Category Archives: Lists

It’s library sale season here in Connecticut, and today Hobgoblin and I checked out one of the local ones. There are many more that we could go to, if we wanted to, as every library in the area seems to have a sale, but we will probably hit only a couple at most. No need to go crazy. We have run into a bit of a problem with bookshelf space, after all. We were very fortunate to be able to get some new bookcases from Becky — yay! — but of the four she had available, only one would fit up our narrow stairs (old house) and we have space downstairs for only one more. So, believe it or not, we had to leave two bookcases behind. As of now, we have some empty shelves available, but that won’t last long, of course.

So, here’s what I got:

• Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. An autobiography of the first few decades of his life, including his experiences in World War I.
• The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Michelle’s posts on Houellebecq got me interested in giving him a try. Perhaps once I read this, I will remember how to spell his name!
• Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski. I know nothing about this book, but it’s a Persephone, and they always look so nice.
• Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire. After reading The Transit of Venus with the Slaves of Golconda last winter, I decided I wanted to read more by her.
• Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I didn’t love Case Histories as much as most people I know did, but I want to give her another try. This one sounds intriguing.

I could have gotten so many more! Hobgoblin came home with a couple Ross Macdonalds, a Sebastian Barry, a few other things I’m forgetting, plus a complete set, a dozen or so books, of mystery stories. The set was published in 1929. I haven’t looked through the volumes yet, but he said there are lots of authors included that he’d never heard of before. It should be fun to explore.

And then there are the books I brought home from the library recently, including Jo Walton’s Among Others, which I’m reading right now and enjoying very much, and The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure. I might start that one tonight. Lots of good books around here!

I mentioned visiting a bunch of bookstores in London, and I spent a good bit of time in the two bookstores in Dingle, so I’d better tell you what I bought:

• Chet Raymo’s Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland’s Holy Mountain. Hobgoblin has already read this one, and he told me it’s good. Mt. Brandon is on the Dingle Peninsula, and I climbed it while we were there. We had a gorgeous view of the summit and surrounding area until about 3/4 of the way to the top, when the fog moved in and we could no longer see anything. Still, it was a great experience. We went up the back side of the mountain, and on the way down the front side, the most commonly-climbed side, we saw crosses through the mist at regularly paced intervals to mark the path religious pilgrims take. This book tells the story of how it became a religious site. I picked it up in the shop specializing in all things Irish.
• At Dingle’s other shop, I bought Hermione Lee’s Body Parts: Essays on Life-writing. I already have the American version of this book, called Virginia Woolf’s Nose, but that one is a lot shorter than the British version, with many fewer essays. I liked the parts of Lee’s book I’ve read already, so I was glad to find the rest.
• The rest of the books come from London. Since I never find books by Jenny Diski in American stores, I brought home three of them, including her new one, What I Don’t Know About Animals. This is one of those books that I wouldn’t be interested in at all if knew only the title, but with Diski writing it, I’ll read it happily.
• Also, A View From the Bed and Other Observations, a collection of essays. I already read a few of them about moving to Cambridge that I thought were great.
• And one Diski novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, about Marie de Gournay, friend of Montaigne.
• Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, about eighteenth-century women writers and their changing fortunes throughout the century.
• Travel Writing, by Carl Thompson, kind of an overview of the history of travel writing and current critical debates about it. This will be useful for my class on literature and the journey this fall.
• Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness. I just heard an interview with Zanganeh on the radio yesterday, and it was great. This is a personal meditation on Nabokov and his writing.
• Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation. It’s about Byron and the Shelleys and other people in their circle. It will make a good addition to my collection of Romantic biographies, and it’s particularly appealing as a group biography.
• Monica Dickens’s Mariana. This was my selection from the Persephone shop. The only thing that kept me from buying more was fear that my suitcase would be too heavy.
• The Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Selection. I’ve been reading this one slowly since the plane trip home. It’s fun to learn about her life and to get her perspective on what her brother William and his friends were up to.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to write detailed posts on what I read while I was traveling, but in case you’re curious, I started out with Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country (read on my Nook), which was great. I loved returning to her; she is such a great chronicler of social ambition. Then I read the second Mary Russell novel, which I liked quite a lot, after not particularly liking the first one. A Monstrous Regiment of Women was much more focused and coherent than her first, and I liked the London setting. The Mary Russell put me in the mood to read a Dorothy Sayers, so I read Clouds of Witness, also on my Nook. Dorothy Sayers is so much fun! I suspect my favorite will remain Gaudy Night, but I liked this one a lot too.

