My Big Pretentious Indian Novel

One thing, I'm told, that you should never do when applying for a publishing job is talk up the books you love -- if you love classics or very obscure literary novels. "Don't bring a pretentious novel into the waiting room," one editor said. "You think we don't see right through that? And if you go into your interview and talk about how much you love F. Scott Fitzgerald, that doesn't help us that much."

I have occasionally been guilty of the pretentious-novel-as-conversation-starter, although not as guilty as these anonymous examples, I suppose. But what if that seemingly pretentious novel happens to be what I'm reading?

For, dear readers, I am reading a novel that sure looks pretentious, yet I would contend my motives for reading it are not at all pretentious. I read Indian diasporic writer Vikram Seth's travel book (FROM HEAVEN LAKE) and two of his other novels (THE GOLDEN GATE and AN EQUAL MUSIC) before I was gently pushed to pick up this novel, A SUITABLE BOY, which is Tolstovian in scale, rich in irony, and... well... 1400+ pages long. (1474, exactly, and don't think I haven't checked.) But I wouldn't have it in my possession at all were it not for my mom's having already read it, gushed over it and (gradually) pushed me towards it. And while Mom's taste doesn't necessarily mirror mine -- I still don't get ANGLE OF REPOSE, for instance -- she got to me to the point that I did, in fact, want to read this obscenely long book.

I started it in the beginning of May, and at long last I have made a, shall we say, suitable dent in it. An impromptu bus trip last weekend pushed me over the 1000-page mark, and I actually got into it. Still, if I don't take it to lectures and on errands with me, I may never finish it. I know I may look pretentious standing in line at the post office with a paperback book that really requires two hands, but I'm just trying to finish it sometime this year. I already missed Mum's deadline of June 17th, and she has promised it to someone else as soon as I finish it. When I finish it. (I can't say if any more; I couldn't bear to waste all that work and put it down now.)

Pretentious or not, I am finally heading into the home stretch, and so far I actually do recommend A SUITABLE BOY -- for people who like long novels. (It's about 3.5 times more interesting than WAR AND PEACE, for example, and for only 50 extra pages!) Maybe lifting it several times a day will help me build up hand strength for the almighty business handshake. But probably I'll move onto something less pretentious, not for my prospective employers' sake, but just because I'll need a break.

Things I learned about Curtis Sittenfeld and the PREP phenomenon.

1. Curtis Sittenfeld is not Lee Fiora from PREP, even if she did go to boarding school. NB: She said she appropriated a lot of the campus architecture and institutions from Groton for PREP because it was easier that way, since she was already making up the entire book.
2. She has serious writerly chops -- it was her dream to go to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she did.
3. Her personal style is not so much preppy -- when a Washington Post style writer wanted to cover her style, she asked her publicist, "Can I wear sweatpants?"
4. The real way to get magazine editors to notice your book? Send it out with Moleskines, flip-flops and pink white-out attached. (This via Ms. Sittenfeld's publicist.) Anyone know where I can get some pink white-out? Or should I say, pink-out?
5. Stalker alert! She lives in Philadelphia.
6. When PREP was published she promised her ninth-grade English class that she would buy them pizza if it hit the New York Times best-seller list -- and she actually did. In this case it's probably best she didn't go to #1, because she had promised them all a trip to Hawaii.
7. She found out at 22 that she is Tony Orlando's daughter. (Oh, I made that one up. But you believed me, didn't you!)

Adam Gopnik Sez: Lost Generation Not Lost Enough

I was lucky enough to hear New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik speak last night through the Brown Friends of the Library. Gopnik talked about the American ideal of Paris in writing from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson until... well, himself, in his book PARIS TO THE MOON about his 1995 to 2000 residence there.

Gopnik's point was that Americans see Paris as a type of idyll, in the same way they see New York, and have gone there either to be good bourgeois and study at the Sorbonne and rub shoulders with the literati, or to drink and smoke and have lots of sex and be good bohemians. (Right now in New York he does neither, although he acknowledges that most people he meets still think he lives in Paris because he lives in "the Paris of their minds.") Franklin and Jefferson were both in Paris on diplomatic missions, but Jefferson studied it like he studied his farms, while Franklin concluded "[the French] must have some way of changing the air here that we are not acquainted with."

His talk gave me a whole raft of new authors to read about the city, which I have been lucky enough to visit once. Nathaniel Parker Willis, who Gopnik said is largely forgotten today, wrote about "restaurant Paris"; Art Buchwald of the New York Herald Tribune chronicled the city in the 1940s. Henry James had an unrequited romance with the city, because he tried to live there and never really felt accepted. "No American has known Paris better" than Edith Wharton. But the Lost Generation, most often invoked in the same breath as Paris, lived a much more insulated life among fellow expats than earlier chroniclers of the city -- hence him saying they weren't lost enough. And having tackled THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, I confess I did wonder where the French were and why Stein and Toklas moved in such a small circle. In any case, he really whetted my appetite to read more about the City of Light (besides my abortive attempt earlier this semester at HAUSSMANN, OR THE DISTINCTION). Suggestions?

