Category Archives: Life

Thursday, July 9, 2009 · 9:26 pm

Time for a meme!

Both Musings and Cam nominated me for an award and tagged me to do a meme asking me to describe seven personality traits. I’m not sure what the award is for, but that’s okay! I’m happy to accept awards for whatever reason. And I’m also happy to write about myself. That’s what blogging’s all about, right? (Okay, maybe not, but it can be.) So here goes:

  1. I find it very hard to describe myself. Maybe to others I seem like a coherent, consistent person, but I don’t feel that way. I can’t decide if I’m industrious or lazy, organized or a mess, sociable or isolated, calm or anxious, judgmental or tolerant (probably judgmental). Maybe it would be better to have other people do this meme about me, and then I might recognize myself in what they say. I suppose the best way to put it is that I’m very aware of how changeable I can be.
  2. What I can say about myself with a great degree of certainty is that I’m a worrier. I worry about everything. This means I’m (generally) organized and well-prepared (except when I’m not) because it’s too stressful to be otherwise, but it also means I waste a lot of mental energy on worrying. One of the many benefits of yoga, which I’m trying to practice regularly this summer, is that it helps me calm down a bit. Except in a lot of ways, I already am a calm person (back to #1).
  3. I’m athletic, but I’m also very surprised I’m athletic. I never thought of myself as athletic growing up, even when I was on the track team in high school, because I was always absolutely, completely horrible in gym class. But, all sports requiring coordination aside, I love being active. I’m having a great time riding a lot this summer, as well as doing yoga and pilates, and if I could run without injuring myself, I would do that too, and if I could run, I would swim and do triathlons. But then I’d be in danger of having no reading time whatsoever.
  4. I can be stubborn. But, back to #1, only stubborn about some things. I’m not stubborn about having to win bike races, but I am about riding lots and lots of miles. I was stubborn about finishing my dissertation, but I’m not about having a fabulous academic career and publishing a lot. I’m stubborn about finishing books, even if they aren’t going well. I’m not stubborn about winning arguments.
  5. I try very hard to understand why people think the way they do and do the things they do. I try so hard sometimes, that I find myself persuaded by their arguments and begin to lose a sense of what I think. I find it disturbing when I can’t figure out what someone’s thought process is. Who knows how often I get this right, but I have a strong need to try at least.
  6. As a follow-up to #5, there’s nothing I like better than a good conversation analyzing people. Sometimes this means a long gossip session, which I will admit is a whole lot of fun, and sometimes it means a kinder conversation trying to understand why people are the way they are. But either way, much more fun than a party is a post-party analysis of everything that happened.
  7. As a follow-up to the last two items, this is one reason I like character-driven fiction so much. I don’t care a whole lot about what happens; give me some interesting people and some interesting ideas, and I’m happy.

Wow, that was hard. It took me longer than I thought it would. That said, I’d love to hear answers from these people, if they are interested (no pressure of course! I ignore tags from other people sometimes and don’t mind if you ignore mine). I nominate:

Eva

Frances

Debby

Hobgoblin

Arti

Lisa

Iliana

Here’s the picture associated with this meme:

award1premio_meme_award

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Filed under Life, Memes

Saturday, July 4, 2009 · 7:14 pm

A quick note

Happy Fourth of July to all of you who care! To those who don’t, I hope you are having a nice Saturday. I spent much of the day helping out at a big library event and working on my suntan. When I say I was working on my suntan, I mean I was making some of my funny fan lines worse and some of them better. Because I spend most of my outdoor time on my bike, I have suntanned arms and white hands, with a pretty distinct line on my wrist and some lines on my fingers you can see if you look closely. Today my hands finally got some sun and now they don’t look quite so ridiculous, although I did develop a new watch line. The line at the bottom of my neck and on my upper arms is now worse, though. I’m afraid I won’t look normal in the summer as long as I continue to ride my bike. Oh, well.

The library event — a big party for the library’s 100th birthday — went well, although it was windy and one of our tents flipped over on us. Mostly I sold coffee and bagels to hungry people, and I also helped kids make cat puppets. They had fun.

The other thing I’ve been doing is finishing Mary Brunton’s novel Discipline, and I also recently finished Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls, which means I get to choose a new novel and maybe a new nonfiction as well. Yay! I’m not sure what I’ll read, but I’ve considered picking up Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and also Michael Frayn’s The Trick of It. And I’ll probably consider others before deciding on something.

One other thing I did today: I spent some time checking out these two posts from Fernham about books she might teach in her Transatlantic Women Modernists grad class this fall. There are a bunch of authors I’d never heard of in those lists, including Betty Miller, Gertrude Bell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Jessie Fauset, as well as other authors I’ve heard of but know next to nothing about. The class looks fascinating, and my wishlist just got longer.

Enjoy your weekend everybody!

10 Comments

Filed under Books, Cycling, Life, Reading

Saturday, June 20, 2009 · 9:32 pm

Prayers of the Cosmos

Every once in a while, I find myself going through a phase where I become intensely interested in matters of theology and spirituality. To call it “a phase” is maybe not taking it seriously enough, but my point is that this feeling cycles in and out, and I appear to be entering another high-interest time. I’ve had a number of great conversations with a friend who has a similar religious background to mine, more great conversations with another friend who is studying to be a yoga teacher, and other great conversations with acquaintances who have an interest in the subject. This is happening at a time when I’ve been practicing yoga more regularly and loving the spiritual lessons that it has to offer and have also been reading more on the subject. As you may know if you have read this blog for a while, I grew up a serious Christian of the evangelical sort, but as an adult have become … I’m not sure what. I’ve become someone who is interested in “spirituality,” the sort of person I used to scoff at when I was much younger. It’s wonderful when life turns you into the sort of person you used to scoff at, isn’t it?

Anyway, I recently finished Neil Douglas-Klotz’s book Prayers of the Cosmos, which offers alternate translations of some of Jesus’s words: the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, and some other famous sayings. I’m not entirely sure of the merits of the argument Douglas-Klotz opens with, which is that we should look to Aramaic versions of the New Testament to understand what Jesus said, instead of Greek versions. But I’m not really concerned about arguments over which Biblical manuscripts are the earliest or most reliable. What interests me is that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and that Aramaic is a language where, according to Douglas-Klotz, words can have a range of meanings in a way they don’t in English. This means that the words Jesus spoke can be translated in a variety of ways, and each translation is there in the original words:

Furthermore, like its sister languages Hebrew and Arabic, Aramaic can express many layers of meaning. Words are organized and defined based on a poetic root-and-pattern system, so that each word may have several meanings, at first seemingly unrelated, but upon contemplation revealing an inner connection. The same word may be translated, for instance, as “name,” “light,” “sound,” or “experience.” Confronted with such variety, one needs to look at each word or phrase from several different points of view … Jesus showed a mastery of this use of transformative language, which survives even through inadequate translations.

