Look Elsewhere?

Check out this really nice reading page I just discovered from reading the improbably titled blog round-up Damn Hell Ass Kings. I would love to design my own page (maybe not exactly like this, but I dig the four-color separation for various categories) like this, whenever I have time to learn Dreamweaver. The owner doesn't like magical realism, which is a MAJOR minus in my book, but I'd be willing to debate him over that.

I haven't had a lot of time to read lately, not as much because it's midterm season as because work has been quite hectic (the trouble with theatre box offices is, when it's show time EVERYONE wants a dang ticket!) and also because my boyfriend was visiting this past weekend for my birthday. Ah yes, my birthday! I got a couple of books on film from my father (who first pressed into my dirty little hands a copy of William Goldman's ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE), including B-movie actor Bruce Campbell's memoir and a hilarious Fametracker collection, and I am eagerly awaiting a book (as yet unknown) from my mom. And lest I forget ATOMIC BODYSLAMMERS TO WHISKEY ZIPPERS: COCKTAILS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, from my Francophile friend Ainslie (whom I met in Paris -- as I never tire of repeating). As soon as I get paid I'm going to pick up WHAT LOVE MEANS TO YOU PEOPLE, a debut novel from a blogger I've been reading for about four years now, which is so exciting I can hardly wait till it gets here.

I can't wait until spring break (two weeks hence!) when I can take a good week off and do some serious poolside reading. (Yes, I have been known to rock the poolside hardcover.) How about you?

The Great Answer Post

Okay, let's finish this...

#1: "There's never been an opera about me..." is from WATCH YOUR MOUTH, the second novel by Daniel Handler, the "ghostwriter" behind the Lemony Snicket phenomenon. I actually put down WATCH YOUR MOUTH after about 50 pages, not only because I felt like I knew where it was going but also because it was too gross. I guess I ought not to be surprised, given his current occupation. His debut, THE BASIC EIGHT, is more conventional (a high-school diary novel) but also, so far, less quease-inducing. This is one of my conquests from the Interlibrary Loan system, the source of many of my smaller joys.

#2: "The faces of the judges..." comes from the first, uneven novel by Cintra Wilson with the hilarious title of COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE. I think it was intended to be a Bildungsroman for the modern age, and the kitsch factor of it is astounding, but it got a little tiresome after I hit the 275-page mark. I recommend INDECISION by Benjamin Kunkel instead. I bought this book at the Brown Bookstore, which, alas, is facing corporate buyout.

That leaves #4, "Yesterday, I found Violet's letters to Bill." I'm not exactly sure how I got interested in Siri Hustvedt's book WHAT I LOVED except for the fact that it's a not very implicit roman a clef (I'm thinking of the "New Yorker" cartoon that reads, "More roman, less clef.") about Hustvedt, her relationship with fellow writer Paul Auster and her stepson, Michael Alig, now infamous for a New York City club-kid killing in the early '90s. (This was also covered in the book, and later the movie, PARTY MONSTER -- but that is a memoir. Reportedly. Not that James St. James did drugs during that era or anything.) Weirdly, the novel got the most attention for its connection with the murder, even though the murder is really only covered in the last hundred pages of th ebook, and then obliquely. It's no Margaret Atwood, but it's pretty good.

Next time maybe I should offer a prize or something.

Black Pawn, White Pawn

Continuing with the answers...

Besides Capote, Stephen L. Carter was the other outlier in the bunch because his book THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK is a legal thriller with a pretty heavy hand. As I mentioned I borrowed it from my mom, who raved about it and then recanted when I finished, which was weird. The chess-game-as-race-conflict metaphor governs the book, and is about as subtle as, say, representing those conflicts with automobile accidents. (Sorry, I watched the entire Oscars last night. Give me a break.) Anyway, here's the first line, as narrated by the main character (a law professor at a very Yale-ish university) about his wife (a newly minted Supreme Court nominee):

"'This is the happiest day of my life,' burbles my wife of nearly nine years on what will shortly become one of the saddest days of mine."

Stay tuned for the final three!

