NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 1

Having chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my February read, I put the Penguin edition on hold at the library, and when I received it I was disappointed to see that it was the movie tie-in edition (always more embarrassing to carry around, plus it warps my vision of the characters, so that Wackford Squeers is always Jim Broadbent and Nicholas is that cute British guy from Undeclared, which I guess is not too much of a problem now that I think about it). Instead of being written by a Dickens scholar, the introduction was by Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter/director of the film. Luckily, McGrath is a smart, nimble writer who charmingly details the agonizing process of distilling such a rich novel into a short screenplay: “Most readers begin a new chapter with the hope that it will have something interesting in it. I often kicked off a new chapter with the hope that it contained something boring I could remove.” In doing so, he sums up the themes of the book more clearly than many literary critics would be capable of.

McGrath says (brilliantly, I think), “Given the astonishing fact that Dickens wrote Pickwick and Twist simultaneously, Nicholas Nickleby is their love child: it merges the wandering, comic qualities of the first with the gothic social vision of the second.” Honestly, I was a little worried about that “wandering” bit. Combined with the description on the back of the book, it made me downright twitchy: “Nicholas Nickleby’s loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century.” Ack, the P-word! Give me something described as picaresque, and nine times out of ten I’ll hate it. Sure, I found Candide, Don Quixote, and Moll Flanders intermittently amusing, at least conceptually, but in practice they left me cold. And bored. I like a good plot, and it’s the Victorian-melodrama aspect of Dickens that appeals to me.

Luckily, so far I’m liking NN. The only time the P-word sprung to mind was in Chapter 6, when the coach crashes on the way to Yorkshire, and the passengers engage in a little impromptu storytelling session, a la The Canterbury Tales. We are treated to two random stories that are completely irrelevant to the story and drag on for about 15 pages. The endnotes observe that “Dickens seems to have inserted this…as a means of filling out the second number,” or installment, of NN. McGrath more charitably calls them “the literary equivalent of bonus tracks.” I skimmed them. As long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m OK.

NN high points so far:

• Dickens’s famously concise summary in Chapter 1 of how Nicholas’s father was financially ruined by poor investments: “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stockbrokers took villa residences in Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined.”

• Chapter 2, which hilariously brings to mind the 1990s dot-com boom (new, ludicrously named companies springing up every day, making sweeping claims to lure stockholders and boost share prices until the bubble bursts) and takes full advantage of the comic potential of the word “muffin” while describing the joint-stock meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company:
  
  “The honourable gentleman made a speech which drew tears from the eyes of the ladies, and awakened the liveliest emotions in every individual present. He had visited the homes of the poor in the various districts of London, and had found them destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin…. He had found that among muffin sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy…. He had found the same vices among the poorer class of people who ought to be muffin consumers, and this he attributed to the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in intoxicating liquors.”
  
  Then an Irishman gets up “with such a speech as only an Irish member can make, breathing the true soul and spirit of poetry, and poured forth with such fervour, that it made one warm to look at him; in the course whereof he told them how he would demand the extension of that great boon to his native country; how he would claim for her equal rights in the muffin laws as in all other laws; and how he yet hoped to see the day when crumpets should be toasted in her lowly cabins, and muffin bells should ring in her rich green valleys.”

• The delightful description of Squeers in Chapter 4 (even if, as the endnotes tell me, Dickens did crib it from Sheridan): “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.”

• Dickens’s description of the poor, neglected students of Dotheboys Hall in Chapter 8 is a tour de force: “Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long, meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies . . . there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding there!”
  
  Wow.

DICKENSMANIA!

Month of Chabon is over, and I consider it a great success. I read four great books—three new to me, and one reconfirmed as a favorite. I would have liked to revisit Wonder Boys (or at least rewatch the movie), but now I’ve got bigger fish to fry. 700-page-long fish, to be exact.