What the book does is give a line that Jesus spoke and then analyze the Aramaic words and the possible translations of those words. So for example, the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father which art in heaven,” could also be translated “Oh Birther, Father-Mother of the Cosmos,” because the roots of the Aramaic word “abwoon” point to a “divine parent” and also to a “cosmic birthing process.” The line “hallowed be thy name” becomes “focus your light within us,” and the line “Thy kingdom come” becomes “create your reign of unity now.” Douglas-Klotz’s translations point to a Jesus that is much more mystical and feminist than the one we are generally familiar with.

This book isn’t entirely scholarly, though; it could also be used as a devotional or a guide to meditation. Douglas-Klotz includes poetic responses to each of the lines he analyzes and also what he calls “body prayers,” which are ideas for how to meditate on each of the lines and how to use the prayers to help deal with life’s problems.

It’s a very short book, only about 90 pages, without a lot of text on each page, but it’s the kind of book you might want to read very slowly, since there is a lot to absorb and it seems appropriate to take the time to really soak up the language.

I liked this book because while I’m not all that invested in arguments about the reliability of manuscripts and how Jesus’s words got recorded, I do think the issue of translation is fascinating, and I like the idea that the version of Jesus I learned about in childhood isn’t necessarily the only version of him out there.

17 Comments

Filed under Books, Life, Nonfiction

Monday, June 8, 2009 · 9:56 pm

The answers revealed

I’ll get back to books at some point soon, I promise. But for now I’ll tell you about my weekend and then give the answers to my quiz in my last post.

In most respects, it was an excellent weekend. It started with a noir picnic. Not sure what that is? Neither am I, really, but it’s fun. It consisted of getting together with my mystery book group, eating lots of good food, and sitting out in the sun on a beautiful day discussing Ross MacDonald’s novel The Underground Man. Perhaps a noir picnic should involve dark clouds, gloomy music, suspicious looks, and threats of violence, but we made do with what we had. We did take a walk in a woods that could possibly be called gloomy, although no one was kidnapped or harmed in any way.

Then on Sunday there was a bike race in my town. You’ll be happy to know that Hobgoblin recovered well enough from his concussion to get 6th place in his race. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that he got stung by something — we don’t know what — at the end of that race, and by the time we got home, he had broken out in hives. He took some Benadryl and seemed okay, so we proceeded to have a fabulous time hanging out with cycling friends and forcing them to walk (we make everyone who visits us walk) a mile into town to get some ice cream. The afternoon with friends was great, but when this morning got here and Hobgoblin wasn’t significantly better, we took him off to the doctor, where he was taken care of, and is now doing just fine. At this point, I think it’s only fair if Hobgoblin gets a chance to go through life without any accidents or incidents for a good long while.

My own race was pretty uneventful. There were only 11 women racing. It was an odd race because nobody wanted to ride out front into the wind, and so we all went pretty slowly through much of it, until we got to the bottom of the hill, at which point everyone started riding fast. I spent the race falling just a bit behind on the hill and then catching up during the rest of the lap. I got 7th, which was about right given my strength compared to everyone else’s.

But now on to the quiz. I think I might have made it a little difficult, but it’s hard to judge what my readers remember of the things I’ve said about myself. At any rate, here are the answers:

  1. C. I have six siblings. I think I tricked some of you with this one, because you might remember me mentioning the number “seven” in this context, but does that mean seven children total or seven siblings? It means seven children total. I’m the oldest.
  2. C. I’ve been teaching 11 years. I wasn’t teaching full-time all those years, and that number includes all the teaching I did as a grad student, but since teaching a class is teaching a class no matter whether I’m a graduate assistant or an assistant professor, I count them all. I taught at least one course a semester in all those years.
  3. B. I grew up in western New York state, the Rochester area to be specific. My parents are still there, so I return usually a couple times a year. It’s especially fun in winter time, when Hobgoblin and I almost always run into a blizzard.
  4. B. I specialized in eighteenth-century literature in grad school. I write about that enough that all of you got it right.
  5. D. I’m afraid of being upside down. I’m sure I wrote about that at least once on this blog, but I don’t blame anybody for not remembering it. I don’t know where the fear came from, but somersaults terrify me. Let’s not even talk about cartwheels or flips or anything like that.
  6. A. I hate potatoes. I’ve always hated them. There are lots of foods I hated as a child and learned to like as an adult, but potatoes aren’t on the list and never will be.
  7. C. I’m not a fan of D.H. Lawrence. All of you got that correct. That was an easy one.
  8. A. I’m particularly obsessed with essays. I’ve never read any true crime that I can remember, and while I like historical fiction and biographies, I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with them. But I’m always reading essays, most often the personal or familiar sort.
  9. B. I’m usually bored by action movies. All that violence and special effects — who cares? Give me some interesting emotional drama and I’m happy.
  10. A. I don’t like shopping for clothes at all, although I suppose I do do it on the weekend now and then. But I’m much more likely to be found riding, hiking, or, alas, grading papers.

That was fun — feel free to write your own quiz if you want to!

12 Comments

Filed under Books, Life, Memes

Saturday, June 6, 2009 · 9:32 pm

The All About Me Meme

Stefanie tagged me to do Emily’s “All About Me” meme. Take the quiz and see how well you do!

Rules: Try to answer the following questions, and leave your answers in the comments section. If you feel like it, create ten questions of your own with multiple choice answers and ask people to see how well they know you. Tag five others to do the same.

1. I have how many siblings?

a. 2

b. 3

c. 6

d. 7

2. I have been teaching for how many years?

a. 4

b. 7

c. 11

d. 13

3. I grew up in …

a. Vermont

b. Western New York State

c. Eastern Pennsylvania

d. Connecticut

4. I specialized in what field in grad school?

a. Early Modern literature

b. Eighteenth-century literature

c. Victorian literature

d. Modernism

5. I am afraid of …

a. heights

b. flying

c. dirt

d. being upside down

6. Which food do I refuse to eat?

a. potatoes

b. brussel sprouts

c. liver

d. cottage cheese

7. Who is not among my favorite authors?

a. Laurence Sterne

b. Virginia Woolf

c. D. H. Lawrence

d. Vladimir Nabokov

8. I am particularly obsessed with …

a. essays

b. true crime

c. historical fiction

d. biographies

9. Which type of movie usually bores me?

a. romantic comedies

b. action movies

c. independent films

d. documentaries

10. On weekends you will not catch me …

a. clothes shopping

b. riding my bike

c. hiking

d. grading papers

I don’t feel like tagging people, so if you want to do this one, consider yourself tagged!