At the same time, I was reading Geoff Dyer’s collection of essays Otherwise Known As the Human Condition (the first book I bought for my Nook), which was fabulous. This is one it would be worth writing more about, but in case I don’t, I was surprised at how much I loved the essays on photography with which the book begins. I know very little about photography, so these essays taught me a lot, and Dyer’s voice is so fabulously entertaining. His essays on literature were good, but I was less taken with those, perhaps because the subject matter was more familiar. The book ends with personal essays, almost all of which I loved.

I didn’t read much while we were in London, but I started Monique Roffey’s White Woman on the Green Bicycle, and I finished it on the plane home. That one I do want to write a full post on, so more on that later.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve had a little trouble concentrating on reading, but I did finish up the Dyer collection and read Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House. Perhaps more on that later. Just today I started Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time for my mystery book group meeting next week, and I’m still reading the Dorothy Wordsworth letters now and then.

And I think that catches you up on my bookish news. Have a great weekend everyone!

Fellow cyclists, readers, and bloggers Suitcase of Courage and She Knits by the Seashore joined Hobgoblin and me on a now time-honored tradition of taking a trip somewhere interesting and buying lots of books. This time we went to Whitlock’s Book Barn, in Bethany, Connecticut, 20 minutes or so north of New Haven. I love used book shops in barns, and this one had two of them, one of them, as the woman working there explained, for books $5 and up, and the other for books under $5. They had a very interesting selection in both barns, with unusually large sections of literary criticism. I found lots of good books, of which I brought home the following:

• Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire. I read and enjoyed the first book in the Cairo trilogy, Palace Walk, but hadn’t yet gotten inspired to acquire the second one. I taught a Mahfouz short story last semester, “Zaabalawi,” and that has put me in the mood for more.
• Lilian Nattel’s The River Midnight. I’ve been enjoying Lilian’s blog for a while now, so it’s high time I read one of her books.
• Marion Meade’s Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. The book focuses on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber and everything they were up to in the 1920s. I’ve collected a couple group biographies now, and I’m looking forward to all of them.
• William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age. This is a collection of essays on various figures of Hazlett’s time, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, and lots of others. Knowing Hazlitt, I’m expecting it to be mean-spirited and fun.
• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I’ve read about this book on someone’s blog recently, but I can’t remember where. It’s a slim book of nonfiction and is about loss, love, and the color blue.
• Douglas Atkins’s Reading Essays: An Invitation. I’ve never read any Atkins, but I’ve seen his name around the essay world. This book contains his close readings of 25 different essays, and an exploration of the artistic elements of the genre. The idea is to study the art of the essay in the same way we do for poetry, drama, and the novel.

After finishing at Whitlock’s, we headed down to New Haven where we ate lots of excellent food and checked out more shops. We went to one of my favorite new bookstores, Labyrinth Books, which has a truly great selection of really smart books, the kind of serious, intellectual tomes you aren’t likely to find in the chain stores. It also has a fabulous fiction section with tons of lesser-known works and books in translation. From here, I bought Truth in Nonfiction, a collection of essays edited by David Lazar. The essays are about the complicated nature of truth as captured, or not captured, in nonfiction. It contains pieces by writers such as Phyllis Rose, Vivian Gornick, Oliver Sacks, John D’Agata, and others. It looks fabulous.

We also checked out Book Trader Cafe, where I bought a copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist. I bought this book solely because I find Whitehead’s tweets so amusing and I want to see what the fiction is like.

