THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 2

Update: Only on page 100 of 500, so I have some serious catch-up reading to do on the plane to Minnesota. On the plus side, I’m enjoying it much more than expected. My progress has only been impeded because of a heap of library books demanding urgent attention (due dates approaching, renewals maxed out). I read a nice little Connie Willis novella, Inside Job, and am hurtling through The Best American Travel Writing 2006—I’m a sucker for these annual anthologies, and am eternally annoyed that the Pasadena library doesn’t carry more of them (no Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Food Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, or Best Crime Writing this year, boo!). Of course, I’ll have to clear my schedule come 2007, because my Reading Project list has ballooned to a whopping 20 volumes, most of which I’m quite excited to crack open. Unlike this year’s classics-heavy “homework reading,” it promises a lot of fun action, mystery, and humor, including works by Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shirley Jackson, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Anyway, I loved this passage on the heartbreak of childhood from TMotF:

Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie—perhaps it was even more bitter—than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. “Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by-and-by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief at the reality of their pain.

So true. Bonus points to ol’ George for the painfully sweet and precise “tiny bare legs above our little socks” detail. And also, using the odd verb form “blent.”

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 1

Time to fulfill another arbitrary, self-set goal—read The Mill on the Floss before the end of the year. I don’t feel an especially great desire to read the book anymore (having been on my mind for so long, it seems dull in comparison to all the shinier, flashier, newer books on my list), but I greatly desire to have read this book so I can get on with my life. All the George Eliot books I’ve read have been good (Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and even Felix Holt: The Radical), but I have no particular interest in the story of TMotF for some reason. I don’t know why—usually I enjoy tales of bright, spirited, unconventional young girls. Maybe it’s already knowing how the novel ends. Spoiler alert: It’s a downer.

Anyway, I opened my paperback library copy this morning (the copy I own is an enormous, leatherbound, gilt-embossed hardcover hand-me-down from my father, too bulky to carry around) and, in an effort to reassure myself that this wasn’t that daunting a task, did some long division in my head. The novel is 515 pages long, so I only have to read 16 or 17 pages per day for the next 31 days. That sounds doable. I read my allotment for today and actually started enjoying myself a little bit. An extra bonus of reading the library copy is that it’s an Oxford World’s Classics edition, with all the nice explanatory notes. I encountered a great word, “franzy,” which apparently means “frenzied, crazy.” I like it. Boy, making myself read TMotF in the month of December sure is franzy!

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, PART 2

I finally finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read all year. All the provocation is probably why it took me so long to finish; sometimes it’s just harder to enjoy your food when you can’t stop yourself from thinking about it. As food is a personal obsession with me, at times I was resentful of Michael Pollan for coming into my head and messing with it. He was hitting me where I live. Still, for all the uncomfortable truths and dire situations it forced me to acknowledge, it wasn’t a downer book. Not only did I finally learn the etymology of “corned beef” (as well as “cornhole”), but I also enjoyed (and agreed with) his informed, passionate writing. Even though I think I was already a much more conscious eater than most Americans (what with my penchant for farmers’ markets, menu planning, homemade meals, delicious vegetables, etc.), I’m now thinking about food in an entirely new way.

Here are a few paragraphs to chew on:

The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality…A few years ago the English writer John Berger wrote an essay called ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals—and specifically the loss of eye contact—has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!). Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians.

*****

There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts—two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection. The case of the koala bear, one of nature’s pickiest eaters, exemplifies the small-brain strategy. You don’t need a lot of brain circuitry to figure out what’s for dinner when all you ever eat is eucalyptus leaves. As it happens, the koala’s brain is so small it doesn’t even begin to fill up its skull. Zoologists theorize that the koala bear once ate a more varied and mentally taxing diet than it does now, and that as it evolved toward its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, the bear’s underemployed brain actually shrank. (Food faddists take note.)

*****

The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensely cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone.

*****

The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places….To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manure—would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can guild a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA

I just started The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, and it’s a cool bath after my feverish reading of Passage. Though so far it’s inspired mainly depression and guilt (the first section deals with our culture’s dependence on the monoculture of corn, and contains a grim history of corn’s role in the death of the American family farm), I have already learned a number of interesting facts:

• “without humans to plant it every spring, corn would disappear from the earth in a matter of years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them.” Wow, I had no idea! Pollan continues with an entire section on how corn does reproduce, and I love that he repeatedly uses the phrase “corn sex.”

