THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

I got a hand-me-down copy of this long ago from A’s mother, but resisted reading it for a long time even though I love the other Edith Wharton books I’ve read (The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and particularly The House of Mirth). I suspected there was a reason it was one of her more obscure efforts; most summaries include words like “biting” and “satirical,” which is often code for “unlikeable.” And indeed, the main character, the ruthless, materialistic social climber Undine Spragg (is it a coincidence her initials are U.S.?), who repeatedly marries and divorces in search of the wealth and status she feels she is entitled to, is hard to sympathize with and often made me want to throttle her. Yet I found this book completely fascinating and surprisingly enjoyable—the satire isn’t laugh-aloud funny, but there’s a grim, riveting pleasure in Wharton’s vivid, incisive, unrelenting dissection of the era, class, and characters she depicts.

But while it’s easy to read the book as just a what-is-society-coming-to/get-off-my-lawn takedown of a new age of bloodless noveau riche opportunism, there’s more to it than that. Wharton also underscores that if Undine had been a man, her determination and ambition might have been productively channeled into business, but as a woman, her only recourse is to desperately jump from man to man, eternally frustrated (whatever she manages to get, it is never enough) and causing collateral damage right and left. I might not recommend this as someone’s first taste of Wharton, but it’s as powerful and brilliant as any of her other masterpieces.

MISS MAPP

Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older....Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

This is the second or third book in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, depending on how you figure (second published, but the omnibus edition of the series I got from the library had it third, which makes some sense because it’s about a completely different character and town). Like the two Lucia books, it centers around the social machinations of a strong-willed woman and her friends (or frenemies) in a quirky small town, but the similarities end there. While Lucia is grandiose—egotistical, snobbish, “artistic”—Miss Mapp is petty, a nosy, conniving, parsimonious spinster (I hate to use the word, but she lives up to the stereotype), and her battles for social supremacy center around small matters of bridge parties, dressmaking, red-currant fool, and the drinking habits of elderly bachelors. Like Lucia, she disarms frequent but (usually ineffectual) challenges to her position (mostly from her hilarious rival Godiva “Diva” Plaistow) with relative ease, but she takes a more obvious, sometimes downright mean, pleasure in thwarting her enemies. This sounds unpleasant, but never fear; she is thoroughly as delightful to read about as Lucia, sometimes even more so. Like the townspeople of Tilling, who chafe under her dictatorship but ultimately accept their defeats with resigned good humor, I grew to love Miss Mapp and her antics, because no matter how maddening, they definitely make life more interesting.

MANY WATERS

This was published later than the rest of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet (in 1986), and I always think of it as the last book, but it actually takes place between A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, so I’m reading it in that sequence.

I ain’t gonna lie: it’s kind of weird. Weirder than the previous book’s mitochondrial adventures, you ask? In this one, twins Sandy and Dennys, the “ordinary” members of the Murry family, are transported back to the time of Noah and the flood (presupposing that story literally happened), when people’s lives span hundreds of years and shapeshifting angels (seraphim) and fallen angels (nephilim), not to mention unicorns and manticores, walk the earth. It’s the Bible as sci-fi. I was fascinated by this book as a child, but at the same time it creeped me out, and it turns out I still feel pretty much the same way. On the one hand, it’s fun to see the practical twins dealing with a decidedly bizarre situation, and L’Engle’s rendering of her imagined world is detailed and interesting—particularly the fact that people keep adorable terrier-sized mammoths as pets! But on the other hand, it’s dark, and there are a lot of sexual undertones going on, which I guess is in keeping with the tone of the Bible but pretty unsettling for a kid, like nephilim impregnating human women and an unfortunately over-the-top virgin/whore dichotomy between the two female characters the twins both fall for: Yalith, Noah’s superpure daughter, and the megasexy (and therefore, of course, in league with the bad guys) Tiglah. I can’t get too down on the book’s feminist cred, though, because L’Engle also makes some sharp commentary on the original story through the existence of Yalith, who’s left out in the cold when God commands Noah to bring only his three sons and their wives aboard the ark. I also liked the subtle way in which the characters of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, the supposed fathers of the modern-day human race, are portrayed as kind of a dickwad, a middlingly OK guy, and a standup dude, respectively (and their wives handily correspond to the same traits, with Ham’s wife a sister of the evil Tiglah and Japheth’s wife part angel), which is about the same mix of good and bad people you probably find in society today. Well played, L’Engle. Now where’s my mini mammoth?

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS: 1955–1956

The characters are surprisingly young in this early stage of the strip (Lucy sleeps in a crib; Linus can’t walk), but key patterns are already in place—Linus’s security blanket, Charlie Brown’s kite-flying ineptitude, Lucy and Shroeder’s dance of pursuit and rejection, Pigpen’s dirtiness. Most notably, in December 1956, Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown for the first time. I never approved of that meanness, but otherwise: classic, and awesome.