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Filed under Life, Memes

Thursday, June 4, 2009 · 8:04 pm

Maisie Dobbs and other things

Now that summer is here I thought I’d have all the time in the world to blog, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. This is partly because I’m teaching online, which doesn’t keep me too busy to blog, but it means that often I’ve maxed out on computer time before I sit down to write a post. There’s only a certain amount of time that I can stare at a computer comfortably before my eyes start to hurt and I get restless.

I’ve also kept busy riding my bike: last week I rode nearly 13 hours and almost 220 miles. I’m not sure if that’s a personal record or not, but it’s a lot of miles for me.

And then there are bike races to go to, and … well, unexpected visits to the hospital. Hobgoblin is just fine, but he did crash last night and suffered a concussion. Initially he seemed okay, if shaken up, but then he got dizzy and detached and slow to respond, so I got the car and we zipped off to the hospital. They did a CAT scan and everything looked fine, so they sent him home with some percocet. He’s recovering but still has a headache. As you can imagine, this kind of thing changes our plans pretty drastically. No one ever knows what’s going to happen to them ever, but sometimes this seems particularly true when a person spends hours and hours every week on a bicycle and rides in dangerous bike races …

But on to books. I’m considering participating in Infinite Summer, a website and a group of people dedicated to reading David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest over the course of the summer, from June 21st to September 22nd. There will be some regular posters at the Infinite Summer blog, and then there will be forums for discussion. They say we need to read only 75 pages a week to finish the book over the summer, and that seems entirely doable. Since I’m a new but ardent Wallace fan, and since Hobgoblin got me a copy of the novel for my birthday, the time seems right to read it.

And now on to Maisie. I finished Among the Mad, the latest Maisie novel recently, and enjoyed it, although with some mixed feelings. I think I’ll continue to read this series and continue to have mixed feelings.

This time around, Maisie seemed just a little bit too perfect. It struck me that she’s always right. The intuitions she has never lead her in the wrong direction and whenever anybody disagrees with her, you know they are going to be wrong. Maisie has a particularly strong and reliable intuitive power, one that borders on the supernatural at times, and that can get … boring.

I suppose this is a potential problem in all detective novels, since the detective does end up solving the case, and we read them partly to get to see our hero outsmarting everyone else. There’s always a danger the outsmarting will get dull. So a detective novelist has to find a way to keep this from getting too predictable, and really interesting heroes need to make mistakes, or at least have some believable flaws that keep them realistic.

And I’m not sure Maisie really has any flaws. She suffers, definitely, but her suffering comes from her experiences in World War I and not through any fault of her own. If anything, her flaws are that she works too hard and won’t allow herself to have a personal life, and this does become one of the recurring storylines, but for me, it’s not enough.

That aside, though, the story was interesting, not so much because of the mystery, but because of the historical context. All the Maisie Dobbs novels deal with the legacy of WWI in one way or another, and the author continues to keep this fresh and intriguing. This novel takes place in the winter of 1931 and tells about people who fought or worked in the medical field during the war and were damaged by it and who now feel that society has abandoned them. It deals with the history of chemical weapons development and animal experimentation, and one of the characters is a potential domestic terrorist, which gives the book a contemporary feel. The novel also makes it clear that World War II is on the way with references to fascists and political unrest.

I like the way the novels allow me to get a sense of the time period, and that’s really why I keep returning to them, besides the simpler motivation of wanting to know what happens to the characters. They aren’t perfect books, but they are really great light reading for when I’m in the mood.

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Filed under Blogging, Books, Cycling, Fiction, Life, Reading, Teaching

Friday, May 29, 2009 · 7:25 pm

Birthdays, books, and bikes

Yesterday was Hobgoblin’s birthday, and we spent the day doing some of our favorite things — riding, reading, and buying books. We started off the day going on what we came to call the cupcake ride: four cycling friends and the two of us set off on a 50-mile ride that included a stop at a bakery that sells fabulous cupcakes of all kinds. I had what they call — with wonderful redundancy — a “chocolate cupcake with chocolate” and Hobgoblin had one with a pecan pie theme. The cupcakes were great, but the ride itself was even better. We had so much fun zipping around Fairfield county, sprinting at the town line signs, making silly jokes, laughing, and generally being kind of dumb. We rode fast but it didn’t feel difficult — at least it didn’t for me, since I drafted most of the time and there were four guys over six feet tall who provided awesome drafts.

Once we got home we hopped on the train for Manhattan and had a chance to read for a bit; I had the latest Maisie Dobbs with me, which provided excellent train reading. In the city, we headed straight for the bookstores, took a break to go see Star Trek (which I liked quite a lot, and I think that means something, as I generally find action movies dull), headed back to bookstores, got some dinner, and ended the evening at the bookstores again.

It’s a nice way to spend a birthday, don’t you think?

Here’s what I brought home, all from the Strand, although we spent time looking around the Union Square Barnes and Noble too.

  • Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections. It’s the second volume of his Coleridge biography; I already had the first volume on my shelves. After Anne Fadiman’s essay on Holmes and Coleridge, I’m excited to start this one.
  • Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit. Another very long biography that I’ve heard raves about. I couldn’t decide for a while whether to read this one or the Coleridge bio first, but I think I’ll go with the Coleridge. I think.
  • Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats. It was definitely a day for Romantic biographies. After reading a glowing review here, I couldn’t resist picking this one up.
  • Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room. This is the next book to read in my Woolf project, and I’d like to get to it this summer, if possible.

I’ve acquired a number of other books recently I think I’ll take this opportunity to tell you about:

  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. I found a slightly beaten up but still impressive looking hardcover copy of this at a library sale, and have begun to read it already. I’ll report on how it’s going soon.
  • Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, in which he argues that literary scholars should “stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead” (quotation from here).
  • Neil Douglas-Klotz, Prayers of the Cosmos. At the retreat I went to last week, I had a long, fascinating conversation with a very open-minded, super-liberal Christian man who used to be a Unitarian and would probably still be one if his wife weren’t an Episcopal priest. We talked about church and theology and God, and I came away with a long list of books to read. I joked at the retreat that I’ve tried out many different versions of Protestantism and am now trying out agnosticism, which is pretty much true, but I’m still very much interested in reading about theology and church history. Here’s a product description from Amazon: “Reinterpreting the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes from the vantage of Middle Eastern mysticism, Douglas–Klotz offers a radical new translation of the words of Jesus Christ that reveals a mystical, feminist, cosmic Christ.”
  • Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Another recommendation from that conversation, this time about the historical Jesus.

