The Good Luck of Right Now, a still-unreleased book by Russell O. Davies
Read in September.
This book is by the author of Silver Linings Playbook, which was indeed a novel before being turned into an Oscar winning film starring Jennifer Lawrence. Like Silver Linings Playbook, Right Now (is there a rule to how one may shorten titles for brevity's sake?) is a story of a cast of varied characters who all suffer from some form of mental illness or social ostracization. The characters eventually unify to escape their problems, and everything turns out fine. I wasn't too fond of this book because I didn't find myself sympathizing with the protagonist, and though it isn't always in the reader's best interest to sympathize with a protagonist, I felt that I was meant to sympathize in this case but just couldn't. I also found troubling the presence of so many characters with deep, striking problems, and none, or almost none, with concerns on a more "ordinary" scale. I almost got the message that it was morally incorrect or inferior to be a person without a dead parent, an abusive partner, an addiction, or a learning disability. But to this book's credit, it was very readable, both for me and for the friend who passed it on to me (having read it and enjoyed it but not being too attached to it. I feel similarly.).
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Listened to in June, I think.
I spent this summer working outside and mostly by myself, and so when I found out about the Lit2Go free audio books website, I was psyyyched. The next few books on this list are ones that I downloaded from Lit2Go, having scanned their genres and grade level lists to find what seemed most interesting. I started off with The Count of Monte Cristo because I loved its clever adventure story when I first read it in nth grade (between 6th and 10th?), and wanted to remember more of the plot than my favorite part, when the protagonist learns several languages perfectly from a crazy-seeming old man he meets in prison. Brief summary: a nice dude is put into jail for life by false friends, then escapes and spends the rest of his life becoming a magically exotic mystery man while secretly seeking revenge. Wonderful. Apparently suitable for 5th graders. To my amusement, I discovered that this novel contains an entire lengthy chapter of hallucinatory pro-hashish propaganda.
Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Listened to this summer.
I wanted to read The Great Gatsby but this is what was at hand (or at cursor, since I downloaded the book online) so I went for it. This is a collection of short stories, some of which feel timeless, and some of which feel like an excursion into 1910s and 1920s culture. These stories have the sort of satisfying twist endings and rich visualizations that I remember from the short stories I liked most in middle and high school English classes. I'm impressed by Fitzgerald's work and want all the more to get to his novels now. It's about time I visited a library.
Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki
Listened to this summer.
I never thought that the ashes of a mistreated dog and the gristly revenge wrought on a garden-eating badger would make for interesting fairy tale topics, but Japan has proved me wrong. Also featured in this collection: a recurring dragon king, some virtuous princesses, and the reason that jellyfish are jellylike.
To clear things up, Yei Theodora Ozaki is not strictly the author, but "This is a collection of Japanese fairy tales translated by Yei Theodora Ozaki based on a version written in Japanese by Sadanami Sanjin." [Source.]
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
Listened to this summer.
In which the author of Jane Eyre expresses her love of England admirably. The story is that an English guy goes to Belgium to find a job, ends up teaching English, and falls in love with one of his students. This book is allllll about the superiority of the English over everyone else. This isn't really a spoiler since we all know what's going to happen here, but on the day of the protagonist's wedding to his studious beloved, they arrived at their apartment and he "instructed her how to make a cup of tea in rational English style". Because that is what is important: English tea served in the English way, and also preventing one's sweetheart from speaking French, though it is the language she grew up speaking, so that she can get better at English, the language of her dead mother's country, to which she is ever dreaming of traveling. Okay, this book isn't that bad, just a little didactic in a classic Charlotte Brontë manner (if anyone's read Jane Eyre, you'll remember how Jane was always working so hard to get the awful Frenchness out of her foreign pupil, and to instill in her some proper protestant morals), and worth reading if you'd like to learn about what being a teacher was like in the 1800s (pure suffering). On an unrelated note, I will forever associate this book with pruning lilac bushes, because that is what I was doing while listening to it.
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Listened to this summer.
This is a collection of interconnected short stories about people living in a fictional town, where they wish to be interconnected but aren't. Anderson understands loneliness. This is a good book for those "but I don't WANT to be cheered up!" days.