In Lukewarm Blood

Nobody has a guess on my last post? You know, Truman Capote didn't have a guess either...and now he's dead.

Okay, I shamelessly ripped that off an old Herald house ad, but I think living or dead Mr. Capote would have recognized #5 as being the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. I pulled out the tiny black-and-pink paperback I got at Dom Knigi in St. Petersburg, in which slang terms like "suitable for the Colony" get their own dutiful Russian gloss in the back. It cost 75 rubles (the receipt is in the back).

Here's #5 again if you don't feel like scrolling down: "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment."

I'll keep posting the answers this week one by one. Not that you can't still guess. Come on!

First Lines to Authors

Can you guess who wrote what? Answer in the comments to be proclaimed either a literary superstar, or just a really good guesser. NB: If you cheat and use Google, I won't be your friend any more.

1. "There's never been an opera about me, never in my entire life. Normally this wouldn't bother me. There hasn't been one about you, either, and besides, I'm still young."
2. "The faces of the judges revealed, although they were trying to hide it, deep distaste for the fact that the thirteen-year-old girl in front of them had plucked eyebrows and false eyelashes."
3. "'This is the happiest day of my life,' burbles my wife of nearly nine years on what will shortly become one of the saddest days of mine."
4. "Yesterday, I found Violet's letters to Bill. They were hidden between the pages of one of his books and came tumbling out and fell to the floor. I had known about the letters for years, but neither Bill nor Violet had ever told me what was in them."
5. "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment."

A. Stephen L. Carter
B. Cintra Wilson
C. Truman Capote
D. Daniel Handler
E. Siri Hustvedt

I've fallen in love!

... in this case, with a book website. (One topic at a time!)

A similarly book-minded buddy recently linked to LibraryThing, a website that allows users to log, tag and visualize their libraries online as well as peek at other people's libraries and comment on them. Just to start out I catalogued the various library books, recent purchases and half-completed books I have scattered around my room. It's a little misleading, since half of them are library books and thus do not have the gorgeous (or heinous) Amazon-provided cover art, but it's a decent approximation. Looking at my "shelf" gives me both a sense of adventure, of knowledge yet to be taken in, and the urgent feeling that I ought to be reading instead of, you know, updating this blog.

So I believe I'll do just that. I hope everyone who has a long weekend for Presidents' Day enjoys it with a good book, and for the rest of you -- I'm sorry, but hopefully you can get some reading done anyway!

How I Find Time

One of my friends recently asked me how I find the time to read for fun.

When I was a kid, I read literally all the time. I read in the car under streetlights (I was fortunate enough to almost never get carsick!) and on the bus to and from school, I read walking home from the library, I read under the covers despite my little sister's protestations. I read during class, and during recess (until I got caught). I even read when I was practicing the violin -- I don't recommend this, however, because it won't help you on your Juilliard app. It was my favorite form of portable entertainment -- cheap, light and endlessly renewable.

I guess it's these habits that have carried me over to the point where I rarely go anywhere without an extra book (or two!) just to fill the time. I got a lot of reading done last spring when I was in Madrid in part because I was commuting -- 45 minutes to school, then 30 minutes to my internship and 30 minutes home. Here at school I don't commute unless you count a five- to ten-minute walk to class, but I have a fair amount of time in between other things. It doesn't even have to be a book either; one of the things I love about the "New Yorker" is that it's textually very dense and also very light and easy to carry. If you don't mind looking like a complete egghead, you could take it to the gym, because unless you work out for 4 hours at a time you probably won't finish it. (Can't say the same for "Glamour," although I subscribe to that too.)

I'm not saying all this because I'm trying to brag; I'm actually a pretty slow reader, so I probably need all that extra time to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. And I certainly don't read as much as I like to during the school year, because (surprise!) I have plenty of other assigned reading to keep me occupied. But what I'm saying is, you can make time to do it, maybe before bed or during morning coffee or in that last half-hour before you leave work and when you never get anything done anyway. Maybe people might look at my textual habits and tell me I need to "get a life," but honestly, I have a life. It's just broken up by a lot of reading.

The Importance of Being Earnest?