Um, I think it’s time to stop buying books for a while.

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Filed under Books, Cycling, Life

Monday, May 25, 2009 · 9:12 pm

Thinking about summer

Here it is, Memorial Day, the beginning of summer, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with it. I usually have something planned, but this time, I really don’t. There have been some summers when I had to take exams for grad school or when my job extended through the summer or when I had my dissertation to write. Two summers ago I had a couple articles to work on, and last summer I taught online for the first time, which was a lot of work.

This summer I’m teaching online again, and that will take some time, but I’ll be honest and say that it won’t be too terribly hard. I also have some reports to write and some changes to make to my classes for the fall, but those things aren’t that difficult either.

I feel as though I should have some grand plans for the summer — a writing project or redecorating my house, or at the very least, some ambitious reading project. But I’m just not interested in any of that. Maybe some ambition will come to me as I muddle along, but for now, it’s hard to think past the next day or two.

I will be riding my bike a lot, although even there, I’m feeling unambitious. My race yesterday didn’t go well at all — I got freaked out by a crash that happened in front of me, and when I finally got around the crashed riders and discovered just how far behind the main pack I was, I said forget it, I’m through with this, and stopped riding. I’m still loving my training rides and the Wednesday night race series, but I’ve lost interest in any race I’m supposed to take seriously, and my most serious ambition is to ride 5,000 miles this year, which will be the most I’ve ever done. That’s a serious ambition, I suppose, but it only requires that I do just a bit more riding than usual.

I’ll also be attending my sister’s wedding in August, and afterward Hobgoblin and I will spend a week in Maine. We might take some short camping or backpacking trips, but then again, we might not.

So, I guess I’ll just keep muddling along, doing whatever occurs to me and reading whatever books I feel like. That’s something to look forward to, right?

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Filed under Books, Cycling, Life, Reading

Friday, May 22, 2009 · 9:13 pm

The return

Funny, I’m reading over my last post about how I didn’t want to go on my retreat and am laughing at myself because I’m so silly about these things. I had a really good time. I’m very glad I went, and while I was there I kept telling myself to make sure to go again in future years. I wish I didn’t dread things so much. It’s such a waste of time and energy. But it seems that I can’t help but go through agonies of dread and uncertainty before I go off and have a great time.

The truth is, though, that this retreat has been difficult for me in the past. It’s hard to describe what it’s like. It’s a retreat where about 50 people get together and talk about teaching ideas and challenges and share their feelings about what teaching means to them. It’s not at all the typical kind of conference where you listen to lectures by keynote speakers and attend sessions where scholars read papers. Instead, we make a point of everyone being on the same level and everyone having their chance to speak and be heard.

The hard part is that this can get awfully touchy-feely, and I’m never sure what to think of it. A part of me feels incredibly uncomfortable, and the other part likes the chance to think and talk about emotions openly. The amazing thing about this retreat is that, for the most part, the usual academic posturing and posing just doesn’t happen, and instead you’re more likely to see people hugging and tearing up. When I remember that this is a work retreat, it feels utterly bizarre.

So every year I go, and every year I feel this pull between wanting to mock what goes on and wanting to make sure I stay a part of it. What made this year’s retreat so much fun is that I’m no longer a brand-new participant as I was the first year, or a brand-new staff member as I was last year, but now I get what’s going on and am familiar with all of it, so I can relax and let myself experience things instead of worrying so much.

Now that that’s all over, I’m at home trying to recover and trying to figure out what my summer will look like. I will be teaching an online course beginning next week and was supposed to teach a on-ground course too, but that one got canceled. Even though I would have liked to earn some extra money, I’m hugely relieved I won’t have to commute to campus to teach and won’t have those extra papers to grade. So I’ll have one class for a while, but will have extra time to read and ride and go to bike races. I haven’t thought much about what (if anything) I’d like to accomplish this summer, and maybe I’ll have to spend time this weekend figuring that out.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to a chance to recover from what was a very long semester. Perhaps I’ll come up with a reading list or project for my summer, or perhaps I’ll just do whatever I feel like at the moment. We’ll see.

I hope to be back soon with a review of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge.

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Filed under Life

Sunday, May 17, 2009 · 8:51 pm

The week ahead

Although I’ve been avoiding it all day, I finally got around to packing for a work retreat — a seminar on teaching — that I have to go this week. I’ll be gone from Monday through Thursday. Believe me, I’d much rather stay home and read and sleep, and it makes me feel worse that this is a retreat I don’t actually have to go on. A colleague talked me into going two years ago, last year they put me on staff, and this year I agreed to be a staff member again. So yes, not only do I have to go to this thing, but I have to be enthusiastic about it.

The truth is, once I’m there I’ll be fine, but at the moment I’m not into it.

Although I won’t have much time for reading, I will bring some books along anyway. I’m taking Anne Fadiman’s excellent essay collection At Large and At Small, which I’m already over half way through. It’s an excellent little book — about all kinds of random things, but it doesn’t matter what she writes about, because she makes everything so fascinating. Her literary essays have made me want to read more Charles Lamb and to start reading Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, which I have on my shelves.

I’ll also take Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, which I’ve almost finished but won’t quite get to the end of before I leave. I’ve found this a very strange book, and I’m not particularly liking it, although it’s given me a lot to think about. Has anybody else out there read it? It’s just … odd. More on that later.

I’ll also be taking the next Slaves of Golconda book, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. We’ll see if I get a chance to crack it open.

I’m also taking my bike, which may provide a much-needed escape for an hour or so now and then, although I’m guessing other people attending will also be bringing their bikes, so it may not be an escape at all. If necessary, though, I can probably tell everybody I need to train hard for my next race and then proceed to leave them far behind. That would be kind of fun.

Okay — see you at the end of the week!

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Filed under Life, Reading

Saturday, May 9, 2009 · 6:47 pm

Ireland!

In case you haven’t heard the news from Hobgoblin’s blog, it looks like we’ll be going to Ireland next year! It’s not 100% for sure, but it’s likely enough to get excited about. What happened is that Hobgoblin’s university offers a study abroad option there a couple times a year, and Hobgoblin will have a chance to teach a course as part of the program. The course is two weeks long, and our plan is that I’ll join him for the second week and hang out there while he teaches, and then we’ll spend the following week traveling on our own, perhaps to London and Paris, unless we change our minds and decide to go somewhere else.

Even though we’ve wanted to go to Europe for a while, it was just a vague plan, a nice idea, until this opportunity came up. Not only will Hobgoblin get paid for teaching the course, but his airfare and lodging will be covered, so the trip will cost only my airfare and the cost of the London and Paris trips. The one thing that has to fall into place is that enough students have to register for Hobgoblin’s class, and as long as that happens, we’ll be going. Woo-hoo!

