Category Archives: Life

School starts for me this week, and although it is a short week, with classes beginning only yesterday, it feels very long. Everything hits all at once, and the transition from quiet summer days, with work to do but with relaxed deadlines, to semester busyness is a shock.

One of the classes I am teaching is World Literature II, and it’s an online course. I’ve taught fully online courses before, but not this particular one, and I haven’t taught a literature survey in this format before. So it will be interesting to see how it goes. This week my students are reading a few poems by Friedrich Holderlin and Heinrich Heine by way of introduction to German Romanticism, and next week we will read Goethe’s play Faust, Part 1. I am very curious to see what the students will make of it as it’s such a bizarre play in a lot of ways. I’m asking students to write on a discussion board each week and also to keep a private reading journal (private between me and each student, that is), so I’m looking forward to seeing what they write. The journal assignment is open-ended, so I could get a whole range of interesting responses.

I’m not sure what the new semester is going to mean for me reading-wise. I have some reading to do for class, but I should still have time to read just for fun. The question is how much energy and focus I will have. I finished a short but powerful novel last night, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, which I hope to post on later, and now it’s time to choose something new. Part of me is tempted to pick up a long Victorian novel (perhaps Margaret Oliphant), but another part of me is worried that if I start something long but don’t have a lot of time to devote to it, it will drag on forever. Another part of me (there are many parts) wants to start something easy, perhaps a mystery novel. Another part is annoyed that silly things like work get in the way of the reading I want to do. I’m lucky that part of my job requires reading, but when it comes to reading, I’m greedy and am not satisfied with only what the job requires.

But now it’s time to get offline and go browse my shelves in search of a new novel.

Hobgoblin and I returned home today, and our trip turned out to be the kind that’s perfect for recovering from a busy semester. I spent most of my time curled up in a chair right next to the wood stove in my parents’ dining room/family room either reading or working on crossword puzzles. In fact, I didn’t set one foot outdoors for a solid two days, and although I’ve become the kind of person who likes being outdoors, that kind of sloth is exactly what I wanted. When I finally stirred out of my chair, it was to go see the Sherlock Holmes movie (silly, fun, good if you don’t take it seriously). The next day I went with seven other family members to hang out in a bookstore and have lunch. And that is everything I did. Oh, I also got to babysit my one-year-old niece, who is utterly adorable. As always, though, I was happy to hand her back to her mother once the crying began.

I finished one book, Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading (which is the perfect book to read during a family holiday, in fact — it sends just the right message, if that is the message you want to send), and I came home with a bunch more. Hobgoblin came through for me and gave me Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist. I dropped enough hints about wanting this book that even the densest person could have figured it out, and Hobgoblin is anything but dense. I’ll be reading it next, and I’m SO looking forward to it.

Hobgoblin also gave me Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, which is something I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. I’m a bit intimidated by the length and seriousness of the book, but that’s what draws me to it too. It seems like it will be a good book for summer when I have enough time to dig into it.

I also received P.D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction and Joyce Cary’s Herself Surprised as Christmas gifts from a friend, but I already wrote about those.

And then there are the books I brought home from the family bookstore excursion. First there is John D’Agata’s anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay. I’m on a mission to collect every good essay anthology out there, apparently, and this one looks great. The back cover says it’s “an anthology in the service of a wonderful idea: that the essay has been encumbered by its obligation to tell us the facts. It prefers the delicacy of Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’ to the assertive ‘I know’ of information culture.” It sounds like a concept I can get behind.

And then I picked up Lee Gutkind’s essay anthology The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume I, which I’ve seen in stores before (there are three volumes now) but never felt ready to buy. I’ve read Gutkind’s anthology In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction and liked it, and as I understand it, the three follow-up creative nonfiction volumes are an attempt to collect pieces from lesser-known publications and blogs. I’m guessing it’s meant as competition to the Best American Essay series, perhaps trying to be edgier and less mainstream. I’m willing to give it a try.