• “Originally ‘corn’ was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt--hence ‘corned beef.’” I’ve always wondered why it’s called that!

• “The shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term ‘corn hole.’)” Well, I’ve actually never wondered about that...but how interesting. I wonder how far the term goes back—when the pilgrims got mad at each other, did they say, “Prithee, stick it in thy cornhole”?

PASSAGE

Passage was one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I’m on a Connie Willis kick—in 2006 I’ve read everything by her I could get my hands on, starting with To Say Nothing of the Dog and continuing with Doomsday Book, Lincoln’s Dreams, Fire Watch, and now Passage. Sadly, this is the bulk of her ouevre—I’ve got one novella left on my list and then I have to sit around waiting for her to write another book. Though classified as “science fiction,” most of her books (except some stories in Fire Watch) don’t deal with space or aliens or apocalyptic futures. She writes almost obsessively about researchers (historians or scientists) trying doggedly, desperately to figure things out; she builds excruciating suspense as she takes you step by step through the frustration of the research process, as her characters endure confusion and missed connections and unhelpful leads and mistaken theses and dead ends. In her books, history is something alive, a reality that impinges on contemporary life (whether through time travel, dreams, visions, or as a metaphor); it is full of disaster (the Blitz, the Plague, the Civil War, the Titanic) and heroism and death. These are the kind of books I wish I could write, full of allusion and real drama.

BOOK TO FILM: THE GRASS HARP

Last night I watched The Grass Harp. I figured, well, I loved the book (I hadn’t liked other Capote books I’d read, but coworker D pressed The Grass Harp upon me and as promised, it was good—simple and sweet and gorgeously written, so that’ll teach me a lesson for badmouthing Capote’s fiction), plus the cast was stacked: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Sissy Spacek, Nell Carter, Joe Don Baker, Edward Furlong, Charles Durning, Mary Steenbergen, Sean Patrick Flanery (who I used to adore when I was 14 and he was in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).

Unfortunately, the movie...sort of sucked. I mean, it was competently made, but it was a poor adaptation, in that they took a tender, subtle, well-written book and made it mawkish and cheesy. They gave the book the worst kind of makeover, changing major details in a way that only served to make the story more cliche—which character gets shot, what illness a major character dies of, and the entire end of the story, in which the narrator grows up and leaves town. In the book he goes to law school to become a judge—the character who’s been a sort of father figure to him in the story is a retired judge—and before he leaves, he and the judge go walking in a meadow. The book ends thus: “A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.” In the movie, the character leaves town because he wants to become a writer, and the voiceover goes on ad nauseum about how he wants to tell all the stories that the grass harp has told him, because it’s Dolly’s voice he hears speaking to him, and they’re her stories, blah blah, beating you over the head with the grass harp metaphor, sentimental nonsense that would make Truman Capote gag. (I hate it when movies about children end with the narrator growing up and becoming a writer and telling you this very story.) I was watching the movie alone, but during the last 10 minutes I kept feeling compelled to do the finger-gun-to-the-head gesture in sheer frustration, interspersed with booing. I’m so glad I read the book first, because if I’d seen the movie first I’d never have been interested in reading the book.

THINGS THAT SCARE ME

In honor of Halloween, off the top of my head, here are the scariest things I have read:

1. The Dollhouse Murders, by Betty Ren Wright: A kids’ book in which dollhouse dolls come alive and reenact a murder; I still get goosebumps thinking of it.
2. Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy: Another kids’ book in which dolls come alive; according to the Amazon reviews, these dolls are friendly and benevolent and help a young girl to find the love and security her family can’t give her, but all I remember is feeling terror at the concept. I mean, even the title is creepy-sounding.
3. “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson: Scariest short story ever.
4. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood: For obvious reasons, competes with 28 Days Later for worst-nightmare dystopia.
5. “All My Darling Daughters,” by Connie Willis: I love Connie Willis, but can’t recommend this highly, highly disturbing feminist short story that manages to include both animal abuse—which I particularly hate to read about—and sexual abuse; all the ickiness has a purpose and it’s well-written and thought-provoking, but I nearly became physically ill while reading it.

