Category Archives: Reading

I am enjoying Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White very much — thanks to all of you who recommended it! It’s quite long, 900 pages, but the pages fly by. Long books that fly by are their own particular sort of pleasure, aren’t they? Absorbing, fun stories that you can spend hours with and that seem never to end.

I’m not sure what I think, though, of the author’s use of second person. Those of you who have read the book before, did you like it? Here is how the book begins:

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.

The narrator goes on like this for a while, leading “you,” the reader, through the city to the room where the story itself begins. He (I’ll just assume the narrator is “he”) talks to the reader about the reader’s expectations of the setting and time period, and then introduces the characters and gives information on their relative importance. Once the story is underway, the narrator interrupts now and then to keep up this “conversation” with the reader, making little jokes and anticipating what the reader’s reactions will be. For example:

(What? Sugar? Why are you thinking about Sugar? Don’t worry about her anymore; she’s spoken for! And also try to put William from your mind. Everything is in hand I assure you.)

One advantage of this technique is that it allows the author to address the fact directly that this is historical fiction and that we as 21st century readers are trying to work our way imaginatively into a world that is long gone — so there’s no pretending this is a 19C novel or that 19C people could have read it. Why not just acknowledge that this is a 21C version of a 19C novel?

It also gives the author the chance to prepare the reader for what’s coming and to give the reader clues as to how to read the book, and it gives the book a lighter tone than it might otherwise have. It’s also a clever updating of those 19C third person omniscient narrators (and 18C ones) who were powerful presences in many novels and who were characters in and of themselves.

I get all this, and yet I also find this use of second person just a tad silly.

Have you come across writers who use the second person? Who use it successfully? I know such things exist, but I can’t think of many examples.

I have tried to stay away from reading challenges because, although I like the idea in principle, in practice I find myself not doing all the reading, pushing myself to do the reading, and then getting annoyed with myself when I don’t. And reading should be fun, right?

But … you know how it goes. Someone comes along with a new challenge and it seems intriguing, and next thing I know I’m signed up. I should not get so caught up in trying to finish these things and should just think about what they are good for: getting me to read things I might not otherwise.

(I still am thinking about Kate’s Reading Across Borders challenge, by the way, which is an excellent one for getting me to read new things. I feel like I should do some version of this challenge every year, perhaps with a different focus or theme. You see why it’s hard for me to stay away from these things?? I’ve completed three out of my planned five books, but I have until the end of the year so finish, so I just might make it.)

This time it’s Imani who’s come up with interesting new challenges, and the Outmoded Authors one has caught my eye (she has also proposed the Index Librorum Liberoram challenge). She’s created a list of unfashionable authors that participants can choose from, and the plan is to read as many books as people want from the list over the course of six months.

The list is quite long, and there are tons of authors I’d happily read from it. I think, though, to increase my chances of actually completing this thing, I won’t decide for sure which ones until the last moment, with one exception: I’d really like to read Walter Scott. I’ll probably read Waverley, as it’s the one I have on my shelves. Other than that, I’d like to read maybe two or three other authors from the list. Here are some possibilities:

• Christina Stead. I own a copy of her novel The Man Who Loved Children, and I don’t know anything about it whatsoever, except that it’s on Jane Smiley’s list from her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Perhaps it’s time to find out.
• Djuna Barnes. I’ve wanted to read Nightwood for quite a while, although I’m a bit nervous about not getting it; as I understand it, it’s an experimental novel and sometimes those work for me and other times they don’t.
• Elizabeth Bowen. I think she’s someone I’ll like when I finally read her. I own a copy of The Last September, which would do nicely.
• John Dryden. He’s someone I suggested, not so much because I’m excited about reading him, but because he someone I don’t think non-academic readers read very often. If people are going to read something from his time period, it’s more likely to be Aphra Behn or maybe one of the comic plays, or more likely it’ll be something from a bit later like Daniel Defoe. But maybe I should read more of his work (beyond what I’ve read for various classes).
• Radclyffe Hall. I own a copy of her book Adam’s Breed, and Imani has written so intriguingly about The Well of Loneliness, I may just give it a try.
• Sybille Bedford. Litlove mentioned A Favourite of the Gods as one of her favorite books from 2006, so surely that would be a good choice.
• Other possibilities: Merce Rodoreda, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Malcom Lowry.