And finally I couldn’t resist Dierdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, which is a gorgeous book with lots of color photos. It gives biographical and cultural background on Austen and her times and then looks at each novel and discusses its context. I’m planning to see the exhibit on Austen at the Morgan Library in a couple weeks, and this seemed like the perfect book to get in honor of the occasion.

So that was my holiday; I hope everyone enjoyed their time over the last week, and I hope to be back soon with some year-end wrapping up.

I’m busy, but I can’t exactly complain about my workload being overwhelming, because the truth is, it’s really not. It’s a reasonable workload. The truth is that I’m busy because I’m insisting on spending lots of time on my bike and on going to yoga and pilates classes several times a week. Okay, maybe four or five times a week. That keeps me busy. So I’m not complaining, exactly, but still, I don’t have a lot of extra time.

So I was hoping to review Paco Ignaco Taibo II’s novel The Shadow of the Shadow, but I’m just too tired. I think I’ll ramble on a bit instead. Come back on Wednesday (most likely) for a proper review of the Taibo.

Even though I haven’t joined a challenge in ages, I’m considering doing Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome challenge because the number of books I have lying around unread is truly ridiculous. The challenge is to read 20 books from your TBR list between December 1st, 2009 and December 31st, 2010. AND you’re supposed to refrain from buying books until you have read or attempted to read all 20 of your chosen books, unless you need to buy a book for a book group.

If I decide to do this challenge, I’m adding some small changes to make me more likely to complete it: 1. I’ll write a list of 20 books from my stacks I’d like to read, but I’ll allow myself to make substitutions as desired. Having a list of 20 books I feel I need to stick to is too limiting. 2. I’ll try not to buy any more books, BUT I’ll allow myself to get books from Book Mooch and I’m allowed to buy books, new or used, if I happen to be on a trip with friends where the point is to visit bookstores. There’s no way I’m saying no to friends who want to visit bookstores with me, and there’s no way I’m going some place like The Strand without buying books. It just ain’t happening.

So we’ll see. I have a few more weeks to decide. Not having committed to or begun this challenge yet, I was free to visit bookstores over the weekend, and I stopped by one of the shops in town on a whim. I came home with two things, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years. And the next L.M. Montgomery book (Anne of the Island) arrived in my mailbox recently from Book Mooch, as did Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

I suppose if I’m going to commit to a challenge like Emily’s, it’s good to have a substantial supply of possibilities on hand!

Yesterday, Hobgoblin, She Knits, Suitcase of Courage, and I had a most wonderful day: we went on a literary pilgrimage up to Walden Pond and Concord to see the place where so many great American writers lived. It’s a trip Hobgoblin and I had wanted to go on for a while, but we often talk about things for a long, long time before we actually get out and do them. I’m very grateful to our friends who provided some impetus to get us out the door and on our way up to Massachusetts.

The fun of the day began even before we got out of Connecticut, though. Since SOC and She Knits live fairly far from us, we decided to meet at a restaurant along the way for breakfast, and there just so happens to be a place called The Traveler Restaurant that is a restaurant and bookshop rolled into one. And — get this — it offers you three free books when you eat there. You can choose your free books from their selection upstairs in the dining room, and then you can head downstairs where there is a regular used bookshop. I was skeptical that I would find anything I wanted in the free book section, but I did come across some things I wanted, including a book by Nella Larson, a Virago I had never heard of before, and a novel by Georges Simenon.

But soon we were on our way for the final leg of the journey up to Concord. Walden Pond was the first stop. I had heard people say not to be surprised to find that Walden Pond is not exactly in the middle of nowhere and wouldn’t have been even in Thoreau’s time — it’s right next to a fairly busy road and only 1 1/2 miles or so from Concord. So I knew not to expect wildness. What I found was an absolutely gorgeous New England lake where people fish and swim and follow the hiking trails that lead around it. It’s not wild, but it’s quintessentially New England in the sense that you can be fairly close to civilization and yet feel yourself surrounded and engulfed by nature. Many of the leaves have fallen off the trees, but enough remain to create some beautiful oranges and browns:

As you can see, we had a gorgeous day for our trip. It was raining when we left home, but on the way, the rain ended and the clouds blew away. The skies were beautiful, and the water was surprisingly clear.