I've refrained from commenting on the James Frey controversy in this space for one specific reason: I haven't read A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, a qualification which I feel is germane to the discussion.

As a journalist I can't help but be a little angry at Frey (and other fabrications -- J. T. LeRoy, are you listening?) for exaggerating the truth to the extent that he is accused of. Obviously it isn't just Oprah who despises being lied to; we all do, and Frey's efforts to claim the "memoir" as a new style of writing which has little to do with nonfiction is just ridiculous. Just because Lillian Hellman did it doesn't mean it's okay, buddy! And I can understand how so many readers (like this guy, who bought the book just before the storm hit) feel duped, especially those who found inspiration in Frey's tale of how (allegedly, and this is a parenthesis I hate) he pulled himself out of drug addiction on his own. My favorite piece of damning evidence is the statement that Frey had shopped the book as fiction before shopping it as nonfiction, and while I'd like to believe he did a thorough edit in between, it's doubtful he even did a Search and Replace. (And don't get me started on his publisher-mandated author's note.)

But I think there are two different issues here, the outrage over what Frey did and the demotion in value of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES as a result, and I'm having trouble reconciling the two. Some of the devaluation seems to say that nothing that isn't true is valuable, and I resent that. I mean, I know there is no real Lily Bart, but that didn't stop me from enjoying THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, or identifying with Bart for that matter. If people are put off by Frey's deceitful behavior and thus choose not to read his books, I can understand that. But why can't a work of fiction have the same life-changing effect on people as nonfiction? I think this is a fairly recent attitude, and a troubling one, that one can't be inspired by fiction in the same way as with nonfiction. When I think about my childhood literary heros, most were fictional (those kids in Narnia, Christopher Chant of Diana Wynne Jones' books) or quasifictional (the Ingalls girls belonging in the latter category, I imagine), even though I owned and loved biographies of Mother Teresa, Anne Bradstreet and other figures. Now that I'm grown, can I not find similar figures that move in books like THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA or THE WOMEN'S ROOM, because they're fiction?

Once again I end with more questions than answers. I'm not advocating feeling sorry for Frey, but rather speaking on behalf of any readers (and there must be some!) who find merit in his book aside from its contrast with the police reports.

Books I Received Over the Holidays

Nick Hornby: Off the Fiction Island... For Now

It's exam week in my casa and I've been desperate for a little literary distraction. I tore through Karyn Bosnak's I-canceled-my-debt-with-the-Internet memoir SAVE KARYN last week -- it's not just entertaining, it keeps me off stress shopping! -- and this week my friend Mel lent me Nick Hornby's latest novel A LONG WAY DOWN, which I saw all over bookstores this summer but never picked up.

One of the first books I read this year was Hornby's collection of essays THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE, a compilation from his columns in anti-snark mag The Believer. Hornby's column chronicles the books he receives each month and the ones he actually reads, along with facts about those books and about his life in general (and, not occasionally, the confession that as a successful author he has both money and time that most people don't have). The columns are charming and actually inspired me to keep my own lists by month of books going in and out. (I also use mine as a damper when I'm tempted to One-Click a cartload of books from Amazon. I mean, sometimes it works...)

Well, as far as finals week went A LONG WAY DOWN did the trick as far as distracting me. But the story? As my theatre professor say, it's precious. The book got some terrible early reviews (I think this one was my favorite, although I disagree on SONGBOOK) but I gave it a shot anyway... and was, really, quite disappointed. I was willing to forgive a certain contrivance in the set-up (four would-be suicides meet at the top of a building in North London and attempt to straighten out each others' lives), but it never left Twee City on its way to believable. The funny moments (like the invention of a miraculous vision for the tabloids) are outweighed by the tiresome, the unbelievable and the lazily written. And I found that strange, because THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE is jammed with minor tender moments from Hornby's life, which (with little to do with his reading life) still enliven the narrative. Is this the same Hornby who wrote HIGH FIDELITY?

