READING PROJECT UPDATE: REVISIONS

I rewatched The Talented Mr. Ripley, having just finished rereading the book. Unfortunately, I liked the film a lot less this time around, because seeing them in such close proximity made me realize it’s not a very faithful adaptation of the book. The movie bends over backwards to make Ripley likable and in doing so completely alters all the characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance was the only thing that came close to the book.

Speaking of books, I’m retrenching a little with this year’s intractable Reading Project. I’ve very much enjoyed rereading the first two Ripley books and am nearly finished with Ripley’s Game (after which I plan to watch the John Malkovich-starring movie and then complain about it to you if it takes too many liberties with the book). I guess there are two more Ripley books after this one, which I’d like to check out…maybe next year. For now, I’ve got to turn my attention to Harry Potter—I’d had grand plans of rereading the entire series before the last book came out, but at this rate I’ll just have time to reread Book 6, which I’m afraid I don’t much remember, before Book 7 is delivered to my door next Saturday. And then suddenly we’re into August, and me with 17 books still left on my list! So I’m getting rid of The World According to Garp, which I never had much enthusiasm for, and Cloud Atlas, which doesn’t really fit into the Project because I don’t own it—I just have it on long-term loan from P. I’m also giving myself the option not to read all the Sherlock Holmes if I can’t fit it in. That leaves just the Shirley Jackson stories, which I’m looking forward to being terrified by, Stanley Park, which I’m told is about food, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which I have no particular interest in but A’s mom gave me a signed copy, so I have to see whether it’s worth keeping, and the Wodehouse books, which I’ll relish. Hopefully these revisions will rescue the Project from feeling like a chore.

READING PROJECT UPDATE: HOLMES, HAMMETT, HIGHSMITH

I’ve been puttering along through the Reading Project. The Sherlock Holmes and Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op novels have been great fun to read, but with just 10 of 28 books finished and the year midway through, I’m feeling a little discouraged. Now I’ve run aground on Patricia Highsmith: I own a volume containing the first three Ripley books, two of which I’ve read, so only the third is on the list. Trouble is, I don’t really remember the first two, so I’ve decided to reread them first, which is fun but not especially efficient. I know reading isn’t just about checking books off of lists, but I also haven’t been terribly absorbed by anything I’ve read lately either. Grr.

THE LIVING, PART 2/SOMEONE LIKE YOU

I finished The Living, finally. And you know what? I went from hating it to sort of loving it. The plot finally emerged, I got involved with it, I warmed up to the quirks and pacing of the book and started to relish the gorgeous writing. You could read it as a multigenerational family saga, a philosophical meditation on mortality, or a piece of lyrical nature writing, but to me it was mostly one hell of a pioneer narrative. I’m keeping it, and I’m giving it four stars.

Next I returned to Roald Dahl, zipping through the enjoyable and creepy stories of Someone Like You. I’ve decided every Roald Dahl story is about someone trying to trick someone else, which is repetitive but always entertaining. Coming up: some of the enormous Complete Sherlock Holmes tome, then some action-packed Hammett to keep me occupied through my two plane journeys.

SWITCH BITCH/THE LIVING/MISCELLANEOUS

Part of this year’s Reading Project is to make my way through three volumes of a five-volume anthology of Roald Dahl’s short stories handed down to me from my father. First up was Switch Bitch, which was amusing and disturbing in the way that all Dahl’s writing is, but also so singularly ribald I had to peek at the copyright page to see if the stories had originally been published in Playboy (answer: some of his stories were, but not these). They were enjoyable enough; the sexual politics were a bit antiquated, but each jerkwad male character reliably got his comeuppance by the end of the story. Still, by the end I needed a break from Dahl, so for my third book I embarked upon Annie Dillard’s The Living.

Now, I know Annie Dillard isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I love her nonfiction, particularly An American Childhood and The Writing Life. The Living is her one novel, and I’d long been curious about where I’d like it. When A’s mom gestured to a big bookcase last Thanksgiving and said I could have any of the books in it I wanted (she buys a lot of books to read on airplanes, because she travels almost constantly for her job, but she’s one of those people who tends to jettison them afterwards no matter how much she likes them, whereas I cling fiercely to my favorites for later rereading), The Living was one of the books I seized. Do I like it? Yes, and no, and then yes again. The book is about settlers in Washington state during the latter half of the nineteenth century, something I haven’t read much about before. It’s beautifully written and incredibly detailed, but there isn’t much narrative. So far the book has jumped impressionistically, episodically, from character to character; just when I’m settling into one story I get pulled out of it and into a new one. While Dillard does a great job of capturing the randomness and uncertainty and resignation of frontier life; the story meanders, and things just sort of happen, and a lot of people die suddenly and rather horribly. It feels quite real, but it’s not exactly plot-driven. I’m not sure if the whole thing is going to be like this; some of the separate threads are starting, languidly, to intertwine. But it’s essentially just one of those books where you have to sit back and enjoy the ride, and some days I can do this and some days I can’t. It’s been slow going—I’m only about a third of the way through after several weeks of reading. I’ve considered abandoning the book, but then the next day I’ll decide I like it. Still, I keep getting distracted by every nonfiction book that comes my way (see below).