• Is there any better feeling than finishing a book and starting a new one? I just read Danielle’s post about the excitement of finishing Don Quixote, and I’m looking forward to experiencing that feeling myself — I should finish DQ by next weekend or the following one at the latest. I’ve enjoyed reading the book, but still I’m looking forward to finishing. I’m about to finish Proust too, which means in another week or so my reading world will look very different. I feel sometimes that I shouldn’t be so eager to finish books, that I should savor them while they last, but the pleasure of moving on to something new usually wins out.
• I’m experiencing that happy-to-be-finished feeling right now, actually, as I just finished Susan Ferrier’s Marriage. I’ll write a post on that book shortly.
• Along with the pleasure of finishing a book, I’m experiencing the pleasure of beginning a new one: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. I didn’t know it was quite so long! It’s about 900 pages, but I’m guessing it will read fast. It looks like it will be fun — an absorbing story about a prostitute in Victorian London.
• Hobgoblin suggested that I might like to read The Crimson Petal quite a while ago after he read and liked it. As usual, I didn’t listen to his suggestion. Instead, I waited until I got recommendations from other people, and then I got excited about it and decided to pick it up. Hobgoblin seems to understand this and doesn’t take offense, for which I am grateful.
• Imani has proposed a couple of reading challenges, one of which, the Outmoded Authors challenge I’m considering signing up for. She’s currently compiling a list of authors — a list I contributed a couple of names to. If you know anything about my reading tastes, you might be able to guess which ones!
• The whole idea of outmoded authors is quite interesting, I think — the way authors come in and out of fashion, the way they sometimes are popular in their day and then forgotten and then revived again. I love reading stories about how the reputations of authors rise and fall and the factors that play into those changes. A writer like John Steinbeck is an interesting case — I don’t know if we can call him outmoded, as he still gets read and probably assigned in high schools, but I don’t think he’s been a favorite amongst academic critics, unless there’s been a revolution in thinking that I don’t know about. A guy I knew in grad school wanted to write his dissertation on Steinbeck, but wasn’t sure if that was wise — it might be the case that critical work on an unfashionable author would be valuable because no one else is working on him and the work would seem fresh, or it might be the case that no one would be interested in the work at all.

I received some interesting answers to my questions from yesterday (and I welcome more at any time!).  I will clearly have to read Scott soon, and I’m thinking of a couple of possibilities: perhaps Waverly because it’s what we’ve got on the shelves, or perhaps Ivanhoe, which Victoria highly recommends, or perhaps The Heart of Midlothian, recommended by Ed.

In answer to my question about what types of books I’m missing, I got some great responses, which fall into these categories:

• I need to read some science fiction/fantasy.  I knew this would probably come up — it’s an area I know little about.  I read some Isaac Asimov as a teenager but that’s about it, unless you count books like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which has science fiction elements, which I’m not inclined to count, as I didn’t pick it up for that reason.  Stefanie suggested Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, so I think I’ll start there.
• I haven’t read much historical fiction, although I read a lot of novels published in previous centuries.  I pick historical fiction up now and then, but not often — I’ve read Ferdinand Mount’s Jem and Sam, about Samuel Pepys, and Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney, which has Samuel Johnson and the Thrales in it.  I’ve also read the first novel in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy and the first of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series, both of these suggested by Victoria.  I liked them both … but I wasn’t in love with them to the extent that I wanted to keep reading the series.  I think I have a hard time with series unless I can breeze through them fast like I did with Philip Pullman’s series (which, now that I think about, is an example of speculative fiction I’ve read).  I consider this a failing of mine.  I did really like reading about late 17C England in the Stephenson novel, however.  Both Victoria and Danielle recommended Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, so I think I till turn to that one next, or perhaps Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.
• Finally — mysteries.  I’ve enjoyed the Maisie Dobbs books I’ve listened to, but there are more.  And Danielle recommends P.D. James, whom I will read at some point soon.