The Hornby case is troubling because it seems to suggest that writers can't be masters of both fiction and nonfiction (at least not simultaneously), which I guess is what I've been feeling a little bit lately. I started out writing only fiction (well, along with my journal, whose version of the truth is occasionally questionable) but these days when I'm in front of a computer what comes out is usually some form of nonfiction. I still read as much fiction as I used to, but I feel like now I read it as a reviewer, not as a connoisseur. Besides NaNoWriMo, I don't write much fiction any more. I miss it, but I'm not sure if I can go back.

I'm not saying Nick Hornby is feeling the same way, but if his last two books are any indication he may be at some kind of crossroads. I don't know if Hornby should stop writing fiction or if he needs to take a break from nonfiction in order to work on his fiction. I'd like to believe he can do both, but I'd rather one more POLYSYLLABIC SPREE than six more LONG WAY DOWNs. But whether that's true for me as well... I don't know.

Abandoned

I used to be a stickler about finishing books. It didn't matter how bad they were, I stuck it out to the final page, even if I spent the next year whining about the waste of time. I attribute this habit to my fifth-grade reading teacher, although it's not entirely her fault.

To encourage us to read outside of class (we had ORBs, or Outside Reading Books), Ms. VV gave us a sheet every month with a space for the date, the title of a book read and -- here's the rub -- the number of pages in the book. At the end of the month we would all dutifully total up the number of pages and compare it to last month's, hoping to show some improvement.

I was a slave to that number. I was a pretty addicted reader by that time anyway, but I got it into my head that I had to hit 10,000 pages per month, or else. This emphasis on the number convinced me that a bad book read was better than no book, because you didn't get any points for pages in books you didn't finish. Sometimes I would even pump up my totals by choosing the easy read over the over-my-head classic, just so I could. (Sorry, Ms. VV!)

Of course, now I can only wish I had the amount of time I had to read that much. I guess if I counted magazine articles, Weblogs, scholarly excerpts and class reading I might get there, but it's not about the number so much any more. This year I've been trying a little harder to be choosy about what I read, because (although I won't admit it) I will not get around to reading every book in the world. At least, not if I'm a teensy bit more choosy than I have been in the past. Here's a list of a few books I didn't finish or gave up on this year:

- Ian Gibson, LA VIDA, PASION Y MUERTE DE FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA I love García Lorca and I love two-volume biographies, but this just wasn't a good fit. There was too much name-dropping, and Leslie Stainton's LORCA: A DREAM OF LIFE is better. (Alas, I lent that one to someone I don't like and now I don't have a copy.)
- Jorge Semprún, AQUEL DOMINGO This was for a class I took on Spanish novels since 1939, and our professor proclaimed its brilliance constantly. But with 45 minor characters and a main character who, having lived his life in espionage, had a new alias every chapter, I just couldn't keep up.
- Carmen Martín Gaíte, IRSE DE CASA I loved Martín Gaíte's other book I read this year, NUBOSIDAD VARIABLE ("scattered clouds"), but this one just didn't take.
- Jay Cantor, GREAT NECK I challenge you to read this every-moment-can-foreshadow-unspeakable-doom-for-all-characters novel and not throw it out the window. Seriously. That's what you get for choosing a book by its cover (literally; I saw it in Borders and it looked interesting). Sucker.
- Marian Keyes, SUSHI FOR BEGINNERS The first month of my stay in Madrid I read about 10 Marian Keyes books in Spanish to adjust myself to thinking in the language. I know, they're trashy, but I picked up a lot of useful slang. (The word ligar, for example; it means "to hook up" or "to flirt," depending on context.) I snatched this one from my sister for the trip back to school, but they aren't as good in English; when I realized I'd left it on my first flight, I didn't bother buying another copy.

Change of format

Despite creating this blog for the specific quest of reading the Modern Library list in its entirety, I am slowly accepting that I will never be able to discipline myself enough to just follow the list.

So instead of letting this blog languish and die, I'm going to open it up to writing about any and all books I'm reading, meaning to read, attempting to read or swearing off reading.

Right now I'm reading John L. Hess' MY TIMES: A MEMOIR OF DISSENT. I love those Gray Lady books. I just finished Benjamin Kunkel's INDECISION, which is definitely one of my top books of 2005. I didn't even want to like it, but somewhere around page 175 I couldn't believe it's brilliance. Believe the hype! What are you reading?

