Who am I kidding?

In the past several years, I've started four writing workshops and finished three, poetry, personal essay, and short story. The short story one, I took this summer. I mostly thought my story sucked, but I didn't think it was the worst one of the group, and I did think that it held promise. Despite that feeling, I haven't even tried to revise it or really tried to write another one since. I have had some ideas about possible plot elements and characters that I've jotted down here and there, but I just haven't made the time to really do anything about any of them.

Things I know
I have to decide that I'm going to be a writer and make time to write. I used to stay up late and blog a lot, but now that I try to go to bed early, I don't blog nearly as much.

I waste way too much time on the computer playing card games while I half watch TV.

I can make all the plans that I want to, but the chances of me carrying them out are very slim.

Of course, I know a lot more about a lot of other things, but I won't bore you with more.

(I started this post early this morning, and I'm finishing it after dinner while I get caught up on Project Runway.)

How can I make my writing work? ;-)
I think I have to create a schedule to make myself find time to write. Last May, when I first started getting up at thirty minutes earlier, at 5:00 every morning , I thought I might have time to write each morning. I don't know what I was thinking because I'm not a morning person, never really have been. I don't really have a regular lunch time or conference period time at work, so writing at work on a regular basis. So the only time left is at night. Thanks to Valerie, I now go to bed much earlier than I used to. I sleep better and more and really feel better most mornings even though I do miss staying up late sometimes. So where does that leave me? I could write from 7:00-8:00 or 8:00-9:00 or 7:00-9:00. Should I start with an hour and add a second hour after a while?

It's funny how I can find all kinds of time to read, but I can't find time to write. I have to make a decision and establish a schedule and make it a habit or give up on the idea all together. For now, though, it's time for bed. Later.

"Every individual existence revolves around mystery..."

I've been very lax about my daily reading of short stories this summer, but I'm going to try to be better during the second half of my summer vacation. I can't believe it's already half over! I'm feeling the need to get things done for the next four weeks, things that I had planned to do this summer. One of those things was to read a short story every day and tweet/blog about it.

This morning I read Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog." I'm not sure if I've ever read any of Chekhov's stories or plays before. In addition to being a constant reader, I majored in English as an undergrad and almost completed a masters in literature, so you would think that I had read something of his, but I can't remember ever doing so. My point is I've never studied Chekhov. I have read other Russian writers, and I thought this story pretty typical of nineteenth century Russian literature. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong.)

I enjoyed reading this story, but I wasn't surprised by its outcome. I did, however, find a statement in it that I really liked. Gurov, the main character, is a philanderer, and at one point he thinks "every individual existence revolves around mystery..." I think that a lot of people might disagree with this statement, or at least might be upset by the thought of it as a reality. However, I'm not sure if anyone can ever really know everything about another individual. We all have secrets of some kind, right? Some people like to claim that what you see is what you get, but I'm not sure that is even possible. Don't we all live a persona that we've created whether consciously or unconsciously? What do you think?

I'm going to ponder on this for a while and maybe I'll write more about it later. For now, I need to get some other things done. Later.

Giving up on American Gods (#1b1t)

I really don't like to give up on books, but I think I have to give up on this one. I'm not a fantasy fan per se, but I'm not sure that's the problem. I feel like the book is not that well written and it's all pretty obvious. I only chose this book because I wanted to participate in One Book One Twitter. However, ss soon as I saw many of the tweets about the book, I was reminded of why I don't read popular fiction very much. I am an admitted book snob and have no time for obvious questions/comments, but I'm not so horrid a snob as to post snarky comments, at least. Although that might have made my reading of this book more fun. ;-)

I have given American Gods a real chance. I have read seven chapters, so I'm not giving up without a fight. I liked the first chapter and was completely surprised by the grotesque ending of that chapter, so I thought that this book was going to be very interesting and fast paced, but I think the book went down from there. Despite it being a fantasy, there's nothing really new here. Sure, I'm not familiar with all the gods presented, but I am too familiar with some of the motifs and symbols. (Are symbols and motifs the same things? I can't remember right now.) Black birds, gangster type men in black limos with tinted windows, light vs. dark, ambiguously good guys vs. bad guys, etc. Even most of the commentary about American society seems tired.

I think the last straw was the scene where Shadow is grabbed by some men in a black truck in a restaurant parking lot and then he's in what seems like an interrogation room being questioned about the gods. The two men, Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone, doing the questioning are wearing dark suits and have dark hair and shiny shoes. This scene just seemed and felt a little too Men in Black to me, and I've never even seen the whole movie. I did finish that chapter and read one more, but now I think that might be as far as I care to go with this book.

I'm kind of sad about giving up on this book because so many people, including friends of mine, really admire Gaiman's work, and I want to share in that admiration. So, I'm not giving up on the author completely. I'll try at least one of his other books before I give up on him altogether. And maybe I'll read another chapter of American Gods here and there and eventually finish it. I haven't removed the book to the bookshelf yet or even removed the bookmark from it, but I haven't picked it up to read in several days. I have read other things this week instead. I started three different books Footnotes in Gaza, Never Let Me Go, and Middlemarch. I'll probably finish at least two of those next week. So for now, I'll say goodbye to American Gods and One Book One Twitter. Later.

Toni Morrison made me cry

When I finished reading A Mercy this morning, all I could think was "WOW!" I got up from the dining room table and walked into the living room to get my phone so I could tweet that "WOW!" As I was typing out the tweet, I just started sobbing. I mean crying really hard. I cried for at least five minutes before I could get myself under control. I haven't had that kind of visceral reaction to a book in a very long time.

