I am going to try once again to resurrect this goddamned blog. I’m getting quite a bit of reading done right now, and I’ve undertaken a bit of a project: I am going through my pile of unread books, which numbers in the hundreds (seriously, there may be over a thousand books in this house that I have not read), in more or less alphabetical order. “More or less” because I don’t have to finish all of the As, I just have to read an A author, then move on to a B, etc. I have my books shelved in a way that makes this fairly easy: post-19th century fiction is all shelved together in alphabetical order, but there is nowhere near enough room on the shelves for all the books, so the ones I haven’t read are stacked in front of the shelved books. (Since I have too many books, possibly I should also undertake to ditch one or two every time I finish one.)

I am allowed to take breaks for pre-19th century fiction or even nonfiction, but I am not allowed to buy anything new except for book club. And then only if I can’t get it from the library.

We’ll see how this goes. Currently working on “Alexie, Sherman,” which was a great first choice.

Divisidero. I read this for my new book club, and I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand I think his writing is beautiful, and I liked the two stories fine. I think I understood what he was doing with the divided stories, but I was less certain that he’d pulled it off — in the end I just didn’t feel that they’d meshed very well.

I also had a lot of nitpicky complaints about the first half of the novel, which is set in a time and place with which I am pretty familiar. The ice storm in Petaluma felt wrong to me; I know it was supposed to be a “freak” storm, but seriously, he might as well have thrown in a rain of frogs. Claire was far too young to have had polio as a child. Nobody would stop for lunch in Carmichael. And I really wish there had been no mention of a California public defender’s office, or defense investigators, because the total unreality of those elements really took me out of the story.

Those little nitpicks made it hard for me to be fair to the novel as a whole. I found myself distrusting the part of the novel that is set in France, and feeling that it was overly romanticized and possibly anachronistic, when really I just wanted to let go and enjoy the damn book. I’m not sure how much of that was Ondaatje’s fault and how much was mine, but either way I was a bit disappointed.

I do want to read The English Patient now; the only Ondaatje I’ve read before this was a book of poetry and that short novella about the jazz musician.

So I took a break from this site, and then I went and had a baby, and in very short order I became very tired of board books and old women whispering “hush.” So I’m going to try this again, but with no attempt to keep track of every single thing I read. We’ll see what happens.

And comments are unbroken, for whatever that’s worth.

Jeremy intentionally broke the comments on this site because the comment spam was killing the server. We have a couple of different spam catchers installed, but that doesn’t lessen the load on the server from the spammers trying to get through. I don’t know how long this will last but for now, no comments. Sorry.

(It’s not like I was saying anything fascinating, anyway!)

I have a friend who is going to be on bed rest for the next several months, and she has asked to borrow some books. I have a whole lot of books, in a whole lot of genres, and I have already picked out a few. But I have never been incapicated for any length of time so I don’t really know what would appeal to me under those circumstances.

I don’t know her reading tastes in any detail, but I know that she likes Faulkner, she loves Walker Percy, she liked The Kite Runner, and she likes The Lord of the Rings. Those are pretty broad English-majory tastes so I am thinking that any literary fiction with a good story has a reasonable chance of working for her.

If I were on bed rest I think I’d enjoy Robertson Davies, so I am throwing in The Deptford Trilogy. She likes southern lit and I figure she might need some filler between novels, so I was going to throw in short stories by Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty. She’s probably read a lot of those but sometimes short stories are good for re-reading.

What do you think? Name some titles or authors and I will see if I have them.

End in Tears. I know I said I was over her, but I’ve had a really bad year and I’ve needed some escapist reading, and when I saw that she had a new Wexford mystery out I thought I’d give it another try. And I’m mostly glad that I did. Despite my occasional irritation with Rendell’s provincialism, Wexford is my favorite fictional detective. (That “fictional” qualifier probably sounds ridiculous if you don’t know that my dad is a retired detective!) Dalgliesh and Lynley are all well and good, but they are a little cold for my taste. I like Wexford, I like his family, and I like the other detectives, although I wish Rendell would lay off the crazy feminist one. I guessed the solution to the mystery within the first hour or so of the audiobook, but guessing the solution to mysteries is what I do, so that doesn’t necessarily mean the mystery sucks.

In this case, though, my early guess was confirmed for me at every turn in the novel, due to an issue that does mean that the mystery sucks, because that confirmation was supplied by something that I think is a fairly serious flaw in this novel. This flaw has to do with the subject matter and the portrayal of a particular category of women. I am not going to post any actual spoilers, but if you are a Rendell fan and plan to read this one no matter what, you should probably skip the rest of this post until after you read it, because my complaints will reveal some stuff that is probably better if it unfolds as you go. So here’s your warning: don’t read any further if you don’t want to know.

