I was enraptured when a friend sent me a link to a great profile of "daringly sensible" writer Marjorie Hillis (see Open Letters Monthly). And so it was inevitable that I would pick up one of her books; Bubbly on Your Budget (originally titled Orchids on Your Budget) was a steal on Amazon, and it's a charming little read if you need a pick-me-up and a reminder that enthusiasm and resourcefulness can be worth as much as, if not more than, a well-stocked bank account. If you're feeling low, there's no time like now to start to turn things around: although "it's both wise and courageous to live in the future now and then," Marjorie writes, "it never gets you entirely away from the present. The present ... is always with you, and every miserable day you let yourself endure is a large enough proportion of your life to be worth salvaging." Sure, some of her advice is dated, but passages like that are timeless and utterly lovely.
The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell views World War I through the lens of literature. Examining, at turns, satire, myth and ritual, theatricality, and Arcadian recourses (among other topics), Fussell interrogates the "drift of modern history," which "domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable." The catastrophe that begins this, he holds, is the Great War.
Much of my interest in the book stemmed not only from my interest in literary criticism, but also in my discovery last year of some pictures of my great-grandfather, who fought for the US during the war (one of these photos is below; he's sitting at lower left). Although he died before I was born, I've wondered how his experience influenced his life and his career as a painter; whether it's possible to "see" the imprint it had on his life in the stroke of a brush, the turn of a line, or whether that's all just an impossible grasping at straws.
The Fussell, of course, did little to answer any of those questions, but it did provide much food for thought. One of the passages that resonates in particular is the search for a rhetoric to capture the war:
... how are actual events deformed by the application to them of metaphor, rhetorical comparison, prose rhythm, assonance, alliteration, allusion, and sentence structures and connectives implying clear causality? Is there any way of compromising between the reader's expectations that written history ought to be interesting and meaningful and the cruel fact that much of what happens---all of what happens?---is inherently without 'meaning'?"
Definitely worth a read if you're interested in the period, in modernism, in patterns of thought, &c., &c.
Swim for the Little One First, Noy Holland
Wrote a review of Noy Holland's Swim for the Little One First, a collection of short stories, for Bookslut: you can find it here.
Blindness, Henry Green
I first heard of Henry Green in Carmela Ciuraru's fantastic Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. When I found a couple of books by this "writer's writer" at a thrift, I picked them up. Blindness, not one of his more heralded works, perhaps because it was his first (written in 1926), was a puzzling little thing; nothing much happens, and though it wasn't what I would call bad -- I quite liked parts of it -- I wasn't in the ecstasies that others seem to be driven to. I'll have to try out Loving, or Living, or Party Going, and see what I think of those.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple
This quick read is about an architect -- a mother -- who has lost her way and is waging a war against the yuppie scum of Seattle, of which she is nominally a part. Through a series of misunderstandings, it is decided that she needs to be committed, and she slips away, seemingly without a trace, while she excuses herself to use the bathroom during her intervention. Her husband and daughter set out to track her down, and naturally there is an excursion to Antarctica. Great pacing, immensely enjoyable, and another one to add to my list of reads involving girls behaving badly.
The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, Idries Shah
This collection of vignettes focuses on Mulla Nasrudin, "variously referred to as very stupid, improbably clever, the possessor of mystical secrets .... [an illustration of] the antics characteristic of the human mind." Although these shorts are sometimes used in Sufism for breakthroughs into "a higher wisdom," Idries Shah notes, "the Sufis concur with those who are not following a mystic way that everyone can do with the Nasrudin tales what people have done through the centuries -- enjoy them."
I found a wonderfully illustrated Picador edition at MacLeod's Books in Vancouver, BC, a used book shop well worth a stop if you're in the city. I sped through the book but dogeared several stories for rereading, for deeper contemplation.
In "Happiness is not where you seek it," Nasrudin steals a traveler's knapsack, ran ahead of him on the road, then left the bag in plain sight, for the traveler to rediscover; that he was disconsolate at losing his belongings made the joy in finding them again all the sweeter. "The value of the past" distills the teachings of a great many wise men to one word: carrots. And "The short cut" looks at what is gained and what is lost when one diverges from the well-trodden path; the way that Shah plays with words, and with one's sense of perspective, is disorienting but nonetheless rather refreshing.
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
A lovely little love story; it can be hard to stomach cancer books, but The Fault in Our Stars seemed refreshingly honest about the futility you feel in the face of disease, and the way you hold onto hope nonetheless.