I love Morrison's work. She is one of my two favorite authors, but I was still stunned by the beauty and sadness of this short novel. How could she say so much in less than 200 pages? I'm a relatively slow reader, but I read this book very fast, starting it yesterday afternoon. It's a real page turner. She interweaves several stories in this novel about a small group of slaves and their owners in seventeenth century America. There is one central thread that holds the stories together, but I never felt impatient when it was interrupted to tell one of the other story lines.

This novel is on its surface a story about slavery, but its also an indictment of religiosity. Both the Papists and the Protestants are shown to perpetuate not just the use of slaves but the racism that allowed it to exist. In addition, the novel is about identity, jealousy, and cruelty, which is too/most often the result of jealousy, I think.

I just kept wondering how people could be so cruel to other people. How does a group of people ever come to believe that they are automatically superior to another group of people and that the proof of their superiority is in the color of their skin? Even the benevolent wife of the benevolent slave owner becomes cruel in the end, which reminded me of Frederick Douglass's Narrative and his descriptions of the dehumanizing effect of slavery on the slave owner. Morrison touches on this idea in Beloved also.

At one point in the novel, someone says or thinks something like "we don't shape the world; the world shapes us." If that's true, then what kind of sad, cruel world do we live in? I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna here. Are humans inherently cruel? I don't understand why someone would ever be cruel to another human being, and I know that I've been guilty of cruelty at some point, probably more than one, in my life. Whether my cruelty was consciously intended or not doesn't change the fact that it happened. Whether I felt my actions provoked or reasonable doesn't change anything either. Maybe that knowledge is one reason this book affected me so.

I've read most of Morrison's works more than once, and I feel like I should read this one again very soon. I wish that I was still teaching AP Literature because my students would be reading this book in the upcoming school year. Now, I'm going to go to bed and read, but I'm not sure what I'll read because I think that no matter what I read tonight, it'll be a disappointing after having just read A Mercy. Later.

Summer of Short Stories 2

I started this repeat project kind of late, but I'm planning to read one short story each day for the rest of my summer vacation and tweet and/or blog about the stories. I will at least tweetthe author and title of each one. Last summer, I read several whole books of short stories and some other random ones, which is my plan for this summer too. I started reading Anita Desai's Diamond Dust last week, but I wasn't sure then if I was going to repeat the daily reading and didn't keep it up all week. This week, I decided that I had enjoyed the reading and the structure of doing it last summer and should do it again.

I've never read any of Desai's work before this book. I have read her daughter's Booker Prize winning, The Inheritance of Loss, and I bought Diamond Dust when I attended a reading by both authors a couple of years ago. Today, I read the fifth of the nine stories in this book, "The Man Who Saw Himself Drown." I'm not sure I completely understood the story. The story started out with a third person narrator, detailing the movements of an older man on a business trip. After dinner one evening, he goes for a walk and eventually sees a drowned man being pulled out of the river. It's him. Most of the rest of the story is told from the drowned man's spirit's(?) point of view. At first the man doesn't believe he has really died. I can't decide if this story is just a bittersweet story about death or if it's a story about the connection or disconnection between body and spirit. I'm not a very spiritual person, and I think that might be hindering my perception of this story. I guess I'll just have to keep thinking about it for a while.

I am enjoying Desai's writing. In this story I was really struck by a couple of passages, one of which I think might hold the key to the story. But first, this one from the beginning of the story when the man enters his hotel room: "He tossed his briefcase into the armchair--there, now the room knew someone had entered it and made it his own--went into the bathroom to wash." I love the idea that a hotel room is always waiting for life--it only lives when it's inhabited. Kind of makes me feel sad for hotel rooms. :-) And I guess in a sense hotel rooms are kind of sad, temporary dwellings. Maybe Desai is comparing the hotel room to a body inhabited by a spirit. Hmmm.

The key passage in the story, I think, is this one from the end of the story after the man has accepted his death:

It seemed to me that by dying my double had not gifted me with possibility, only robbed me of all desire for one: by arriving at death, life had been closed to me. At his cremation, that was also reduced to ash.

Maybe the story is about the death of the spirit and how once it dies a body can't go on living. At the beginning of the story, the man was exhausted with his life, his work life at least, but maybe that was the beginning of the death of his spirit. I don't know. Maybe I'm trying to hard. Maybe I should just enjoy the story and let it's meaning percolate in my brain whether I ever come back to it or not. I'm going to go read something else now. Later.

Summer reading plans

Not surprisingly, I've missed at least a month of Monday missives. I could give some excuses about moving, end-of-school-year stress, and even having a bad sinus infection this week, but they would just be excuses. I've thought about blogging lots of times, but I've just been lazy about doing it. Once again, I'll make a vow to try to post more regularly. I don't work in the summer, so I should have plenty of time for blogging.

So even though I'm half way through the second week of my summer vacation, I thought I would lay out my reading plans. I finished Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson today. If I hadn't been sick for the past few days, I probably would've finished it faster. I'll write more about it later, but I need to let my thoughts gel for a while.

I am currently reading Innocent Blood, one of P.D. James's older books, and Diamond Dust, a book of short stories by Anita Desai. Before the summer started, I intended to have a second Summer of Short Stories, and I even read one on each of the first two days of my summer vacation, but I didn't tweet or blog about them. Maybe I'll kickstart that project tomorrow. In addition to these books, I started a few books at work before the school year ended:

• Paradise Lost, which I was trying to read along with Rebecca Reads' Milton in May;
• American Gods by Neil Gaimann, the One Book One Twitter selection;
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson, a young adult book by John Greene and David Levithan.