A large portion of the plot concerns infertility, childlessness, fertility treatment, adoption, and surrogacy. So this is probably not a novel that you want to read if you are looking for a break from thinking about that particular set of issues.

But the problem is not just that the issues are there; the problem is that Rendell is so nasty about childless women. She is nasty about women who can’t have children, about women who are too old to have children, even about women who just want to have children. Every such woman in the book is portrayed as dangerously crazy and incredibly stupid, willing to buy into any scam, however obvious and outlandish. The infertile woman are pathetic and shrill; the kindest thought any other character spares for them is condescending pity. Mostly they are treated with contempt by Rendell, by the other characters, and by the plot itself.

Whatever bug Rendell has up her ass about infertile women bothered me enough that I went looking for Rendell’s biography online, and I couldn’t find much, no mention of marriage or children. I don’t really care whether she is writing from a position of smug superiority because she does have children, or because she doesn’t have children and doesn’t want any. The attitude in the book is still smug superiority, and it’s a mean and stupid portrayal, and it hurts the novel.

I’m not sorry that I read End in Tears, but having one sensible, not-crazy infertile woman in the bunch would have done a lot to save this book. As it is, once you’ve identified the author’s weird bias, you can pretty much guess where the plot is going. And that’s the worst thing you can ever say about a mystery novel.

While I was on my long hiatus here, there was some excitement over in my post about The Kite Runner. For a while there, I was apparently both a racist and a man.

Yesterday I accidentally signed up for a rather good deal from Audible. I’ve been an Audible subscriber for a few years now; I pay $21.95 (formerly $19.99) for two book downloads a month. It’s pretty pricey but it’s the best deal around for audiobooks if, like me, you are too impatient for libraries.

For the last six months or so, they have been trying to get me to change to a prepayment plan, where I pay for all my books for a year up front, and then immediately get all 24 book credits. It’s a good deal — you pay $229.50 instead of the $263.40 you’d pay in monthly installments, which amounts to about one month free, plus you also get 30 percent off of any books you purchase outside of the plan. I tend to only use my credits on books that cost at least $25, and I do purchase a fair number of books outside of the plan, so this is a good deal for me. But I kept not signing up, because I never had $229.50 lying around that I wanted to immediately commit to audiobooks.

But yesterday they sweetened the deal, throwing in a free two gig iPod Nano along with all the rest of it. Those are still selling for $199, so at that price it’s hard to say no. So I said yes. I don’t need a Nano; I have a third generation 20-gig iPod that still works fine, and I use a Shuffle for audiobooks, and the Nano won’t work with my iPod speakers, anyway. But my husband has no Nano. Now I am the best wife in the world.

Why am I posting this, though? Because I didn’t really mean to say yes. I clicked on the “choose this option” button, thinking that it would take me to a page to review the deal and the benefits, but instead it took me to a page that said, “Thank you. Your credit card has been charged $242.45.” (That would include shipping for the Nano.) So don’t do that unless you actually want to buy.

I don’t think the free Nano deal is available to new subscribers, but the annual plan is, minus the free device. But I also had options for lower end plans — a six month, six credit plan, or a twelve month, twelve credit plan — that came with free iPod Shuffles. It’s a good deal any way you look at it.

(Am I back to posting here? Maybe. I still haven’t been able to work out the huge amounts of comment spam this site gets, so comments will be closed for now. Not that that helps any.)

Okay, so I was gone for three or four or five months. I have decided to catch up, all at once, with short reviews of everything I’ve read in the meantime. (Or everything I can remember having read.) I considered just writing, “Sucked,” or “Didn’t suck,” for each of these, and maybe I should have stuck with that idea.

[url=http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/07/23/entertainment/e115832D96.DTL]And naturally, controversy ensues[/url]:

Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple’s “The Administration and the Fury” in its print edition — only on its Web site.

“One of the things they asked was that we didn’t have profanity or any obvious sexual content. We watch for that. But anything else, like a political subject, was funny, it was parody. … We felt that that shouldn’t be censored,” said Larry Wells, who organizes the contest with his wife, Dean Faulkner Wells, Faulkner’s niece.

The story portrays President Bush in the role of Benjy, the mentally challenged son — or, as Faulkner himself said, the “idiot” — in his 1929 novel about the wreckage of a Southern family.

