New books

Let the cries of, "Oh no, not more books!" ring out. At the very least I get the knowledge that I didn't succumb to the book-buying urges myself; my father bought them. It's the two NYRBs that I'm most interested in. I've heard of neither of them, but both sound fascinating. Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary and Indian Summer by William Dean Howells. The first of these is described as the story of a "latter-day Moll Flanders" and the second as a romantic comedy of errors. I'm also looking forwards to a wander through Word Fugitives by Barbara Wallraff, which seems to be basically a collection of newly coined words for all the things you ever thought there should be one concise word for.

I don't know how I didn't already own Book Lust. I listen to Nancy Pearl on the radio all the time, and my father has met and spoken with her. I have basically no interest in The Rope Eater, by Ben Jones, but it wasn't bought for me so small matter. It's about Civil War-era Arctic exploration, two themes in which I am profoundly uninterested. Poisoned Pens, by Gary Dexter, is a collection of famous author's writings on other famous authors whose books they hate. I'd never be able to read all of this, as it would make me too sad to read anything hateful against my favourite authors, but some of it might be fun. And Women in Antiquity, by Charles Seltman, is pretty self-explanatory non-fiction.

As I've finally got down to the last of the imminent library books, it'll be nice to have these to look into next.

84, Charing Cross Road

Happy Father's Day!

While I was eating breakfast yesterday morning my father came home from the library, and said he'd bought me a book (not from the library, of course, but there's a bookshop in between). He bought me a book the day before, too, and at this point every time he says he's bought me a book I say, "Oh, dear." Both books were thoroughly welcome, though. Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags, which I've been vaguely meaning to read, and Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, which I've already read, but really ought to own.

And then I sat down and read it again. It's only 97 pages, but it took a while and I didn't mean to and I was supposed to be showering and getting on with the day. It was, however, thoroughly enjoyable.

I tend to think of 84, Charing Cross Road as a novel, as fiction, but of course it isn't. It's a collection of letters between Helene Hanff, a writer living in New York with a taste for out of print books which can't be found affordably any where in New York, and Frank Doel, employee of the Marks and Co. Bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road, London, where Helene's desired books can be bought. Also making appearance are other employees of the bookshop, Frank Doel's wife, and his next door neighbour. The correspondence spans twenty years, beginning in 1949. Helene sends packages of food to the shop during the post-war rationing, they sometimes send her Christmas presents, and she often berates them for failing to find the books she wants in a timely fashion. The letters are bookish, warm, and lovely, Helene's entertainingly blunt as she tries to force Frank out of his stubborn polite Englishness. Ultimately, the story these letters tell is a mild, everyday sort of tragedy, of the sort one's childish instinctive sense of fairness gets woken up for. Despite that, it's still an enormously comforting book, one that makes you wistful for something you never experienced. It's so perfect it's hard to remember it's not fiction.

Another book to count for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge, as well, which I didn't think of until just now. I seem to be reading them all at once (I read Parnassus on Wheels not realizing that counted, too).

I hereby count 84, Charing Cross Road among the books you must read. I intend to start foisting it upon unsuspecting friends as soon as possible.

Summer reading

I have a lot of plans for the summer. It's been a while since I've been able to make enough time to read as much as I'd like to, so that's definitely something I'll have to do. After reading dense political theory treatises and articles about education all quarter I'm reading for some fun, easy reading. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane put me into a bit of a fantasy kick, so now I'm reading The Princess Bride, and after that I'll have to find something similarly fun and fictional. It may be a while before I read anything very serious.

I do have some serious reading plans for the summer in general, though. I have over three months without school, but there's still some education I want to do. I did like reading political theory, however dense, and I'd like to read some more philosophical and theoretical books. Possibly other works by some of the people I read for that class (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, Marx, and Peter Singer). If anybody knows of a good into to philosophy type book that isn't too textbookish, please do recommend it.