Also listened to this summer:
-Plenty of podcasts from Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Orthodox Christian writer, open-minded and thoughtful speaker, and the wife of a priest at a church I used to attend in Maryland. The podcast name is Frederica, Here and Now, and it can be found on Ancient Faith Radio (an Orthodox Christian online radio station with many, many varied programs and podcasts to listen to and download).
-NPR's fascinating, entertaining sciencey/ethicsey podcast Radiolab. Topics ranging from adoption to animal life to artificial intelligence are woven in with reflections on brain activity and connections to music and other awesomeness. Can't even describe it. Here is a sixteen-minute story about an idea in research that I'm still trying to process.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver.
Read in May and June.
The third Barbara Kingsolver novel on this list, Flight Behavior is about the hardships of Appalachia, climate change (and its deniers), and Dellarobia, our trapped but moxie-filled protagonist. The story: Dellarobia discovers a phenomenon which brings her to the attention of the local 300-member church, and the area to the attention of scientists and the media. These two groups, the hickish churchy people and the worldly sciencey people, just can't agree on anything, which doesn't help the danger that an entire species is in right outside of town. Things may or may not resolve themselves, no spoilers.
This book is okay but disappointing after one has read The Poisonwood Bible and wants nothing from Barbara Kingsolver but another masterpiece. What we have here is a novel that should have been a set of essays. The characters are hard to sympathize with and sometimes sound like they're in a Socratic dialogue: the one who agrees with Barbara Kingsolver's views of the world (which aren't bad at all, by the way) gets long monologues, and Dellarobia just agrees, agrees, agrees, switching up the way she says "yes". The same ideas about the environment or the failure of public education are expressed in tiring ways, as when a character who has just had a conversation with a friend about an idea explains the idea to somebody else immediately afterward. Stuff like this reads like page filler and the value of the few good explanatory metaphors is lost through the reader's tiredness of hearing about the same pet topics on repeat.
Why would Ms. Kingsolver plant her ideas into a novel instead of writing about them in a nonfiction format, like essays for a magazine? Perhaps that is what people expect from her and will read from her, novels. Perhaps she had a moment of inspiration about the plot of Flight Behavior, and was not willing to give up the chance to throw all the topics she wanted to discuss into a semi-cohesive story. Even if it reads like a Socratic dialogue, one has to give this book some credit, because Socratic dialogues were made the way they were to engage people, to break up bigger ideas into digestible dialogue. Still, I can't help but feel, reading it, that what materials made a mediocre novel could have made much more powerful essays and perhaps a few stories, though they would have gained a smaller audience.
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I've been reading lots of chapters of nonfiction books on farming and gardening, so it doesn't quite add up to individual books... yet. Soon. :)
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Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen.
Read in March and April.
This collection of interviews was published in 1988, and the first interview in the volume is from 1969. This makes for a funny time window into Vonnegut's life and ideas, or at least the way he wanted his life and ideas to appear in the public's or the interviewers' eyes. The interviewers range from the amusingly ignorant to the well-read and worshipful, and one interview is particularly striking because it is written from the point of view of a Vonnegut character, Kilgore Trout. As the timeline moves forward, the reader hears Vonnegut talk about his latest novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Bluebeard...), one by one, about his family as it changed (he divorced and remarried; his children grew up and became artists/mental patients/doctors/parents), and about his views on morality and what a writer should do. If this book is an artifact, it is a readable and useful one. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or at least in interviews with writers who happen to be former car salesmen.
The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir by Simone de Beauvoir.
Read in February and March.
(This is actually not the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir but the second of four volumes of autobiography that she wrote. The first, covering her childhood and youth, is Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The two books covering later times in her life are Force of Circumstance and All Said and Done.)
This book covers the years 1929 to 1944, when de Beauvoir was 19 to 36 and establishing her career as a writer. Included here is the beginning of her relationship with Sartre, her transition from being a lycée teacher to being a writer of novels (and the beginnings of her philosophical writings), an account of World War II's effects on those living in France and especially Paris, and my favorite parts, the description of de Beauvoir's walking and biking vacations all over Western Europe. We also learn about why de Beauvoir chose not to marry (Sartre or anyone else) and some details of the lives of the literary and historical features with whom de Beauvoir and Sartre came into contact-- for instance, Picasso and Camus. Near the end there is a short discussion of why, at the time, de Beauvoir did not want to be called an existentialist, which is interesting because of course today she is considered an existentialist idol of sorts.