MONEY, A MEMOIR

Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash, by Liz Perle: Everyone should read this book, even especially if they have no interest in finances. I have no interest in finances, and I was fascinated. The material might not be completely groundbreaking, but again, I hadn’t given any of it much thought before. Perle combines memoir, anecdotes, and expert opinions to discuss women’s fucked-up relationships with money—how we aren’t raised to be fully financially responsible, how it’s considered impolite to talk about money, how we are still conditioned to believe that something in our lives will come along and rescue us and take care of us (maybe not necessarily Prince Charming anymore, but at least parents or a job or a stroke of good fortune), and how all of this leads us to imbue money with so many emotions—shame, desire, safety and security, love—that we make poor financial decisions or simply check out of our financial lives entirely, and we let it affect our relationships with parents and children and spouses.

I did recognize myself in this; even though I’m financially independent and my money is in relatively good shape (savings, a few investments, no debt), I hate thinking about or dealing with my finances, and usually try to pretend they don’t exist beyond paying the bills and balancing my checkbook each month. A and I have totally separate finances and simply split the basic household bills (rent, electric, phone) down the middle, but I make significantly more money and do pay for our food, some household items, most of the cats’ necessities, and the majority of evenings out. This doesn’t bother me, but it was interesting to think a little harder about my probable future as the breadwinner and how that ties into my feelings about money.

NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

I’m about 60 pages into Book 10, Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter.

Why I own this book: This was a late entrant into the Project; coworker D gave it to me upon discovering that he had two copies. I thought it only fair that I should add another book to the list, seeing as I had copped out on Women in Love after 71 pages. I read a fair amount of Carter in high school and own The Bloody Chamber and Wise Children, so I was happy to read another of her books. Nights at the Circus is basically about a woman with wings (is she a real freak or a fake?) and, like other Carter books, is both rollicking and grotesque. Carter occasionally turns me off with her over-the-topness, but mostly the book is interesting and fun so far.

ETHAN FROME

Book 9 is Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton.

Why I own this book: I acquired a nice hardcover castoff copy from my dad.

Why I hadn’t read it: What I knew of the plot (mainly from watching bits and pieces of the Masterpiece Theater adaptation starring Liam Neeson years ago) didn’t appeal to me much. It seemed slight, and different from Wharton’s other books.

Why I still own it: I love The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

And the verdict? Wow. It may be a short book, practically a novella, but man, is it well-written—efficient, economical, and depressing as all hell. The introduction in the copy I read talked about how ironic it is that Wharton’s least representative work should have become her most famous (apparently she herself didn’t think much of Ethan Frome), but I can sure see where it gets its rep.

THE READING PROJECT, PHASE 1

With only two books left in The Reading Project (well ahead of schedule—I’d given myself a whole year), I’m already looking around for a new list of books to assign myself. It’s so silly to give oneself homework, but as someone who loves a good to-do list, I’ve realized I have to play to my strengths. If this motivates me to read a bunch of books I never would have otherwise gotten around to reading, then so be it. I have really enjoyed the Project so far. The English major in me is fulfilled to be reading “classics” again, and the bookworm in me is thrilled that most of the books I’ve read have been highly entertaining.

So I thought I’d make a handy little reference list I can update as I complete things...

THE GOAL: To read all the novels I own but haven't read before.

1. Felix Holt: The Radical, by George Eliot**
2. Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger****
3. Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich**
4. Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald***
5. A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster***
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey****
7. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence*
8. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov****
9. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton***
10. Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter**
11. The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot***

* = Didn’t like, didn’t finish
** = OK, but wouldn’t reread
*** = Liked it
**** = Loved it
() = not yet read

I’m contemplating several options for Phase 2 of the Project. Once I finish Mill, I’ll be done with the initial list I set for myself, but I won’t technically have read every work of fiction that I own, because I didn’t include anthologies and omnibuses in the first go-round. There are 13 more unread books that are part of larger books on my shelves, and they’re likely candidates for my next Project. Or perhaps I should take a break from fiction and read all the unread nonfiction books I own? Another thing I’d like to do is to read more, or perhaps the complete works, by writers I’ve liked in the past. For instance, I’ve read every Austen book (even the unfinished novel, Sanditon) except Mansfield Park. And now, after the Project, I’ve read four of George Eliot’s novels—should I read the rest? I like the idea of getting really deeply into one writer’s body of work for a while. So, anyway, I’ll keep you posted on next steps. Most likely, in the meantime, I’ll spend some time goofing off with fluffy library books before embarking on a new phase of the Project.