We also went to Atticus bookstore and cafe, where I had the most amazing and amazingly large slice of chocolate chip cookie pie ever. Doesn’t that sound great? It was the perfect way to finish a wonderfully decadent day.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. I’ve had a wonderful time lazing around, reading, eating, and watching The Thin Man (lots of fun, and After the Thin Man is up next). I got a short bike ride in yesterday, but now the ground is covered with snow, and tons more is on the way. Sigh. I love riding outdoors, even in winter, but deep snow is the one thing that keeps me inside. I’m eagerly awaiting the 40-degree temperatures promised for next weekend.

Now, of course I have to tell you about my Christmas books, of which I got a nice stack:

1. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, sent to me by a friend. I’ve been hearing about Shirley Jackson on various blogs for a long time, but the only thing of hers I’ve read is her famous story “The Lottery.” I’m excited to read a novel of hers, and I’ve heard this one is great.
2. Lynda Barry’s What It Is, also sent to me by a friend. I had never heard of this book before, and it looks fabulous, full of drawings and pictures, as well as text. The book’s pages are a lot like what you see on the cover. It’s about writing and creativity, and has some exercises that might be useful for my creativity class.
3. From my parents, I got a copy of Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and Sentimental Novelist. I wondered how they did such a great job picking out the perfect book for me, until I learned they found it on my Book Mooch wishlist. Oh, yeah. It’s useful having that list up!
4. The rest of the list comes from Hobgoblin. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is the book for me this year, because shortly before Christmas, I found out I would be getting a copy to review, and then the gift-giving friend above told me she had a copy for me, and then Hobgoblin got me one. Clearly, I am destined to read this book.
5. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. I checked this one out from the library a while back but didn’t have time to read it, and so I’m glad to have it now to read at my leisure. I’ve heard such great things about it, and I just read a brief discussion of it in David Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading, so I think I need to pick it up soon.
6. David Markson’s The Ballad of Dingus Magee. I enjoyed Markson’s mystery novels so much that Hobgoblin thought I might like his other venture into genre fiction. This one is a western. Perhaps after this, I will have to try another of his experimental novels. What a range this guy has!
7. David Foster Wallace’s Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. This is one of Wallace’s undergraduate theses, and along with the thesis itself is included a number of essays by various philosophers on free will and a memoir about Wallace as a student. This is a great addition to my growing collection of Wallace’s work.

And now to get reading!

It’s December 1st, which means it’s time to plan what books I want to read for Emily’s TBR challenge. These are books I already own that I am going to try to read over the next year and one month (finishing up on December 31st, 2010). I will try to stick to this list as much as possible, but I reserve the right to make substitutions as I feel like it.

First, there are books I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time. These are books that are near the beginning of my TBR list, since I add new ones to the end.

1. Balzac, Cousin Bette. I’ve never read Balzac, and it’s time I rectified that situation.
2. Samuel Beckett, Molloy. I’ve never read Beckett’s fiction either, and I’ve owned this book for perhaps a decade, or at least a lot of years.
3. Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. I think this is the first book I got from Book Mooch — the first of many.
4. The Bhagavad Gita. Seriously, I’ve wanted to read this book forever. It’s about damn time.
5. Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia. This is an essay collection I’ve had my eye on ever since hearing an interview with him on NPR. At least, I think I heard an interview with him. It was so long ago. I do remember buying the book at a Barnes and Noble near my parents’ place one Christmas, but I can’t remember which Christmas that was.

And now for some books I’ve acquired more recently and won’t want to wait long to pick up:

1. Rosalind Belben’s Our Horses in Egypt. Since I never see this book in bookstores, I decided to order it online, and I found a cheap copy at Better World Books.
2. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. I now have a signed copy of the book. I’m curious to see what I think of her when I read her writing on the page instead of listening to an audio book.
3. Jane Gardam’s Old Filth. Like Rosalind Belben, this is an author I wouldn’t have known of if it weren’t for blogs, and I remember hearing about her from bloggers I admire, so I’m looking forward to it.
4. Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. I know one of these days I’m going to get the urge to pick up the kind of nonfiction book that’s highly entertaining and where the pages fly by. This will be perfect.
5. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Why have I not yet read this book? I have no idea.
6. Jane Carlyle, I Too Am Here. This book is selections of Carlyle’s letters. I came across Carlyle in an Elizabeth Hardwick essay and have heard a couple references to her recently, so I think it’s time to try this one out.

