Think On

2012 in books

Will I keep a list this year? Here's a start:

from the To-Read Shelf:

 

Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of MFK Fisher, by Joan Reardon

 

Every time I read about MFKF, I think of how much I admire her writing, and what a quirky conundrum of a person I find her. Exasperating.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazing, horrifying story. Too much digression about this, that, and the other that should have been edited more sharply. But in the end I'd felt a read a unique tale that gave me new insights into the ways animals and people live together--or not!

Interesting read (about reads)

Via Mama, actually, a thoughtful piece from the New York Times.

Now let us praise Dickens and Dostoyevsky and oh, so many others

This wonderful essay from tomorrow's NY Times. I am posting the whole text so I can keep rereading it myself.

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February 28, 2010

Essay

I Was a Teenage Illiterate

By CATHLEEN SCHINE

At the age of 26, when I returned to New York after an inglorious stab at graduate work in medieval history on the frozen steppes of Chicago, I had a horrifying realization: I was illiterate. At least, I was as close to illiterate as a person with over 20 years of education could possibly be. In my stunted career as a scholar, I’d read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio. . . . But after 1400? Nihil. I felt very, very stupid among my new sophisticated New York friends. I seemed very, very stupid, too. Actually, let’s face it, I was stupid, and it was deeply mortifying, as so many things were in those days. But I have since come to realize that my abject ignorance was really a gift: to be a literarily inclined illiterate at age 26 is one of the most glorious fates that can befall mortal girl.

Of course I could not know that then, and in a panicky attempt to rectify the situation, I slunk in shame to the Strand and stood, paralyzed by the yawning vastness of the store and of my ignorance. I have a very distinct memory of coming home, sitting on the mattress on the floor of my tiny apartment, and staring hopelessly at the forlorn little collection of books on my window sill. A fat Latin dictionary. A fat dictionary of Christian saints. To which I added the skinny gray novel I had just bought. Out of every book in the Strand’s famous miles of volumes, I had desperately, randomly, impulsively grabbed a beat-up Modern Library edition of Anatole France’s “Penguin Island.” Oy.

Anatole France? Not Balzac. Not Flaubert. I’d never heard of them. I didn’t know them from Maupassant. Or Anatole France, for that matter. As for English or American literature, I had never read Austen or Eliot or Dickens or Melville or James or Wharton or. . . .

I blame Dostoyevsky.

When I was a child, I was always allowed to stay home from school with even the flimsiest of maladies (had I known the word “neurasthenic” I would have employed it weekly) if I promised to sit quietly and read. I read “The Cricket in Times Square” and Beverly Cleary and books about horses and young Indian braves and biographies of George Washington Carver from the school library. At home, there were books by Albert Payson Terhune about collies (we had a collie) and my father’s Hardy Boys collection and my mother’s Louisa May Alcott novels. I read a lot. I was one of those children they used to call “readers.”

So what happened between “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” and “Penguin Island”?

“The Idiot” happened. In seventh grade I saw a copy of Dostoyevsky’s novel in the library and, thinking it would be a funny book about a stupid person, began to read it. I read and I read and I read. I developed a crush on Prince Myshkin. He seemed so sweet. I did not know what epilepsy was, and I was too lazy to look it up in the dictionary. I did not know what naïve meant and was, again, too lazy to look it up. But I kept going, in my own naïveté, fascinated and absorbing perhaps a tenth of what was there. A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think. The problem is that now, when as an adult I might understand the other 90 percent, I have no desire ever to read Dostoyevsky again. Ever. Dostoyevsky ruined Dostoyevsky for me.

Which is why I am grateful to him. My Dostoyevsky phase, in which I lugged one heavy volume or another everywhere (there are photos of me stubbornly pretending to read on a sailing trip, on a ski trip, on the beach), lasted through most of high school. If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn’t much room for anything else. In school, we were inexplicably forced to read “The Ox-Bow Incident,” I recall, and there was some Shakespeare. But it was the ’60s, and for one entire year I managed to get away with reading “The Forsyte Saga” (the television series, which was fantastic, was being shown on public television) as an independent study. I also wrote a paper on existential despair in “Crime and Punishment,” “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (assigned to the class) and (my one foray into contemporary American literature) “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Look, I didn’t say I wasn’t pretentious; I said I wasn’t well read.