Other books I’ve read: Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT, by Jane Stern. Mostly I read it because I’m a fan of the Roadfood books Stern has written with her husband, and because from her other writing she seemed like the last person in the world who’d become an EMT. Which is pretty much the point of this nice little memoir. Next there was Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which I found fascinating. I really like reading about the weird ways in which the human mind words. Now I’m gulping down Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, which chronicles a year’s worth of meals cooked and eaten by Slater. I love this level of detail, and I like Slater’s writing (his memoir Toast is also quite good). It’s sort of a cross between Laurie Colwin’s casual, comfortable food writing and Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer.

HOUSEKEEPING VS. THE DIRT (PLUS THE HIGH WINDOW, SORT OF)

In contrast to my slow, sedate march through Mansfield Park, I gulped down Nick Hornby’s latest collection of essays from The Believer, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, in which he simply describes what he’s been reading every month. As my affection for his recent fiction wanes (I love High Fidelity and About a Boy, but do not recommend How to Be Good or Long Way Down whatsoever), my love for his recent nonfiction (Songbook, The Polysyllabic Spree) has increased to the point that I think I would enjoy seeing him write on any topic, no matter how mundane. If he started a blog describing what he ate for breakfast every day, I would read it. Luckily, though, he writes about books, which are plenty interesting.

The second book of my Reading Project, after Mansfield Park, was originally listed as Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. After all Austen’s talk of balls and barouches, I was excited to read something in which hardened cynics seduce and shoot at each other, but when I sat down to start The High Window yesterday, I realized…I’ve already read it! I’m not sure how this oversight was made, but at least now that I’ve typed up all my annual “Books read” lists in a searchable Word file, you can be assured it shouldn’t happen again (ha! my dorkitude has a practical application!). On the one hand, I was relieved to be able to remove a book from my too-long list, but on the other hand, I was a little disappointed. I love the Chandler I’ve read (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, Pulp Stories, and, it turns out, The High Window) and had been looking forward to reading another one. Of course, I realize I could just go ahead and reread The High Window, especially considering I don’t really remember what happens in it, but—there’ll be time for that another year, though probably not before I finally get around to reading the rest of Chandler’s oeuvre. In the meantime, I’ll just be pleased that I got to revisit all the funny cracks at the beginning of the book about how hot it is in Pasadena, which I wouldn’t have found as funny the first time I read them, in 2001, before I lived here. Also, it is impossible not to enjoy great lines like this:

She laughed suddenly and then she belched. It was a nice light belch, nothing showy, and performed with easy unconcern. “My asthma,” she said carelessly. “I drink this wine as medicine. That’s why I'm not offering you any.” I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn’t hurt her asthma.

MANSFIELD PARK

I finished Mansfield Park, hooray! In the end, it wasn’t too bad—I’d rank it well below my faves Persuasion (bittersweet, romantic, mature), Pride and Prejudice (an all-around perfectly written book), and Emma (fun and funny), but above Northanger Abbey at least (not sure where Sense and Sensibility fits in this ranking—my memories of the book might be burnished by the great movie version). If I were Jane Austen’s editor, I would have told her to cut the length down a bit, especially in the first half. The book is divided into two very distinct parts, and the first part is rather perplexing because the main character is barely in it at all. The book starts to seem like an ensemble piece focusing on the antics of the supporting characters; there are whole multi-page stretches where Fanny doesn’t speak or move or think, and the narration doesn’t even seem to be from her point of view. Finally, in the second half, the story kicks into what for Austen is high gear, with some attempted engagements, a trip to Portsmouth, an illness, and a scandal, and Fanny does take center stage, or at least finally exerts a point of view. But overall, infamously, Fanny is a very passive main character. In fact, after I finished the book and was fishing around online for some literary criticism, I came across this brilliantly tongue-in-cheek note on the definitive Jane Austen website, The Republic of Pemberley:

The heroine of Mansfield Park has always been a controversial topic on AUSTEN-L, and we have had periodic “Fanny Price wars,” which one should avoid exacerbating needlessly and gratuitously. Therefore if you have just subscribed, and are new to the list, then it would be advisable, before you post any standing questions or urgent reflections about Miss Price, to take into account the current state of any discussions of the topic on the list, and especially whether or not a “Fanny Price war” has just ended (in such a case, your posting may serve to fan the dying embers of argument into fresh flames, just when many list members were beginning to breathe a sigh of relief)…Meanwhile, you should be careful about casually throwing around words such as the following in reference to Miss Price: “insignificant,” “moralizing prig,” “feeble,” “dull,” or “nebbish”—not because these are necessarily objectively wrong, but because on AUSTEN-L they are what the U.S. Supreme court has termed “fighting words.”

Hee. I’ll steer clear of “moralizing prig,” but my main problem with Fanny is that she’s just too good. In other Austen books, the main character is flawed but lovable, and the story follows her as she learns to understand and overcome her mistakes, and ultimately redeems herself. Emma learns not to be such a busybody, Elizabeth learns not to be so prejudiced, etc. Fanny doesn’t really learn anything because except that she’s been right all along about pretty much everything. She’s righter than all the rest of the characters (righter even than the reader, who’s certainly tempted to find the Crawfords charming), she suffers until everyone else realizes she’s right, and then she marries the only person in the book who’s been almost as right as she. Having a main character who’s so morally upright from the get-go, and quiet and inactive to boot, strikes a serious blow to the narrative development. Perhaps because of this, Mansfield Park isn’t a very funny or warm book—it’s solemn, rather judgmental. Even trying to place myself in an early-nineteenth-century mindset, I had trouble viewing some behaviors are harshly as the novel seemed to want me to. Also? Not one bit romantic. The man Fanny loves is her cousin, Edmund, who is practically a brother to her for most of the book, as well as being morally rigid, and there’s little or no chemistry between them. We’re even robbed of any scene where they finally declare their love for each other; we’re simply told that after Edmund has been foolishly duped and dumped by the naughty—but much more lively than anyone else in the book—Mary Crawford, he realizes the error of his ways and, almost as an afterthought, marries nice Fanny. Zzzzz.

Nonetheless, the book is still Jane Austen, and thus well-written, amusing, and acutely observed. Many of the scenes of flirtation and folly ring vividly true, and once she finally got noticed in the second half of the book, I did have some sympathy for Fanny. In fact, I started thinking that maybe the sharp disparity between the two halves of the book is intentional; there are so many scenes in the first half where Fanny is deliberately overlooked and neglected by her friends and family, where she simply watches the silliness unfold around her while people forget she’s even there, that maybe it makes sense that the narrative practically forgets her too. In the second half of the book, as the cousins who’ve overshadowed her get married, disperse to other cities, and prepare for careers, Fanny comes into her own—attends a ball, is befriended (albeit by Mary Crawford, for Mary’s own selfish reasons) gains and rejects a suitor, is visited by her brother, is allowed by her uncle (for the first time in over 10 years) to visit her parents and other siblings, and finally (after everyone else in the book has proven themselves flawed and misled) gets the attention of Edmund. The more we see of her, the more our sympathy for her grows. It’s a clever device, but it doesn’t quite make up for the fact that most of the action happens around or away from her, and that she takes very little action of her own.

Side note: I now think Filch’s cat in the Harry Potter books, Mrs. Norris, must be named after the loathsome Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park. If so, nice intertextual ref, J.K. Rowling!

FLAPPER (PLUS A MANSFIELD PARK PREVIEW)

For nonfiction, I (along with K, S, and Librarian A) have been reading Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. Unfortunately, although it’s anecdotally interesting and the author draws some pretty interesting cause-and-effect connections between broad social trends, it’s not terribly well written overall. I am still seething because within the first 20 pages, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s accent is described as a “flat Minnesotan burr.” Can I just point out that Merriam-Webster describes “burr” as “a trilled uvular \r\ as used by some speakers of English especially in northern England and in Scotland”? There is nothing, absolutely nothing burr-like about the Minnesotan accent. (I would hesitate to even call it flat, considering the “o”s are deep enough to fall into, but that’s personal opinion.) Maybe I should just blame the editor, considering that later in the book O. Henry’s name is for some reason written “O’Henry.” The Irish and the Scots are just sneaking into this book at every turn! Still, I shouldn’t nitpick. There’s a lot of fun, juicy gossip and interesting social commentary in the book—plus I learned that the Fitzgeralds’ drink of choice was, of all things, gin and tomato juice. Ew!