I plan to finish all three of these, and read many more, including some/all of the following:

• Alice Munro's most recent book of short stories Too Much Happiness
• Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck
• Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, which I'll be re-reading for my book club, having read it a very long time ago when I was young
• Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, a graphic nonfiction book
• Kazuo's Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I've had for a long time
• At least one big book: Drood by Dan Simmons, 2666 by Roberto Bolano, or Middlemarch by George Eliot

I also brought home several young adult books to read this summer, but I won't list them now. All this writing about books makes me want to go read. Later.

Breaking the Fast - The Monday Missive

The plan was to not buy books, except for book club books, before May 25, the release date for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Aside from the book club exceptions, I've actually kept my fast very well until tonight. But the fast breaking is really not my fault. Rebecca Reads is doing a Milton in May read along featuring Paradise Lost. I've never read Paradise Lost, despite having a BA in English and almost having a MA in Literature (I did all the course work but never wrote the thesis), and I've always felt like I should have read it. So I couldn't resist the temptation to join the read along. Plus I thought that surely either Valerie or I had an old copy of Paradise Lost on our bookshelves, but all I could find were some excerpts in a couple of anthologies. Not to be deterred in my quest for enlightenment, I decided that buying a copy, especially one from Half Price Books, was a valid exception to the book buying fast. A read along selection is almost like a book selection, right?

If I had stopped with one book, I wouldn't have felt as bad, but I decided to buy another book, American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This book wasn't just a splurge though. I discovered One Book, One Twitter on Friday or Saturday, and I decided to join in when I saw what book had been selected. I have a reader friend in real life who loves Gaiman's work. Last year, when it was my turn to make the book club selection list, I asked her to recommend a Gaiman book for me to include. Guess what book she suggested--American Gods! How could I resist taking part in One Book, One Twitter? Besides it's almost like being in a book club, so it's not like I just blatantly violated my fast, right?

It's a good thing that I have all summer for the Gaiman book because I still need to finish The Year of the Flood and read the next book club selection, The Hour Between by June 13. I also want to read at least one more YA book before school is out for summer vacation--only 22 days left! And, oh yeah, Valerie and I are moving into our house on the 15th. In the meantime, we have to paint the master bedroom, give the entire house a good cleaning, and hang some window treatments. Whew! I think I have to go to bed now and read myself to sleep. Later!

A Missed Missive & Some Reading/Book Notes

This house is the reason that I failed to post my Monday Missive last night. Valerie and I closed on this house late yesterday afternoon, the first home purchase for both of us. It needs a bit of work, mostly cosmetic, thank goodness. Still, I'm very excited if a bit daunted by the reality of owning a home. It's going to be quite a change. I've lived in apartments for the past eighteen years, and I hope that I can handle being responsible for maintenance and upkeep. Plus I'm not much of a DIY-er. I never even painted a wall in any of the apartments that I've lived in, but I'm going to have to learn how to paint soon, very soon.

After the closing, we spent some time at the house making plans and noticing things like the weird placement of light switches that we hadn't paid attention to previously. Then we went to toast our purchase on the rooftop patio of our friend's Midtown townhouse. The weather has been so perfect lately, last night included, that I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, the satisfaction of being a co-homeowner, the champagne, the company, or the location and the view. It's not a rooftop patio with a view of downtown, but our house does have a good sized backyard and a small patio that Valerie and I are going to improve and enjoy as often as possible.

Enough about the house, let's talk about books. I'm still reading The Year of the Flood, but my reading time has been too sporadic lately. I don't feel like I've been able to focus on the story enough to become really engaged with it. I'm hoping that I can find some quality reading time later this week and this weekend. Of course, I have other books waiting to be read. Killing time before our closing appointment, we picked up copies of our book club's next selection, The Hour Between by Sebastian Stuart. I don't think I had ever heard of this book before seeing it on the list for book club. Blurbs on the cover compare it to A Separate Peace, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Catcher in the Rye, all of which I like, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

At work today, I started reading All the Broken Pieces, a novel in verse by Ann E. Burg. I'm not sure why I picked it up; it wasn't one of the ten books that I have stacked on my desk to read. Maybe I'm trying to make amends for not celebrating National Poetry Month like I have in the past. Maybe I just wanted something that I could read fast. I spent most of the day giving teachers twenty-minute breaks from TAKS administration, but for two consecutive twenty-minute periods, I got to be the bathroom monitor, which gave me some reading time. I got about half way through the book. The poems tell the story of teenager Matt Pin, the son of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, who was airlifted out of Vietnam during the war and adopted by an American couple. I'm not a big fan of novels in verse, but I am finding some of Burg's poetry to be quite beautiful. I wish I hadn't left the book at work so that I could quote some of it here. I'll post more about this book when I'm finished, and I'll include quotes in that post.

Okay, I think that I'll go to bed now and read The Year of the Flood for a while. Later.

It's Monday! Time for another missive.

Posting two Mondays in a row! I'm off to a good start in my effort to blog more regularly. Too bad for my reader(s), I don't really have much to blog about tonight. I spent most of last week in San Antonio, attending the Texas Library Association. It was a very busy 3.5 days, giving me little time for reading. I did finish Ruined, a YA book by Paula Morris that I had started the week before. It is a ghost story set in post-Katrina New Orleans. I thought the book was really good until the overly convoluted twist at the end. The ending didn't completely ruin (no pun intended) the book for me, but it made me feel less enthusiastic about it.

I about 100 pages into Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, another work read. It's the story of a boy listening to cassette tapes recorded by a high school classmate just before she committed suicide. The protagonist is one of thirteen people who did something that contributed to her deciding to kill herself. The narration alternates between the girl and the boy. I know that some of my students have read it, and all agree that it is so sad. If it's really that sad, one or more of my students will probably catch me in tears at the circulation desk later this week.