They have built a replica of Thoreau’s cabin where he lived while writing Walden, although it’s not on the original cabin site:

At the site itself, which wasn’t discovered until 1945, the boundary of the cabin is marked with stones, and right next to it is a rock pile where people add their own rock to commemorate their visit.

Standing on the very ground Thoreau walked on was an eerie experience — the first of a series of eerie experiences that day. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that such great things happened in the very spot I was standing on.

After visiting the cabin site, we walked the rest of the way around the pond, admiring the view the entire time. Then it was time for lunch, followed by a cemetery. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott are all buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in a section called “Author’s Ridge.” Sleepy Hollow cemetery is a wonderful place; it’s gorgeous, with sloping hills and quiet paths. I was surprised to find that Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Alcott are buried all within just a few feet of each other. Emerson is nearby, but it seems he didn’t want to join the crowd. He’s buried under the big rock in the picture below:

Thoreau’s grave is marked with a simple “Henry” and Hawthorne’s grave just says “Hawthorne.”

After the cemetery, it was time to visit the Old Manse, a house built by Emerson’s grandfather where Emerson and Hawthorne both lived at different times, and where they both did some of their most important writing.

The tour of the house was amazing. We got to see the room where Hawthorne wrote most of the stories from Mosses from an Old Manse, and where Emerson wrote some of his essays, including the essay “Nature.” The tour guide told us that Emerson got inspiration from looking out the window at the fields and farms surrounding the house and the river that ran behind it, but Hawthorne found the view too distracting, so he built a desk into the wall looking away from the windows in order to concentrate. The desk is still there.

Among the wonderful things in the house are the words various members of the Hawthorne family scratched into the windows, which you can still read. Hawthorne’s wife Sophia did a lot of the scratching with the diamond from her wedding ring, and it was lovely to be able to read a series of messages Nathaniel and Sophia wrote to each other.

And that’s not all — you can stand in the room where Emerson and Hawthorne wrote and look out at the fields where the Revolutionary War began. Just outside the Old Manse is the North Bridge where the first shots of the war were fired, and where there stands the Minute Man statue with the poem about the “shot heard round the world.” After our tour, we spent an hour or so walking around the grounds and imagining what the beginning of the war must have looked like. Here’s the bridge, with the statue at the far end of it:

Here’s a more wide-ranging picture that gives you a sense of how open the landscape is:

After our walk through the area, we started to hit the point where all we wanted was to sit down and rest a while, and when an acceptable dinner hour finally arrived, we gratefully found ourselves a warm, cozy inn with a restaurant, where we discussed books and transcendentalism and ate a great meal.

We did a lot while we were there, but there is SO much more left to see. There is Louisa May Alcott’s house, Emerson’s house, another Thoreau house, as well as the Concord Museum. And there are two bookstores there we wanted to visit yesterday, but which were closed. We will definitely be back!

I’ve found myself simply swamped with work lately, and I just haven’t had the time or energy to post as much as I’d like, even though I have two books I’d like to review as soon as I can. Actually, to be truthful, it’s not that I’m swamped with work so much as I’m unwilling to take a moment away from the other things in my life I like to do (bike riding, yoga, friends, etc.), and I spend so much time on those things that it gets a little tricky to squeeze work in. How bothersome work is. So I’ll post as much as I can, but don’t be surprised to see fewer posts than usual.

That said, I did manage to finish reading Antonia White’s Frost in May, which I liked quite a lot, and I also listened to Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me and have become a Strout fan. I’m now eager to get to some of her other books.

And I have a couple acquisitions to report: J.C. Hallman kindly sent me a copy of the collection he edited, The Story About the Story, which looks fabulous and like something I want to dip into just as soon as I can. I got a copy from Book Mooch of The Norton Book of Personal Essays, edited by Joseph Epstein, to add to my essay collection collection. And I have two new book group books: Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which I’ll probably need to have read sometime in November, and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black for the Slaves of Golconda. And I’ve just begun the book for my mystery group: Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Angel. Lots of good stuff coming up, so I hope I have time to write about it!