I enjoyed the pace of this book, the long chapters which covered years at a time, showing how life moves along not necessarily like a constructed plot with distinct parts for different relationships and thoughts, but as a more complex (and not always logical) whole. Next on de Beauvoir reading list is The Second Sex, in French if I have the patience. We'll see how many chapters I last through...
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir, by Mark Vonnegut, M.D.
Read in March.
The beginning and end offer thoughts on the stigmatization and experience of mental illness, and the need for art, that I found strikingly agreeable. The middle has a style a little like that of Mark's father, Kurt Vonnegut, in that he'll get into some topic for a while, then break the paragraph pattern with a simple sentence that throws everything off. There's stuff in there about Kurt, too, and he is called "Kurt," just the first name. Near the end of the middle this book gets thick with mental illness memoir stuff, so that it reminds me of the unoriginal style of other writers who have covered the same material, but perhaps it is necessary. Anyways for me the names of medicines, listed one after the other, don't have enough connotations (or meanings, at all, in my mind) for the words to make much sense at all. Perhaps someone with a particular kind of medical education or experience in mental illness, however, would find those passages useful.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Read in March.
This is like one of those "Forever Alone" memes except the family version, and the family contains I think twenty guys with the same name. Lots of magical realism that gets heavier as the years wear on. One of my friends stopped reading this book because of the sensuality; another liked it better for the same reason. My main question was: is this fictional family written about supposed to be more full of solitude than the typical family in the world? Is it a special case or is it just filled with so many different lonely family members to prove that anyone can be lonely, and probably is?
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Read in February.
That one Vonnegut book that everyone seems to have heard of. From a book written some 25 years earlier than Timequake, see below, I expected something more conventionally structured and this was, but only a bit. Again we have first person narrator who is the author himself speaking in third person about his favorite character, who is in this case Billy Pilgrim, a WWII soldier. (Vonnegut was a WWII soldier, and at Dresden during its destruction, like Billy.) Again with the paragraphs skipping from topic to topic. And again there are elements of time travel and the discussion of free will, or rather how we don't have free will. But the story is of Billy's life and the effects of the war on his later experiences, and on the results of his potential extraterrestrial encounter, so... lots of things going on.
I read this at the desk at my job and groups of people passing by sometimes commented on this book as "worth it," or said it's "really good, I hear," and surprisingly to me a couple of them noted (to each other) that this was "Kurt Vonnegut's book about the Dresden bombing" or "about the destruction of Dresden". True, that is a central event in the book, but it doesn't happen until the very end. Meanwhile, there's all the alien and time travel and Billy's life and free will stuff going on. I suppose it's easier to say that it's a book about the bombing of Dresden but that description does miss out on a lot. Anyways, perhaps this is like me describing The Brothers Karamazov, also see below, as "that book about the son who kills his father" when most people I know who have read it see much deeper themes and purposes running throughout that piece of work. The different levels one could read this book at are just so far from each other that one could describe the same book twice and sound like one was talking about two entirely different books, instead.
Interestingly, there's a bit in Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse-Five that mentions The Brothers Karamazov:
Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough any more," said Rosewater.Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Read in February.
Vonnegut's last novel, full of humorous pessimism or pessimistic wisdom, in which he slips between being himself in 1996 and 2001 and 2010 (he lived to 2007 and the book was published in '97) and possibly 1991, and interacts with his alter ego, Kilgore Trout (who has been in other K.V. books, oh man oh man!), and talks about the real and fictional past, and throws in plots and characters from both real life and his, or Trout's, unwritten stories-- but the main thing is that in 2001 a timequake happened and everyone had to relive the past ten years again, without free will, able to remember their actual past but not able to change a thing. Phew. This event of course causes widespread existential agony, which most people get over with the help of K. Trout. I'm not describing this well. I like Kurt Vonnegut even more now. Here is the book's Wikipedia page. This is a good bad day book, somehow.
BOOK INTERCONNECTIONS TIME!
-As noted below, C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves recommends (in a dark tongue in cheek way?) Anna Karenina, which I was reading already when I started TFL.
-In The Prime of Life, by Simone de Beauvoir, Simone describes happily having nothing but hot chocolate for supper... just like Rose in Rose in Bloom, by Louisa May Alcott.
