The Biblio Philes

I posted this entry in my windmills journal here on AOL, but this is where it really belongs.  If anyone with extra space on their bookshelves wanders through here, come check out what I'm removing from my shelves.  It's like saying goodbye to dear friends, so your help is appreciated. 

In the extremely unlikely event that anyone out there is still reading this journal, I salute thee.  And want to let any journal friends (former journal friends?) know that we are in the throes of sorting and reaming and packing out this big old Delaware farmhouse, in preparation for moving to a slightly-less-old adobe house in the East Valley, in Albuquerque, NM.  In order not to have the 79 boxes of books we moved here from Massachusetts eight years ago, I am putting some that we can bear to part with on eBay, for sale.  As AOL has already turned Journals into advertising space, I thought I'd just play right along.  If you'd like to see what we have for sale, come visit my "shop" on eBay:  Maisie743. 

Selling books is really hard for me, and selling them to friends would make it all easier.  I will be listing more as we go through them; it's an ongoing process, so check back in from time to time.

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This is not really a post - I just wanted a place to copy down a couple of passages from the last two books I've read.  The two passages are perhaps polar opposites of ways of looking at our world, and I mysteriously can identify with both of them.  The first is from Michael Cunningham's new and wonderful book:  Specimen Days.  The speaker is a woman who has been driven round the bend by current American society, and who has become part of a curious form of terrorist ring

"Look around," she said.  "Do you see happiness?  Do you see joy?  Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe.  They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history.  To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself.  We can fly.  Our teeth don't rot.  Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next.  There's no dung in the milk.  There's milk, as much as we want.  The church can't roast us alive over minor differences of opinion.  The elders can't stone us to death because we might have committed adultery.  Our crops never fail.  We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to.  And look at us.  We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots.  Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering eight-year-olds, or both.  We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married.  Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn't, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn't get poison, they'd put pins in it.  A tenth of us are in jail, and we can't build the new ones fast enough.  We're bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on.  Traces of fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women's breast milk.  So tell me.  Would you say this is working out?  Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?"

(Note to self:  look up his two books prior to The Hours:  A Home at the End of the World, and Flesh and Blood.)

The second passage is from Ian McEwen's latest book:  Saturday.

Once, on a walk by a river - Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow - his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favorite poet..."If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water." ...They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make use of evolution.  What better creation myth?  An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of foms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities - and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.

So, would this religion be Intelligent Design or Creationism?  Or, simply, science.  These were both books I could not put down, stayed up too late reading, read most of Saturday yesterday (which was itself Saturday!) because I was felled by some mean and nasty sort of flu.   

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Classes ended last Friday, then I slept for fourteen hours and finished A Thread of Grace.  It was a long wait between books for Mary Doria Russell, and what a very different book from her first two - but the wait was certainly worth it. 

A belief in grace is all that keeps me from swallowing ground glass most days, and that thread does run through this book.  A difficult but compelling read, a story of great evil and great compassionate goodness existing side by side -  an account I hadn't heard before.  It's the story of Northern Italy at the tail end of WW II, the Italians finished with war, the Germans desperate to hold a front, the Jews who had escaped from occupied Southern France over the Alps hoping to find a safe haven in Italy, the partisans fighting a guerilla warfare against the Germans on their soil.   There's a large number of characters, but once I had time to really settle down and read without constant interruption I had no trouble with the large cast.

It's done without stereotyping - not all the Italian peasants are generous and good, not all the Nazis are unredeemably evil, but don't get too attached to anyone in the story - there is a low survival rate, I must warn you.  Not that it's unexpected, but it is a heartbreaking book.  Heartbreaking but full of the wonders of grace, the miracle of the human spirit.

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I am not dead, nor do I sleep.  I am teaching two work-intensive, fast-paced classes this summer.  One I have taught several times before, so I am familiar with the material, textbook, etc., but it's a writing class and there's a lot of work coming in very quickly.  It entails a lot of paper-reading for me.  The other class is brand-new to me, and requires learning the equipment in our also brand-new language lab.  The class is a kind of guinea pig all the way around, and I often end up feeling like an idiot.  It's called "Advanced Listening-Speaking" and no one knows what it's supposed to be.  The woman who has been teaching it turned it into a prep class for students who will be going on to take academic classes in the college, basically taking notes on lectures, and also learning to give presentations in front of a class. And that's the texts I'm using.  The head of the dept, who will be teaching it next semester, doesn't like this focus and keeps giving me all kinds of other stuff she wants me to do. Not knowing the equipment means I often have to run to find someone to help me out of a jam - I hate doing this sort of thing in front of students.  All in all I wind up with a massive tension headache every Tues and Thurs afternoon.  Feels like a steel rod is running from the top of my head through my neck. 

So, I'm teaching five hours four days a week, staying afterwards to fool around with the language lab stuff,  get used to what I'm trying to do.  This is an amazing, state-of-the-art system, but we've had no training, won't have any until September.  The system is far smarter than I am. 

Then there's TheBlueVoice, the new political group blog you have possibly heard about already.  Seven other AOL political bloggers (as I often have been in my other AOL Journal, thewindmills) and I got together and decided to take our show on the road.  It's turning out to be a very worthwhile and enjoyable project, but it's The Big Time, and I have been doing a lot of research for the things I write over there, which are mostly pieces on the environment. 