I visited Germany and Switzerland when I was in high school and again in college, but that’s the extent of my European travel, so I’m thrilled to be able to go back. Interestingly enough, the town in Ireland we’ll be visiting is the place where one branch of my family originated. I actually have no idea whether this is my branch of the family or not, as people with my last name come from both England and Ireland, but still the possibility that I’m visiting my roots is pretty exciting. Perhaps it’s time for some genealogical research? Hobgoblin tells me that someone with my last name will have an instant crowd of friends in this particular town — all I’ll have to do, apparently, is tell people my name, and I’ll have people buying me drinks and inviting me over for dinner. It sounds like fun.

We have a whole year to plan, as the trip will be next May, and in the meantime, if anybody has any advice on how to find cheap-but-not-dreadful places to stay in London and Paris, let us know!

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Monday, April 20, 2009 · 8:07 pm

Blogging house guests

I never expected when I started blogging that it would lead me not only to making new friends from all over the world but also to getting to meet some of them. And yes, it sounds odd to talk about making friends first and then meeting them later, but that’s exactly what happens, and I consider many bloggers friends even though I haven’t laid eyes on them. But this past weekend it happened again: I got to meet fellow-blogger Mandarine and his wife and six-month-old son, who are visiting the U.S. from France.

What a charming family they are. Can I just say that Baby Mandarine is so, so adorable I almost started wanting a baby of my own? And let me tell you, it takes a truly adorable baby to make me feel that way.

I should probably warn you that if you ever visit us, you should expect to walk until you’re in pain. We don’t mean to tire our guests out; it just sort of happens. Hobgoblin and I did it to his mother when she visited a few years ago, to my aunt when she visited last fall, and I’m sure we did it to others as well. This time the Mandarines wanted to do some hiking, and some hiking we certainly did. It just so happened that Hobgoblin was planning to take his class on a hike up Bear Mountain in northwest Connecticut, so we all set off together. I was so impressed at the way Baby Mandarine took it all in stride, so to speak, happily allowing himself to be carried up the mountain and sneaking in a nap on the way down. And I was impressed at the way Mandarine made carrying the baby up and down the mountain seem effortlessly easy. I’m not sure if our hike was what Mr. and Mrs. Mandarine expected, but I know I was left with some sore muscles the next day, and I’m so grateful they were good sports about the experience.

And I’m also grateful for the dinner they cooked for us. We spent a leisurely day on Sunday walking to town to stroll around some shops and then taking naps and visiting the local park to walk the dog (even after the epic hike, the walking continued! Consider yourself warned). And then we enjoyed a fabulous pasta dinner followed by a wonderful chocolate cake, Mrs. Mandarine’s specialty.

So once again I find myself very, very glad I began blogging and very appreciative of the great friends I’ve made this way. I’m also glad I live near New York City, which brings people into my area so I have the chance to meet them. Just remember, if you plan on visiting the city or our part of Connecticut and you want to have a blogger meet-up, that you’d better bringing some good walking shoes.

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Friday, March 6, 2009 · 7:53 pm

Updates

I’m taking an online course! I’m weirdly excited about this. It’s an online course in how to teach courses online — and yes, I’m doing this backwards because I’ve already taught courses online. Two, in fact. And it’s only now that I’m taking the course to learn how to do it. But that’s the way things generally work when it comes to college teaching — you get thrown into it with only the tiniest bit of training or maybe none at all and you figure things out on your own. You learn things from colleagues and maybe pick up some training here and there and you do the best you can. The course I’m in will run for nine weeks and I’ll get a certificate at the end of it if I complete at least 80% of the work.

I guess I’m just a nerd who likes learning new things. The fact that I’m looking forward to the class tells me that while teaching is fun, being a student is much more so (especially since I won’t be getting A, B, C-type grades).  Maybe I should take classes more often.

……

I really loved the recent New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace. It gives an overview of his life and, most interestingly, talks about his unfinished novel and what it was he was trying to do with his fiction. It sounds like the unfinished novel — which will be published some time next year — is fascinating and majorly ambitious, so much so that Wallace had a lot of trouble making progress. Part of the trouble is that its subject isn’t well suited for fiction — it’s about boredom and tells the story of IRS workers dealing with the dullness of their jobs, so the issue is how to make boredom interesting. He took on a difficult subject, but he also was trying to write in a new style:

Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained … how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

This is such an interesting combination to me — acknowledging the darkness of life but not succumbing to despair and managing to write about “the possibilities for being alive and human” without being trite or cheaply sentimental. I’m also intrigued by the way he is influenced by postmodernism — its irony and self-consciousness and playfulness with language — but also cared about writing fiction with a moral interest and with real emotional weight to it, things that the postmodernists sometimes ignored.

Apparently his last novel was only about one third finished, but it still sounds well worth reading.

…….

My cycling is coming along pretty well, with the exception of a few days last week when I couldn’t ride because of a snow storm. I was supposed to ride in my first race last Sunday, but it was canceled because of snow, so now my first race of the season will be this coming Sunday.  It may rain that day, but it’s supposed to be in the upper 50s, so I doubt we will be in danger of snow.

This week was bitterly cold, but it’s finally warming up a bit, and I am more than ready for the change. I really should have gotten on the trainer on those cold days, but I just couldn’t. I don’t like the trainer ever, but it’s particularly bad when it’s March and spring is on the way. Riding on the trainer in January is tolerable, barely, but riding on it in March is just impossible. I’d prefer to sit around and do nothing, even if my I lose some fitness and my mood plummets. That’s silly, probably, but oh, well.

…….

And now I want to go read some more of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book I’m greatly enjoying.

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Saturday, February 21, 2009 · 7:54 pm

Everybody’s doing it …

A “getting to know us” relationship meme, that is.  I saw this one last here, here, and here.

What are your middle names?

Michael and Lynn.  Pretty boring names, but seeing them there like that and realizing they refer to Hobgoblin and me feels very strange.  I’m not a “Lynn.”  Okay, now I’m having one of those moments when a familiar word all the sudden looks foreign and I’m not sure I spelled it right.  It’s especially weird since it’s my own name I’m talking about here …

How long have you been together?

Since August, 1996, married since August, 1998.  It’s almost one third of my life at this point.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?

We started dating pretty much right away.  It took maybe a couple weeks or so to figure it out 100% for sure, but that’s all.

Who asked whom out?

Neither one did any asking — it just sort of happened.  We met when I moved to the Bronx to go to graduate school and Hobgoblin happened to be one of a group of students I hung out with during my first few weeks there.  We had a class together — literature of the American Renaissance. We spent some time getting to know each other with the group but soon enough dumped everyone else and started spending time on our own.  We had a “first date,” a first formal date in NYC that we dressed up for, but we were already dating, basically, so it didn’t mean quite the thing it usually does.