Things I Have Been Reading Which Do Not Appear on the Modern Library List, Nor Have Any Guaranteed Value Whatsoever

Barbara Ehrenreich, BAIT AND SWITCH. It's not as good as NICKEL AND DIMED.
Stephen Carter, THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK. Borrowed from my mum. I liked the part about the liberal judge mom refusing to let her son read that pro-life appologia, Horton Hears a Who.
Hilary Mantel, GIVING UP THE GHOST. Memoir of a British novelist which the New Yorker promised was full of paranormal events and eerie coincidences. And in this case, David Remnick done me wrong.
David Itzkoff, LADS. Memoir of a former editor at "Details" and "Maxim." Pretty entertaining, actually, if you like press memoirs already.
Rick Moody, THE DIVINERS. Wildly entertaining novel about the schemers behind a Hollywood miniseries. Thick and convoluted like a Tom Wolfe book, but without any of those pesky authorial moral judgements. Did I mention that Moody is an alum of my own university? He, Marilynne Robinson (GILEAD, HOUSEKEEPING) and Jeffrey Eugenides (MIDDLESEX, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES). And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Jon Stewart, NAKED PICTURES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE. No, Stewart doesn't have a new book out; this actually came out pre-"Daily Show," in 1998 and I tracked it down on inter-library loan out of curiosity. It's not bad, but it's not Woody Allen; not surprisingly, some of it is pretty dated. Also, I might note that there are no actual naked pictures of famous people in it.

This list isn't an excuse. Really. It's totally not. Okay, maybe a little.

Vonnegut Update

As mentioned by the lovely Sarah, Vonnegut is indeed still alive. Not only that, I just saw him on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Not only that, he was hilarious.

Watch the madness here. My offer still stands, Mr. Vonnegut! Come forth and receive the Tinfoil Prize!

LN VS. ML extra: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, the sitcom pitch

Okay, so there's this woman. She's grown up wealthy, goes to school in a big city, very worldly... no, not Paris, I was thinking more Reese from "Legally Blonde," like she's smart, but cute as well. OK, Reese marries this nice, old-rich young guy, a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt type, and then he goes off to war... No, not a political drama. Definitely not Iraq!...I'm not a communist... Fine, you win, he's on a really dangerous business trip and he gets into an accident, where he loses -- well, there's no way to put this delicately, but he can't have sex any more. He's disabled... You think the disabilities people are going to sue us? Yeah. Fine. Whatever. The point is that it's irreversible. No kids, no bed time, nada. So he resigns from his job and decides to become a writer, since he's independently wealthy. So we have this young, sexy, married...Sure, we could give her a throwaway job, maybe an antique store, art gallery...young, sexy, functional housewife whose husband... No, we can't get Pam Anderson to play her. That's not what we were really thinking...Carson? From "Queer Eye"? I guess we could write him in, but that's not really the point. Anyway, the show's about her struggle to remain faithful, while acknowledging the fact that she's young and... No, we had pictured maybe by midseason sweeps she might take a lover, maybe her husband would say something like, I want us to have a child, even though it's not with me...You want that to happen in the pilot? Well, that is sort of unexpected. I mean, don't you think we should take more time to develop... Okay, I guess that could work... Well, ideally it wouldn't be competing with that infertility show, because we're not dealing with a reversible thing here. Yeah, I know the ADA is not going to like it, but that's just... So say there's this really hot, masculine groundskeeper we bring in as the love interest...Lawn boy? Well, if it worked for The O.C., Desperate Housewives... No, see if it was her husband's business partner, that's really not what we're... Okay, we'll look into it. Maybe the butler, or a security guard. The point is... I'm not trying to be classist here, I just think... Okay, Reese trying to resist temptation with the help of her sassy gay friend and... You want Steve Carell as the love interest? You know, I really don't think we're on the same page here at all. It's supposed to be someone masculine, you know, muscled... A lawyer? You know, maybe we're going in a different direction on this... Did you just say David Spade as the husband? Okay, that's it. I'm leaving. We're done here.