A brief history of my relationship with Dickens: My dad loves Dickens. He reads a Dickens novel every year, in order of publication. He’s being doing this as long as I can remember, and he’s restarting the cycle anew with The Pickwick Papers this year, so I figure he’s read each of the 14 novels at least two or three times, if not more. When I was a kid, he read me A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers, and I adored them. (This amazes me a little now, because I picked up Pickwick a couple of years ago and could barely get through the first few chapters. That puppy is loooong and meandering. I figured Dad must have skipped some stuff to keep his 10-year-old audience interested, but he swears he read it to me the whole way through, every single word. I would be curious to know how long it took to read that entire book aloud, in 30-minute nightly increments.) I revisited Oliver Twist and Great Expectations a couple of times for assignments in high school and college, and added Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times to my repertoire during my English-major years, and each time I was reminded how much I enjoy reading Dickens (in contrast to my classmates, some of whom were less than thrilled about it). But I’ve never read Dickens for pleasure, under my own steam, until now.

I thought I’d kick things off by reading a Dickens biography to put things in context. I sought out the definitive bios, only to realize that—duh!—they’re thousands of pages long. Plan B: Jane Smiley’s 200-page Charles Dickens, part of the Penguin Lives series. While it’s got less trivia than I’d like (the only factoid I’ve picked up so far is that Dickens’s recreational daily strolls sometimes clocked in at 20 to 30 miles), it also dispenses with all the grindingly dull detail (I’ve read way too many bios that begin by profiling the subject’s parents, grandparents, or even more distant ancestors for 20 pages or more) and cuts right to what I need: a decent overview of Dickens’s life, organized more thematically than strictly chronologically, with emphasis on analyzing the novels. Smiley is affectionate without being overly reverent—she seems as annoyed as I am with the fact that Dickens seemed to blame his wife for their enormous quantity of children and her subsequent health problems and recurrent postpartum depression. Still, Smiley manages to be fair and insightful to both sides, succinctly summing up the troubled marriage as follows:

Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. [To Dickens] a good life is a busy one; an idle life is boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine, But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.”

For the novel itself, I’ve chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my assignment for February. About all I knew about the book before I started was that (1) It’s so long and dense that the Royal Shakespeare Company famously adapted it into a stage play lasting nine hours, and (2) I really enjoyed the 130-minute 2003 movie. I picked it because I was curious about all the stuff that must have been cut from the book to make the movie, and also because Smiley describes it as the “first wide-ranging ‘Dickensian’ novel,” “a lively and entertaining reading experience,” “ebullient,” “bright,” and “high-spirited.” Sounds like fun, right? Stay tuned for my thoughts on the first 150 pages later today.

BOOKS TO FILM: THE GOLDEN COMPASS AND MANSFIELD PARK

The Golden Compass finally moved to the cheap theater (now just $3, yay!), so A and I went to see it. Not having read the books, he thought it was OK, but I kept writhing and smacking my forehead so much I think he wanted to smother me with his coat. It wasn’t a total loss—everything looked just as I’d envisioned it while reading, and the casting was brilliant. Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, and the girl who played Lyra were especially perfect, and you could play “Spot the famous British actor” throughout—Derek Jacobi! Christopher Lee! The voice of Ian McKellen! I thought Freddie Highmore was too squeaky as Pan’s voice, but at least we got Kathy Bates for Hester. I’m not usually a fan of CGI talking animals, but the daemons and armored bears were very well rendered. The plot, however, was a mess—hamhanded and dumbed down. I’d been prepared for the dilution of the (anti)religious themes, but not for the watering-down of everything else. Small examples: in the movie Iorek Byrnison is exiled from Svalbard for losing a fight with another bear, rather than for killing another bear in a fight. (Why? Were the filmmakers afraid of making him too scary or unsympathetic?) And he doesn’t eat Iofur Raknison’s heart after killing him, although at least they left in the jaw-ripping-off part (ew! and awesome!). One of the things I loved most about the book is that nothing is overly explained; you experience and learn things from Lyra’s point of view over time. In the movie, there was lots of very clumsy exposition, some of it in the form of Old Evil British Guys Talking, which was not only annoyingly non-Lyra-POV, but boring for kids as well. And although I knew going in that the downer ending of the book was going to be saved for the next movie (which I think is perfectly fair—the Lord of the Rings movies did it effectively enough), now that I know there’s not likely to be a sequel (since The Golden Compass wasn’t a hit), I wish they’d just gone for it. The film’s ending was dreadfully bland and toothless, especially if you’ve read the books. Overall, it seemed like the filmmakers were afraid of their material—I think they wanted to adapt the book so they could show a lot of cool computer-generated animals, and then they realized they’d have to wince and duck all the inconvenient story details. (Still, I reread The Subtle Knife the next day, remembered I like it even more than the first book, and found myself totally yearning for a second movie—for one thing, Sam Elliott got totally robbed of Lee Scoresby’s big scene!)