-In Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut recommends/orders his reader(s? He advised other writers to write with one person in mind for an audience, so maybe he did so himself.) to read Catch-22, which I read last year sometime. Feeling real educated now.
-This isn't really a straightforward connection but am reading Storyteller, the biography of Roald Dahl, and it occurs to me that both he and K. Vonnegut are in my mind "funny men who came out of World War II" and that perhaps there's more of these characters out there... C.S. Lewis too... probably there's hundreds. Am wondering who the funny women writers who came out of WWII are; they too surely must exist... though they were doing quite different things at wartime... anyways rambling here.
Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott
Read in February.
These two didactic but sweet children's books by the author of Little Women (see my "Won't Read" list) describe the growing up and coming of age, respectively, of Rose Campbell, an orphaned heiress sent to live with her six aunts and seven boy cousins. Eventually, of course, the older cousins all want to marry Rose, and the question is not "Wait, she's going to marry a cousin?" but "Which cousin will it be?" The cast of characters also contains a likeable, kind uncle and mentor supposedly modeled after Louisa May Alcott's father. For the record, I'm not going to say that these books are novels because Rose in Bloom actually contains the following line: "...when she said her prayers that night, [Rose] added a meek petition to be kept from yielding to three of the small temptations which beset a rich, pretty and romantic girl—extravagance, coquetry, and novel reading."
In Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov, the lecture on Anna Karenina.
Read in February.
Before he got rich and famous for writing Lolita, Nabokov was just a regular genius teaching Russian Lit at Wellesley. After reading his lecture on Anna Karenina (whom he calls "Anna Karenin" so as to decrease confusion about naming. The first draft of this lecture was written in 1940, if that explains anything.), which I read as the new year started, I want to read all the other books and stories lectured/written on in this volume because Nabokov's insights here are so helpful and amusing. For instance (on the helpful end), he speaks of how Tolstoy writes in an especially realistic manner because he manages to get across his various characters' personal senses of time, and then gives instances of this in Anna Karenina (and blows my mind). Here, for your entertainment, is the sassy first paragraph of the A.K. lecture:
Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoyevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation.
Read in January and February.
In which a son kills his father. Famous Russian novel that I read as a story but perhaps should have read as some sort of philosophical discussion? Maybe I'll read it over for that purpose. I did like the story for a story, though the characters go off giving speeches and rants all the time that were just unrealistically long-- I understand why they're there, to go more deeply into the themes of the book and to discuss Dostoyevsky's pet topics (Tolstoy did this too in A.K. and W&P, which I just read) and all, but though I enjoyed these passages, I had to suspend my disbelief to make them fit into what was going on in the "actual story" of the brothers. I liked the way that Dostoyevsky caused my loyalties to shift among the various characters throughout the book. Engaging read for long hours. It's weird though because Wikipedia ("The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality.") and everyone I know who's read any part of the novel saw it as some sort of collection of important essays, which I now feel I perhaps should have done, but nobody was telling me how to read the book as I read it, so I didn't go through it too academically. Also am curious about what existentialism prof. kept referring to last semester when he randomly mentioned Dostoyevsky's apparently pre-existentialist views (???).
All There Is: Love stories from Storycorps, edited by Dave Isay
Read in February.
Storycorps is a nationwide (USA) project which collects and records people's stories and stores them at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Occasionally this organization comes out with a book of interesting, true, fact-checked stories. This particular volume has stories about looooove. Unlike some other story collections, ahem Chicken Soup books, this book doesn't feel oversentimental or too optimistic; it's just true, and that's what's so appealing about it. One section of the book is filled with stories of love lost through death, and that touch of realism makes the parts of the stories that recall good memories much sweeter. Because the written stories are taken from audio recordings, the "voices" of the narrators come off as genuine, too. Pretty lovely. After reading this I'd like to find Storycorps: Listening Is an Act of Love and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from Storycorps.
A Corner of the Universe by Ann M. Martin
Read in February.