PNIN

After the shameful failure to finish Reading Project Book 7, I’ve moved right on to Book 8, Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov.

Why I own this book: L gave it to me for Christmas in 2000.

Why I haven’t read it: If you can believe it, I haven’t read anything by Nabokov, and, again, wasn’t sure I’d like him.

Why I still own it: Gift! With a sweet note inscribed by L on the title page that says, in part, “This is a good book. Read it. I have programmed it to self-destruct at 12-25-01, so get a move on.”

The verdict: Although I did not take L’s advice, I was lucky it didn’t self-destruct, because I really love this book! Although not very much happens (it’s basically just a character study, with a little academic satire and reflections on the immigrant experience), Nabokov’s painstakingly detailed style is a treat to read. I definitely plan to read more by him (perhaps next year’s Project will be to read the further works of authors I have enjoyed in the past?). Maybe Pale Fire, because I’ve heard Pnin has a cameo in it, hee.

WOMEN IN LOVE

I embarked on Book 7 of the Project, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, a few weeks ago. (Somehow I completely neglected to write about Book 6, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, but a belated thumbs up—it was hard to get into, but I found myself intensely involved in the second half and very moved by the ending.)

Why I own this book: L gave it to me, many years ago.

Why I haven’t read it: Have never read anything by Lawrence, wasn’t sure I’d like him.

Why I still own it: Well, it was a gift, and L said she liked it...

But the verdict is that this book and I, we didn’t get along. I tried, I really did, but the characters seemed to have no personality, everyone made long, dull speeches about abstract ideas, and the writing style was overwrought. I have a hard time with books that seem to have no particular details. I followed the Nancy Pearl Life’s Too Short Rule (subtract your age from 100, and that is the number of pages you need to read before you quit a book), got to page 71, and shut the book. I think I’ll give it to Goodwill. (Sorry, L.) It felt like a failure for the Project, until I remembered that the whole point of the endeavor is to make sure I only own books I like. Now I know I don’t like Women in Love. I’m willing to believe things really get grooving around page 110, and maybe I’d like a different Lawrence book someday, but for now I’m not looking back.

PERFECTION SALAD

I’m taking a break from the Project to read a great nonfiction book called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro, a dense but slyly amusing look at the food science movement (to quote the jacket cover because I’m too lazy to think for myself) “that placed fruit salad with marshmallows at the heart of our national cuisine and made American cheese into a staple widely appreciated for its uniformity, sterility, and blandness.” It’s crazy to realize there was a time when food quality, hygiene, and the purity and consistency of ingredients were all so poor that people applauded the advent of mass-marketed food and believed that canned vegetables (so clean and modern and scientific!) were superior to fresh ones. And now foodies today are taking everything in the absolute opposite direction—locally grown, organic, heirloom ingredients; home-cooked comfort food; fusions of different styles and cultures. Thank god, because most of that turn-of-the-century “modern” food sounds revolting. Boiled chicken on a bed of popcorn smothered in white sauce, anyone?

By far my favorite part of the book is the discussion of the period’s attempts to study nutrition and digestion. I’m a sucker for crazy moments in the history of science and found this one irresistible:

...a famous series of experiments performed in the 1820s by an American army surgeon named Beaumont who was lucky enough to come across an 18-year-old Canadian wounded in a shooting accident. The young man’s stomach had been perforated, and the wound left a permanent opening. This inspired Dr. Beaumont to investigate exactly what happened during normal digestion…. By tying a piece of meat to a string and suspending it inside the stomach, Dr. Beaumont was able to mark the rate at which digestive juices did their work.

I read this passage to A on the airplane coming back from DC and I think he turned a little green.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA

Book 5 on my list is A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Yes, I had never read A Passage to India. I love Forster, have read all of his other novels multiple times and seen their film adaptations, have adored the movie of A Room With a View since middle school, wrote a college paper about Howards End and a mini-honors thesis comparing Howards End and Maurice, intensively studied the Bloomsbury Group and wrote my honors thesis proper on Virginia Woolf, but hadn’t read the most famous and acclaimed Forster novel.