How old are you?

I just turned 35; he’s 41 and will turn 42 in May.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

Mine.  We see all or most of my siblings each year at Christmas and sometimes again in the summer, which isn’t all that often, but they are scattered all over the place: Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and, for the moment at least, South Africa.  He has one sister in California whom I’ve only seen a couple of times.

Which situation is hardest on you as a couple?

We’ve always had some uncertainty about where we were going to work and live.  We met and married as grad students, both in English, which is a difficult field for one person to get a job in, let alone two, let alone two in the same location.  So along the way there was always the question about who would get a job first, whether we could get jobs in the same place, who would follow the other if we couldn’t, where we would be willing to live for the sake of a job or two, etc.  We got very lucky and found two jobs in the same area, for which I’m very grateful.  But we’re still dealing with uncertainty, as neither of us is tenured. It’s looking likely, though, that we will be able to stay where we are.  Then perhaps the question will be whether we want to stay here, but we can deal with that one later.

Did you go to the same school?

We went to the same grad school, but very different high schools and colleges.  Our undergrad experiences couldn’t have been any more different — he went to a very large public university where you got ignored and I went to a small liberal arts college where you got babied.  Both of us survived.

Are you from the same home town?

Nope — we’re from opposite coasts.  I’m from western New York state; he’s from California.

Who is smarter?

Hobgoblin has a much better memory than I do and is a better writer.  I think I have more intelligence of the emotional and social sort.  He’s smart with facts; I’m smart with relationships.  Is that annoyingly stereotypical or what?

Who is the most sensitive?

It very much depends on the situation.  I probably am, generally speaking, but there are times Hobgoblin will worry about something I’m able to brush off.  I think, though, that I spend more time worrying and obsessively repeating conversations in my head to try to figure them out, so I guess that would make me more sensitive.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

We eat out at lots of places — it’s one of our favorite things to do.  There are maybe half a dozen restaurants we can walk to in our little town, dozens more we can easily drive to, and thousands of them just a train ride away in Manhattan.  We do our best to support them all.

Where is the furthest you have travelled together as a couple?

California and Cancun.  We went to Cancun for an academic conference.  Really.

Who has the craziest exes?

Probably Hobgoblin, but we never shared a whole lot of details, which is just fine.

Who has the worst temper?

Hobgoblin will lose his temper only rarely, but when he does, he really loses it.  I don’t have much of a temper if you mean yelling and throwing things, but I’m plenty prone to fits of irritation and pouting, which is probably worse.

Who does the most cooking?

Hobgoblin.  He does all the cooking, in fact.  I was all set to learn how to cook when I met Hobgoblin, and it just never happened.

Who is the most stubborn?

I’m not sure.  Maybe me, but just by a little bit.  And of course, it depends on what we’re being stubborn about.  Okay, probably me.  Hobgoblin has enough of the laid-back California attitude that I generally get my way.  I just don’t like to admit it.

Who hogs the bed most?

Me, but I’m not a horrible bed-hog.  Sometimes I’ll wake up with more covers than I should have though.

Who does the laundry?

That would be me.

Who’s better with the computer?

Hobgoblin is, but we’re both pretty good with them.  I’d say we’re equally good at figuring out new programs and software, but Hobgoblin knows more of the technical stuff than I do.

Who drives when you are together?

It’s about equal.  On long drives we’ll take turns.  On short trips Hobgoblin is more likely to drive, unless it’s at night, in which case I take over.  The glare of headlights bothers him more than it bothers me.  I’m more comfortable driving in the snow too, having had tons of experience in my Rochester youth.

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009 · 7:50 pm

Book Chat

This semester I teach Tuesday afternoon and on into the evening until 8:30 and then again on Wednesday morning (and I teach Monday and Thursday, too, but those days are easier), and I’m realizing today just how taxing that schedule can be.  So far this semester I haven’t actually had to teach a full week because snow days always got me out of it, but now I’ve done it and my brain is shot.  So I thought I’d just chat a bit here before I turn to my books.

I’ve been meaning to write about Peter Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London, but I’m not sure I’ll get around to it.  It’s been a couple weeks since I finished it, and I’ve lost the sense of urgency to write about it and don’t have a strong sense of what I want to say.  I didn’t love the book, although I wanted to.  It’s historical fiction about Charles and Mary Lamb and their obsession with Shakespeare, and that sounds fun.  But the book never quite grabbed my attention or captured my imagination or made me care all that much.  I think I wanted a little more narrative tension, and the characters always felt a little bit unreal.  Which is odd, since many of them were really real.  Perhaps this is often a problem with historical fiction that turns real people into characters? I imagine it would be very hard to turn their real lives into an interesting plot for a novel and to make up enough about the people to ensure they are strong characters without violating what we know about the real people’s lives.

Those of you who know Ackroyd’s work, is The Lambs of London typical?  Are his other books better/worse?

I’ve begun reading Dorothy Sayers’s book Gaudy Night for my mystery book group, and while I’m only a little ways in, it’s turning out to be such a fun book.  I do like reading about Oxford and all its odd people and interesting traditions, and Harriet Vane is a great character — she’s a successful mystery novelist with some experience as a potential suspect herself, and she now has Lord Peter Wimsey pursuing her in search of a romantic relationship.  She can’t quite decide how she feels about this.  I haven’t gotten to the crime yet, but surely something will happen soon …

I think I’ll go find out!

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Saturday, January 24, 2009 · 10:05 pm

Reading Notes

I’d meant to write about Virginia Woolf’s collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday, but that isn’t happening this evening.  On the subject of Virginia Woolf, however, I’m going to see a staged reading of Edna O’Brien’s play Virginia at The Drama Bookshop, performed by the Shakespeare’s Sister Company.  The play “encompasses Virginia Woolf’s mercurial inner life, as well as the relationships of her three great loves: her husband, Leonard; her lover, Vita and her greatest writings. Ms. O’Brien touches the heart and captures the essence of Virginia’s character and brilliant mind.”  Fellow blogger Fernham will be there giving a brief talk about Woolf.

And that’s not all — next weekend I’m going to see a performance of Woolf’s own play, Freshwater.  Until recently, I didn’t even know she had written a play.  It’s a comedy about Woolf’s aunt, Julia Cameron, a photographer.  I don’t usually connect Woolf with comedy, so it will be interesting to see what it is like.