Thanks for these great suggestions!

• I checked Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Be Near Me out from the library a little while ago, on a whim and because I read this review from The New York Review of Books. Will I actually read it before it’s due back (the rhetorical question)? I’d like to, but so much else is on my shelves waiting to be read. Checking books out of libraries doesn’t always work for me because, while I want to read whatever book I’ve checked out, I don’t necessarily want to read it right away.
• Reading my Jane Austen in Context book and reading a novel from Jane Austen’s time, Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, has reminded me that I have yet to read one of the most famous authors from Austen’s time: Walter Scott. Not one single novel of his have I read, which wouldn’t mean much, except I like to think I know something about that time period. My father is a huge fan of Walter Scott — I inherited my love of 19C novels from him — but somehow, along with my interest in Austen and Eliot and Dickens, I never picked up an interest in Scott. Does anybody have a favorite Scott novel? A place I should begin? Something to stay away from?
• This is a rather obnoxious question, but I’m curious, so I’ll ask anyway. I try to read a variety of kinds of books — books from different time periods, books about different subjects, books from different genres. But I’m sure there are types of books I’m missing, some of which I might actually like. Obviously there are tons of authors I’ve never read, but that’s not what I mean — I’m thinking about categories of books, like 18C novel or contemporary experimental fiction, or whatever. So, have you ever thought something along the lines of “I wonder why Dorothy never reads ______” or “I love ______ and now that I think about it, Dorothy’s never mentioned that she’s read it” or even “I love _______ but I bet Dorothy would hate it”? You see why this is an obnoxious question? Who thinks about what I’m missing in my reading life except for me? Who knows all the kinds of books I’ve read but me? But still, maybe somebody has had such a thought. It doesn’t hurt to ask. And I’m curious. What am I missing? If I get some suggestions, I don’t promise I’ll read them, but I’ll think about it seriously.

There were so many good things people wrote in answer to my questions from yesterday, that I want to highlight them up here in a post. My blog readers never do let me down! I might as well put my responses into a regular post, because otherwise I’ll be burying a post-length piece of writing in the comments section.

What Susan had to say cracked me up: “My mother always maintained that she didn’t want to waste her time reading something that was made up. She watched 3-and-a-half hours of soap operas every afternoon, though, and one of her favorite papers was the National Enquirer. It’s awfully easy to get a story fix without ever cracking the pages of a novel.” That’s true! If part of what we need from fiction is narrative, we can find narrative in all kinds of places. To claim that you don’t read fiction isn’t to claim that you don’t enjoy those aspects of it you can find elsewhere. Not that the narratives you find elsewhere are necessarily going to be satisfying beyond a basic level (the soap opera).

But what’s wrong with enjoying narrative on a basic level? And if people choose not to read fiction, I can’t exactly call it a moral failing, or even a failing of the imagination. What I object to is the attitude that reading fiction is a waste of time. That attitude shows a failure of imagination, I think.

But that brings me to a point several other people made, which is that nonfiction works are narratives too, and that the line between fiction and nonfiction is not entirely clear. Litlove says that “history, science and autobiography are all beholden to the laws of narrative,” and Sylvia says, “non-fiction can be crafted into a story as well, which of course involves real people and real events.” If you claim you read only nonfiction and never fiction, that’s true only in a narrow sense, because the nonfiction books you pick up contain stories and elements of narrative and often fictionalized elements.

Some of my favorite books, in fact, walk the line between fiction and nonfiction; I’m thinking of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a book I’m not at all clear how to categorize, or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which is clearly a novel, but contains long sections of writing that could easily appear in a nonfiction text, and which also contains footnotes. How do you categorize Sophie’s World, a story and a history of philosophy all in one?