Why I own this book: Obviously, I always meant to read it.

Why I hadn’t read it: No good reason. I saw the movie when I was perhaps too young to fully understand it (during the early days of my Room With a View obsession), and remember finding it boring and confusing.

The verdict: I’d really been looking forward to this book as the high point of the Project, but I do have to admit I had a hard time getting into the first 30 pages. Mostly that’s just because I didn’t have much uninterrupted reading time with it, but also I found the blatant racism of the British characters toward the Indian characters very off-putting. Even though I realize that’s the point of the book, it’s a bit hard to sit through without wanting to punch those damn colonial oppressors. But even though I struggled with it, in the end it was a damn fine book. I think Forster is just so relentless about capturing the weaknesses of human nature, so unflinching in portraying his characters’ flaws, that I found it difficult to really like any of them, and for me it’s hard to enjoy a book if I don’t like any of the people I’m reading about. I ended up either annoyed by them or embarrassed for them. It was masterfully done, and I adore how Forster manages to capture the delicate fumbliness of people trying to connect across vast cultural rifts, but still, that shit is harsh.

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

Book 4 of the Project is Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Why I own this book: It’s a discarded Dakota County Library copy I picked up for 50 cents at one of their sales in high school or college.

Why I haven’t read it: As usual, laziness.

Why I kept it: Well, it’s hardcover, though the spine is a bit fractured. And I’ve read The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and liked them. And also—hey, that makes three Minnesota-born writers in a row! Anyway, the book is good so far, sweet and sad, though written in an oblique way that sometimes makes me worry I don’t understand what’s really happening. Still, just when I’m starting to feel confused, F. Scott hits me in the gut with a his ability to sum up huge, true feelings in one clear and perfectly formed phrase, like “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”

LOVE MEDICINE

Book 3 of the Read-Everything-I-Own Project is Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich (that makes two MN authors in a row for the Project!).

Why I own this book: L gave it to me; she loves Louise Erdrich.

Why I hadn’t read it: Sheer laziness.

Why I still own it: It was a gift, and besides, it’s now signed by the author, from when L and I went to one of her readings a few years ago and L got so excited she turned bright pink when she finally got face to face with Louise. I like being reminded of L’s cuteness. (Also, Random Erdrich Connection: Louise’s sister, Heid, was one of my writing professors in college.)

The verdict: It was skillfully written, but I found the characters hard to relate to (lots of drama and dysfunction). This is more my problem than the book’s, but prevents it from becoming a favorite.

PEACE LIKE A RIVER

Now I’m tackling Book 2 in the Read-Everything-I-Own Project: Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger.

Why I own this book: Editor-friend A gave it to me last Christmas.

Why I haven’t read it: No particular reason; other books just seemed to keep getting in the way.

Why I still own it: Well, it was a gift, of course, so it comes well recommended to begin with, and both my parents read and liked it too, and it’s critically acclaimed, and it’s written by a Minnesota writer. So I’m about midway through right now and really like it. I was puzzled why it took me a while to get into it; at first the setting, the characters, the writing seemed strange to me, almost too folksy. Then I realized that almost all the books I’ve read recently have taken place in either Victorian England (To Say Nothing of the Dog, Felix Holt, Arthur & George) or magical fantasy lands (the Secret Country trilogy, Howl’s Moving Castle). How long has it been since I’ve read a plain, straight-up, good old-fashioned rural American literary novel? No wonder it seemed foreign to me. Now that I’ve settled in, I’m relishing it; it feels a bit like To Kill a Mockingbird, or, um, maybe Huck Finn? OK, it feels like maybe I ought to read a few more Great American Novels. Can you believe they gave me an English degree when I spent all my time dallying with the Elizabethans and the Victorians/Edwardians?

HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE

I tore eagerly through Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. Jones wrote one of my favorite young-adult books ever, Fire and Hemlock, and I may have read some of her other books when I was a kid, but they didn’t stick in my mind. I wasn’t aware she wrote Howl’s Moving Castle until after I saw the movie, and I was immediately curious to find out how much of the weird, wonderful film was really from the original source material and how much was a product of Miyazaki’s rich imagination. The answer, it turns out, is about half and half—the film is a pretty loose adaptation, paralleling the book at first and keeping most of the same elements, but soon shooting off in other directions. Despite their differences, I had about the same reaction to both versions: “I’m not sure I really understand what’s going on, but I like it!” The book would definitely benefit from repeated readings—in fact, I was relieved to see that the School Library Journal reviewer called the book an “intricate, humorous and puzzling tale of fantasy and adventure which should both challenge and involve readers....At times, the action becomes so complex that readers may have to go back to see what actually happened, and at the end so many loose ends have to be tied up at once that it’s dizzying. Yet Jones’ inventiveness never fails, and her conclusion is infinitely satisfying.” Thank you, Sara Miller of White Plains Public Library, N.Y.! I was afraid it was just me being shamefully confused by a novel aimed at 6th-graders. Anyway, thumbs up to a truly inventive and riveting (and, sigh, romantic) story—I might even read the sequel, Castle in the Air, sometime.

ARTHUR & GEORGE

Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes, is a novel is based on actual events: Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; George a contemporary of his who’s convicted of a crime he hasn’t committed. The story follows their parallel, but very different, lives and the point at which they intersect, as Arthur takes an interest in George’s case and launches an investigation to clear his name. It’s Victorian social drama, biography, and mystery all wrapped up in one—fascinating and completely gripping, and totally makes me want to reread Sherlock Holmes, too.

FELIX HOLT

Felix Holt: The Radical, by George Eliot, is the first of the 10 novels I’ve assigned myself to read this year because I own them but haven’t read them.

Why I own this book: When I studied abroad at the University of East Anglia, I took an awesome class called “The Condition of England Novel,” and this was one of the assigned texts, so I dutifully bought it at the campus Waterstone’s.

Why I haven’t read it: The professor spent too many class periods lecturing on Frankenstein, his area of expertise (it was worth it—he had a great theory about the monster as metaphor for the struggling poor, supplemented with a gory, revelatory history text called Death, Dissection, and the Destitute) and had to cut one book from the syllabus.

Why I still own it: I love George Eliot (I’ve read Adam Bede and Middlemarch so far), and soapy Victorian novels in general. I was a little worried my brain had atrophied and I’d find the book hard going, especially since it’s supposed to be her “political” novel, but so far it’s mainly a juicy love triangle set against the background of the Reform Acts. Esther, a silly, selfish, superficial girl with potential, must choose between Harold Transome (a wealthy no-goodnik running for Parliament as a Radical, but only for expediency) and Felix Holt (the poor, heroic true radical who wants her to make something of herself and says things like, “If a woman really believes herself to be a lower kind of being, she should place herself in subjection....If not, let her show her power of choosing something different”). So far, most of what I’ve read has been exposition, but various secrets, scandals, and complications are starting to loom. I’m intrigued—though I do have to admit, every time I read “Felix Holt” I think “Steve Holt!”

THE SECRET COUNTRY

I kicked off this year’s reading with The Secret Country by Pamela Dean. My favorite book when I was 15 (and one that I still frequently reread) was Dean’s Tam Lin, kind of an eggheaded fantasy novel about fantastically bright and well-read liberal-arts college students. (This book, plus Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, formed all of my expectations about college, and I consequently spent my freshman year totally disillusioned by the discovery that my classmates were not all beautiful, brilliant, charismatic people who read Greek and quoted Keats at the drop of a hat. I somehow managed to overlook the fact that the genius Classics majors in Tartt’s book commit two murders, while in Dean’s book the Classics department is run by faeries who lure undergrads into their web of illusions and sterile immortality, and occasionally sacrifice them to hell.) There’s something I love about her Shakespeare-influenced writing style and her prickly, intelligent characters, but she’s only written a handful of other books, and they can be hard to find. The Secret Country trilogy had been out of print, but it’s been recently reissued and appeared at my library, so I warily checked it out. And it’s pretty good—it’s the kind of fantasy I like, grounded in the real world but with fantastic elements, a la Harry Potter, Madeleine L’Engle, etc. Actually, it’s very similar to the Narnia books in that ordinary children are transported to a magical world, only in these books, it’s a world they invented while playing make-believe, and now they find themselves living the stories they made up and acted out, and trying to figure out how it works and what they can change and (of course) how they can get home again. I promptly ordered the whole trilogy from Amazon, which then proceeded to torment me by sending me the third book (The Whim of the Dragon) this week, and not shipping the second one (The Hidden Land), which I am eagerly waiting to read, until next week.