And what else is going on in my reading world?  I recently finished Elizabeth Hardwick’s collection of essays Seduction and Betrayal; it’s a very enjoyable book that makes me wish more literary criticism were written as well as Hardwick writes it.  I’ve also finished Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, the Slaves of Golconda group read for January.  It’s a very short book (160 pages in my edition), so you have time to join us if you would like.  And now I’m reading another Jeanette — Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle, for one of my in-person book groups.  So far it’s a very good read, rather harrowing in an un-put-downable way.  It’s a memoir of Walls’s childhood; normally I wouldn’t go in for that sort of book, but Walls’s story is captivating.

But there’s more … I’m still plugging away at William Gaddis’s The Recognitions; in fact, I’m approaching the halfway point in the book (it’s about 950 pages).  I’m not finding the middle sections as captivating as I found the beginning, but there is still much to enjoy and ponder.  There are moments of confusion, too, I’ll admit — it’s a challenging read — but I can generally understand what I need to to keep going.  I’ve also begun reading Montaigne’s essays as part of my ongoing essay project (the idea being to read as many essays as I can).  Montaigne is such a wonderful reading companion; he’s even interesting when he’s writing about battles and ancient history, two subjects that don’t generally interest me all that much.  But he is most fun when he is writing about himself, and I think he begins to do this more and more as the book goes on.  I have a lot to look forward to.

Finally, I’m slowly making my way through Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Harmonium (I have the collected poems, but am only reading the first part of it, for now).  Stevens is an odd poet.  I didn’t realize that when I was familiar only with his most famous poems, but reading deeper into his work, I’m coming across lots of unusual vocabulary and strange images; I have had the experience over and over again of reading a poem and thinking it’s utterly bizarre, and then re-reading it multiple times and realizing that it’s beautiful in its strangeness.

The reason I’m a bit too tired to write a proper review this evening is that I spent the afternoon shopping — clothes shopping.  This is highly unusual.  I love book shopping, but any other kind leaves me feeling weary and miserable.  But I really, really need some new clothes and my birthday is coming up, so Hobgoblin arranged for the clothing-shopping expert at Musings From the Sofa to take me on a shopping spree.  If you hate clothes shopping as much I do, this is a great way to fill out the wardrobe a little bit; it’s so much better shopping with someone who can tell you what colors and styles work for you and can give you ideas and take you straight to the right shops.  I came home with some nice new things — and, very importantly, a promise that we can do it again.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2009 · 7:41 pm

Two reviews

First of all — yay for President Barack Obama!  I watched the inauguration at school with a crowd of faculty and students, and it was exciting.  It’s amazing how much optimism I see and feel out there, and it’s wonderful to have something to feel hopeful about and proud of.  I thought his speech was great.  I was also immensely cheered to read this article from the New York Times about how important books and reading have been for Obama.  There is a lot I don’t know about Obama, but that article makes me feel like he’s someone whose mindset I can understand, unlike a certain former president of ours (it was such a relief to hear the words “former president George W. Bush”!).

But on to books.  I thought I would write briefly about two books today, in an effort not to fall too far behind in my reviews.  Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop and E.F. Benson’s Queen Lucia are two very different books — one of them is quiet and serious and dark and the other is bright and comic — but they have a surprising amount in common.  They are both set in small, isolated towns in England where tradition reigns and newcomers are held in suspicion, and they deal with how tight-knit communities define and redefine themselves when change threatens them.  They also have similar types of characters — in particular, the gossip mongers and the matrons who pride themselves on supporting the arts.

But their differences in tone are striking.  Fitzgerald’s book tells the story of Florence Green, a widow with enough money, although barely, to buy a bookshop.  Her town has never had a bookshop and seems like the perfect place for one, given its distance from other town centers and its summer tourists.  Florence has settled on Old House, a building in need of repairs but with some promise, as the perfect place for her shop, but, unfortunately, Mrs. Gamart, the town’s most powerful woman, has had other ideas about how Old House should be used.  She wants to see it as an arts center, and she has ideas about who should run it and how.  But Florence takes her chances and bucks Mrs. Gamart’s wishes, and her bookshop opens.

The book is only about 120 pages long, and it’s tightly focused on Florence and her bookshop’s fortunes.  I’ll admit I found the tone of it a little uneven and I had trouble orienting myself in the story, but I’m not sure I was reading the book under the best circumstances and may not have done it justice.  I’m planning on reading Fitzgerald again to see if I can do better with another novel.  Eventually, though, the story clicked with me, and I was thoroughly involved in it when I got to the ending — which I won’t say anything about except that it’s incredibly powerful.

I’m wondering if this is a book someone English might be better suited to understand.  It took me a while to figure out just how to understand the characters, just what to make of the glimmers of humor that appear in an otherwise somber book, and I wonder if there isn’t something about the tone and mood that could be hard for an American to pick up on.  I’m not sure.  I’ve got Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, which I’m looking forward to reading.

As for Queen Lucia, the book was also very English, but in such an over-the-top way that anybody who knows anything about the English and stereotypes of the English will find it amusing.  Queen Lucia, otherwise known as Mrs. Lucas, reigns supreme in her little town, dictating the artistic sensibilities and the social calendar of anybody who has pretensions of being anybody.  She plays piano, puts on tableaux, talks Italian with her husband, and is so very proud of her performance in all these things.  Her admirers, most importantly her two best friends Daisy Quantock and Georgie Pillson, glimpse now and then the fact that Queen Lucia is not quite as talented as she likes to think she is, but they are still reasonably happy to live in her shadow.

Until, that is, a guru shows up in town ready to teach them all yoga and universal benevolence, followed by a spiritualist ready to perform seances and communicate with the dead, followed, most devastatingly, by Olga Bracely, the famous opera singer.  With each of these intruders a fight breaks out over who will “own” them — who will get credit for introducing them to their small town and who will take charge of their social calendar, dictating who can see them and when.  Benson has a wonderful time delicately skewering all the characters with his light, satiric tone — and the characters really do do some ridiculous things, especially Queen Lucia — but it’s clear that he’s also fond of each of them, and no one is seriously hurt by the satire.  It’s just a lot of fun for everyone involved.

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Sunday, January 18, 2009 · 9:05 pm

A lovely day

Yesterday was a lovely day, the kind of day that does a lot to pull one out of the winter blues, even if it means spending a little more time than is ideal in temperatures in the teens.  Hobgoblin and I spent the day in New Haven with some friends, visiting the Beinecke library and then browsing through bookshops.  It was the first time I’d visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and it turned out to be a lovely place to go — it’s a modern building with marble panels that let the light shine through so it feels light even though there aren’t many windows.  There are special exhibits open to the public that wrap around the outer edge of the building with the middle part taken up by stacks and stacks of very old books.  This middle section is behind glass, so you get a view of some of the shelves.