As for adult books, I did start Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Finally! I'm only about fifty pages in--so far, so good. On Friday, I saw Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy. Several times during her presentation and during the Q&A, I was reminded of the how much I really liked The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. Collins never mentioned Atwood's works, but I can't help but think that she has probably read at least The Handmaid's Tale, which I think I need to re-read sometime soon.

This week is pledge week for the local NPR station, and I can only listen to so much of the begging. (Just so you know, I'm a sustaining member.) I decided to listen to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which I downloaded for free a while ago. My commute is only about thirty minutes, so it will take me a while to listen to the whole book. Even though I've only listened to the first track, I'm already curious to know more and to see what happens.

Okay, I'm going to bed and read for a while. I'll try to blog something more interesting next Monday. Have a good week!

Back to Blogging - Monday's Missive

Damn! Where does the time go?I have no excuse for not blogging; I have just been lazy about it. Of course, I have been reading, quite a bit actually but mostly YA books. However, since my last post, there are a couple of adult books that I've read that I realy want to write about, Motherless Brooklyn and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I'm going to attempt to start a regular schedule of posts. For now, I'm going to plan to post a Monday's Missive every week. I figure if I can make that a habit for a while then I'll be ready to add some other regular features. I'll count this as my first Monday Missive, but I might post something later about the poetry reading I'm attending tonight. Later!

Computer problems & Classics Circuit

Posting from iPhone.

I think my hard drive is going out. I spent a long time last night just trying to get Windows to load. By the time I got it to load and backed up in case problem recurred, it was rather late. I thought I would finish up and post before going to work. Well, guess what? My computer won' t load Windows this morning. Argh!!!

So I'll have to post from work, which means my post on Alain Locke's The New Negro wil not be here until later in the morning. Luckily, today should not be too busy in my school library. Sorry for the delay. Please come back for my post.

The First Book for 2010 & Some Plans

I finished On Beauty by Zadie Smith on Sunday. Actually, I read all day trying to finish for that night's book club meeting, but I had to read the last twenty or so pages after the meeting. If I had read on Saturday instead of running errands and watching the Cowboys win, I would have finished with no problem. I do sometimes put other things before books and reading, especially the Cowboys at this time of the NFL season. :-)

Since I was reading the book for the second time, I wasn't too concerned with not finishing. This month's host lives only a few blocks from us, so Valerie and I were able to walk to the meeting, and she reminded me of the final events as we walked. It's been a long time since I have re-read a book that I wasn't teaching. I usually won't vote yes for a book club selection that I've already read, but I loved White Teeth, Smith's first novel, and On Beauty the first time so I wanted to see what other members thought about her writing.

I blogged about On Beauty the first time I read it. It was just as good on a second reading, and I refuse to think that I'm swayed by how friendly she was when I saw her read here three years ago. I love Smith's use of language. In my previous post, I talked about some of the passages from the book, but this time, I'll limit myself to just one, one that I can't seem to forget for its precise and perfect imagery:

"From here she could see the strangely melancholic format of Jerome's text, italics and ellipses everywhere. Slanted sails blowing on perforated seas."

What a great image!

Everyone at book club enjoyed the book, and we had a really good discussion, but I forgot to bring up one point. When I read the book the first time, I didn't like the Levi character very much. Levi is the bi-racial teenage son of the main character, a rather hapless professor Howard Belsey. When I first read the book, I thought that Levi was perhaps the one misstep in the novel. I thought his use of street lingo wasn't authentic. This time, I thought he was one of my favorite characters, and I see that his street lingo isn't supposed to be authentic. He is trying very hard to be real, to be black. His attempts make him a very funny yet endearing character. I think he might be my favorite character in the whole book. Despite his pretensions, he is in many ways the most honest and least political character in the book and that makes him very likable to me.

I can't wait for Smith's next novel, and I'm going to put her recent essay collection Changing My Mind on my to read list. Speaking of my to read list, I do have some reading plans for 2010, but part of my plan involves not buying any books, except for book club selections, until May 25. So, it'll probably be a long time before I read Changing My Mind.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Next, the final installment in Stieg Larsson's trilogy, will be released on May 25, and I'm going to try very hard not to buy any books until then. Instead of buying new books to read, I'm going to read books that I already own. Some of them I've owned for a very long time. Some that are definitely in line to be read, but not necessarily in this order include:

• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan - the current book club selection
• The New Negro by Alain Locke - my assignment for The Classics Circuit's Harlem Renaissance Tour
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano
• Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
  
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
• The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

And who knows how many more. I read 38 books last year, 10 of which were young adult books. Man, all this talk of books just makes me want to go read. Later.

Books & Things - What I got for Christmas & Birthday

I'm including my birthday gifts here because I was too lazy to blog about them before Christmas. My birthday is December 22. I won't spend time whining about how over the years I have received lots of Christmas/birthday presents. It happened sometimes, but not enough to scar me for life. Plus, Valerie never combines gifts, and her gifts are always just what I wanted even when she surprises me with something that I hadn't put on my Christmas wish list. :-)

Birthday Gifts
Drood by Dan Simmons - I've been wanting this book all since it was released in February. I've been rather obsessed with it. Searching the New Releases shelf during each visit to Half Price Books since its release. The kind of funny thing is that I've never read any Wilkie Collins books or Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood. However, I did purchase a copy of Dickens's book and Collins's The Woman in White at Half Price Books during the spring or summer, but I haven't found the time to read either yet. I even downloaded a free audiobook of Collins's book. It's funny how I can sometimes read about a book and can't stop thinking about it. I think I'll have to read Drood very soon, even though it's 784 pages makes it a daunting read for this slow reader.