A few oddities cropped up on my high school reading list, some unfortunate (like Robbe-Grillet: I had never read Emerson, but I’d read Robbe-Grillet?); and others like gifts from the gods (a heavy dose of Colette, thanks to my mother). But these were tiny islets upon the great, heaving ocean of my ignorance.

So, that day, the day of my illiteracy epiphany, I came home from the Strand and sat shamefaced on my mattress staring unhappily at “Penguin Island,” which I had started and put down in confused boredom several times. Then I remembered a bag in the closet with stuff my ex-boyfriend had left behind, including a paperback copy of “Our Mutual Friend,” his favorite novel. A few days later I emerged from that exquisite book and cursed myself for wasting so much of my life doing things other than what God in all his wisdom clearly meant for me to do for the rest of my life: read Dickens.

This was a defining moment; it was my discovery of the English language. It could never have happened if I had not been blessedly illiterate.

Imagine the satisfaction, the exhilaration when, not long after, I stood as a newlywed surveying my husband’s bookcase. It reached from one wall to the other, from floor to ceiling. It had been culled and collected by a person of know­ledge and taste, a product of Columbia’s core curriculum, and . . . it was arranged alphabetically. I started at the upper left hand corner (Jane Austen! J. R. Ackerley!) and worked my way to the lower right (Waugh! Wodehouse! Woolf!). I got to read “Huckleberry Finn” for the first time when I was 35 years old. And when I eventually moved on to a different partner, there waiting for me was a new bookcase full of other books. I read “My Antonia” for the first time last month. That is a kind of grace.

If Dostoyevsky had not overwhelmed me at such a young age, and I had read “Huckleberry Finn” at 14, would I have reread it at 35? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been the same transcendent experience as discovering it as an adult. And maybe I never would have gone back to it: it took me decades to recover from “The Old Man and the Sea” and try Hemingway again. On the other hand, I did just recently reread “Buff: A Collie,” and was stunned at how good the prose is. Italo Calvino, in “Why Read the Classics?,” said that a work read at a young age and forgotten “leaves its seed in us.” If that’s true, and I think it must be, then I thank you, Albert Payson Terhune, and I suppose I must thank you once again, too . . . Dostoyevsky. And, oh all right — even though just the sight of your name reminds me of a time when I thought it was O.K. to walk around Manhattan barefoot, I guess the day has come to give “The Idiot” another shot.

Cathleen Schine’s most recent novel is “The Three Weissmanns of Westport.”

The to-read list, getting longer

NYTimes picks for best books of 2007. How many have I read? And then there's the entirely different question, how many do I own?

       

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December 28, 2007

A Year of Books Worth Curling Up With

 

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

   

Full-time book critics approach recreational reading with a head start. We’re already reading for pleasure. We are immersed in books we find appealing, since the nearly 300 books chosen for the daily reviews in The New York Times have been culled from tens of thousands of volumes published each year. Some are chosen for their self-evident importance. Some are terrific sleepers. Even if a book’s foremost quality is its awfulness, a review in these pages means there’s something about it that one of us found noteworthy.

But we have favorites. And they meet criteria that any reader will recognize. These are the books that are disappointing only because they have to end. They’re the ones we mention to friends. They’re the ones worth taking on vacation, and they are well executed, whatever their genre or subject matter. They are what we’d read even if Michiko Kakutani, William Grimes and I weren’t designated readers.

The 10-favorite lists that follow are not 10-best lists. They’re not based strictly on merit. They don’t cite books we admired in the abstract but didn’t particularly like. Nor are they based on comprehensiveness; with so many books afoot, none of us can hope to have a complete overview. Each of us has stayed within the confines of our own reviews published in 2007 and picked the 10 books we covered most avidly — though there is one exception. Because Times critics do not review the work of their Times colleagues, Michiko Kakutani did not review Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes.” She recommends it nonetheless.