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
I'm not quite sure I understand the Gone Girl phenomenon. I mean, the book was good, but not ... phenomenal? Still, I raced through the literary thriller, and though a lot about what makes for healthy relationship dynamics (it should go without saying that framing your husband for murder does not make for a nurturing bond). Debate, please: "Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous."
Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett
It was serendipity that I read this after Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?, but I couldn't have planned a better counterpoint to that book if I tried.
Like Heti, Patchett uses notes from life -- weaving Lucy Grealy's letters into her reminiscence of their friendship. It is heartbreaking (because, of course, Grealy's end is untimely), and it is hopeful: "It takes a certain amount of effort to be miserable," Patchett writes, "and another kind of effort to be happy." She chooses to try and be happy, and to build happiness into the lives of others. Watching the rises and falls, the ebbs and tides of a friendship over the years, is surprisingly poignant, and though I will not try to emulate their relationship -- that would be a folly, obviously -- there are many things to learn from Patchett's quiet wisdom.
How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti
This book seems pretty polarizing; I fall into the "love it!" camp. (OK, there are some flaws, but on the whole, I was into it.)
The prologue is particularly strong, and if I had only read that, I would still be pretty happy. "How should a person be? For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. ... in everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. ... [But how] could I know which [choice] would look best on me?"
It's been a year for questioning, and Heti's "novel from life" is a satisfying coda. What do I want? What's the one right thing I should do? How should I be?
At the end of the book, she tells the story of a gravedigger: a ditchdigger questions a gravedigger about where the man has chosen to dig:
'Right here is fine,' the gravedigger said. 'It's not the plot, it's the grave.'
The man shook his head and laughed. 'If I had your job, I'd always be asking myself which plot was best. I'd keep on switching! You'd have this whole land covered in small holes, two feet deep.'
The gravedigger nodded and smiled gently, imagining the scene---all those bodies piling up by the gates. He might have been this way, too, but long ago he realized his intelligence didn't extend so far---to know what was good from what was best---so he taught himself to dig well, and did."
It goes on a bit more, and it's lovely. Perhaps you should read it, too?
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan
This was an entertaining read that reminded me a bit of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother: although Robin Sloan's book is more of a literary mystery and less of a call to action against an increasingly intrusive government (OK, Penumbra isn't that at all), the attempts to reconcile old knowledge and new today strike a similar chord. As Sloan notes on his Web site, "This is a novel about books and technology, cryptography and conspiracy, friendship and love" -- much of which could also be said about Little Brother. You probably won't learn as much about Aldus Manutius, early printing, and font punches in that book, though.
A Cordiall Water, MFK Fisher
This slim book, "a collection of odd and old receipts to cure the ills of people and animals," is magical, and a palliative in and of itself.
Not all of the folk remedies resonate these days (I likely will not wear a bag of asafoetida around my neck, nor will I try Dr. Nintle's Crawfish Broth), but some of them sound rather soothing. Delicate onion soup, for instance, in which you peel and thinly slice a large mild onion, then wilt it in one tablespoon of butter and combine it with a cup of hot milk, is supposed to be useful for a common cold; it might be worth a taste later today, given my snuffling and hacking.
What is most interesting is not the recipes themselves, but Fisher's acknowledgement that sometimes the best "cures" are really only a blend of "incantation, mystery, and faith." She describes the "little slice of ham" once (still?) served to patients in France as a treatment that, "especially when taken in bed with a little glass of wine, will cure completely or at least help cure the following: exhaustion, migraine, grippe, gout, disappointment in love, business worries, childbed fever, dizziness, coughing, and indeed almost everything else except Death and Taxes." Indeed, people "will react to the balm of a quiet room, and of a simple meal, spiced with the extra sauce of loving care and consternation."
As Fisher writes, "A certain gesture at a certain time, the inner warmth ... the trustful obedience---healing, it is called!"
The House Without Windows, Barbara Newhall Follett
The House Without Windows is not itself a mystery, but the disappearance of its author, some 15 years after it was written, is -- and thus it is perhaps an appropriate read for this spooky season. (Follett's book, the tale of a young girl who leaves her family to live in a meadow, by the sea, in the mountains, was published when she was 12. She vanished at 26; Lapham's Quarterly has a good account of the strange story.)
"I do not happen to be acquainted with a single prose document ... which achieves the full expression ... of what is in a normal healthy child's mind and heart during the mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallows, and white-capped waves are twice as real as even a quite bearable parent, and incomparably more important -- the phase before there is any unshakable Tyranny of Things," wrote her father (the editor and writer Wilson Follett) in the book's afterword.