CueCat Barcode Scanner from LibraryThing - Yes, I'm a nerd. I've been wanting one of these as long as I've known about them, but I wouldn't purchase myself one because I thought it was silly. However, Valerie and I really need to weed some books and organize what we have. I'm not happy about the thought of getting rid of books, but I'm excited about organizing them in a joint library. We downsized our living space in April and weeded several boxes of books then, but, sadly, we still need to weed more, especially since we can't seem to stop accumulating them.

Smart Glass Necklace - A couple of years ago, Valerie gave me some cool cobalt blue earrings made of recycled glass, and this year, she gave me a matching necklace. I was totally surprised by the necklace, but it was a perfect gift. :-)

(Some) Christmas Gifts
Because Valerie and I bought a new TV for ourselves right after Thanksgiving, we only gave each other stocking stuffers on Christmas day. Once again, she made great surprising choices: a nifty Scrabble tile necklace that she purchased from someone on Etsy.com, some superb sterling silver earrings that I can wear all the time, and a box of Red Hots. I love Red Hots!

I got lots of other good things from Valerie's family and from one of my nephews-in-law--my extended family is too big, so we draw names--but I won't bore you with all the details. I'll limit myself to the two books I received.


Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - I've been wanting to read this book for a long time. Robinson and Joseph O'Neill did an Inprint reading here in September, and I had to miss it because my school Meet Your Teacher Night was the same night. Since I was having a book fair that week, I had to be there to sell books that night, and I'm still upset about the timing. Anyway, every time I hear someone talk about this book, it makes me think that I have missed out on a masterpiece. This book is rather short, so it should be easy to work into my reading schedule very soon.


Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro - I've read two other books of Munro's stories, Runaway and The View from Castle Rock, which I read this summer as part of my Short Story Reading Project. I've completely fallen in love with her writing, and I would now list her as one of my favorite writers. I can't wait to find the time to read this volume of stories.

Like I said above, I got lots of good gifts that I'm very grateful for, and I feel like the gifts that I gave were well received. As far as I'm concerned, Birthday and Christmas 2009 were GREAT!

I need some footnotes

While I should have been reading Water for Elephants last night, I started T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. The mere mention of this play's fourth tempter in an Engines of Our Ingenuity episode during yesterday's commute to work reminded me that I had never read this play and made me obsess about reading it. I kept thinking about it off and on all day. (Eliot's "The Waste Land" is one of my favorite poems, and I like "The Preludes," and some of his other poems too.) I knew that I had a copy of the play at home, a copy that I bought over three years ago when I was still teaching AP English.

So last night before going to bed, I found the book, thinking that I might read the whole playbefore going to sleep--it's very short and even a slow reader like me can read a play in one sitting sometimes. However, I should have known that I'm too old to stay awake that long. When I woke up this morning, I remembered a line from what I had read: "I have seen these things in a shaft of light." This line immediately brought to mind Emily Dickinson's poem that begins "There's a certain slant of light." Later, while I was waiting on the hair straightener to heat up, I found the poem in a book and reread it. Both the poem and the play have religious themes. Is Eliot's line an allusion to Dickinson's? That question is one of the reason's I need some footnotes.

Murder in the Cathedral is a short play, mostly in verse. It tells the story of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, returning to England after years of exile/banishment. He is assassinated very soon after he returns, and he had prophesied his impending death. Despite being written mostly in verse, the basic plot of the play isn't difficult to follow. What I need footnotes for is the British history, which provides the basis for the play. I just don't know or remember enough.

I really enjoyed the Chorus, which functions in much the same way as the Chorus does in the plays like Oedipus Rex. One of my favorite Chorus parts is in Part II after the four knights have stated the evidence of Thomas's treason and hinted that he must die for it. The Chorus says:

I have smelt them, the death-bringers, senses are quickened
By subtile forebodings; I have heard
Fluting in the night-time, fluting and owls, have seen at noon
Scaly wings slanting over, huge and ridiculous. I have tasted
The savour of putrid flesh in the spoon. I have felt
The heaving of earth at nightfall, restless, absurd. I have heard
Laughter in the noises of beasts that make strange noises: jackal, jackass, jackdaw; the scurrying noises of mouse and jerboa; the laugh of the loon, the lunatic bird. I have seen
Grey necks twisting, rat tails twining, in the thick light of dawn...

And this great poetry goes on for another page and a half in my book. Eliot piles on the dark imagery as the Chorus intones an incantation of death. (This passage makes me wish I still taught AP English.)

I think this play is intended as a tragedy, which would explain Eliot's use of a chorus. I need to reread the play with some footnotes and/or read some literary criticism before I say anything else about it. Hopefully, I'll have time tomorrow at work to do a little research. One of the perks of being a librarian is that I can do personal research and reading and look like I'm working hard, but let's keep that little secret between us. ;-)

Now, I need to go to bed and read more of Water for Elephants. Book club meets on Sunday, and I don't want to spend my whole weekend trying to finish it.

Post-Holiday Week Reading Report

I had planned to do a lot of reading during the holiday, and I did, but I only finished one book.

I'm not a big fan of non-fiction, but I finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher Saturday. And I loved it! I thought Kate Summerscale did an excellent job narrating the details of the murder and its ensuing investigation. I had never really thought about how the profession of a detective, whether policeman or private, might have developed nor how the public might have felt about the creation of this new profession. I was fascinated with this aspect of the book. Being a literature lover, I also really enjoyed Summerscale's use of the investigation of the murder as a parallel to the development of detective fiction. I was a bit surprised that Summerscale was able to weave all these informative and narrative threads into such an enthralling book that kept me reading not only to find out who did it but also see how it affected the public psyche and literature.