And given my Mansfield Park angst last year, of course I had to watch the new PBS adaptation. Surprisingly, I liked it. It made me appreciate the story more. It was snappy and streamlined (though I was sorry to get the Portsmouth part get cut), and I think the morality-play aspects were easier to watch than to read. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way in conveying why certain people in the book are supposed to be good and others are supposed to be “bad” (but seem way more fun than the goodniks—I’m looking at you, Crawfords). I really enjoyed the portion of the film after Mary and Henry show up and all the young people start flirting and running amuck—I even laughed aloud a couple of times. Also, I loved Pug. However: While I figured they’d have to change Fanny’s personality to make her more likable and less passive, did she have to run all the time? In the book she’s practically an invalid and it’s a big deal when she has to walk a quarter-mile, and in the movie she’s manically racing all over the place, romping with children, dancing, and playing badminton, for pete’s sake. A slight adjustment to her character would be fine—no need to bend over backwards and make her a freakin’ tomboy. Also, I know Mansfield Park isn’t the most romantic of Austen novels, but the adaptation went a bit overboard to rectify that at the end, with about 10 minutes of longing glances over the breakfast table, gooey confessions of love, kissyface, and wedding frolicking. It didn’t work for me…although maybe that’s because A (who tuned in halfway through) was so repulsed: “But…they’re cousins! They were raised as brother and sister!” Yeah, no matter how cute and nice you make Edmund and however much you amp up the romance, that’s a hard detail to overcome.

By the way, is anyone else cranky about the new Masterpiece Theater format? Television Without Pity’s Blogfile nails it in the fittingly titled entry “Goddammit, PBS!”:

Oh, sorry, it’s Masterpiece now, isn't it? What—the second word was too much to handle? We live in such an impatient blog-ridden society that no one can manage to wait around for a two-word title? Wait, I know—it was the use of “Theatre” and not the Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and E.M. Forster that made the series seem too intellectual for all those PBS-watching theatre-phobes. Like Masterpiece alone is so much better. It’s just hanging out there all cold and unfinished. “Masterpiece” what? Society? Barbecue Sauce?

GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD/SUMMERLAND

As the Month of Chabon goes on, my esteem for him continues to grow; I’ve definitely crossed over from casual reader to actual fan. Is there no genre he can’t take on? Thanks to Editor A, who recommended it and lent it to me, I greatly enjoyed Gentlemen of the Road, aka “Jews With Swords” (in the Afterword, which is genius in and of itself, Chabon claims this was the book’s original title). It’s a brief, swashbuckling illustrated adventure tale that (although it contains no magic) somehow pleasantly reminded me of the Judith Tarr fantasy novels (particularly the “Hound and the Falcon” and “Avaryan Rising” trilogies) I loved as a teenager, even down to certain plot points. I’m very curious to know whether Chabon ever read them, or if the similarity is just a coincidence of genre. Now I’m rereading Summerland and still think it’s a near-perfect young adult novel. Though I’ve now caught up with all Chabon’s major works (I’ve left his two short-story collections unread, as well as the two McSweeney’s anthologies he edited), I’ll be sorry for the month to end. Can’t wait to see what his next novel is like!

THE FINAL SOLUTION/THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION

January is Michael Chabon month, and I am enjoying it greatly so far. I kicked off with a novella called The Final Solution, which imagines a very elderly Sherlock Holmes (though his name is never mentioned) unraveling a mystery in the 1940s. As the title cleverly implies, the Holocaust overshadows the story and its central mystery. This was a slam-dunk for me, as I’ve read a lot of Holmes stories recently and also greatly enjoyed Julian Barnes’ novel Arthur & George, in which the “Arthur” is Conan Doyle; I also tend to be fascinated with the ’40s. I would highly recommend this bittersweet little book, and the only reason I didn’t give it four stars is that I kept wishing it was longer.

Now I’m nearly halfway through Chabon’s newest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I can only describe as “Jewish Raymond Chandler in Alaska.” It’s set in an intriguing alternate-history version of the world, has an alluringly mysterious plot (nothing grabs me like a mystery, honestly), and is wonderfully written. Even the descriptive asides make me sit up and take notice. I’m exhilarated. Most of what I read is pretty good, or at least decent, but I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to read something really good.