Meanwhile, I’m reading an amusing time-travel novel, Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. As the title implies, it contains a lot of references to Three Men and a Boat, which I now totally want to reread, in addition to reading more Connie Willis. I don't know whether to find it fun or maddening the way one book keeps leading to another...and another...and when will I ever get to War & Peace at this rate?

2005 IN BOOKS

I read 67 books in 2005. For the 13 years I’ve been keeping track of the books I read, this is exactly the mean number (there were 6 years when I read more than 67 and 6 years when I read fewer). My 2005 reading was divided almost perfectly evenly between fiction (33) and nonfiction (34, 9 of which were about food!). All but 8 of the books were new to me (so much for this Great Rereading Project I keep intending to launch). Many were newly published this year; in fact, only one was published before 1900: Emma, one of my rereads (so much for being a serious reader of the classics—what can I say? I’m easily seduced by the fun and glossy reviews in Entertainment Weekly). But even though it’s tempting to look back at the list and see all the holes in it, all the weighty and important and beloved things I didn’t get around to reading or rereading, I do think I enjoyed and learned from every book I read (even if, I admit, I don’t remember everything I learned). Here are the best, the definite keepers:

10 FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS 2005 (listed in the order I read them)

1. Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food, by Susan Marks
2. Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell
3. The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson
4. Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, by Ruth Reichl (discussed briefly here)
5. The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby
6. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Human Behavior, by Temple Grandin
7. Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell
8. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak (This is, according to my records, the fifth nonfiction book I’ve read about Nancy Drew, and it’s perhaps the best-written and most comprehensive.)
9. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach (It’s not quite as focused and revelatory as Roach’s first book, Stiff, but still pretty funny and interesting, and the chapter about ectoplasm—which Victorian mediums often faked by hiding fabric or sheep intestines in their hoo-has—made my jaw drop.)
10. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, by Dan Savage

10 FAVORITE FICTION BOOKS 2005 (again, in the order I read them)

1. Easter Island, by Jennifer Vanderbes
2. Jamesland, by Michelle Huneven (although I also read Huneven’s Round Rock, a sort of prequel, and loved it almost as much)
3. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
4. Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody, by Chelsea Cain
5. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
6. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore
7. Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way: A Novel, by Bruce Campbell (Unlike Campbell's first literary effort, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, this is a novel...but the narrator happens to be a B-movie actor named Bruce Campbell. All the details about him are real, but the plot is totally fictional—“Bruce Campbell” gets cast in an A-list movie, gets really excited to do some real acting and does all this pretentious and ludicrous character research, but then slowly and unwittingly infects the production with “B-movieitis,” so it degenerates into a pulpy mess, with Richard Gere all excited about adding in some fight scenes (even though he’s an antiviolence Buddhist, and anyway, it’s supposed to be a romantic comedy) and Mike Nichols doing crazy handheld camera shots. Fluffy, but riotously funny.)
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
9. The Virgin Suicides, by Geoffrey Eugenides (Extremely good and if I were still in college I would totally, totally write a paper comparing it to Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, because they are both about the futility of biography and the beautiful obscurity of the unknowable object, and if Eugenides hasn’t read that book I’ll eat my hat. Not that I’m wearing one. OK, I’ll eat my shoe, like Werner Herzog. Anyway, a close runner-up is Eugenides’ Middlesex, which I read earlier in the year. I had a few complaints about some of the more gimmicky narrative flourishes, but it was very epic and fascinating—it’s about a hermaphrodite, after all—and well-written.)
10. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith (I hadn’t been planning to read it—White Teeth was good, but I wasn’t enraptured by it—until I read that it’s an homage to Howards End. I love E.M. Forster and wrote two major college papers on Howards End, so that sealed the deal. And lucky for me, because I quite liked it.)

My parents gave me a special “Books to Check Out” notebook for Christmas, to contain my burgeoning things-I-gotta-read list. I’ve already got several pages filled, and I feel the usual frantic eagerness, overwhelmedness, and guilt bubbling up as I contemplate everything I haven’t read and want to read. Still, I think if I find 20 more books this good in 2006, I’ll be doing just fine.