I liked Fendergal’s point that fiction writers face the problem of the ending – of wrapping things up (although some choose not to wrap things up, of course), because wrapping things up can sometimes seem awkward and maybe jolting after you’ve read a novel that up until the ending seemed very life-like. Stories in real life don’t end very often like stories in novels, do they? If a writer wants to provide the reader with the type of satisfying ending where everything seems fully concluded, all connections made, all lose ends tied up, then the writer pulls us away from what we recognize as real life. But that brings up the question of what fiction is supposed to do – to capture real life or to do something else entirely.

And then there’s the point to be made that fiction can tell a certain kind of truth that nonfiction may not be able to; Imani writes, “it’s entirely possible, if not probable for a novel like Middlesex by Eugenides (for example) to present a more truthful account of gender issues, that resonates, than an “autobiographical” account from a so-so writer.” And then there’s Emily who wittily says, “I don’t believe anything I read except fiction.” That’s probably not a bad idea, actually. The person who says that she doesn’t read fiction because it’s not true surely has a narrow understanding of truth. If I’m seeking out specific facts nonfiction is probably better, but surely there is much we learn from reading novels?

I just realized that I have my very own test case in front of me, if I choose to take it up: I just finished Geraldine Brooks’ novel The Year of Wonders, about the plague, and I have on my shelves John Kelly’s nonfiction book, The Great Mortality, also about the plague. I don’t recall ever reading fiction and nonfiction in tandem like this (except reading criticism of a text along with the text itself, but that’s different). While I haven’t read Kelly’s book, I imagine it’s chock full of information on the plague, and also that it’s full of stories, and I know that the Brooks’ novel has a good story, but also a lot of (horrifying) facts about the plague. And Brooks’ novel captures the feeling of living during plague times – what it might feel like to have your world crumble all around you. Maybe Kelly’s book does that too.

I suppose ultimately I respect people’s decision to read only nonfiction if they have good reasons for doing so (although personally I find that preference hard to understand), but what really bugs me is the implication that reading fiction is a waste of time.

The best cure for getting a little bit tired of reading is, of course, a trip to the bookstore. Hobgoblin and I went on Friday night and I didn’t find anything I liked, being a bit too tired to enjoy myself, but today we checked out one of the used bookstores in town and I had better luck.

The problem with the books that I have on hand, I’ve recently realized, is that I tend to collect books in an optimistic and ambitious frame of mind, thinking that I’ll always have the energy and the interest to read long novels, difficult novels, experimental novels, classics, dense nonfiction, difficult poetry, philosophical treatises, etc. What I neglect to collect is the lighter, comfort read. But of course, I do need lighter, easier books now and then, as most people do, I think.

I’m in the middle of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I think you could call an experimental novel, and I’m liking it quite a bit and will be sure to post on it later, but I’m not finding it quite what I want to spend hours and hours with. I prefer it in shorter chunks. So yesterday I picked up one of the books I have on hand that did strike me as something I could spend hours with: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and, if I like it well enough, I can go on to read Love in a Cold Climate, which is published in the same volume. I’m about halfway through and enjoying it immensely; it’s satire of the English gentry from between the world wars, complete with blustering squires and hunting and balls and class conflict. It’s fun.

And today at the bookstore I picked up two new books that looked good: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which I remember hearing good things about on blogs somewhere, although I can’t remember where, and a Virago book, Antonia White’s Frost in May. I don’t know much about White, but I trust the books published by Virago, and the description sounded good:

The Convent of the Five Wounds, where Nanda Grey is sent when she is nine, is on the edge of London — but in 1908 it is a world unto itself. For the young girls receiving a Catholic education behind its walls, religion is a nationality, conformity an entire way of life. In this intense, trouble atmosphere — caught to perfection by a superb writer — passionate friendships are the only deviation. Nanda is thirteen, a normal, quick-witted, spirited girl, when, catastrophically, she breaks the rules and pays too large a price for her transgression.

Interesting, yes? Maybe I should make it a habit to pick up “comfort reads” more often, to balance out my collection a bit. Not a bad excuse to buy more books, is it?