After this, I may read one of Chabon’s short-story collections, Werewolves in Their Youth, but I’m kind of itching to reread both Summerland and Wonder Boys, two books I remember really loving. (I also loved Kavalier and Clay, but it’s too long for me to realistically tackle in half a month. I did not love and will not be rereading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, though I’m tempted to take a peek and see if it still bears a striking, disappointing resemblance to The Secret History, which as an adolescent favorite still holds a very cherished place in my heart.) Chabon’s awfully prolific, though—I could also read his swashbuckling serial Gentlemen of the Road, his early short-story collection A Model World, or the two anthologies he’s edited for McSweeney’s. Guess I’ll just see what I feel like. But regardless, I have a hunch it’s going to be a good year for reading.

THE READING PROJECT, PHASE 3

THE GOAL: Devote each month to reading the works of a different author.

January: Michael Chabon
1. The Final Solution****
2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union****
3. Gentlemen of the Road***½
4. Summerland*****

February/March: Charles Dickens
1. Charles Dickens, by Jane Smiley***
2. Nicholas Nickleby****
3. David Copperfield***½

April: Raymond Chandler
1. The Lady in the Lake***½
2. The Little Sister***
3. The Long Goodbye****
4. Playback***

May: Annie Dillard
1. The Maytrees**
2. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek***

June: Vladimir Nabokov
1. Lolita****

July: Patricia Highsmith
1. Strangers on a Train***
2. The Boy Who Followed Ripley***
3. Ripley Under Water****

August: Mark Twain
1. Huckleberry Finn****

September: Elizabeth von Arnim
1. Christopher and Columbus*****

October onward: P.G. Wodehouse
1. Thank You, Jeeves***
2. P.G. Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum***
3. Right Ho, Jeeves*****
4. The Code of the Woosters*****
5. Joy in the Morning****
6. The Mating Season*****
7. Bertie Wooster Sees It Through***
8. Jeeves in the Offing****
9. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves*****
10. Jeeves and the Tie That Binds****
11. The Cat-Nappers***

* = Didn’t like, didn’t finish
** = OK, but wouldn’t reread
*** = Liked it
**** = Really liked it
***** = Loved it

2007 IN BOOKS

Tremble before my Excel prowess!

Overall, I was disappointing with my reading last year. Not really with the quantity—though, as my handy pink chart of extreme nerdliness demonstrates, it was one of my lower-performing years in recorded history—but with the quality. I enjoyed the books I read, at least while I was reading them, and I don’t think there were any (or many) I would describe as truly awful or worthless, but few stuck with me, at least on the deep, heart-and-soul OMG-I-love-this-book level. In fact, I was almost hard-pressed to pick just 10 for my top books of the year. Of course Harry Potter rocked my world and Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby, Connie Willis, and Calvin Trillin remained reliable Gintastic-pleasers, but I think the only honest-to-god blissful sense of surprise and discovery I felt was for The Prestige (with the runner-up being What Is the What, which was so much more mature and moving than any of Eggers’ previous work). When I read a book I love that much, I actually have to remind myself to focus on reading it, because part of my mind is already looking forward to rereading it. I get briefly, secretly obsessive with things I truly love; usually it’s a new song I feel compelled to listen to again and again until I’ve memorized it, or a TV show I devour on DVD, or a movie so good I want to turn around and see it again (like Juno, which I saw with K in St. Paul on Boxing Day and then saw again with A last weekend…and then I might have bought the soundtrack, too). It’s rare, these days, that it happens with a book. I oppress myself with things I think I should read, or distract myself with things I’m mildly curious about, and it’s all very well and good but it feels more like reading a magazine than like meeting your soulmate. Last year my reading life was a bit short on soulmates, is what I’m saying.