In other news, it appears that Starbucks is going to start selling books soon. Oh, help us all.

Sonnets from strangers, and a great way to keep mum.

In my sophomore year of college, I wrote that one of my life goals (per "As You Like It") was to find a boy willing to tie sonnets on trees for me. If I had known about these London sonnet walks, in which you are given directions from Shakespeare's Globe and random people come up to you and recite poetry, I might have given up on males in general! (But it's a good thing I didn't.)

Here's a funny interview with author/ blogginista Paperback Writer, one of my personal favorites.

Extra: Karyn Bosnak, 20 TIMES A LADY

Whatever else you can say about Karyn Bosnak's 20 TIMES A LADY, you can't say it's totally autobiographical.

How do I know? Because I've read her memoir, SAVE KARYN. Bosnak's claim to fame is that she started a personal Website at SaveKaryn.com (which is still up, although mostly concerning her new book), to ask strangers for money to pay off a $20,000 credit-card debt and to highlight her own struggle to cut lifestyle corners. People criticized the book (and the author) for its seemingly fancy-free approach to money -- easy go, easy come, I guess -- but I enjoyed it because Bosnak looks at herself and says, "I'm not in debt because something tragic happened to me. I'm in debt because I was foolish." And that takes the huevos grandes.

Very little of that struggle shows up in Bosnak's first novel, of which I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. Her heroine, Delilah Darling, does have a pet mascot and a love for all things cute and luxurious, but Delilah's troubles in love -- not money -- take center stage. After she reads a New York Post article on sex and decides she may have been, well, a bit too free with her favors (as befits someone named Delilah, I guess!) she decides to sink her unemployment into a cross-country trip to find her hookups of yore -- because if she can rekindle the spark with one of them, she won't have to add another man to her "list." It's cheesy and silly, but like a good romantic comedy, you feel satisfied at the ending. Not that I'm giving any clues.

Sure, there are some autobiographical details in 20 TIMES A LADY; reading Bosnak's new blog I notice she has a Yorkie now, like the heroine, and a few memorable scenes take place in her old stomping ground of Chicago. But my major deal-breaker for chick lit is when the biographical similarities are so overwhelming that it feels like the author, well, didn't make anything up for herself! Jennifer Weiner is another author who knows how to use her experiences (like her love for Philadelphia) in a way that doesn't overwhelm the reader. I know most people wouldn't be bothered by this, but I felt pretty miffed when I discovered that John Irving had pretty much copy-pasted his entire life into THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. Bosnak is obviously a more talented writer than her Internet detractors give her credit for.

Our libraries are furniture. They are decoration. They threaten the breathable air to paper ratio in our apartments and offices. Books spill over my shelves. They crowd my kitchen table. We are what we read...paper will continue to be used by academics for a long time to come purely on the basis of its utility as an information technology. But we are not passionate about paper because it is a good research tool. We are passionate about it because of the way that it smells and feels. Our love of paper springs from the way it insinuates itself into not only our career, but our souls. An academic defends the text universe. Lovely!

Extra: Fernando Henrique Cardoso, THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL

What I learned from reading the memoir of Brazil's second-to-last president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, now a Brown professor:

• Scholar-presidents do a pretty good job (see also: Woodrow Wilson).
• It's no accident that the Brazilian currency Cardoso instituted to solve the country's inflation crisis in the early '90s is named the real; the title (translated as "royal" or "real") was meant to reassure citizens that it would, unlike previous currencies, actually be worth something in the weeks and months after it was introduced. Diabolical!
• As much as the 2003 election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Cardoso's successor) may have freaked the crap out of the West, "Lula" (a Union leader of working-class origins) used to be a lot more radical...
• ...which is something I didn't pick up on at all when he took office on January 1st. I was in Rio de Janeiro at the time, and all the press coverage stressed how far-left he was, never mind that Cardoso himself was pretty center-left.
  
• My dad's flippant comments about how "people would just disappear" when he lived in Brazil in 1972? Not so much kidding on that account. (Dad was an AFS student who checked the "Send me anywhere" box on his application and landed in Sao Paolo knowing no Portuguese. We visited his old neighborhood when we were there.)
  
• Not even fame or democratic election can save you from having a terrible Wikipedia picture.
  

P.S.

I updated my LibraryThing. Don't be scared at the rolling tide of job-hunting books appearing on the shelf. As they say, "It's the most wonderful time of the year..."