WALK TWO MOONS

Despite the fact that it’s a Newbery winner, I’d never heard of this Sharon Creech novel (or Sharon Creech, for that matter) until it was selected for our book club. That’s because it was published in 1994, long after I had outgrown YA books and several years before I grew back into them again. I was rather unenthused when I sat down to read it; the Amazon and book-flap descriptions made it sound suspiciously dull and earnest, possibly Tough Teen Issue-y. I was thrilled to be proven dead wrong. This is a beautifully written and moving book with serious themes (occasionally enough to move a grownup to tears), but it’s also quirky and funny and original and endearing. We all loved it so much that our book club discussion consisted mainly of comparing favorite parts. If this book had existed when I was a kid, I think my younger self would have really enjoyed it—especially the part that takes place in Pipestone. Minnesota, represent! (Aw, now I wonder what happened to the little pipestone turtle I once bought there as a childhood souvenir...)

LUCIA IN LONDON

The second (or third, depending on who you ask) book of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, in which Lucia moves to London and starts social climbing on a grand scale. Thoroughly as delightful as the first.

MY ANTONIA

OMG LOVED. I spent a weekend in Nebraska in June, and it gave me a hankering to reread O Pioneers!, which I’d enjoyed years ago. Then I realized that perhaps I should check out that other little novel Willa Cather’s famous for writing, the one that many of my friends count among their favorites, the one that for some reason I’d never read. And what do you know? I adored it: the gorgeous landscape descriptions, the portrayal of stark pioneer life and strong immigrant women…I hope it won’t sound dismissive if I call it Little House for grownups. It’s got the nature and the coziness and the hardship and the nostalgia, but with deeper themes, including sexuality and violence (HOLY CRAP that Russian story about the wolves and the wedding party will haunt me always). The whole time I was reading it, I talked it up to everyone I knew, which resulted in the sad revelation that a few of my dear friends are closeted Cather haters and the awesome discovery that my mom had read it and adored it; her exact review was “That book blew my mind.” After I’d finished it, I wanted to just turn around and reread it, and subsequent books seemed to pale in comparison. I don’t think it’s premature to say that this is going to be my favorite book of the year.

SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE

A nice, funny, absorbing little biography by Bill Bryson, which I listened to on CD while commuting. As in A Short History of Nearly Everything, he focuses on what we know and how we know it, and in the case of Shakespeare, it turns out that what we know isn’t much at all. Bryson very reasonably debunks a lot of accepted Shakespeare “facts” (including a number that I’d learned from my high-school English textbook) as mere assumptions (often wildly inaccurate ones), contextualizes the actual facts that remain, and resoundingly shoots down the ridiculous “authorship question.” As a bonus, the audiobook is read by the author. My favorite part:

Nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit of it—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book,” a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS: 1959–1960

Of course, after reading the Charles M. Schulz biography, I had to revisit the work itself. I still own the two old collections (Peanuts Treasury and A Snoopy Festival) I used to reread obsessively as a child, but I wanted to see some strips that were new to me, and luckily Fantagraphics is releasing the entire comic sequentially in gorgeous editions, of which my library carries a few. The earlier ones (before the strip became so Snoopy-centric in the late 1960s/early 1970s) have always been my favorites, so I picked the oldest one on the shelf. It turned out to be a landmark two years: the birth of Sally, the first mention of the Great Pumpkin, Linus’s love for Miss Othmar, Lucy’s psychiatric practice, and the famous “happiness is a warm puppy” strip. Smart, alternately bleak and sweet, and even better than I remembered.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A BIOGRAPHY

This had been sitting on my TBR list for years and I’m so glad I finally picked it up. I loved Peanuts (along with Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, and Doonesbury—sigh! for the golden age of comics) as a kid, so getting the behind-the-scenes story was really exciting, and I liked the way David Michaelis analyzes the comic strip through the biographical lens (comics are interspersed with the text to underscore certain points). And although I knew Schulz was Minnesotan, I’d never really realized that his childhood home and his father’s barbershop were at the corner of Selby and Snelling in St. Paul, just 1.5 miles from where I grew up (I even took violin lessons in the same building where Schulz attended elementary school decades before) and half a mile from the apartment I lived in as an adult, so the entire story of his background had a special resonance to me.

I didn’t always love Michaelis’s writing style—it tended toward the melodramatic/psychoanalytic at times—and the depiction of Schulz’s later life started to meander, but for the most part I was absolutely riveted. It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a complicated man who wasn’t always the warm and fuzzy person his fans hoped for, but for some reason I felt a deep sympathy for him...even when his biographer didn’t always seem to. Furthermore, I’m grateful to have been reminded of how good Peanuts used to be and how much it meant to me.

JACOB HAVE I LOVED

(By Katherine Paterson) My pick for book club, because can you believe I had never read it? Despite the fact that it takes place during WWII and on an island? I think as a child I sensed that it would contain precious little of my favorite reading fodder: animals and nature, cozy food descriptions, rugged survival narratives, magic/alternate worlds, historical settings, or charming hijinks of precocious youngsters. The cover, with its windswept young woman staring moodily out to sea, smacked of Bleak Realism and Tough Teen Issues, topics I tended to avoid. And in a way, I was right. This is a classic and well-written book, but I probably wouldn’t have liked it back then and didn’t fall in love with it as an adult either. My favorite part was actually the last chapter or so, when Sara Louise grows up and becomes a midwife in a mining town and finally gets over her issues. That could have been an entire book unto itself!