5 FAVORITE FICTION BOOKS 2007 (in chronological order):

1. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers
2. The Living, by Annie Dillard
3. Bellwether, by Connie Willis
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
5. The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

5 FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS 2007 (in chronological order):

1. About Alice, by Calvin Trillin
2. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, by Nick Hornby
3. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, by David Kamp
4. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert
5. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

Even though I didn’t wholeheartedly love Mansfield Park, it was so fun to complete my reading of Jane Austen, to encounter that one last new-to-me book by an author I love. And that got me thinking: there are certainly many authors who I follow, reading everything they publish as it comes out, but there are many more I’ve enjoyed one or several books by, but never followed through to explore the rest of their oeuvre. I always think I will, but then some bright, shiny, new object steals my attention. So if what I feel my reading lacks is depth, why don’t I dive deep into the works of some of my possibly-favorite authors and see what else they’ve got to give me? This should appeal to me—I’m a completist who, as a child, loved nothing more than reading every book in a series and then lining them up neatly on the shelf. As a project, it has structure, but there’s room for freedom as well—I don’t have to read everything an author has ever written, just focus on him or her for a little while instead of darting all over the place in the library like a hummingbird.

So, for my Reading Project this year, I’ve selected 10 authors I want to get to know better, and I’ll devote a month to each one—with the exception of Dickens and Wodehouse, who get two months apiece (I know that unless I quit my job, just reading one Dickens novel might take me an entire month, and I’d like to read at least two; meanwhile, Wodehouse gets to stick around because I’d like to try to read all the Jeeves books, and there are 11 of them). I’ll read at least one (preferably at least two) books by that author I haven’t read before. I can also reread books I have read by them (this applies to Wodehouse, because I can never remember which Jeeves books I’ve read, so similar are they, and to Twain, whose work was mainly read to me when I was a kid, and to Dillard and Chabon, who’ve written a lot of books I’ve loved and been wanting to revisit). I can also read biographies or other nonfiction about the author in question (Editor A recommended a bio of Wodehouse I’m looking forward to, and I’m curious about Highsmith and Chandler too). I can also read whatever the hell else I want to in any spare time I have left, no matter who wrote it, because I’m not into forcing myself to read stuff. That way lies madness, or at least dissatisfaction.

The complete list of authors is here.

THE READING PROJECT LIMPS ALONG, AND OTHER STORIES

One of the things I love most about blogs is how they provide a forum for people to take on crazy projects and record their progress for others to follow. Want to see someone cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking or The French Laundry Cookbook? Walk every street in Manhattan? Spend a month living without post-1950s technology? There’s a blog for that. And while there’s nothing crazy about trying to read every book you own, I’d like the Reading Project to follow that model: a gauntlet to throw down for myself, a way to document my endeavor, a means of holding myself accountable. It worked OK last year, and even at the beginning of this year, I got a lot of mileage out of my struggles with Mansfield Park and The Living. But, let’s face it, this year’s list was more or less doomed from the get-go: too long, too repetitive (three Dahls, four Hammetts, four Wodehouses, and, my god, all of Sherlock Holmes?), a bit less meaty, maybe—full of things I solidly liked, but didn’t passionately love or hate. At times it felt like more of an endurance challenge than an intellectual one. I wanted to add a little discipline to my reading, but I didn’t want to feel so chained. I feel somewhat embarrassed about this, but am I really so compulsive that I need to make excuses to myself for not completing a project I assigned myself in the first place? Do I really need to be the valedictorian of online self-improvement projects?

I’ve already done a little damage control to the Reading Project 2007 list this year, but now I’m seriously retrenching. After reading the requisite number of pages proportionate to my age, as dictated by the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50, I’m now allowed to say “Life’s too short to keep trying to read Stanley Park.” It bored me and I’m not going to finish it. I’m not even going to start The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which I only own because A’s mom gave me a signed copy (signed by the author, that is, not A’s mom); it can keep sitting in the “to read someday” pile atop my bookcase. And there’s no way in hell all that Conan Doyle’s getting read this year. I do pledge to read the last Hammett book and the other two Wodehouses, though.

When I abandoned the sinking Reading Project, I hit the library catalog with wanton abandon. It must have been just before lunch, too, because everything I put on hold was a food book. Thanks to my inability to remember that if I put a bunch of books on hold at the same time, they’re all likely to arrive at the same time, now I’m binging on them. In the past month I’ve read:

• How to Read a French Fry: And Other Stories of Kitchen Science, by Russ Parsons (Meh. It’s a good book, and useful if you want to learn about the fundamentals of cooking, but not a lot of it was news to me and I didn’t find it inspiring. That doesn’t mean that his follow-up about fruits and veggies, How to Pick a Peach, isn’t sitting on my nightstand right now, though.)

