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Sunday Salon: Oh, Beautiful Rain

It’s been a while, now, hasn’t it? I’ve been working on Sundays and I find when I work on Sunday I really don’t have time to read and get online. The past few Sundays I’ve been reading after work and then going to bed late into the night… I also haven’t touched Twilight of the Superheroes since the last time I posted under this heading.

When I started doing these Sunday Salon posts I thought it was a brilliant idea to dedicate each Sunday to a short story, then write about that story with my post. I’m starting to think that I’d prefer to do what other people do - read a bit from the book I’m already reading anyway, then share my ideas on my progress so far. For one, it means I don’t get stuck reading something I’m probably not in the mood for anyway (*cough*).

So what have I read since the last time I posted? Gosh, it’s almost been a full month! I finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which was one I couldn’t put down… Sort of like how I couldn’t put down Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. Those young adult authors clearly have something going that I’d like to get into. I also read the first two Lords of the Underworld novels by Gena Showalter; I’ve loved JR Ward’s Blackdagger Brotherhood books and I wanted to read something else mythologically appealing (if inaccurate), so The Darkest Night and The Darkest Kiss both spoke to me. Actually, they giggled at me, and I giggled right alongside them. Lately, though, I’ve been reading The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer which has been on my wishlist since it came out in hardback and on my TBR pile since the day it came out in paperback. It’s a good sign - I’m finally making an etch in those bookshelves I reserve specifically for “not read yet” books!

A few Sundays ago, Katrina’s Reads posted a meme specifically for the Sunday Salon and today I’m going to steal it.

The author I always meant to read is Evelyn Waugh. I have some of his books (this is true for a lot of authors I haven’t read, though) and just haven’t seemed to have gotten around to them yet.
The author I always meant to read more of is Philip Roth. I have seven of his books in my collection already but I’ve only read one of them. I really enjoyed it so I’m not sure what’s keeping me back from reading the rest…
The genre I always meant to try is political/spy thrillers, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever read any from this section of the store. I mean, I usually enjoy political thriller movies so why wouldn’t I like the books?
The book on my TBR pile I always mean to read next always manages to be by Haruki Murakami. I have tons and tons of his books and one of my 101 Things in 1,001 Days goals is to read all of his books that I currently own. So I’m in the middle of a book and I glance in the direction where I keep his books on my shelf and think, “I’ll read one of those next.” I always mean to… But it doesn’t seem to quite turn out as planned.
The book I always meant to try again is The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Well, there are a lot I’d like to read again, but this one in particular because while I was reading it for a class in college, people kept comparing it to The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Now I’ve read that, and others by Vargas Llosa, and I’d like to go back and re-read this book which I loved so much, if not just to get more out of it.

I don’t have a lot else to say, unfortunately, because (as I hinted) I’m not really in the mood for Twilight of the Superheroes. But! I did read some Castle in the Forest and I’m starting to get into the book much more. It had a very slow, rather drawn-out and confusing beginning, but now it’s one of those books I randomly think about in the middle of the day and yearn to read even though I can’t because I’m at work or driving or doing some other menial, obviously unimportant task. Like writing this post, for example.

It’s been raining a lot lately, I should mention, since it’s my subject line and all. I really enjoy reading when it’s raining - I can’t sit on the porch and listen to it, because my apartment is crooked. (Basically the rain very easily gets onto the porch, even though we have a covering, and large puddles start to build and attempt to drown us if we sit out there.) However, I can crack a window and listen to it, smell the musky breath of the wind while I dive into another world. The sounds of rain are so soothing; even the thunder never frightened me.

Today is another promised rainy day so I hope to get a lot more reading done later, but now it’s time to make cookies.

Sunday Salon: Summer

I know it’s not technically summer yet, but the past few days have been so horribly hot that it may as well be. Yesterday I cut my hair in the bathroom really, really short so that it wouldn’t be on my neck. Of course, now it’s always in my face. Why I give myself bangs every time I cut my hair is beyond me, because I clearly don’t enjoy it! I’m also sitting here eating cantaloupe. Most people associate watermelon with summer, which is fine I guess, but I personally tend to have cantaloupe at the start of the season so it always comes with a feeling.

Somewhere in the middle of my reading today, I suddenly felt it only proper to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All of my peanut butter is expired (yes, it’s been that long since I’ve had a PB&J sandwich), so I compromised and made it with grape jelly and apple butter. It wasn’t too great, but this season is about experimentation and energy. The fan sent shivers down my spine as I continued reading munching on wheat bread with too much slop in between.