So, where does that leave "real" reading?  By which I usually mean novels. Kind of in the dirt, for the present time I'm afraid.  I read a couple of Ian McEwan books, not the new one yet.  They were okay, but I wasn't really swept off my feet.  All my library books are so overdue I expect the Library Police to arrive at the door any day now.  I started Mary Doria Russell's new book, A Thread of Grace  (If you never read The Sparrow and Children of God I have to say go get them and begin immediately.  They are probably categorized as Science Fiction, but oh, they are so much more than that.  But isn't most Sci Fi more than that, really?  It's why it's one of my favorite forms of fiction.)  a week or so ago, and haven't gotten very far into it.  Gail read it almost without stopping and loved it, so I know I need to stop this obsessing with climate disruption and species extinction, etc, and get back to reading.

As for movies, we haven't seen any recently because we are watching the first season of "The West Wing" on DVD.  Somehow we didn't gear into this show until it won all those Emmies its first year.  We don't watch much TV, and just had no idea how addictively wonderful this was, especially when Aaron Sorkin was its mastermind.  We have two more first season discs to go, then we'll start on last season's "Six Feet Under" on DVD. 

Three more weeks and summer classes will be over.  We'll have a lot of company at the beginning of the month, maybe even all through the month.  I'd love to get to Texas before the fall semester begins, but it may not happen.  In any case, I'll get back to reading in the brief weeks between summer and fall semesters.  Don't give up on me, please!

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Just a short report on a couple of book disappointments.  Yes, I have them - and these two were especially disappointing to me because I have loved the authors' previous work so much.  Elizabeth Berg wrote what I still consider to be the best book on women's friendships:  Talk Before Sleep.  She's written many other novels, and some short stories.  I've loved all of her books.  So I was eagerly anticipating her latest one, especially after hearing her interviewed on the Diane Rehm show on NPR.  This one is called The Year of Pleasures, and unlike any of her other books, it often felt false and forced.  It's the story of a recently widowed woman of fifty-five and the year she spends after her husband dies, seeking a new life.  The title may seem odd, given that short synopsis - but it will make sense if you read it.  And it's probably worth reading, it's just not up to Berg's usual standards.

The second book was an even greater disappointment.  I can't tell you how much I loved Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, her first novel.  I gave it to everyone for gifts, I dreamed about it, I still remember whole chunks of it.  It was a wonder of mystery and blessing, love, spirit, heart and soul.  So, for months now I've been waiting for The Mermaid Chair, her new book.  I was on a long list at the library, but last week it was finally my turn.  Maybe it's bad to have such high expectations for a second novel.  In any case, it certainly fell far short.  The story is basically banal, despite a lovely setting and a few mystical trappings, an affair between a married woman and a monk just short of taking his final vows.  A lot of background tragedy in their lives, a lot of religious angst, but...it's the story of an affair.  The writing is not what I remember from Secret Life, either - it seemed plodding and tedious in places, never the untrodden path that the first book set before me.

I haven't read any reviews of either book - so I'd love to hear from anyone who has read either or both of these.  What did you think - have I just become old and jaded? 

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Thanks to my friend Duane, over at SottoVoce, I have this fun map and article from the NYT to share with you.  The article is "We Mapped Manhattan," and the project is one I wish I'd known about from the start.  But, as the writers themselves say:

"Mapmaking is a process of omission -- if it were not, a map of the United States would be 3,000 miles wide. Our design allowed the display of only 49 books, plus a very nice epigraph from Melville (with thanks to Rob Tally of Durham, N.C.). In deciding what to include, we wanted to represent many genres and many eras, and to be guided by reader preferences. The triage was painful, necessarily excluding many wonderful books and authors."

I'm sure my submissions would have been the same as many others  - Catcher in the Rye, the Eloise books, The Great Gatsby, Stuart Little, Time and Again.  There are many on the list, however, that I haven't read - it makes a nice list of things to look for. 

The resultant map is an interactive toy, you can go from location to location, seeing the actual mise en scène of each book or poem. It is a map of Literary Manhattan..."a place where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks."  You may need to sign in to access the article and map, but heavens - who among us is not registered online with the NYT? 

PS - I just checked, and you do have to sign in for the article, but you can access the map just from my link, without registering or signing in.

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Dunning himself used to have exactly such a bookstore in Denver, The Old Algonquin. He now has only a virtual bookstore, which can be visited here. 

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So, that’s where I’ve been, bookwise. And I only just realized, as I began to write about my recent reading, what a theme ran through it. There are several books in my stack that I’m reading over a period of time, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Garlic and Sapphires, Plan B – books that don’t come from the library and can be dipped into when the mood strikes.

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I have much to consider in this blog, but for the moment I only have time to pass along this movie review I just read at Salon.com.  That two of my favorite actresses, maybe even my two favorite actresses, are together in a film that sounds so wonderful is reason to continue living - at least until I see it.  And then, I could get the DVD and see it over and over.  It sounds like the sort of film that deserves to be called literature, thus included in a book blog.  Read and rejoice.




Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in "Ladies in Lavender."

"Ladies in Lavender"
Maggie Smith and Judi Dench prove beauty is ageless in this sparklingly lively period piece.

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By Stephanie Zacharek

April 29, 2005  |  "Ladies in Lavender," the directorial debut of actor Charles Dance, is the kind of small, fine-boned English picture that's usually sold with one of those deadly art-house-cinema trailers. You know the kind: The actors' most emotive moments are plucked out of context and put before us against a backdrop of swollen string music. Sometimes there's even a handy voice-over to alert us to significant plot points: "Two lives will be changed forever by a stranger" -- that sort of thing.

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About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.

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