The contest home page is here. But you really need to read the winning entry:

Down the hall, under the chandelier, I could see them talking. They were walking toward me and Dick s face was white, and he stopped and gave a piece of paper to Rummy, and Rummy looked at the piece of paper and shook his head. He gave the paper back to Dick and Dick shook his head. They disappeared and then they were standing right next to me.

“Georgie s going to walk down to the Oval Office with me,” Dick said.

“I just hope you got him all good and ready this time,” Rummy said.

“Hush now,” Dick said. “This aint no laughing matter. He know lot more than folks think.” Dick patted me on the back good and hard. “Come on now, Georgie,” Dick said. “Never mind you, Rummy.”

We walked down steps to the office. There were paintings of old people on the walls and the room was round like a circle and Condi was sitting on my desk. Her legs were crossed.

“Did you get him ready for the press conference?” Dick said.

“Dont you worry about him. He ll be ready,” Condi said. Condi stood up from the desk. Her legs were long and she smelled like the Xeroxed copies of the information packets they give me each day.

“Hello Georgie,” Condi said. “Did you come to see Condi?” Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled.

“Dont go messing up his hair,” Dick said. “Hes got a press conference in a few minutes.”

Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox copies coming right out of the machine. “He looks just fine,” Condi said.

A few weeks ago Monkeytoe said something on the forum to the effect that the best way to make himself lose interest in a book is to assign it to himself. Amen to that. So, instead of reading anything from my 2005 reading list, I am reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes and listening to Sense and Sensibility, which I have read at least twice before.

I’m sure I’ll read something new and challenging again someday. Right now, my brain and I are on summer vacation.

I’m still not sure. I do not have oral argument after all, but I am still not sure if I am going to take the exam. I have been swamped with work the last few weeks, spending nights and weekends finishing a Supreme Court brief rather than reading Portrait of a Lady, so I am not sure I will be ready to take the test. Fortunately all I have to do is just not show up, and I can postpone it to the fall.

It was a little dumb of me to read all the easy and compelling stuff first, I have to say. I am now stuck with Paradise Lost, The Scarlet Letter, Emerson and Thoreau, stupid fucking Billy Budd, “The Wasteland,” and Chaucer to finish in the next two weeks. Not to mention the two-thirds of the Henry James I still haven’t finished.

I did not actually fall off the face of the earth or anything. What I did was get married, go on a honeymoon, and get really sick. For a while there it was all I could do to read Anne Rice novels and drink tea. I wound up abandoning the Rushdie novel at the halfway mark, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I just ran out of time and energy.

Now school has started and I am not exactly awash with verve and enthusiasm. I have decided to drop my writing tutorial because it is going to be a huge time commitment and it is not what I wanted it to be. I thought I would be able to work on my novel in the class, but the professor is really busy this semester and has instituted extremely tight deadlines and guidelines, and is actively discouraging anyone from working on a novel in the class. I would have three tight writing deadlines, including one three weeks from now, and everything that is handed in must be complete (a complete short story, which would be fine, or a complete chapter, which is a little more problematic because my chapters are all going to be long). And you have to turn something in at each deadline, something new, and there is a maximum page limit that he is being very strict about, and mathematically it is just impossible. And it is impossible in a lot of other ways, too, and I don’t want to write three short stories this semester just to write them and meet a deadline. I’m done with that; I’m too busy and it won’t give me any pleasure. So I’m dropping the class.

All that’s left is my comp exam. “All.” Just the comp exam. I am starting to be a little bit scared, even though I’ve read everything on the list except for two short contemporary novels. I should probably have felt better when I heard people at the informational meeting last night saying that they had only heard of about a third of the novels on the list, but that just depressed me. And no, I didn’t join that study group. Holy god, no. I joined a quasi-study group made up of people who work full time and do not have time to do work for other people, so we are going to check in by e-mail and share resources as we find them but not dump a bunch of work onto one another, which is the approach advocated by our advisor.

Jeremy is taking a post-colonial lit class this semester, which is kind of fun for me. He is a computer science major but he has a couple of upper division electives to fill, so I helped him pick out an English class that I thought he might like. I based that guess on the reading list, which has since changed twice, and on the professor, whom I only know from one meeting of a class I decided not to take. But I got a good vibe from him and I still think Jeremy will enjoy the work. I hope. In any event it will be nice if our study dates just involve sitting in a coffee house reading, and he doesn’t have to sit there and do math or something awful like that. And Jeremy has felt a little more confident about the class ever since the professor asked how many people had heard of the Booker prize, and Jeremy was the only person to raise his hand.

