," from the musical Company, will be playing in my head for the rest of the day. As will one of my favorite lines of dialogue, ever--forgive me: "I'm a living thing, too, you shithead." Oh, my whimsical mind, God help me. (God has surely averted his/her/its eyes from my book blog, and yet will also forgive me.)

Anyway, Wikipedia informs me that Zafon was controversial in Spain for writing his novels in Spanish rather than Catalan. And that the follow up novel to Shadow of the Wind is actually a prequel, The Angel's Game. And, in another attack of whimsy, I keep hearing the author's name in my head as "saffron," an expensive yellow spice. Hence, today's picture of a saffron crocus.

*Translator Lucia Graves is the daughter of Robert Graves. Phyllis is reading I, Claudius, a perennial favorite, by Robert Graves! And Phyllis is an excellent cook, who probably has some saffron in her spice cabinet.

(They are going to bury me in the Cemetery of Forgot What I Was Writing About.)

The Third Rail & Dead Writers

Day 113 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Sheila is reading The Third Rail, by Michael Harvey, a murder mystery set in Chicago. I assume she's reading it because 1) she lives in Chicago and 2) she's read others in the series, as this is #3.

In Harvey's mysteries, Michael Kelly, a former police officer turned private investigator solves crimes in Chicago, with a great feel for the city because the author, a former journalist, still lives and owns a bar there. I wonder if all my Chicago police officer friends are reading this series?!

This one is pursuing murders on the CTA, so maybe I should avoid it, as I take a lot of public transportation in Chicago. There is a particularly chilling murder on an el platform, here excerpted via the Washington Post review by Gerald Bartell:


Kelly has his own nasty brush with the sniper...one snowy morning when a man named Robles approaches a woman standing on a mass-transit train platform. He points a gun at her left temple and fires. She drops "like a puppet with the strings cut all here and there, arms, legs, and a smear of lipstick across her lips and down her chin."

Ew, ew, ew. Both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times think I should be reading it, though. Plus, there's the Archdiocese connection, and I used to live in St. Gertrude's parish. Hmm, might have to take up the reading of mysteries, after all.

But my Barbara Pym awaits, and it's her birthday. I like her because she's subtle and funny and acutely observant, a sort of 1950s Jane Austen. But nobody read her for 20 years because she went out of fashion! Pooey on them. Then her friend and pen pal, poet Philip Larkin, brought her back into style by nominating her as "the most underrated writer of the century." Someday I hope to be the most underrated writer of the century, too. (Oh. Wait.)

Thank you, Writer's Almanac, which also reminds me that it's also Thomas Hardy's birthday. Happy birthday, dead writers. Thanks for being born.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Day 112 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my mother is reading Good Grief, by Lolly Winston, because she needed something to read while visiting her sister, and Pam had finished it, so Mom borrowed it!

I love the fuzzy pink slippers on the cover.

Mom says it is a quick and easy read, and it sounds like classic chick lit, which I was able to semi-define for my daughter, having studied up on it here, in past entries, and by asking around! Amazingly, in this book, the humor and cheerfulness abound in a novel really about grief. The main character is a widow at 36.

And I have no trouble believing in the rebounding joy here, as I met, this spring, a woman who had also lost her husband, young, to cancer, and was juggling grief, joy, and children like a pro in the circus of life. People are so amazing, so resilient, so beautiful. Oh, people, I wish you, too, boundless joy and some way through your inevitable griefs.

Recently I borrowed and read Donald Hall's book of poems, The Painted Bed, because a poet friend wanted me to read it. She warned me that it would be dark and raw, and it was. These are poems of grief at the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, also to cancer. Though written over a period of years, the poems are fresh in sorrow and rage. In fact, I could not make it through all of them, but it was time to return the book, so I did. If I need more woe, I can turn to Kenyon's own Collected Poems, here in my office, sitting atop Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

And now the sun is shining, and I will go gaze at the Ohio blue spiderwort blooming on the north side of the house.