Last week I missed the Salon and all the posts that came with it due to a funeral. I also missed my reading of Twilight of the Superheroes; instead, I spent most of the day on an airplane reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. Actually, since my last Salon post, I finished that, I Sing the Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury, and JR Ward’s Lover Enshrined. I’m hopping quickly through The Book Thief by Markus Zusak as a feeble attempt to start my Cat Herding Challenge books. I’m a little behind in my two challenges, but I’m putting together a post for the June Bookworms Carnival, which is hosted by Nymeth and themed Fairy Tales, and the Soup’s On! challenge requires me to cook… And, well, I haven’t had a lot of time for that either. Looking forward to getting into my cookbooks soon, though, because they’ve been neglected for far too long!

So today was my first revisit to the Deborah Eisenberg book since two weeks ago… It’s a good thing I’m keeping tabs. Today bright me to a story called “Window,” and made me realize how few books are single-word titled. They all have “the”s or “a”s… And even though this is a short story, it’s made me want to find a book that doesn’t have more than one word in its title!

I can’t say it did much else for me.

I didn’t “get” this one. There were a lot of characters in this story and I couldn’t quite figure out what their relations were to each other. I was also pretty annoyed with the fact that the story started out fine, perfectly well in fact, but then slowly snowballed into a mesh of improper punctuation. People would be saying things, but there would be no quotes, and no line breaks. It felt rushed, smushed together like the editor didn’t have time to correct it.

Somewhere in the middle I started thinking that maybe when there weren’t any quotes and these mysterious other characters showed up, perhaps those were memories. Those moments had a memory feel to them; in your memories, there’s no time for proper quotation use and line breaks. You just think of it how it was, and it’s very straight forward and jumbled. And this would have been fine - great, in fact - except there was nothing implying a memory, nothing to connect these characters to the others (except a child, though I was unsure of why he was in both groups of people). Maybe I missed something. Maybe I fell asleep across two sentences and thus missed the point of the whole story.

Surprisingly, though, I got the “Window.” I may have missed out on the bulk of the meaning, but the window stayed with me - looking through it with envious eyes, sometimes yearning or expecting something, sometimes disappointed… Rarely satisfied but surprised at finding something satiable. Perhaps I have slapped this “memory” thing onto this story and it’s not actually there, but the window theme made me think of how we sometimes think of our past. It’s always as if gazing through a closed window, clear though it is we can’t get through to the other side, can’t warn ourselves of what’s to come or congratulate old friends with whom we recently lost touch. And so I think this story has created meaning for me through my own silly and maybe incorrect interpretation of it, because I was trying so hard to get into this author’s writing that I eventually got bored of it.

An edit (the next day). I reread the story and found what I was missing. I’m amazed at how well the “memory” was translated, how I got that even though I had no idea what was going on! I’ll have to strike through my original statement that I “didn’t get much” from it, because the power of word usage and style is readily apparent in this story. It starts with Kristina, her half-sister Alma, and a baby Noah in an apartment. The sisters are newly reunited and the parentage of Noah isn’t clear, but Alma says he’s “their” baby, as if to imply they’ve taken a bond to take care of the child together. Then we jump back in time to “she”s and “her”s which confused me so much; “she” was living with Nonie and Munsen while working at a cafe, where she met Eli. Eli, the love of her life, the man she looked at and wanted through the window… Then later, found that she could have him. Noah is his child with another woman, a nondescript name that floats through Kristina’s - “her” - life, until eventually things come together. (It could be construed as a twist, so I won’t share it.) So, for one reason or another, she’s with Alma thinking of the past.

So I’m quite a bit impressed. Sometimes stories confuse me so much that I’m left with the basic plot but I couldn’t recount details or tell you exactly what happened (read any Faulkner?). Sometimes I am so lost that I end up feeling like I just wasted two hours of my life reading this jumble of words. That would have been true of this story if it weren’t for the attention to style. I clearly understood that there was some recollection going on, that there had to be a connection in some way between the Eli, Nonie and Munsen storyline and the Kristine and Alma storyline. Noah. I’m just glad they didn’t change their names until the end, because that really would have thrown me in for a loop. Edit ends.