I've also got a lot of nonfiction lying around that I'd like to read. I started Virginia Woolf's letters ages and ages ago, and I'd like to get back to that; I also have Charlotte Bronte's letters. I want to finish Victorian Visitors, read the chapters we skipped over in class of a couple of books, and finish The Odyssey (that's not nonfiction, but it's going in the same class of not being a relaxing lazy book). I've probably got loads of other nonfiction to read as well.

Apart from all that, I want to make art. I want to sew, I want to bake, I want to write, I want to do craft projects. I am thoroughly excited for summer.

Now I just have to get through two finals and a paper.

Location, location

Managed to spend a whole hour reading Greenery Street this morning, as I had to get up outrageously early to get into honors classes, and had to wait in line for ages. I'm still loving it.

Then after lunch passed a random book sale, which had lots of books all for under ten dollars. It's been quite a while since I browsed through a bookstore properly, so it was quite pleasant. I didn't buy anything, but I was rather fascinated by which books appealed. It was mostly nonfiction that struck my eye (though granted, the sale was mostly of nonfiction). I did consider buying a collection of Alan Bennett's writing, but didn't in the end.

After that I had to finish reading the assigned chapters of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I contemplated reading outside, as it was quite sunny today, but it wasn't really warm enough. Next best thing (or maybe better!), I went to sit in the Suzzallo Library reading room. I'm sure you've all seen this webpage, the collection of beautiful libraries. Most of them are photos of centuries-old libraries in Europe, but Suzzallo Library makes it in. Deservedly so. Reading there is like sitting in a church. The ceiling's enormously high and there's all sorts of lovely details, carving in the walls, beautifully painted ceiling, stained glass. Something about those long wooden tables with the lamps built into them make me feel like I should be wearing a 1950s suit. And reading there makes you feel kind of virtuous and pretentious at the same time.Given my sudden desire to read nonfiction and my recent discovery of the joys of reading in Suzzallo, has anyone got any good nonfiction suggestions? I'd like to brush up my history, but I'd like books that have a specific focus, that take history from a certain angle. Ideas?

Nonfiction

I've been musing a lot lately, though still not reading very much. After The Man of Property I was all set to blaze through the rest of the Forsyte Saga, but of course that didn't happen and now it's due back at the library. Instead, I've started reading a nonfiction book called The Victorian Visitors, by Rupert Christiansen. It's basically about various foreign personalities who visited London in the 19th century, and how they interacted with Victorian British culture. I'll have more to say about it when I've finished it.

I'm thinking about reading as escapism. Lately, it's nonfiction that does the best job of keeping my attention. Maybe the fiction I'm reading just isn't exciting enough. But given the amount of nonfiction reading I have to do for classes this quarter, it seems odd that I would choose more nonfiction for my pleasure reading.

I don't know if this has anything to do with this trend in my reading, but I wonder if in some ways nonfiction actually makes better escapism than fiction. In fiction, we get a more or less complete picture of characters. We know what they did, and more importantly, why they did it. In fiction, however, we have a fair chunk of facts, but little background knowledge, mere guesses at what influences and motives went into events. Nonfiction asks us to think about what happened. Fiction asks us to think about why it happened; it shoes us people's internal workings, and in that way probably makes us more aware of our own. And that probably takes more energy than just reading the tangible history and wondering vaguely what else was there.

I nearly always speed through nonfiction. I don't know why, really. I just always find something in it to fascinate me.

Glorious Nonfiction

Once again, being reminded how much I love reading nonfiction. I've seen a couple of reviews of Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education, by Jane Robinson, but the one that made me immediately order it from the library was Cornflower's post about it. In the course of reading the book, she realized she had known one of its subjects, which really drives home the point of the book--that the women whose stories are told made a very real and tangible difference to the next generations of women.

Actually, my very ability to read this book says something for its story. It's not published in the US, so of course my public library didn't have it. My university library didn't even have it, but they managed to interlibrary loan it from a college in Oregon, which incidentally is the other college I might have gone to. So it was my being a college student which enabled my reading about women's fight for college education.