Think of these as lists that leave off the broccoli, figuratively speaking — though we have nothing against broccoli at all. (Michael Pollan’s new pro-vegetable manifesto, “In Defense of Food,” might be on my list were it not for a technicality: Its publication date is Jan. 1, 2008.)

Our tastes and interests are sufficiently different for there to be only one point on which we readily agree: As it becomes possible to rush books into print ever more hastily, editing ain’t what it used to be. “Finding Faith Without Fanatacism” is a misspelled subtitle that actually found its way onto the front cover of a hardbound 2007 book (“You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right,” by Brad Hirschfield, published by Harmony Books; it has since been corrected). Though there are many candidates for the honor of Year’s Sloppiest Book, the wall-to-wall bloopers in “Pearl Harbor,” a novel by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forschten, warrant special “wretching noises” from us all. The books that follow, in alphabetical order by author, were, in the “Pearl Harbor” vernacular, “all ladened with” better things. —JANET MASLIN

Michiko Kakutani

HOUSE OF MEETINGS by Martin Amis. This harrowing, deeply affecting novel recounts the story of two brothers interned at one of Stalin’s slave labor camps, taking the reader on a frightening journey deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA by Ronald Brownstein. A veteran political reporter provides a shrewd election-year assessment of the growing partisanship in American politics, looking at the roots of this polarization and its alarming consequences for the country at large.

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION by Michael Chabon. A clever, engaging and fully imagined epic cum detective story based on this historical what if: What if a temporary safe haven for Jews had been created in Alaska in the wake of the Holocaust?

NIXON AND KISSINGER: PARTNERS IN POWER by Robert Dallek. A fascinating portrait of President Richard M. Nixon and his chief foreign policy honcho, Henry A. Kissinger, a book that not only deftly deconstructs their emotionally fraught relationship and their policy making on Vietnam, the Middle East and China, but also underscores the historical lessons of their decisions and missteps.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Díaz. A dazzling debut novel that unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into an unnerving meditation on Dominican history and the relationship between political and personal dreams and losses.

THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan. This Tasmanian novelist has written a dark, unsparing thriller about a case of mistaken identity, using his Hitchcockian heroine’s plight as a launching pad for an examination of a post-9/11 world in which fear is a valued commodity for terrorists and governments alike.

WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN: A MEMOIR OF AFRICA by Peter Godwin. A haunting and deeply evocative memoir about a writer’s discoveries about his father’s hidden past and his family’s life in Zimbabwe, a country that has seen its bright post-revolution dreams of a multiracial society give way to violent hatred and strife.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS by David Michaelis. A revealing and sympathetic new biography of the creator of “Peanuts,” which highlights the autobiographical sources of the cartoonist’s art: how Charles M. Schulz gave his own wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown, his sarcasm and anger to Lucy, his dignity and “weird little thoughts” to Linus and his frustrations and daydreams to Snoopy.

THE NINE: INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THE SUPREME COURT by Jeffrey Toobin. A vivid narrative of the Supreme Court’s recent history and an intimate portrait of the individual justices that shows how personality, judicial philosophy and personal alliances can inform decisions that affect the entire country.

LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA by Tim Weiner. A timely, compelling and prodigiously researched history of the C.I.A. by a reporter for The New York Times that chronicles an alarming litany of intelligence blunders and bungled operations, from the agency’s creation after World War II through the cold war to its recent failures in the prelude to the Iraq war.

Janet Maslin

CHRISTINE FALLS by Benjamin Black.  A broodingly atmospheric period piece and a credit to its author, John Banville, who needn’t have used a pseudonym.

AWAY by Amy Bloom. Alive with incident and unforgettable characters, this brief but epic novel illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains.

THE LETTERS OF NOëL COWARD edited by Barry Day. Fizzy yet eloquent correspondence, toughening over time, from a man who once accurately wrote to his mother, "You’ve got a fascinating youth for a son, my dear."

HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill. The year’s best horror debut, with fantasy used to witty, shockingly good effect — by a writer who could easily be compared to Stephen King, even if Mr. King were not his father.

EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE by Walter Isaacson. The great man’s geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy, amorous affairs and superstar status are all part of this admirably lively portrait.