And now for some books I would like to get to for various reasons including book groups or because they are part of a series:

1. Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. This is the next Slaves of Golconda selection. My edition, very fittingly, has yellow paper.
2. Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Yellow Room. This is the next selection for my mystery book group, chosen by Emily.
3. Richard Holmes’s Coleridge: Darker Reflections. This is part 2 of Holmes’s Coleridge biography. I read part 1 last summer and have wanted to continue on ever since.
4. L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island. I’m on a small Montgomery kick these days and want to continue my reread of the Anne series.
5. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. I’m slowly rereading Woolf’s major works, and this one is up next.
6. Elizabeth George’s Payment in Blood. This is the second Elizabeth George book in the series; I read the first at some point this past year.

And now for a few random books:

1. Miklos Vamos’s The Book of Fathers. I have a review copy of this one I need to get to fairly soon.
2. Louise Gluck’s Proofs and Theories. I like her poetry, and I’ll probably like this essay collection as well.
3. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Hobgoblin bought this one a while back, and we both hope to get to it next summer. A nice, light summer reading, right?

As I wrote the list, I tried to find a balance between heavier books and lighter ones, although my tendency when coming up with challenge lists is to go for the heavier books — the challenging ones. But a mix is better.

I’m looking forward to diving into these!

You will be relieved to know, I’m sure, that I took your advice seriously about not feeling guilty when I acquire books, and I will be acquiring a bunch more of them soon. I’ll tell you about that later. As I don’t have a whole lot of time to read right now, the next best thing is to think about what I will read soon, when I get the chance. So here’s what’s looking most interesting right now:

• Richard Powers, The Echo Maker. I’ve heard lots of good things about Powers over the last couple years, and have heard about him recently from a friend, and I’m intrigued. He writes about science a lot, and I think I’d like that.
• Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy/Tacy books. I just received a lovely edition of Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself in one volume from Kate, and the book is too lovely to let sit on my shelves for too long. I loved these books as a kid, and I want to see how I like them now.
• Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. I really loved Abide with Me when I listened to it recently, and so now I want to get to this one. Plus, a friend recently gave me a signed copy of the book, and that feels like a reason to read the book right there.
• Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. With all the Collins posts appearing around the book blog world, he has been on my mind a lot. This is the book of his I have waiting on my shelves.
• Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. I’ve said I want this book enough times in enough places, that if it doesn’t appear under the Christmas tree, well, I’ll rush out and buy myself a copy the day after. Baker is one of my favorite writers, and this book is about a guy trying to write an introduction to a poetry anthology, so of course I will like it.
• Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. I’ve been hearing about Davis for a while and am intrigued. This is a book of short stories, a genre I haven’t read in a while and would like to get back to. Two very good reasons to read this book. I’m curious about the extreme shortness of many of these stories, and also about their poetic quality. I guess since I don’t read many short stories and have been known to complain about overly-poetic prose, this book feels like a challenge, and I wonder if I will like it in spite of my biases.
• Anything by Lorrie Moore and Margaret Atwood, two writers I have never read, and really should.
• Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. I’m slowly reading through Woolf’s major works in chronological order (at the rate of a book or two a year), and here is where I’m at, into the more experimental work.
• Louise Gluck’s Proofs and Theories. I love Gluck’s poetry, and this is a book of essays. I hope I like them as much.
• Rosalind Belben’s Our Horses in Egypt. I look for this one in every bookstore I go to and haven’t found it yet. From what I remember hearing about it, it’s a good novel that does really interesting things with the writing. It seems to fit into the category “experimental, but not too much so” that I like a lot.
• John Keats’s letters. I’ve heard these are great, and I need to find out for myself.

I haven’t had much time to read, but I did finish Brideshead Revisited recently, and I hope to write up my thoughts soon.

