It’s alive, it’s alive!
January 4th, 2012Contrary to appearances, this blog isn’t dead. It was just, um, resting it’s eyes.
Ian McEwan profile in the New Yorker
March 3rd, 2009The January 23rd issue of the New Yorker has a thoughtful profile of Ian McEwan by Daniel Zalewski (“The Background Hum -Ian McEwan’s art of unease.”)
I was particularly amused by this:
Greg, McEwan’s younger son, entered the sitting room in a bright-blue bathrobe. He had spiky black hair and his father’s slitted eyes. McEwan chatted briefly with him about Argentina—in two days, Greg was beginning a semester abroad. Now twenty-two and a graduate student in international relations at the University of London, Greg was a source for Theo, Perowne’s guitarist son in “Saturday.” Greg later told me that he had a persistent virus that kept him at home, “under observation,” when his father was writing the novel. Though he had Theo’s loping grace, he noted a key divergence: “I definitely don’t wear tight black jeans!” He recalled, “I used to play the guitar a lot, and I think he foresaw me going into music. I used to really like the blues.” His father, he noted, plays the flute and is also a blues fan. “He gave me loads of instruction. He taught me my first chords. He’d play Oasis with me.” Some reviewers found the father-son relationship in “Saturday” dubiously chummy, but not Greg. “I’m not sure if we’ve ever argued,” he said. “He walked us to school and picked us up, yeah. He’d drive us to my friends’, and watch out for us when we went to skate parks.” His father didn’t “close himself off with the work,” he said. “I could walk into his study at any time of the day.”
The portrayal of familial contentment in “Saturday” was meant as a provocation. “No one ever says, except in conversation, that they’re actually enjoying their children, that they might be a source of interest and pleasure,” McEwan said. “I thought there was some bad faith in omitting that as a possibility.” The book is equally rosy about marriage; Perowne has sex with his wife twice in one day. John Banville, in The New York Review of Books, seized upon that detail, writing, “Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan’s fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex.” McEwan says, “The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife’s teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book.”
Speaking of his son, Greg – farther along in the piece there’s a brief aside about Greg having to write an essay about one of his father’s books. The teacher gave him a D because she “didn’t care what I [Ian McEwan] thought” after Greg had consulted his father before writing the essay. I know making fun of Lit Profs is like shooting fish in a barrel, but really, this is why. Of course, the Elder McEwan might very well be failing to mention that the essay was poorly written.
book meme
November 29th, 2008(This is cross-posted, because I’m lazy).
I’m following Erqsome’s book meme. When I copied & pasted the list I almost left her commentary because I so agreed with her assessments. I think we’ve bonded in the past over our mutual dislike of Catcher in the Rye and Wuthering Heights, but I also think there was bourbon involved so I can’t be certain.
At any rate, feel free to be a copycat, but be sure to link back so I can see your answers!
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (I like these a lot, but they get kinda turgid)
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (I haven’t read the 3rd one yet cause Husband is hogging it)
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (All of them????)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy I’ve read some but not all…
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (See 33.)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (I tried, I was underwhelmed)
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – I really disliked this book
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon I liked this one a lot.
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding – I tried. It hurt my brain.
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73.The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Why is this here?)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I set a fairly high standard for the books I marked “loved”, there were plenty on the list I liked a lot. There were also some I truly hated. I think I’ve marked them accordingly.
Frankenstein: A cultural history
September 16th, 2008I’ve finally gotten around to finishing Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s Frankenstein: A Cultural History
When the book was published I hesitated, because I have a pretty good grounding in the history of horror and film, and also did a fair amount of resource gathering in my old job for Betty T. Bennett an eminent Shelley scholar.
I wasn’t certain the book would have anything new to say to me, but I took a chance on it and I have to say that it proved worthwhile. Mostly, I enjoyed how well Hitchcock maintained her focus on Frankenstein. It’s very easy for horror scholars to get too narrow or, conversely, to try to pile up so much evidence and so many examples that their prose, not to mention their topic, becomes completely opaque. It’s like they’re frantically trying to prove that horror is a worthy research area and in the process completely undermining their claims since that approach overwhelms the reader and paradoxically leaves one wondering if maybe there isn’t something to the authors insecurities.
Hitchcock never doubts the importance of her subject, but didn’t preach, either. She only touched on other topics, such as Dracula, long enough to give context, but never went completely off the rails on long scholarly tangents or engaged in the the aforementioned theoretical pretzel-making.
Most interesting to me, perhaps because it was entirely new ground, was the history of the various Frankenstein comic book series, and the evolution of their storylines to keep pace with changes in American culture. I think somewhere in the back of my brain I was aware of one of them, but I had no idea there’d been so many. Or that they’d lasted for so long.