Books that came into my house these past few weeks? Ugh, don’t make me list them all! I grabbed Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky at the airport, though, and quite a few ARCs came in for trade at the bookstore sometime ago. They aren’t new anymore, but I like having them anyway - The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor, New Moon by Stephanie Meyer, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, among others. I’m thinking I’ll read the ones I haven’t read and perhaps give some away during some distant future contest? (I’ve never done a contest before. It’d have to be really interesting. :P)

The Sunday Salon: Reading

This may come as a surprise, but at work at my bookstore I have to shelve books. Often I come across absolutely ridiculous tag lines (like Danielle Steele’s “Everybody reads Danielle Steele!”) for authors, but it struck me the other day how sad some of these actually are. For example, “If you read only one book this year, read [this one].” What is with that? They don’t care if you read others, just as long as you read that one. (The book I saw this on was 1,400+ pages long, so I highly doubt that anyone who is only reading one book this year is going to choose that one over something shorter, simpler, and more likely to be discussed by their friends. On the other hand, it would take some people a whole year to read that book if they picked it up because they’re so unused to reading that they get distracted and comprehend the words slowly.)

At the beginning of this year I noticed around book blogs and news websites that people were interested in how much time the average American spent reading last year, and how many books they read. It was a story consisting of other life factors that kept one from reading, interviews with people who said they don’t understand why people read for pleasure, and comments from people who said that reading websites and magazines is just as fruitful as reading a book.

Take the books that you have read this year - ones you started on or after January 1, 2008 - and tell me which of those books, so far, would be your “one read” for the year. If I went back in time and took all those other books away, adding life stresses and distractions so that you wouldn’t have time for them, which one book would you like for me to leave for you so you could say you’d read one book this year? Did you have to look through your list of books read, weigh the pros and cons of each, then finally decide that I’d have to randomly select for you? I wouldn’t be able to pick just one book from my list; I have gained and learned so much from each, even if I didn’t particularly like one or two of them. They are part of me now, just as every other book I read this year will be.

Somewhere in between here and Tennessee, Louisiana, or Ohio, I found an article called “Reading is Dangerous” by Anthony Doerr contained in the February issue of Spirit. This is one of those complementary magazines you find with SkyMall so you can kill time while you’re on a long flight with no peanuts to sustain you. The article doesn’t go into much detail on why we don’t read, rather why we do read – why it’s valuable. It throws out some statistics, and then ends with the magic of reading. (Consequently, it mentions TV, video games, and Paris Hilton as reasons why we don’t read books, but not magazines.) It’s an interesting introduction to the issue, but I was disappointed that it banks more on teaching kids to enjoy books. Yes, this is very important, and I hope some day to raise a reader, but what about the kids from 20 years ago who didn’t have booklovers to tell them how much fun reading can be?

My mom reads about 80 books each month, give or take a few. I can’t tease her for it because she’s reading what she enjoys – trashy romance, quick mysteries, and “lame” fiction. (We have a bookstore in this area that labels the stuff she reads as “lame fiction,” but you’ll see “Romantic Suspense” on the binding.) At least she’s passing her time reading.

So I don’t recommend Twilight of the Superheroes as the only book you read this year, if you’re going to read just one. It’s true, I find at least one interesting thing about each of the stories, but overall this book has been a bit misleading. Where is Batman crying, beaten up looking across buildings at men apparently doing something sad?

The story “Like It or Not” seemed to be titled just appropriately for me. I didn’t seem to get it completely – the relationships eluded me, some until the end and some still do. A woman’s husband (or… ex husband?) is dying, and though he left her for an electrician whom she became close with, she seems conflicted on what to think about it. Their kids are upset, asking her personal questions about the nature of their relationship – Mom, what would make Dad leave you for a guy? What happened between you two? But then there’s this other character, Harry, and I’m not sure what his role in all this is but she seems incredibly awkward around him, not sure what her place is or what she should be doing. She’s clearly annoyed by his love of history, museums, facts, ancient ideas, and antiques, but she accompanies him anyway on a trip towards his family’s farm house, which he wishes he could sell but can’t bring himself to throw away treasured memories.

I somewhat began to understand the theme of this collection and why it was called Twilight of the Superheroes until I read this story. It doesn’t seem to fit, but I suppose I’ll see it come together in the end. I’m not sure I liked it.

I can’t bring myself to recommend just one book. I look through my read books in 2008 and I want to tell you not to miss any of the Haruki Murakami, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; make sure you read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Susan Nagel’s Marie-Therese, Child of Terror, and How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard also, because I found those to be thought-provoking or beneficial to my intellect in some way. I haven’t even finished I Sing the Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury, but already it’s moving up to a default recommendation.