I am not allowed to know who is on the exam committee (since I am not doing a thesis I don’t choose my own committee; I get a list compiled by a secret cabal, and the cabal then scores my test without knowing my name until it’s over) but I am about eighty percent sure that his post-colonial lit professor is one of the three, and I am about ninety percent sure that another one is my Faulkner professor. (Linda Hogan on the exam list: that is the tip-off.) I am crazy about her as a professor, but she is a really tough grader, and it occurs to me that I actually could fail this fucker. I don’t think I will, but it could happen. Or I could pass without honors, which would make me sad. Because, dude: some people have only heard of a third of the novels on the list?

The third reader is a mystery to me. I actually think it could be my grad advisor, but he says no. I think he might be lying, though. Seamus Heaney is on the list, too. I have no idea who teaches Heaney. And I am not sure why I am obsessing about who is on the committee, because what I am going to do, offer them money, chocolate, or blowjobs for a passing grade? It is all pointless.

Anyway. I am back from the land of the half-dead honeymooners, but I am not sure how much I will be posting here. I have made a vow that between now and exam time I am only reading books for my test and maybe the occasional Mayfair witch novel (and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, if I ever finish it), and I am not sure how much you want to hear about that. I will post here if I have something to say, how is that?

It’s that time again. The 2005 list looks a lot like the 2004 list except it’s much longer. Hopefully there will be some deletions in the next month if I actually manage to knock a few more off last year’s list. I didn’t do very well this year, mostly because I took writing classes that left me without any time to read. Normally I read about 85 books a year but this year I am not sure I’ll make it to 60 books. But hey, I read Ulysses, and that should count as nine or ten books all by itself.

Next year I’ll be taking my comprehensive exam, hence all the retreads on this list. I’m also deleting a few from 2004 that are just not appealing to me at the moment. The items in bold are new additions for 2005; the unbolded items are pulled in from the 2004 list.

1. Alai, Red Poppies
2. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
3. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
4. W.H. Auden, Selected Poems (Review)
5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Review)
6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Review)
7. James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
8. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Review)
9. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
10. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
11. Camilo Jose Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte
12. Chang Ta-chun, Wild Kids
13. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Review)
14. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Review)
15. Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
16. William Congreve, The Way of the World (Review)
17. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
18. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Review)
19. Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (Review)
20. John Donne, Selected Poems (Review)
21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
22. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Review)
23. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
24. T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems (Review)
25. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
26. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” and Other Essays (Review)
27. William FaulknerAs I Lay Dying (Review)
28. William Faulkner, The Hamlet
29. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Review)
30. Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz
31. Glen Gold, Carter Beats the Devil (Review)
32. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
33. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Review)
34. Heaney, Selected Poems (A reread)
35. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms Review
36. Hsiao Li-Hung, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers
37. Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God Review
38. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (Review)
39. Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man
40. James Joyce, Dubliners (Review)
41. John Keats, Selected Poems (Review)
42. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
43. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
44. Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
45. David Lodge, Nice Work Review
46. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (Review)
47. Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Review)
48. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Review)
49. Toni Morrison, Beloved (A reread) (Review)
50. Ovid, Metamorphoses
51. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
52. Annie Proulx, Postcards
53. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Review
54. Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order : A Romance of Souls
55. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
56. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
57. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Review)
58. Sam Shephard, True West (A reread)
59. Steven Sherrill, Visits from the Drowned Girl
60. Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
61. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
62. Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems (A reread) (Review)
63. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
64. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems (Review)
65. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Review)
66. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Review)
67. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
68. Wang Chen-Ho, Rose, Rose, I Love You
69. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
70. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (Review)
71. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Review)
72. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Review)
73. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
74. William Wordsworth, Selected Poems (Review)
75. W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems (Review)

I found this brief biography of Toscana and liked this description of his writing:

David Toscana describes his narrative aesthetics as “realismo desquiciado” (t: unrestrained realism) which breaks with magic realism. Neither rhyme nor reason determine his protagonists’ actions – what goes on in their world takes place in the imagination alone, albeit as an exchange between life and fiction unfolding on more than one level.

I realize his books are out of print in the U.S., and my school library at least doesn’t carry any of them, translated or not. Our local library has two English translation copies of Tula Station, though, as well as one in Spanish, and one translated copy of Our Lady of the Circus. And Amazon has a bazillion used copies.

Just continuing on my mission to make everyone read the books I like. What, you’d rather wait to see what Oprah is reading next?