It's funny that I've never considered myself a mystery connoisseur, because I have always liked mysteries, even as a young reader. I loved Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. As an adult, I've enjoyed Lawrence Sanders, especially his McNally series, and P.D. James. I have always liked movie mysteries too, especially those based on British mystery stories, such as Agatha Christie's, and Conan Doyle's. Some of my favorite TV shows are police dramas, which are often mystery-like in plot, such as the Law & Order franchise, the CSI franchise, Cold Case, and Criminal Intent. In addition, I love British mystery series like Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis, and Midsommer Murders. I like mysteries, I think, because I like solving puzzles and trying figure out the answer before it is revealed, and something about knowing the answer in the end is comforting.

Because I think of mysteries as my "easy" reading, I've never thought about mystery sub-genres, such as the country house murder mystery even though I'm sure that I've read and seen some. The murder that is the focus of the book is a real-life country house murder. A child is brutally murdered and someone in the house did it. Because this is a real life murder, it's a bit more difficult, actually damn near impossible for the detective to prove his case. Even years later, when the accused confesses, there's some question as to whether she could have done it alone. I really hate it when TV mystery/police dramas don't tie up all the loose ends at the end of an episode, but I don't mind when a book leaves me wondering.

In the Afterword, Summerscale comments:

"Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional--to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presences of death."

So in the end, we are comforted and cleansed and feel better about the (fictional) world. Is it any surprise that there is more than one book where the detective is/was/almost was a priest/rabbi? (Okay, I can only think of one that I've read, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman, but I'm sure there are more.)

Other Reading
I read some more of both of the two motherhood books that I named in the previous post, and I might blog about them later this week. I also started Water for Elephants. I've only read about 50 pages, but I think I'm going to really like it. (Is it just me or does the opening narration by the 90- or 93-year-old narrator remind you of Little Big Man? I've never read that book, but I've seen the movie a couple of times.)

I did not read any of the YA books that I brought home with me from work. Today at work, I finished the first chapter of Tender Morsels, and I decided it wasn't the YA book for me right now. I read the first chapter of Marked, the first book in the House of Night Series, and thought I might give it a chance. I also read two or three chapters in The Missing Girl, and the opening chapter was kind of creepy, so I think I'm going to give it a try too. Tomorrow, we are doing some testing at my campus, and I have to sit in the hallway all morning and relieve teachers when they need a bathroom break, and I plan to use that time to read more of one of these two books.

Now it's time to go to bed and read for a while. Later.

Big Plans for a Week of Reading & Writing

If you look at the left sidebar of my blog, you will see that it says I'm reading The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (true - I'm completely enthralled with this book & will definitely write about it later), Water for Elephants (false - not started; planning to begin today), and Moby Dick (false - read about thirty pages at work but that was several weeks ago; planning to restart soon). In addition to those three books, I brought home three work reads: Tender Morsels, which I started a few weeks ago but can't decide if I'll finish or not; Marked, the first book in the House of Night series, and The Missing Girl, the last book by the recently deceased YA author Norma Fox Mazer (brand new book; only one student read so far & her comment: "This is a very creepy book" made me want to read it). Add to this list two books about motherhood: The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, & Birth and Confessions of the Other Mother--I should have already finished the first one (I'm afraid that Valerie is getting frustrated with me for not having finished it or read the one that she read).

Whew! That's a lot of reading for a slow reader to do in only one week. I know that I won't finish all of these this week, but I should be able to make a pretty big dent in most of them.

As for writing this week, I am usually such a procrastinator when it comes to writing, but I've been feeling the need to get some out lately. I spent the summer reading short stories, and I have been thinking a lot about trying to write some since the summer ended. Last week, I decided that I would try to write one this week. I have a couple of ideas for it but unfortunately nothing definite. I'm going to get off the computer and do some housework for a while then come back and work on that story.

Enjoy your Monday!

My To-Read List Just Keeps Getting Longer

I went to the Texas Book Festival in Austin two weekends ago. The weather was gorgeous and the authors were interesting and entertaining, even the ones that I wasn't that excited about seeing. The problem with the weekend, though, is that now I have a bunch of books added to my already impossibly long list of books that I want to read. When I picked the sessions for Sunday, I seriously thought about cutting out early and even not going at all, but I ended up staying all afternoon, and I am so glad that I did. What follows is a list of the authors that I saw and the books that I now want to read. (I started this post over a week ago, so excuse the lack of details for the Sunday sessions. I suck when it comes to posting regularly.)

Saturday


Jane Smiley and Lucy Silag: I thought that I had read something of Smiley's, but after checking out her list of works, I'm fairly certain that I was mistaken. After hearing her talk about her writing, I definitely want to read something of hers, especially A Thousand Acres and maybe her new YA book, The Georges and the Jewels, which is what she is promoting right now. I already wanted to read her daughter's book Beautiful American, but I didn't know Silag was Smiley's daughter. I picked up an ARC of the book at last year's Texas Library Association's conference, but I haven't made time to read it yet. When I get to work tomorrow, I'm going to move it to the top of the to-read pile that I have there.


Colson Whitehead and ZZ Packer: The title of this session was About Race: Identity and American Fiction. Whitehead began by reading a very funny satirical piece about post-racial America then he read an excerpt from his most recent novel Sag Harbor. I have read and really enjoyed his earlier novel The Institutionist, and I think I started his novel John Henry Days several years ago after I saw him read here in Houston. After hearing the excerpt from Sag Harbor, I really want to read this book. ZZ Packer read from an article that she wrote about Reconstruction. The she read part of a short story from her book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I have read already and highly recommend. She is currently working on a novel about the Buffalo Soldiers and Reconstruction--can't wait to read it now. After they read, there was a discussion about race and American fiction, which was very interesting.