I’ve gone on a bit of a Book Mooch spree over the last couple days, something I haven’t done in a long time.  But I can only let those points sit there for so long before the fact that each point can get me a book for free (or for “free,” since I earned points by mailing books to other people) becomes too much to contemplate, and I break down and use them.  I requested seven books recently, and that still leaves me with nine points — plenty left in case some really cool books become available.  Here’s what I got:

• Henry Green’s Loving, Living, Party Going.  These are three separate novels, collected into one volume.  I’ve never read Green, but he’s someone I hear of now and then, not frequently, but just enough to keep him in mind.  I believe Francine Prose praised him in her book Reading Like a Writer, which brought him to my attention once again.  I could love him or hate him — I have no idea.  It will be interesting to find out.
• Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments: A Memoir.  Here is another author I have never read and don’t know much about, so I am taking a bit of a risk with her.  It’s a memoir of her relationship with her mother.
• Maria Edgeworth’s Helen.  I’ve read one Edgeworth novel (Belinda) and am looking forward to reading more.  She is an early 19C novelist; she sometimes writes about Ireland and Irish/English relations and was also known in her day for her children’s writing as well as her adult novels.  Helen was published in 1837.
• Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault. I enjoyed Shriver’s novel The Post-Birthday World, and this one looks fun — it’s about a tennis-playing couple who become rivals and suffer from competitiveness and jealousy.  I’m not suggesting, let me be clear, that this is at all parallel to the experience Hobgoblin and I have racing bikes together!
• Emile Zola’s Germinal. I’ve never read Balzac, and I’ve never read Zola, and this book seems like a good place to start.  I’ve been saying I’m going to read those two for years — maybe I’ll actually get around to it this year.
• Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. I like reading travel writing now and then.  Here’s a description: “In a 35-foot sailboat Raban traverses over 1,000 miles of often treacherous waters … Passage to Juneau is a lesson in comparative literature, the history of the Northwest’s Indians and the first European explorers, and a sociological treatise on class and technology. But most of all, Passage to Juneau is a fascinating navigation through Raban’s psyche — a brave interior exploration of family, relationship, and mourning.”
• Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence.  I do already have one unread Pym novel on hand (No Fond Return of Love), but Pym is so good, it’s impossible to have too many of her books around.  And I’ve heard such good things about this one.

Now that my Book Mooch spree is over, maybe I can let my remaining points sit for a while …

I had a gift card to use at Barnes and Noble and needed some other things as well, so last Saturday, Hobgoblin and I used this as an excuse to head to Manhattan to go on a shopping spree (which included getting me a new pair of running shoes, so now I consider myself officially a runner). I really, really will stop accumulating books, very soon, I promise, but in addition to the Barnes and Noble trip, I did order a couple other books online that I can’t do without and I mooched one that looked irresistible. So here’s the last “new books” post I’m going to do for a while (seriously!):

• Javier Marias’s All Souls. Marias looks like an interesting new (new to me) author, and Litlove’s intriguing review made me pick this one up. There’s also this article from the NYRB if you’d like to know more.
• Rosamund Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove. I loved Lehmann’s A Note in Music, which I read last year, and I wanted to find The Echoing Grove in particular as a follow-up because it inspired the Jonathan Coe novel I’ve got, The House of Sleep, so perhaps I’ll read the two back to back.
• Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book. I loved Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just, and this one looks fabulous too. One of the Amazon reviews says that Scarry “wonders how the best writing enables us to produce images and scenes in our minds that carry something of the force of reality. She deftly unfolds an answer by identifying and explicating several general principles and five formal practices by which authors invisibly command us to manipulate the objects of our imagination.”
• Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel is on its way to my house right now; it’s the next Slaves of Golconda book, the discussion of which will be held at the end of February.
• Plutarch’s Selected Essays on Love, the Family, and the Good Life. Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay recommends this one as follow-up reading for Plutarch.
• Gabriel Josipovici’s Moo Pak. This one is coming to me from Book Mooch. I know very little about it, but I’m sure it’s going to be good!
• Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. I love reading about this time period!