The first women's colleges in England were established at Cambridge in 1869. Incidentally, Cambridge was also the last university in England to grant women real degrees--in 1948. This book doesn't even stretch that far; its scope pretty much ends with the late 1930s. It's not the numbers in the book that make it wonderful reading, though. Bluestockings is stuffed full of lovely anecdotes, and that's really the best way to tell the story. The personal stories and many quotes from diaries and letters make the woman who brought education to their daughters very real.

Having applied to college in recent memory, a favourite anecdote of mine is this one. Elizabeth Smedley applied to St. Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1928. At her admissions interview, the interviewer

"sat in a dim light, by the fireside, making the shadows of different animals appear on the wall by manipulation of her hands. I was full of carefully prepared brilliant thoughts on Shakespeare etc. and was utterly taken aback on being urged to try and make a rabbit or an elephant appear beside hers."(pg. 105)

Miss Smedley got in.

It's not the funny stories, of course that make this book so valuable. One Oxford student, Trixie Pearson, was forced to contemplate leaving her studies because she was unable to afford them. But "discreetly, with infinite sensitivity, the college invented grants and bursaries to help, some of which - Trixie discovered later - came straight from the pockets of her tutors" (pg. 3). Many of its stories are inspiring, some infuriating, all thoroughly worthwhile reading. Bluestockings gives me a profound desire to make the most of my college education. I also rather want to buy a pair of blue stockings.

A jaunt through the President's past

It was one of those books I never would have picked up of my own volition, but one which I nevertheless enjoyed and which proved to be timely. I didn't read it when I was theoretically supposed to, but I read it when it was the book I needed. Thinking about my various developing interests and goals, Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama, in some measure addressed those.

My main reaction to the book, or to the first half at least, was, admittedly, a sort of gleeful "I know something you don't know." Obama says in the introduction:

"The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone's asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I've usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here." (pg. xvi)

The book was published in 1995. Before he'd run for president, before congress, even before, I think, he ran for state senate. Admittedly it's true that the scope of this book doesn't involve anybody famous or any big important events, but we all know, reading it, where his life is going to go. I kept thinking about the various ordinary people he befriends in the course of this story, and wondering where they are now and what they think of him. And, really, he's a very ordinary person.

There's a passage fairly early in the book about then mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington. He was the city's first black mayor in 1983, and Obama says,

"His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores; displayed prominently, like some protective totem." (pg. 147)

I can't help but be reminded of those red, white and blue Obama posters plastered in similar places in 2008, many of which I'm sure are still there. It's a funny occasion of two times squeezing and blurring together, Obama's own observation of such posters and later, his own posters, which really had exactly the same effect.

Obama writes rather like he wants to be writing a novel. I suppose this is a story, memoir rather than the usual strain of nonfiction, and it's hard to write impressions of various times in the past in any other way. It's not a jarring style, though it can get a little flowery at times. I've gotta say I was pleased we've got a president whose vocabulary is better than mine (though not by much).

While the book, which all UW freshman were given last summer and told to read, has been much mocked by various people I know here, having acquired the usual stigma of required reading, I thought it was a worthwhile read. Obama goes through his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, college, his time as a community organizer in Chicago, and his first visit to Kenya, so I learned a lot about his past that I didn't know. Not to be political, but it's nice to be surprised about some of his history, nice to have a president whose story isn't totally predictable and in a certain mold. And it's a good story, really. The different sections vary a lot in tone and subject matter, but the whole manages to be cohesive. Anyway, I liked it.

Books of the Year 2009: Nonfiction, Short Fiction, and Plays

I read 4 books of nonfiction this year, but my favourite is clear. I read 18 plays, mostly for school. Four of my reads I consider short fiction. I'm kind of arbitrarily deciding how many favourites I get in each section, it's just how many seem to fit there--one nonfiction, two short fiction, three plays.

Nonfiction
The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, would definitely be in the running for most enjoyable book in any category this year. It is 529 pages but I absolutely sped through it. I forget how much I love biographies, but this was biography at its best, giving both a picture of its subjects' personalties and a clear view of their place in history. I found it completely fascinating. Original post here.