UNCERTAINTY: EINSTEIN, HEISENBERG, BOHR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF SCIENCE by David Lindley. A scientists’ showdown, articulately explained and well described by its subtitle. This has been a good year for Einstein, that’s for sure.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW by Laura Lippman. In time-honored mystery tradition this writer challenges her readers with clues hidden in plain sight. The return of a long-missing person, possibly an impostor, stays tricky through 400 serpentine, carefully nuanced pages.

FIND ME by Carol O’Connell. A road trip tracking the hard-boiled adventures of Kathy Mallory, the tough, obstinate heroine of an outstandingly clever crime series.

JOURNALS: 1952-2000 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Both showstopping and door-stopping: a half-century’s worth of political insight and party-hopping from a great and tireless gadfly.

I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD: THE DIRTY LIFE AND TIMES OF WARREN ZEVON by Crystal Zevon. The Los Angeles ’70s rock scene, quite literally in a nutshell: an oral history of its most caustic and unforgettable character.

William Grimes

THE DAY OF BATTLE: THE WAR IN SICILY AND ITALY, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson. The second volume of “The Liberation Trilogy” follows American and British forces from North Africa to Rome in a triumphant work of narrative history.

THE INVISIBLE WALL by Harry Bernstein. The author, now in his 90s, recalls his impoverished boyhood in a British mill town, on a street where Jews lived on one side and Christians on the other.

LONG TIME LEAVING: DISPATCHES FROM UP SOUTH by Roy Blount Jr. A collection of witty, insightful and offbeat essays on Southern culture, from shortening bread to Memphis Minnie.

FINAL EXAM: A SURGEON’S REFLECTIONS ON MORTALITY by Pauline W. Chen. A young surgeon’s thoughtful inquiry into the care of terminally ill patients, and the fears that both doctors and patients must face.

HOUSE OF HAPPY ENDINGS: A MEMOIR by Leslie Garis. A lyrical, melancholy evocation of the author’s childhood and her father’s descent into madness.

AGENT ZIGZAG: A TRUE STORY OF NAZI ESPIONAGE, LOVE, AND BETRAYAL by Ben Macintyre. A true-life thriller, the rollicking wartime adventures of Eddie Chapman, the least likely British secret agent.

YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Digging deep into previously unavailable archival material, the author paints a detailed, convincing portrait of the future dictator as a wild, poetic revolutionary and crime boss of the Caucasus.

TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN: THE REBELS WHO BROUGHT CHURCHILL TO POWER AND HELPED SAVE ENGLAND by Lynne Olson. Sharp portraits of the political outsiders who recognized the Nazi threat early on and organized support for the anti-appeasement policy championed by Winston Churchill.

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Graham Robb. The fractures behind the facade are sensitively traced, revealing France, for most of its history, as a mosaic of regions, languages and cultures united by only mutual incomprehension.

THE BOYS FROM DOLORES: FIDEL CASTRO’S CLASSMATES FROM REVOLUTION TO EXILE by Patrick Symmes. Through Fidel Castro’s classmates at the elite Colegio de Dolores, a Jesuit academy in Havana, the author tells, enthrallingly, the story of modern Cuba.

 

 

 

   

The bookfest continues

Friend and constant reader Richard Smith, late of the BMJ, has issued a challenge to his Facebook pals to read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which he claims to be as Russian a novel as an English novel gets. One thing has led to another, and now I myself have issued a challenge to read a real Russian novel, the new translation of War and Peace. I am definitely going to have to schedule a vacation just for reading.

If I live to be a million

. . . there is no way I can get all the books in this house read. So! I am now trying to polish off 1 or 2 a day, unusually for me, by plowing through one at a time. So far, so good. I have now finished Don DeLillo's Falling Man (highly recommended), Suite Francaise (ditto), and am in the midst of Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon (watch this space).

One day in London

. . . in 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor woke up and decided to walk to Constantinople.

He writes about this epic journey in A Time of Gifts (which is followed by Between the Woods and the Water). So far, it's one of the best travel books I've ever read, and some of you will know that I've read plenty of them.