On Monster Sightings, the blog she sporadically maintains, Hitchcock mentions that there’s an exhibit in the UVA Rotunda, “The Monster Among Us: ‘Frankenstein’ from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks” that will be up until the end of October. Maybe I’ll actually get down there to see it.
To bring this post full-circle, I see that the exhibit was the result of a contest amongst students of Terry Bellanger’s. I never did take a class at Rare Book School, but over those 15 years I was chasing sources for that Shelley scholar, I occasionally sent him (non-Frankenstein-related) items for use at the school when they were donated to our institution but were deemed inappropriate for our own collections.
Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian
September 2nd, 2008You’d think having ample time to lay around doing nothing but recovering from some medical ick, I’d get a lot of reading done, but you’d be wrong. I have the attention span of cheese. A nice gouda, not a stinky, runny blue cheese or anything, but cheese nonetheless.
I did finish Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian
I read the first half and then just didn’t have time to finish it. The book was well-written, it was just ambling along in a way that wasn’t unpleasant but wasn’t really getting us anywhere. When I picked it back up, it seemed much more exciting. At first I thought it was the drugs, but now I think it was simply the fact that the author finally ditched the trope of narration and just told the damned story.
I’m not a medievalist, and I didn’t even try to parse the fact from the fiction. It’s a novel, so I just nodded and smiled and followed out plucky characters around Cold War Europe as they rummaged about in libraries and archives trying to piece together a grand medieval mystery.
The book was hyped heavily as a horror novel, but it seems that most horror readers and scholars and medievalists I’ve talked to dismiss the categorization out of hand. Personally, I thought that it was a perfectly respectable Gothic novel, but that’s just my opinion. I read a review somewhere that quibbled that Kostova should have crafted her prose in “the Lovecraftian tradition.” Turgid? No thank you. The Historian is eminently readable and doesn’t need arcane turns of phrase to make it more dramatic.
I’ll definitely pass this one along to my mom, it’ll keep her off the streets for a few days.
Twilight (spoilers!)
July 17th, 2008
It’s been pointed out to me that I forgot to warn you there were spoilers in my review. Sorry about that.
For what it’s worth, I think they’re pretty mild and don’t ruin the story, but just in case I’ve tucked them away in case you don’t want to know.
Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
July 16th, 2008I bought the first 3 volumes of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
Hellboy, Heart-Shaped Box, and the Historian
July 5th, 2008Used to be, when Husband was out all night working that DJ voodoo of his, I’d inevitably manage to scare the bejeezus out of myself with a horror movie. Not intentionally. I’d pick the dumbest looking, most innocuous movies I could find, but damn if they wouldn’t turn out to be unexpected little genre gems. By the by, I’m still swearing vengeance on whoever told me Skeleton Key was a romantic comedy. (It’s most assuredly not).
OK, yeah, I knew House by the Cemetery was a horror movie. I just didn’t know it would be scary. The cover art looked downright silly and it didn’t say it was a Lucio Fulci movie anywhere on the box. But I digress…
Tonight I decided to spare myself the jitters and leave the TV off. I thought I’d make some progress on the pile of books on the side table. After a few chapters, it occurred to me that Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box
I moved on to a reread of some Hellboy (Seed of Destruction
I’ve picked up Elizabeth Kostova’s 800 page behemoth, The Historian
Actual reading: Tyrannosaurus Canyon, Jane Quiet, Buffy
June 24th, 2008This week I’ve done actual reading of actual printed matter that’s printed on actual paper. Damned exciting.
I finished Doug Preston’s Tyrannosaurus Canyon, I’ve been carrying around for so long that I realized it should have racked up 10,000 frequent flyer miles of it’s own, seeing as it went to Florida, SF and Philadelphia. It was good fun and had a decent pace, the absurd length of time it took me to finish it was due to sheer exhaustion from reading a zillion emails a day and not the fault of the author. I picked it up as a “popcorn read” (a book you can read in a sitting or two, the equivalent of a blockbuster movie) but as you can see that didn’t work out so well. Preston’s science is always believable and his characters are always well-drawn, so I’m sure I’ll pass this along to a friend.
I also caught up on my comics reading.
Most importantly, I got to read K.A. Laity’s awesomely excellent new comic, Jane Quiet: Occult Investigator. Pen and ink goddess Elena Steier draws seriously cool monsters. This was a fun read because there’s no text – a most graphic Graphic Novel. There are some great bits of wordplay and humor (the other names on the mailboxes in Jane’s apartment building? excellent).
I also got caught up on Buffy. 8.14 and 8.15, that is. Yes, I’d already read 8.12. That link contains spoilers, by the way. And sweaty lesbians.