Short Fiction
The Lady in the Van, by Alan Bennett, doesn't quite count as fiction at all, because it's a true story and is mostly made up of Alan Bennett's diary entries about Miss Shepherd, the woman who lived in her van on the author's door step for 20 years. Despite its truth, though, I'm including it here because it is a story, and isn't comprehensive the way nonfiction would be. It was one of those stories that induced compulsive reading aloud, and I loved it. Original post here.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is kind of a given for good short fiction. It's one of those books that is an experience to read, because it's so evocative and intuitive. I'm sorry I never really wrote a post about it; I would have liked to revisit my initial reactions. But I know it was good.

Plays
It feels somehow like cheating to include The Real Inspector Hound, by Tom Stoppard, since I didn't just read it, I produced it and costumed it and assistant stage managed it. But all that aside, it is a good play. It's one you sort of have to read more than once to get the full meaning out of, because it has so many layers. It's very good fun, and I can't resist theatre about theatre.

The Zoo Story, by Edward Albee, is a short, contained play. What I liked was the language, something about the two characters' expressions, the way it rolled. I don't know that I would have expected this to be the one play out of the thirteen from my comparative literature class that I liked best, or even that it absolutely is the best, but it's one I know I'll remember.

What can I say about Shakespeare's King Richard III? It always feels odd somehow to put a Shakespeare play on a list like this. But I suppose there's some Shakespeare I wouldn't put on this list, so putting Richard III here works. I thought he was a fascinating character, historically accurate or not, and this play does have some really great lines.

The Marvelous Mitfords

I've had the most splendid day, doing absolutely nothing but sitting in my back yard in the sun and reading, and getting very tan. My book of choice is The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, which I talked about vaguely here, back when I bought it in December. I am absolutely loving it. I started it Saturday night or maybe Sunday, the thing is 529 pages, and I expect to finish it tomorrow. It's lovely having time to read, but if I were reading a different book I doubt I'd have gotten through so much of it. I always forget how much I like reading biography.

For the few readers of book blogs who have not yet heard, the Mitfords were (and are, I suppose) a family of British aristocrats made famous mostly by Nancy Mitford's semi-autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. They were at the height of their notoriety (I think I can pretty safely call it that) in the 1930s and '40s. Lord and Lady Redesdale, David and Sydney Mitford had six daughters and a son, born between 1902 and 1920. Each of them is a fascinating and often strikingly different person in their own right, and on top of this they lived in one of the most interesting times in history. Not only that but they were also a notable part of this history. The book suggests, for example, that it is possible that Diana Mitford (third eldest daughter) was the only person to be personally well-acquainted with both Churchill and Hitler.

I enjoyed the stories of their childhood and their early adulthood, especially the various eccentricities of the family, and also the various associations they had--suddenly reading a name of some close acquaintance or other and realizing that it was some famous person. Evelyn Waugh, for example, based his novel Vile Bodies off Diana Mitford and her first husband and their friends. Nancy Mitford especially knew numerous famous members of England's literary world.

What I've found most fascinating about this book, though, is the politics, and the family's place within political history. Diana and Unity Mitford were both devoted Fascists, while Decca Mitford was a Communist, and David and Sydney Mitford's inability to agree on Hitler, Fascism, and the war fractured their marriage. The family was related to Winston Churchill. Diana's second husband, Oswald Mosley, was leader of the British Fascist party. Unity spent most of the 1930s living in Germany, and for quite a long time sat in restaurants she knew Hitler frequented, waiting to see him. Eventually, he noticed her. They got to know each other very well; he gave her presents, found her apartments, paid medical bills, got her tickets to the opera. She was so torn between Britain and Germany that she decided she would have to commit suicide if they went to war with each other.

The story of Unity Mitford's relationship with Hitler and Germany is, I think, the most interesting part of this book for me. I've never read anything about Germany in the years before World War II, and it's especially interesting to do so now, having innocently read The Pursuit of Love a year ago, and now being able to connect its author to such a subject.

I definitely recommend this book, whether you already know anything about the Mitfords or not. The writing is very fluid, and I think does a good job of capturing the world these people lived in, and their extremely unique and forceful personalities.