Highly recommended. I'm only sorry I can't follow in his footsteps, since Constantinople doesn't exist anymore. Same reason I'm not sailing to Byzantium ;-) 

Bookish updates

Let me save you $20 or so, by summarizing a promising-sounding but ultimately disappointing book, by Steve Leveen. The Little Guide to your Well-Read Life sounds so, so great to your average bookaholic. Alas, alas.

Here are the contents: make a list of books you want to read, make a list of books you have read, listen to audiobooks, consider joining or creating a bookclub. Oops, I forgot: read, reflect, and summarize; or whatever that high-school guide used to say. It had some funky acronym, like R3T or T3S, or some such. No matter. Very disappointing.

Leveen's company, Levenger, is one of my occasional obsessions, however. Once I wrote him a letter, because they were selling a table on which was inscribed the names of famous writers of the English past. I couldn't help but notice that the name of one of the Big Three (or Big Four, depending upon your teachers' proclivities) was misspelled--unless someone there thought Herbert Spencer was in the same category as Shakespeare. When I wrote to Mr. Leveen, I suggested that the author of The Faerie Queene would probably be dispirited at best to find his name misspelled on a nine-hundred-dollar table. I did get a very charming, hand-written note in return, and the table disappeared from the catalog.

Fortunately, I skimmed Leveen's book in Barnes and Noble and didn't fork over any cash (well, not for that, at least; what I did buy will soon be revealed). In a great piece of luck, though, I was browsing at one of our local independents, when I spied a bound galley of Ghosting on the half-off shelf. (I heard an interview with the author on NPR, and the book sounded just wonderful. It's a memoir by a woman who spent years ghostwriting everything you can imagine for a flamboyant British publisher [the name of whom is revealed in many British newspapers]--everything including love letters!) Well, I wasn't going to pay 50% of the cover price for a galley that says "NOT FOR SALE" right on the front, so I asked the guy behind the counter how much it was. A fellow clerk said it was half price, while he simultaneously said, "Oh, you can just take it," which I happily and quickly did.

What I'm reading

I've decided to try to keep a list of all my finished--ah, there's the rub--reading for 2005. Of course, it's mid-February, and I'm only now getting started, so it's not going to be a complete list. But I'm going to give it a whirl, along with all the other things I'm trying to keep up with this year (short daily journal entry, for one). Still in an Anglophilic phase, as will become obvious.

The Private Lives of Winston Churchill, by John Pearson. Chatty and gossipy, but I enjoyed the inside scoop, however unreliable, on My Man and his wacky family.

17 February 2005

Autobiography of Lady Diana Cooper. A glimpse of the last gasp of the British Empire. What a life--I mean, of the titled, aristocratic sort. Diana's father was a duke, and she lived a life of extraordinary privilege. For more, see entry above!

21 February 2005

Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett. Ann Patchett is the author of the glorious Bel Canto. This book is about her friendship with the author, Lucy Grealy, of another stunning book, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy wrote about her long struggle with facial disfigurement, and the 30-some-odd surgeries she had to reconstruct her face after being treated as a child for Ewing's sarcoma. Patchett's book charts the friendship between the two, the one solid, steady, and workmanlike (Patchett herself), the other flighty, dramatic, and tortured, a kind of supernova that roared to life and came quickly to a crashing end. Beautiful and sad, a very compelling story.

22 February 2005

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, by George Plimpton. If you've ever wondered whether you could actually fly by attaching a bunch of large balloons to an ordinary lawn chair, this book has the answer for you. Plimpton was the legendary editor of the Paris Review, the inventor of "participatory journalism," and a real character. These essays are quick fun.

1 March 2005

Leaves of the Tulip Tree, by Juliette Huxley. Wife of Julian, the botanist/naturalist/biologist/first Director-General of UNESCO. Nanny to the daughter of Ottoline Morrell, flitted in, around, and about the Bloomsbury Group. I didn't get much of a sense of her life from this autobiography, but suspected much of her married life was a trial--he with his affairs and nervous breakdowns, and she with her affairs, only ever so lightly touched upon here. Still, it helps round out my understanding of the literary/intellectual/privileged lives of the English in the first half of the 20th century.