Jim Crace, Johnathan Lethem, Robert Olen Butler, and David Eagleman: This panel was very interesting, but, unfortunately, I had to leave early to get to the location where Margaret Atwood was speaking. I was there long enough to hear each of the authors talk about their most recent books: Being Dead (Crace), Chronic City (Lethem), Hell (Butler), and Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife (Eagleman). It was very funny when Eagleman talked about people coming to his appearances, thinking that he was going to talk about the afterlife from a neuroscientist's point of view and being surprised that the book is fiction. I have to admit that I was one of those people. :-) I have never read any of their works, but I think now that I will definitely try to read some of them.


Margaret Atwood: She is the main reason I wanted to go to the festival. I have seen her once before. I think she was the first author that I ever went to a reading by and Alias Grace was definitely my first signed book. I LOVE Atwood's writing, and I think she is such a smart, funny woman that I don't think I would ever be disappointed by her or miss any opportunity to see her in person. I already have The Year of the Flood, and I will probably read it as soon as I finish Howard's End, the current selection of my book club.

Sunday


Michael H. Marvins: Texas' Big Bend: A Photographic Adventure from the Pecos to the Rio Grande is about a place that I LOVE. I've been there twice and look forward to going back some day. I liked the photos that Marvins showed during his talk, so I bought this book--Surprise! Surprise! But it was the only book that I bought all weekend, which is really good for me.


PC Cast and Kristen Cast: This mother-daughter team are the creators of the House of Night series, a young adult vampire series. There are currently six novels available in this series: Marked, Betrayed, Chosen, Untamed, Hunted, and Tempted. I really don't like vampire stories, not even Twilight, but I went to this session anyway because some of my students have read the series and have asked if I will get it for the library. Last year, one of my co-workers read the books and said she felt like they were too mature for 7th and 8th graders. One of my 8th grade students who has read the books said she thought they would be inappropriate in our library. Still, I thought I would check out the authors, and I'm glad that I did. They were very entertaining women, who are very concerned about empowering young women. Plus the mother used to be a high school English teacher. She doesn't know it, but we bonded over both those points. According to PC, the vampirism in these books is based in biology, something about junk DNA, something that I know nothing about but it made the books sound more interesting to me than the usual vampire books. I'm going to read Marked, the first book in the series, and see if it really is too mature for my school's library.


Jonathan Safran Foer, Novella Carpenter, James Sheehan, James E. McWilliams: This panel was hosted by an Atlantic Monthly writer, Corby Kummer, and I think it was the best panel of the weekend. Each person briefly described the genesis of their most recent books: Eating Animals (Foer), Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Carpenter), Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen (Sheehan), and Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (McWilliams). Kummer had obviously read all three books and asked pertinent questions, and the panelists were not afraid to voice differing opinions on how we should eat, where we should eat, and where we should shop for food. (I wish I had made notes or posted this a week ago). There was talk of factory farming and the ridiculousness of farm bills and how the farm lobby does nothing to help change the status quo. I try my best to shop locally and by free range/grass fed meat, sometimes organic and sometimes not, but I learned that all those terms don't always mean what they connote. I'm a meateater, and I can't really see myself ever giving it up completely, but this panel gave me a lot to think about, and I'm putting two of these books on my to-read list, Eating Animals and Locavores. As my regular reader(s) knows, I'm not big on non-fiction, but I think I might have to start reading more of it.


Jessica Lee Anderson, Libba Bray, and Sara Zarr: These are all young adult authors. I've read one book by Bray and one by Zarr, but I've not read their most recent works. This panel was very entertaining, thanks mostly to the antics of Bray, who definitely wanted to be the star of the panel, and the rather dry humor of Zarr, who didn't seem like she wanted to play second fiddle to bray. I was especially interested in hearing/seeing Zarr because she is a self-professed (former?) struggling reader and an admitted slow reader (me too!) who writes realistic fiction, which is much more to my taste than all the vampire/fantasy novels that everyone and their dog is writing these days. After hearing these authors, I think I would like to read all of their most recent works: Border Crossing (Anderson), Going Bovine (Bray)--is that a great title or what!--and Once Was Lost (Zarr). This was the last panel of the weekend for me.

I had a really great time at the Texas Book Festival, and I was pretty geeky impressed by the fact that I was sitting in the Senate chamber and House chamber for some of theses panels. My final assessment of the weekend's events: I'm never going to get my to-read list down to a manageable number.

A Review and Something about Mysteries

I finished reading The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf a couple of nights ago. (It is my book club's current selection.) This novel is about what happens when two young girls, best friends, go missing at the same time. One of the girls, Callie, hasn't spoken for four years, not since the night her mom had a late term miscarriage after falling down the stairs with some help from her drunk dad. Early on, the reader knows that only one of the girls, Petra, is truly missing in the kidnapped sense. Although a certain person thinks the opposite is true, I tried very hard to like this book, but in the end, I just didn't like it very much.

The story is told from points of view alternating among the participants in the story: Callie; Petra, the other missing girl (only one or two times though); Callie's older brother Ben; Antonia, Ben and Callie's mother; Martin, Petra's father; and Deputy Sheriff Louis, who just happens to be Antonia's first love. I usually like stories with alternating points of view, but I think that Gudenkauf's choice to make all of them first person narratives except Callie's was a mistake because I don't think any of them except Ben really had a distinct narrative voice, although a case might be made for the very stilted and unbelievable first couple of chapters from Louis's point of view. Also, the chapters were so short that I never felt like I got to know the characters well enough to really sympathize with them. (I do not buy James Patterson's theory that short chapters make reading a book feel addictive, and I have to wonder if that's what Gudenkauf was going for.)