• The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table-Hop Like a Pro, by Adam D. Roberts (Based on this blog. Again, I didn’t feel as though I learned a lot, but I like the writer’s voice and savored the book for its entertainment value. Recommended.)

• Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler (I always enjoy an anthology, I’m a big fan of eating alone, and anyway, I had to read it, since the title is lifted from one of my fave food writers, Laurie Colwin. Some of the essays were throwaways, but most were interesting and a couple were standouts, particularly one from Onion and Daily Show writer Ben Karlin, and another from Steve Almond that made me think I really should read more stuff by him—I liked Candyfreak, after all.)

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver (I just started it today, and so far it’s basically a recap of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I expect the personal narrative to take over soon and make me wish I could move to a farm in Appalachia to raise my own vegetables and chickens.)

The book I enjoyed most was not actually a food book: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’m a bit behind with this—I think it’s been on the paperback best-seller list for thirtysomething weeks, which means it probably first came out in 2005—but as usual, when books receive a lot of buzz I like to circle them warily for a few years before maybe, grudgingly, deciding to sit down and read them. (Trendseeking reader I ain’t.) Subtitled One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, this book sounded suspiciously, Oprah-ishly self-helpy. But my parents recommended it, and I kept seeing it everywhere, and it did have “Eat” in the title, so I picked it up. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s great. I’ve read a lot of food books, a lot of travel books, and a lot of memoirs about people “finding themselves,” often through undertaking some crazy project (yes, there are those crazy projects again—and yes, a lot of those books are blog spinoffs), and I freely admit that all these genres can get unbearably cheesy when followed ad nauseum. I was sure this book was going to be “Blah blah the Italian people are so passionate and boy, they really know how to eat and blah blah I found meditation and enlightenment in India and blah blah blah look how travel has healed my soul.” What sets this book apart is how well it’s written and how completely true it rings. I’d kill to write like this: so funny, so painfully sincere, so—there’s no other word for it—deep. Gilbert reminds me of Anne Lamott in that she somehow manages to write about spirituality in a way that’s beautiful and honest, but never fluffy or new-agey. It's totally bullshit-free, which I think is hard to do when writing about religion, because we all want to suck up to that higher power a little.

I’m not saying “This book changed me forever” or “This is my new favorite book,” but it reminded me that there’s more to life than lists and pasta, and I appreciated that. Maybe it’s just timing, that this book was just what I needed right now, but I found it deeply refreshing and reassuring. I read so many books and enjoy them in the moment, but they only seem skim over the top layer of my brain, and when I set them aside I forget them. Every time I read a book that really sticks with me, I’m blown away—grateful and almost disbelieving. It feels like the first time, every time.

WODEHOUSE, THE LOTTERY, AND ASSORTED OTHERS

Vacationing, plus all the accompanying plane delays, helped me get through three of the five books in my P.G. Wodehouse anthology for the Reading Project at the end of July: The Return of Jeeves (the only Jeeves novel not to feature Bertie Wooster, which was quite odd), Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, and a charming non-Jeeves book, Spring Fever. Upon returning home, I finished another Project book, Shirley Jackson’s deliciously chilling The Lottery and Other Stories. I’ve started yet another Project book, Stanley Park, which A bought for me at Powell’s in Portland a few years ago on his friend’s recommendation. I love that it’s about a chef, and the plot does contain and intriguing mystery, but I’m not a fan of the writing style, which occasionally tends toward melodrama and mysticism. Progress has been slow.

Honestly, I’m a little bummed about the Reading Project this year. Even though the books have been more uniformly fun than last year, there have also been fewer challenges and surprises. With four and a half books yet to go (plus those damn “optional” Sherlock Holmes stories), it’s feeling like a chore. I’m busily working out a radically different plan for next year’s Project, which should make it much more exciting (for me, at least). In the meantime, I’ve started dallying with library books again:

• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (fascinating)
  
• A brief scholarly tome called Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century (I’ve read about a million books on this same topic, but I like reinforcing my knowledge)
• The Museum of Hoaxes, by Alex Boese
• The Prestige, by Christopher Priest (I loved it—just as tricksy and creepy and delightful as the movie. Devoured it in just a few days.)

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.