So this week I finished George MacDonald’s Complete Fairy Tales, finally, and as I just mentioned mere seconds ago, I’ve started a Ray Bradbury collection. I’ve also been eyeing my copy of New Moon by Stephanie Meyer because I know it will go quickly… I also signed up for Daily Lit which will send me bits of Pride and Prejudice three days every week. Not sure how I feel about it yet, but I suppose that whenever I finish the book I’ll let you know about my experience. In the mean time, I’m working on some art projects that are keeping my eyes away from books. However, I’ve found that the best way to pass the time while paint dries is to read. Maybe if people painted more often, they’d read more than one book in a year.

The Sunday Salon: Genetics

Tonight I read under a full moon with two candles sharing their scents of “beach sand,” or so the packaging said. To me, it smelled very similar to nailpolish, but then I thought how appropriate that seemed; the few times I’ve been to the beach in my life, my mother would often be caught painting her nails under the bright, warm sun, while I huddled on a towel careful to avoid making contact with the sand.

Tonight I read the second story in Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg. I’ve more or less decided that I like the idea of plowing through my short story collections with this Sunday Salon thing. I don’t often like writing mini “side” reviews of books I am reading and intend to review on my website, but I also don’t always like having one huge comprehensive post detailing my thoughts on a collection of different ideas. I would do well to write a small entry on each story, each experience, rather than taking out bits and pieces of certain chapters and sharing my thoughts without context.

This, called “Some Other, Better Otto,” was much better received than the first. I finished that sometime during the week - also outside, curled up between two director’s chairs with candlelight guiding my senses - but found it to be snippy and unengaging. Otto, however, stressed me out with his thoughts, his concern for his mentally incapable sister, and his unnerving lack of concern for everyone else.

I kept thinking, while reading, that this would be a good story to mention for this week’s Weekly Geeks challenge, if I were participating and if my topic was gay/lesbian relationships. Otto is with William; he seems distanced but at the same time clingy, while William forgives and forgets almost too quickly. Upstairs, Margaret and Naomi are returning from China with their adopted daughter, Molly. Tension is apparent, but as these characters are simply introduced and then dropped off, after the “issue” is mentioned, the cause is unclear.

This story was swarming with genetics, but only briefly did the characters touch on the subject. It was mentioned, scarcely discussed, then they moved on. Will an insane mother produce an insane child? Do we feel connection to our blood relatives, though we are estranged from them? Does having an insane sister mean that you are secretly insane? Are humans genetically inclined to procreate? (Am I genetically inclined to read?)

” ‘Hardwired.’ You know, that’s a term I’ve really come to loathe! It explains nothing, it justifies anything; you might as well say, ‘Humans have children because the Great Moth in the Sky wants them to.’ Or, ‘Humans have children because humans have children.’ ‘Hardwired,’ please! It’s lazy, it’s specious, it’s perfunctionory, and it’s utterly without depth.”

“Why does it have to have depth?” William said. “It refers to depth. It’s good, clean science.”

“It’s not science at all, it’s a cliche. It’s redundancy.”

“Otto, why do you always scoff at me when I raise a scientific point?”

“I don’t! I don’t scoff at you. I certainly don’t mean to. It’s just that this particular phrase, used in this particular way, isn’t very interesting. I mean, you’re telling me that something is biologically inherent in human experience, but you’re not telling me anything about human experience.”

“I wasn’t intending to,” William said. “I wasn’t trying to. If you want to talk about human experience, then let’s talk about it.”

“All right,” Otto said. It was painful, of course, to see William irritated, but almost a relief to know that it could actually happen. “Let’s then, by all means.”

“So?”

“Well?”

“Any particular issues?” William said. “Any questions?”

Any! Billions. But that was always just the problem: how to disentangle one; how to pluck it up and clothe it in presentable words? Otto stared, concentrating. Questions were roiling in the pit of his mind like serpents, now a head rising up from the seething mass, now a rattling tail… He closed his eyes. If only he could get his brain to relax… Relax, relax… Relax, relax, relax… “Oh, you know, William - is there anything at home to eat? Believe it or not, I’m starving again.”

So I read this story straight through in the chill of tonight’s weather. Despite a long work week, I made it through without resting my eyes, without getting distracted by other thoughts or ideas. I was never one to enjoy short stories, thinking that they always ended too soon on subjects that could have been expanded, but I’m starting to appreciate the short, succinct nature of getting an idea across and saying nothing more. That’s what these stories have done - they describe a brief moment in time; they are short, dedicated thoughts from strangers who have something to say. Or maybe they don’t, but they exist, and isn’t that what really matters?