For fiction, I’m about halfway through Mansfield Park, as is friend AH, with whom I am reading and discussing long-distance. I’m going to have to write an entire separate treatise on this later, but let me just say that it’s a very oddly structured book. And it strangely complements Flapper. You might not think there would be a lot of overlap between a book in which Zelda Fitzgerald pins mistletoe to her ass and one in which people spend entire chapters discussing who should ride in the barouche to view the landscape improvements at a gentleman’s manor, but for one thing, Mansfield Park contains a bona fide dirty joke—a pun, in reference to admirals of the British navy, on the words “rear” and “vice.” According to my edition’s end notes, it’s fully as dirty as it sounds. Jane, you naughty girl, you!

MORE MISCELLANY

I read Calvin Trillin’s sweet, funny, sad little tribute to his late wife, About Alice, and a recently-rediscovered favorite childhood book, Betsy’s Up-and-Down Year by Anne Pellowski. (Does anyone else remember these books, about Polish-American girls growing up during various time periods on farms near Winona, Minnesota? Other titles include Willow Wind Farm: Betsy’s Story, and Stairstep Farm: Anna Rose’s Story.) I’m still working on Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, and have been suckered into reading yet another shiny new library book, Simon Winder’s fizzy and fascinating The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond, which examines James Bond in his sociopolitical context; i.e., the fall of the British empire. I’m really enjoying it—I expected it to be entertaining, but am surprised to also find it so enlightening.

JANUARY MISCELLANY

January 19: This week, I started reading the last two library books that stand between me and Reading Project 2007. Luckily, they’re both great, so I can’t resent them. At home, I’m reading Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, and as always, marveling at how he conveys his opinions with such clarity and efficiency without sacrificing humor or intelligence or enthusiasm. On my lunch breaks, I’m being steadily amazed by Dave Eggers’ gorgeous, egoless, truly heartbreaking What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee. Even if you’re an Eggers hater (I’m not, but I know they’re out there), it’s worth reading.

Though I may not get going on it for another week or so, I’ve posted my 2007 reading list so you can follow along (ha) at home. Also, just in case anyone was waiting for incontrovertible, quantitative proof of my dorkitude, here it is: I have created an Excel bar graph of my annual reading volume for the last 13 years. I don’t know…I was curious, and I had the data, and I like to play with Excel, so why not? Looking at the dips and spikes is pretty funny. Lord knows what I was doing with 106 books in 1994, my junior year of high school—they were just shorter than what I read now, I hope, because I’m pretty sure I had homework, extracurricular activities, a boyfriend, and at least a semblance of a social life at the time. The numbers sink their lowest during my later college years; ironically, I was reading more then than at any other point in my life, but they were massive books (Barnaby Rudge, anyone?) and writing papers about all of them detracted from my recreational reading time. (Still, I managed to hold my own somewhat while working boring jobs during my idle J-terms and summers, much as my dad made his way through thousands of paperbacks, carrying them around in his back pocket, during a stint as a hospital orderly post-college.) The numbers rise after graduation, dip mysteriously in 2003, then become consistently middling starting in 2004, the point at which I moved in with a boy and two cats who can all be highly (though adorably) distracting.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out right now how to paste said graph into this post. Perhaps on Monday, after a weekend of fun (I have many happy social plans, hooray), my mind will be fresher.

January 26: I had a highly uneventful week, mostly due to the fact that I’ve spent all my free time with my nose buried in What Is the What—both because it’s riveting and because I have to return it to the library tomorrow. During the time that I’ve been reading it, it’s been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor it fully deserves. (Also nominated? One of my favorite books of last year, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

THE READING PROJECT, PHASE 2

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

1. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen***
2. Switch Bitch, by Roald Dahl***
3. Someone Like You, by Roald Dahl***
4. Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected, by Roald Dahl**
5. The Living, by Annie Dillard****
6. A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
7. The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
8. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
9. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett**
10. The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett***
11. Ripley’s Game, by Patricia Highsmith***
12. The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson****
13. Stanley Park, by Timothy Taylor*
14. The Return of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse***
15. Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, by P.G. Wodehouse***
16. Spring Fever, by P.G. Wodehouse***
17. The Butler Did It, by P.G. Wodehouse***

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