More information about the young author can be found here; the book is fanciful and a quick read, though one can't help but mourn somewhat that lost innocence, and the way the book's theme of escape is echoed later in Follett's own life.
Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale, Herman Melville
Ah: another classic I should have read long ago. Just as I joyed in discovering the pleasures of George Eliot, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Melville's masterpiece. "See how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them," you might say.
In early chapters, I found myself laughing quite a bit at Ishmael's wit and wordplay; later in the book, what struck me most was the contemplativeness amid the Pequod's great journey: "One most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort."
Another reflection echoes this sentiment, and seems oddly comforting at a time of uncertainty and self-doubt: "the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause.” What is important, perhaps, is simply seeing what is yet to come.
Illustration: October 18 Google Doodle, posted this year on the site's home page in honor of the 161st anniversary of the book's publication.
The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, Terry Teachout
I've been reading (and loving) Mencken's The American Language, so I thought I'd learn more about the man. Cantankerous, fearless, and unfortunately a bit of an anti-Semite, perhaps it's best that I focus merely on his thoughts about regionalisms and the evolution of the written and spoken word in the States.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
It seems I'm building up quite a library of books about the importance of putting one foot in front of the other (see "books in which walking is featured prominently": Open City (Teju Cole), On Top of the World (Luree Miller), Wild (Cheryl Strayed), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin), and The Wandering Falcon (Jamil Ahmad), to name just a few).
A guilty admission: I was primarily interested in this book because the protagonist's last name is nearly the same as my own, and another major character shares my grandmother's maiden name, which seemed a delightful coincidence.
Anyhow, this is a pleasant enough read, and the emphasis on small, human connections was lovely. "It must be the same all over England," Harold, the pilgrim narrator, says. "People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that."
Although the loneliness is palpable, it is not all consuming; you must still glory in the little goodnesses, "tender for the strangeness of others." When Harold reaches his destination, the bedside of a dying friend he has not seen in 20 years, he is not heralded with applause. Still, even when things don't turn out as we want them to, the journey changes us for the better.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns), Mindy Kaling
Kaling says something quite valuable about the creative process and taking control: when she and her friend Brenda are working on Matt & Ben, which eventually became a breakout hit at the Fringe Festival, they let it grow organically out of their own bits. "Bits are essentially 'nonsense time,'" she writes, "or, to describe it more pejoratively, 'fucking around.'" They publicized the play on their own, and they sunk their time and effort into it because it was, at its base, fun. "We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a purpose after two years of living in New York and not having on. Matt & Ben was a respite from helplessness."
It's odd, how just focusing your efforts on something like that can grow into such a big thing. A friend and I recently collaborated to put together a literary salon, and it had much the same effect: we produced a book and got together a group of artists to share something, and even if there was a chance that no one would care or nothing would come of it, it was a great way to spend a few months -- and it forced us, as well as our friends, to hone writing we'd been sitting on for a long time, to take a chance and put our work out into the world.
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
A number of people have told me I should read Ursula K. Le Guin, and so I looked forward to this classic of feminist science fiction. I didn't dislike it, but I did have a hard time getting into it; and for whatever reason, as Ai and Estraven were crossing the Gobrin Ice, I couldn't help but think of Cheryl Strayed and her doomed ice pick on the Pacific Crest Trail (a rather strange free association). Perhaps science fiction will never really be my "thing," but I'm glad I gave it a shot at least.
The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
Ronson's book is a fascinating investigation of psychopathy, revolving around the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Ronson meets with criminals, attends a seminar with Robert Hare himself, and ultimately explores the makings of madness in looking at just how much "normal" behavior (including some of his own) could qualify a person as a psychopath.
Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
As I reread Gilman's Herland, I couldn't help but think a bit of Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gilmore: another sci fi/fantasy/utopia novel, where explorers happen upon a coven of undiscovered women and hijinks ensue. Although both get a bit preachy at times, it's fascinating to get a glimpse of how people a hundred years ago imagined gender equality. Brings me back to the good old days of college (I double majored in journalism and gender studies). And Gilman's words still resonate:
"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating," she said, "but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it."
Although not of the same genre, if you're in the mood for a light read and you like literature of the early 20th century, I'd recommend Gilmore's first book, Maida's Little Shop, a charming children's book that spawned a long-running series about the girl and her friends. The first one, at least, is available for free download via Project Gutenberg.