Spring Cleaning

So I'm moving in about a month and a half, to parts currently unknown, which means it's time to go over the ol' book collection. I made the probably unwise decision in September to try and consolidate my "can't live without 'em" books here on the East Coast, as opposed to in my childhood bedroom, but the upshot is I have way more books than I have bookshelves or boxes. I also mailed myself a ton of books to sell on Amazon.com, most of which I later found out were pretty much unsellable. (Alas, the same vendors that allow me to buy books for $0.01 also thwart my own sales!)

In about half an hour I pulled a whopping 26 books out of this place, most books I've read or used for a class that I really no longer need or want. I was originally going to send them to the New Orleans Public Library, but they are asking for monetary donations over books, so I think I'll just send them what I would have spent on mailing the books, and put them in the donation box set out by my local bookstore during textbook buy-back season. And as long as I was searching, I found two books to return to my sister, six to lend to my mom (who has lent me umpteen books over the years) and one to lend to my dad (who finally has time to actually read books I recommend to him, like THE TWINS OF TRIBECA). As if I needed another proof of my decadent lifestyle, that's thirty-five books just taking up space chez moi. That's just ridiculous on so many levels.

And that was the easy part! I also have in my room probably upwards of 20 books I've been meaning to read and haven't gotten around to yet. Even if I dropped out of school today, I probably couldn't finish them all before my move-out date. (And I'm not dropping out, so don't worry, Mom and Dad.) But it's ridiculous to cart that many around when not only does the world hold a large number of superlative libraries (like, um, the one three blocks away), but I am also constantly acquiring new books. Heck, I just bought seven or eight books on job hunting and careers (the fabulous life of a college senior) and I don't have space for them. I barely have room for the books I always take with me, foreign-language dictionaries and THIS SIDE OF PARADISE and LOST IN PLACE: GROWING UP ABSURD IN SUBURBIA and the like. My name is Ellen, and I officially have a Book Problem.

And I need a Battle Plan. Because on the other hand, I would like to be a minimalist even though I have stuff trouble. At least I know I have stuff trouble. Maybe I should return or read my library books first, right? And also, delete the document on my desktop called "Library to-do list." I'm not joking. I really do have a problem.

The War Within

It's confession day at LN VS. ML.

I've been keeping a computerized list of books I've read since late 2001 (actually the weekend I visited a certain school while reading THIS SIDE OF PARADISE for the first time). If you saw the list you would only be able to conclude that I'm crazy, because it has all kinds of signs and color codes and I can sort it by author or by date. Because while I am a 21-year-old college student, I am also apparently the 40-year-old virgin with a copy of Excel in lieu of a lot of action figures.

Last year was the first complete year in which I kept track of all the movies I watched. I had compiled a list in the fall of 2004 while I was taking a Spanish film class and wanted to remember all the movies we watched for my friends not in the class who also loved Almodovar. Then I went abroad, and my library in Madrid had a pretty decent collection of recent Spanish movies, so I figured I'd use it to keep track of my weekly rentals. A lot of the movies I saw in theatres in the first six months of last year haven't even come out yet in the states ("Reinas", for example, which the blue states are just going to love because it's like "Love, Actually" but with a mass gay marriage, and features a number of hot actresses over 40 as the mothers of the affianced) so it was useful to keep track of them. I kept up the habit when I got home because it was blockbuster season (not that I saw most of the blockbusters, but that's neither here nor there).

Then I counted up at the end of the year and saw I had more movies than books on my lists (just barely more!).

I guess it's not that hard to understand. It can take a lot longer to finish a book than a movie, depending on the book (and the movie?), and sometimes watching movies is preferable (like when I'm trying to do something else). But I feel like I'm giving up if I let the books not matter as much to me, because I was very much a books-first teenager (I probably didn't see more than 5 movies a year in theatres until I started driving). But assuming I can't read and watch movies at the same time -- well, I can do class reading, anything that's meant to be skimmed anyway -- I can only do one of them, and I have library books but I also have Netflix.

All this blather means I should probably stop keeping lists if I'm going to look at them every day and obsess over them. But I'm thinking about cutting back on my Netflix account. My stack of books I want to read is piling up faster than movies I want to watch, and there's really no substitute for a good book.

Books I brought with me on vacation.

This is for a one-week vacation with a four-hour flight, mind you:

Andres Martinez, 24/7: LIVING IT UP AND DOUBLING DOWN IN THE NEW LAS VEGAS
Hunter S. Thompson, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
LONELY PLANET: LAS VEGAS
Ian Frazier, GREAT PLAINS
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL
DeLaune Michel, AFTERMATH OF DREAMING
Vikram Seth, A SUITABLE BOY

So maybe the last one was a bit of a stretch... Needless to say, I guess, I made it through the first four, and started the Michel. Usually I read a lot more during vacations, but this time I spent most of my leisure time sleeping. I'm looking forward to being a commuter again so I'll "have to" read an hour, or more, every day. I'm also looking forward to graduating.

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!