The main exhibit yesterday was about alchemy, so we saw old textbooks on the subject, some of them complete with charts and models and pictures of very early chemistry labs.  I particularly liked seeing books where the reader had taken notes in the margins (writing in books is a good thing!  People in the future will be interested in your marginal notations, maybe!).  My favorite comment was something like this: “There is neither worth nor merit to be found in this chapter.”  Ouch.  There is also a Gutenburg Bible on display, which was marvelous to look at.

After staring at old books for a while, we went off to find old-but-not-quite-so-old books at the Book Trader Cafe, and after a couple hours there (it’s not a huge store, but the selection is great), we spent another hour or so at Atticus Bookstore.  I had a grand time looking through the books and an even better time talking about them, but I was remarkably restrained and bought only two books.  When I came across Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey I knew I would be bringing it home, given my developing Janet Malcolm obsession and Zhiv’s intriguing post on the subject.  I also couldn’t say no to the eighteenth-century novel Nature and Art by Elizabeth Inchbald.  I’ve read her novel A Simple Story and found it a very interesting treatment of mother/daughter relationships and problems with women’s education, and I’m looking forward to reading another of hers.

It was so cold yesterday, I really couldn’t help but have a couple lattes to help keep me warm, and those two large chocolate chip cookies I ate went so well with my coffee I couldn’t resist.  And what’s wrong with a little indulgence now and then, right?

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009 · 8:28 pm

Existential crisis reading

I’ve been on a bit of an emotional roller coaster lately; I’ve been going through something like an existential crisis, for reasons there is no need to go into, except to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were experiencing something similar right now, given the state of the world, and this has made me think about how my reading relates to my emotional state. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has no trouble reading depressing books, someone who can pick up bleak, despairing novels and come away from them filled with sorrow over injustice and sadness at suffering, but still able to put things in perspective and to figure out how to go on. I tend to think of sad books as offering bracing insights into the true nature of things, and I think of myself as someone who wants to know the truth about how things really are.

And I still believe these things about myself.  But my faith in my ability to read sad books has been put to the test lately, as I’ve matched my emotional roller coast experience with some incredibly sad books in such a way that has sent me reeling.  The sad books I’m talking about are Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, both of which I enjoyed (I will write about them in more detail later) and both of which made me despair.  It’s funny the way sometimes your reading matches your mood, and sometimes this works in your favor and sometimes it doesn’t.  I didn’t know what I was getting into with either of these books (I read one because a friend gave it to me for Christmas and the other because it’s been on my shelves for a while and I thought a book about bookshops might be nice), but it turned out they both had something to say about things I’ve been pondering.  I appreciate that chance or fate or whatever is bringing along books that make me think and seem to speak to me personally, but sometimes this kind of convergence can be overwhelming, and this is one of those times.

I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about comfort reading; it’s fairly new, actually, for me to consciously turn to a book for comfort.  I mean, I found comfort in books and retreated to them when other parts of life were overwhelming, but I didn’t tend to pick up specific books that I thought would make me feel better.  I didn’t have the category “comfort reading” in mind when choosing a book.  I would reread books now and then, which is the closest thing to comfort reading I had, but I didn’t tend to think of that rereading in comforting terms — it was just something I did when I felt like it.

This has changed lately, largely due to hearing other people talk about comfort reads, and I’m more aware of choosing books for their comforting qualities and more likely to pick up something light when I feel I need to.  But still, in spite of knowing better, there’s a part of me that feels that if I pick up a comfort read I’m seeking an escape that’s too easy.  It’s one more manifestation of the curse of the puritan work ethic, I suppose, a work ethic I’ve been thoroughly, soundly, completely cursed with.

I have, you will probably be happy to know, recently picked up a comfort read, and many thanks to Musings from the Sofa for lending me a particularly good one — it’s E.F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, and so far it’s been a lot of fun.  It’s probably exactly what I need.  I think I’ll go read a bit of it and see if it makes me feel better.

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Saturday, December 27, 2008 · 7:01 pm

Home again, home again

So Hobgoblin, Muttboy, and I are back home after a trip to upstate New York to visit my family.  The trip was fine.  I complain about how hard it is to visit my family, but the truth is that they are totally fine and the problem is all with me.  I just read Litlove’s post about how hard it is to be sociable, especially when you are introverted and sensitive to other people’s feelings, and I recognized myself in everything she wrote.  There is just too much going on when I visit my family — too many people, too many emotions, too many memories, too much conversation, too much uncertainty.  And these days there are new people to meet all the time — new boyfriends and girlfriends (I have six siblings, all of whom are younger than I am), and I have to figure out not only what I think of them but what they think of each other and how they change the family dynamic for better or for worse.  This time around only two of my siblings could make it along with their respective boyfriends, but even though the numbers were relatively small (only eight people, including my parents, out of a possible 15 or 16, depending on whether my littlest brother is dating anyone or not), there was plenty to think about.  I’m tired.

I got a nice stack of Christmas books, though, which is the real point of this post.  First of all, a good friend sent me Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant. She said it was the best novel she’d read last year, and as she is one of the most discerning readers I know, I’m sure it’s good.  I read Malamud’s The Fixer quite a few years ago and enjoyed it, but this novel looks to be quite different, as it’s set in Brooklyn rather than in Russia.

On Christmas day I had a few books waiting for me under the tree; first of all, Hobgoblin gave me Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen.  I love Austen so much it’s a little ridiculous I haven’t read a biography of her yet, and after reading Tomalin’s bio of Samuel Pepys, I know she’s the one to read.  Then I got a copy of Gabriel Josipovici’s Everything Passes, which my sister found on my Book Mooch wishlist (I made sure my family knew about that list, just in case they wanted help choosing books — there are something like 170 books on that list, so there is plenty of room for surprise).  After reading Litlove’s review of the book, I’m thrilled to own a copy.  I also got an eighteenth-century novel: Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, in a beautiful Broadview edition.  Looking at the Broadview website, I see that there are dozens if not hundreds of books I’d like to order right now.  Finally, I got a copy of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, which I’ve seen highly praised on blogs and which promises to be a good read.

But that’s not quite all.  My dad wanted to go to Barnes and Noble on Friday to use his gift cards, so Hobgoblin and I joined him.  I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but I knew if something struck my fancy, I wouldn’t leave the store without it.  So when I came across David Foster Wallace’s book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I didn’t resist.  It will make a nice contribution to next year’s nonfiction reading.  It’s clear where I got my book-loving genes from — I was exhausted and ready to leave the store a good half hour before my dad made his choices.  I had to retire to the cafe to rest up while he was still happily browsing.

I’ll be back soon to write a year-end wrapping up post or two …

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