This week: I’ve still been reading George MacDonald’s collection of fairy tales. I want to give each tale its due justice; there’s no need to rush through them. I’ve recently acquired a book compiling Japanese folk stories and fairy tales, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, and Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill in hardback. I don’t normally like hardbacks, but the colored illuminations and illustrations of this book caught my eye and indeed sparked an interest in any of Cahill’s other “Hinges of History” books. I look forward to reading this one soon enough. It sometimes strikes me as odd that I have well over 1,000 books in my library, the majority of which are unread, and yet I continually find new books that I’d like to read before those.

Ah, well. Unitl next Sunday.

Sunday Salon: Booksnobbery

I work in a bookstore and every day I am faced with some form of book snobbery. It comes in many forms - customers who scoff at those browsing historical romance, people who are shocked that an employee has never heard of Thackery, and others. (A note on that Thackery: at my corporate bookstore job, a man told me I was wasting my English degree simply because I’d never read Vanity Fair.)

Of all the faces of booksnobbery, though, what amuses me most are customers who ask for books they know next to nothing about but get mad at us when we can’t find them. “It’s a classic,” they say, “but I can’t tell you the author or what it’s about; I’m not even sure I can discern the difference between fiction and nonfiction. But you - the bookseller - have never heard of it? You can’t find it? Oh my God! What kind of bookstore are you people running?” It makes my day go by much more pleasantly when those customers call or come in.

An article I came across recently, “You Are Not Your Bookcase,” discusses the books we put in our e-profiles and how we think they define us - and how others define us because of them. Would someone put He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt next to Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey? If they didn’t, would it be more because it wasn’t expected or because they didn’t want to be associated with a self-help relationship book despite the fact that it proved extremely beneficial to them? That this kind of booksnobbery exists is not a surprise.

Take my Thackery customers, for example - the one who was appalled at the bookseller who didn’t know who the author was, the other who was appalled at me because I’d never read a certain title of his. With certain levels of education or interest, people expect you to have every “classic” under your belt. I was an English major and I collect books, therefore my friends look at me when a Jeopardy category deals with authors or books. It doesn’t matter what genre, time period, nationality or theory the category presents - I know everything! So they say.

Why? Why is this expected? It’s not just English majors or booksellers, mind you, it’s everyone. Why in Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read did one student lose his social standing simply because he admitted that he hadn’t read Hamlet? I sometimes don’t understand the societal pressures to read what we “should” read - Shakespeare, Dickens, Harper Lee, whatever; sometimes I get an inkling of where they come from and why it’s important that they’re there, but I always question it when I come across it in my day-to-day life. Why am I expected to have read these certain titles? Does the fact that I don’t care make people think that I really do care, that I’m hiding behind my reading insecurities by saying “it really doesn’t matter what I’ve read or what I choose to read as long as I enjoy it”?

So I’m starting my first week taking part of The Sunday Salon by talking about a story no one told me to read; in fact, I judged this book based on its title (just as I’m not afraid to admit I haven’t read Hamlet, I can tell you that I buy books based on covers and titles). It’s a selection from Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, a collection of “perfectly shaped studies of human connection and disconnection” (from the back cover). I don’t normally like short stories collections, even though short stories are the only kinds of stories I can write, but I read another one by Ben Fountain recently (Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) and fell to the floor in ecstatic happiness after I was done. I’m hoping that this one will have the same effect, because that totally ruled.

It is hard to catch on, hard to enjoy. The writing style is, well, different… First person present, then second person past, then suddenly we’re experiencing a disaster of epic proportions, but then everything’s fine again. This morning I woke up early and just as soon found myself in a long, stressful day at work; we are tired as the turtle says. Perhaps this book will fare better over the next week. I can definitely see myself enjoying it, but for now I’m having a hard time keeping my brain on the same page as my eyes.

This week I’ve been working on George MacDonald’s collection of fairy tales. I intend to read it thoughtfully so it’s taking me longer than expected. I’ve also been interested in the French Revolution (thanks to that Marie-Therese book I read recently) and a book called Finding Your Roots by Jeanne Westin, which besides being very old (pre-Internet) is helping me put together a family history. I’ve also recently acquired an interesting look at video game culture (Power-Up by Chris Kohler) and a much-coveted hardback copy of John Connolly’s Nocturnes (evidently this makes it the UK edition, as it wasn’t released in hardback in the US or Canada). I would really like to get into these soon.

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