One big problem that I had with this book is that in the chapters written from Callie's point of view there were descriptions that were obviously not the way a child would view things or describe things. Although these chapters were not written in first person, in Callie's voice, I still felt like the adult word choices were a misstep. For example, at one point, Callie recalls a fun afternoon at Petra's that included the marriage of a dog and a stuffed animal. The dog belonged to one of Petra's father's students, Lucky. Callie recalls Lucky "pretending to cry with happiness..and drawing [Petra] close to him." I"m sorry but an eight-year-old would not recall that event using those words to herself. Another example occurs late in the story. Callie is thinking about what she witnessed, about what happened to Petra. She remembers, "He carefully moved to set Petra down, resting his hand behind her head as he laid her on the altarlike rock. Once again he stood, shaking his arms free from the residual weight of Petra." Now Callie might be a very smart eight-year-old, but this description is not believable as hers at all.

Depite this problem and others, I didn't hate this book, and I thought it had some good writing in it, but overall, I just didn't think it was better than okay. The characters are not very original, but the writing is not bad and even occasionally very good. I really like this passage, Ben is describing his father, but I'm not sure it's a teenager's description:

"For once in my life, I think my dad looks old. Not ancient old, like an eighty-year-old man, but just tired old. Like a middle-aged man who spent too much time drinking and being mean to others, time sits on his face like some Halloween mask."

Then later in the same chapter, Ben describes some pajamas that he used to wear:

"I remember they were white and had these grinning little clowns holding balloons all over them. I wouldn't tell all my friends this, but I loved those pajamas. It was like sliding into something happy when I put those on after a bath." :-)

Like I said earlier, I did try to like this book. It's basically a mystery--who and what happened to Petra?--and I like mysteries. I don't think many readers would have a difficult time figuring out who did it before it's revealed, but I don't think they would figure it out too early in the story. Sometimes when I'm reading mysteries, I want to look ahead and see if my suppositions are correct, but I enjoy the getting to the solutions so much that I resist the temptation. With this book, I just didn't enjoy the getting there enough to resist. This book didn't make me want to keep reading or to read faster to get to the end; it just made me want to skip to the end. Not a good sign.

One thing this book did do for me, though, is make me want to read a good mystery, so I picked up an old P.D. James book, Unnatural Causes, to read before I read my next book club selection, which will be picked on Sunday. It also made me wonder what makes a good mystery and made me want to do some research about the conventions of mysteries, which made me think that I need to read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher very soon. Maybe I'll do some research and post about what I find.

For now, though, I need to go to bed, so I can get up early and do some work that I should have been doing instead of blogging. Later.

No cooking equals book buying

What happens when you don't put the chicken strips in the refrigerator to defrost and don't put the peas in the crockpot to cook while you're at work and the only other option for dinner is spaghetti with jarred sauce? Well, in my home, you end up talking yourselves into going out to pickup some Chinese food. Of course, you also decide to go to the one Chinese food place that is in the same strip as a Half Price Books. No one wants to just sit in the restaurant and wait on the food to be prepared, right? After all, the time will pass much faster in the bookstore than in the restaurant, especially when you find books that you have to have.

I only bought one book tonight: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimimanda Ngozie Adiche. There was no way that I could leave it sitting on the shelf unbought. It just came out in June! I absolutely fell in love with Adiche's writing when I read her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. I still need to read her first novel Purple Hibiscus too. This new book is a collection of short stories, so it might get read sooner than later. I can read one here and there and not have to worry about remembering where I left off.

Well, the Cowboys have won, and I can go to bed and read now. Later!

A Really Good Weekend & Some Reading

Even though the Astros lost badly when I saw them last night for the last time this season, I still had a really good weekend. I enjoyed a yummy Mexican food dinner and margaritas with Valerie and a good friend of ours on Friday night. Afterward we went to a bar for a couple of more drinks.

Yesterday, Valerie and I went to a members preview of a new exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The Moon is an interesting exhibit that combines art with science. My favorite item in the exhibit was a painting by one of my favorite painters: Blue Luna by Kenneth Noland--I wanted to include a photo of it, but I can't find one online. I will definitely go back and see the exhibit again. I want to see A Trip to the Moon, a silent film, the first science fiction film. It's based on two novels, one by Jules Verne and one by H.G. Wells. We watched about five minutes of it, but I want to go back and watch the whole thing. (I have one big complaint about this exhibit. It is organized around the phases of the moon, but it is not laid out in a way to easily follow the phases.)

After the museum, we went to the sorry Astros games. :-( But after the game, we had a nice dinner with another friend and did a bit of people watching in downtown Houston.

Today, I mostly spent the afternoon finishing The Little Stranger. I thought the book was very good. I see why this book is a Booker prize finalist. Waters is doing so much more with this novel than simply creating an entertaining haunted house story. Because one of the main characters is named Roderick, I really feel like I should re-read Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Also, I need to think about The Little Stranger for a day or two before I write at length about it.

Now, what's next to read? I have to read The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf for my book club, but I'm going to start at least one other book too. I really want to read 2666, but it's so long that I think I will wait a bit to read it. Besides I'm already reading a very long book at work, Moby Dick. I also have been thinking about reading another P.D. James mystery, but Valerie's great pleasure in reading Sarah Vowell has made me really want to read something by her. So, I think I will start The Wordy Shipmates soon.