I got some very interesting comments to that post on happy books I wrote a couple days ago — thank you! — and they got me thinking. First of all, I realized that my own claim about not paying attention to whether books or happy or sad or something in between isn’t quite true. When I pick up a title that’s new to me I’m not all that concerned about what type of ending it has or whether the book’s mood is light or heavy. But it’s different with re-reading. I realized that one of the charms of Jane Austen novels, which are among my favorites in the whole world, is their happy endings. When I re-read them, which I do fairly regularly, one of the reasons I do it is because of the comforting quality of the happy resolutions. I suppose most of the time I feel ready for the challenge of whatever I might find — happy or sad, serious or light — in new books, but other times I want the familiar, and the familiar is usually happy.

(That said, though, even those Jane Austen novels don’t always have perfectly happy endings — isn’t Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley just a little odd, more like a father/daughter relationship than a husband/wife one? And Marianne’s marriage from Sense and Sensibility? Edmund and Fanny?)

A number of people suggested that my students wanted entertainment out of their reading rather than to be hit with seriousness and sadness, and I think that’s true for some of them. For some, they don’t like reading and so they were wishing the experience could fly lightly by, as though they were reading fashion magazines or something. For others, they like reading but prefer to read something that’s going to leave them with a happy buzz — that’s not really going to challenge them.  One student mentioned the Chicken Soup for the Soul books once, and I worked hard at not rolling my eyes.

But others are good readers and serious students, so for them, the explanation is different. For these students, I think it’s more a matter of how they understand the world and how their view of literature fits with that understanding. Some are very aware of how harsh life can be, and they seemed not to want to be reminded of it again — they didn’t want to have to dwell on it while doing their homework and sitting in class. I can kind of understand this, but I don’t share the feeling — reading and thinking and talking about the harshness of life I find comforting because it makes me feel less alone.

I’m remember now, though, that students were more likely to make this sort of comment at the beginning of class, and by the end they seemed to like whatever it was we read a little better. I think I tried to communicate what inspires me about the stories in the hope that they would find their own sources of inspiration, and sometimes I think they did.

Do you think about the (relative) happiness or sadness of books when you choose to read them? I’m thinking of this because I recently read Hepzibah’s post in which she describes people telling her to stop reading so many depressing books and to read something happy instead. And reading that post I remember how some of my students voiced mild complaints about the depressing stories I chose for them to read. They wanted something uplifting.

I was surprised when my students said this, because it really hadn’t occurred to me to think about whether what I’ve read or asked my students to read is sad or not. Perhaps what I put on the syllabus is affected by a taste for sad stories I may have (this is a class where I teach students how to write about literature, so I can choose whatever literature I want), although I’ve never thought of myself as having such a taste, but my first response to this complaint is to think that much of really great literature is sad because that’s the way life is, and there’s nothing to be done about it. In fact, I’m guessing that what my students would consider “uplifting,” I’d consider cheesy and overly sentimental, and if I ever feel “uplifted” by literature, it’s when an author has said something bracingly difficult but true about life.

But maybe this has to do with how I read — with the fact that although I get caught up in stories I don’t tend to believe in them or get involved with them to the extent that what I’m reading affects my mood. I rarely feel sad, much less get depressed, when I read a sad book, so to call books depressing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, reading something beautifully well-written can make me feel happy or reading something shoddy can make me feel irritated, but if I read a story where everybody dies or the marriage breaks up or a character fails to reach her dreams or whatever I’m not bummed for the rest of the day.

But maybe my students are? I do recall treating some of the violence in a Flannery O’Connor story lightly (not that this violence doesn’t carry significant meaning, but she does find humor in it sometimes) when that violence shocked my students. I wanted to tell them … but, but, it’s a story! Don’t take it so seriously! I mean — take it seriously, definitely, but don’t get upset about the violence! No one is actually dying here!

So, am I callous, or are they overly sensitive, or is this an age and experience thing?