A book by Ann M. Martin that's not in the Babysitters Club series! This one's actually a Newberry Honor Book. Excuse me because I can't help but compare the style to that of the BSC books. The story moves at a different pace, with more "slowly" described episodes and deeper characterization and way more sensory description than the BSC books, and the book covers more serious topics: the main premise is that a girl's disabled uncle comes to town over the summer and changes everyone's lives, not necessarily for the better. I would have liked it better had it not reminded me so much of a couple of other novels, young adult and, uh, regular adult, that I've read. Interesting tidbit: in her little bio at the back of all the BSC books, Ann M. Martin is described as liking ice cream, the beach, and I Love Lucy. All three of these things make appearances in A Corner of the Universe.
Kristy and the Worst Kid Ever by Ann M. Martin
Read in February.
There's a new kid in the neighborhood, a foster kid who likes to terrorize people's pets and run away from babysitters. But Kristy realizes that this kid might not just be the worst kid ever, but the saddest kid ever... and maybe she can help. #62.
Mary Anne Misses Logan by Ann M. Martin
Read in January.
#46. A couple of Babysitters Club books ago, Mary Anne broke up with Logan because he was being a male chauvinist pig. But now she is stuck working with him on a school project, and he's being all considerate and stuff! Problem is, her archenemy, Cokie, is also in their group for the project.
WHATEVER WILL HAPPEN?
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
Read in December and January.
Enlightening and engaging definition and description of how the four loves of affection, friendship, eros, and charity should be felt and used in life. I was annoyed at one part of the book which seemed dated by its sexism (Lewis argued that it is difficult for men and women of suburbia to sustain friendships because their interests and lives are so different; I hope this isn't the case now) but found the rest of the book rich in truth and good sense. Interestingly, at the end of the section on eros, Lewis speaks of how lovers can chain each other in drama and resentfulness, and then advises, "Read Anna Karenina and do not fancy that such things happen only in Russia." Of course I was reading Anna Karenina already!
Jessi and the Bad Baby-sitter by Ann M. Martin
Read in January.
When Dawn leaves town, the Babysitters Club is swamped with extra work. Jessi tries to help by inviting her friend Wendy to join the club, but Wendy is a total flake. #68.
Kristy's Secret Admirer by Ann M. Martin
Read in January.
In which the founder of the Babysitters Club starts getting love letters... but then things get creepy, as they often do... #38 in series.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation.
Read in Dec. and Jan.
Have been on a Tolstoy kick since the cold weather started; needed a book to be cozy with for endless hours so read War and Peace, and loved it, so this was next of course. Really loved the truth of the characterizations and descriptions (I keep stumbling upon people I seem to have met in Tolstoy's books) and really relishing the translation work of these particular translators, an intriguing and intelligent married couple. Really didn't know what I was getting into when I picked up this book; knew it would be detailed and told by a voice I liked listening to, but suspected that such a long book written on, what, a woman's affair? would certainly be boring. Okay, so [this is not really a spoiler because everyone knows it] Anna cheats, she dooms herself in the face of society, what is there to write? But the story is drawn out and told from various perspectives, all in a readable way that doesn't seem to be trying to fill pages, and then there is the whole second story of Levin and Kitty going on simultaneously, so there ends up being no lack of plot and questions to draw the reader back in after putting the book down for dinner. Currently I couldn't critique Anna Karenina if I tried.
Not sure where to go from here, in terms of what to read. I started Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in Russian in December but had to return it to a library, so I might get that out and read it again, but for the flow of a novel (cozy reading!) I might do some more research about stuff Tolstoy's written, or try Dostoyevsky in Richard and Larissa's translation, or maybe I'll resort to Dickens or Hugo because I just know there's some masterful fiction out in their parts of the library stacks...
Psychiatric Tales by Daryl Cunningham
Read in January.
This has "Graphic Novel" written on the lower left-hand corner for classification purposes, but it's not so much a novel as a series of sketches, if you will, of a variety of the mental illnesses encountered by the author/illustrator in his work as a psychiatric nurse in Britain. This book's strengths lie not so much in its artistic achievement but in its ability to pull the reader through several difficult subjects effortlessly. Somebody reading Psychiatric Tales might find it surprisingly easy to sympathize with mentally ill patients who suffer from dementia or who cut themselves, or with psychiatric nurses who somehow keep doing their jobs despite having to clean up patients' feces or deal with the effects of a calm-seeming patient's sudden suicide. This book is short, educational, and can be effective in lowering the stigma of mental illness: it's sometimes dark, and the illustrations can be bland, but other than that there's little reason not to read it.
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