2015 reading: here are some numbers.

December 30, 2015

this is why i like the end of the year. >:3

in 2015, i read 68 books*, and here are my top 7 from those 68 (in no particular order) (or, rather, in the order i posted them on instagram, which was in no particular order).

helen macdonald, h is for hawk (jonathan cape, 2014)
alex mar, witches of america (FSG, 2015)
patricia park, re jane (viking, 2015)
rebecca solnit, the faraway nearby (penguin, 2014, paperback)
jonathan franzen, purity (FSG, 2015)
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
robert s. boynton, the invitation-only zone (FSG, forthcoming 2016)

(you can find quotes and reasons why i chose these 7 on my instagram.)

* as of this posting time. i still have two days to read more!

in 2015, i went to 38 book events and readings, and here are 10 i particularly enjoyed.

marie mutsuki mockett and emily st. john mandel with ken chen at AAWW
michael cunningham at columbia
meghan daum with glenn kurtz at mcnally jackson
kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y
aleksandar hemon with sean macdonald at mcnally jackson
alexandra kleeman and patricia park with anelise chen at AAWW
lauren groff at bookcourt
jonathan franzen with wyatt mason at st. joseph's college
patti smith with david remnick at the new yorker festival
alex mar with leslie jamison at housingworks bookstore

(both franzen events had no-photo policies.)

in 2015, i took 34 photos of books with pie. mind you, this is not the number of times i ate pie. this is simply the number of times i went to eat pie and decided to photograph it with the book i was reading at the time. and by pie, i mean pie from four and twenty blackbirds because their pie is delicious and not too sweet and totally worth going to gowanus for (so, if you're in nyc, go get some!).

here are 5 photos of books with pie because it would be unnecessarily mean of me to torture you with all 34 slices of amazing pie, wouldn't it?

in 2015, i took 38 photos of books with stitch.

i suppose, to provide some context: i love stitch. lilo and stitch is one of my favorite movies (we're talking top 3 here). i've had this stitch for 13 years. i still shamelessly take him with me everywhere (he's in california with me right now). obviously, he popped up every now and then with a book.

here are 5 photos of books with stitch. i'm totally choosing how many photos to post arbitrarily (in multiples of 5, though, so maybe not so arbitrarily?).

in 2015, my book club started, and we read 10 books. we've now eased into a routine of meeting at my friend's apartment and having a potluck, but we were absent this routine the first two times we met, hence the three out-of-place photos. i know; it's making me a little twitchy, too; but we'll have 12 consistent flat-lays from 2016!

marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
alice munro, the beggar maid (vintage, 1991) (first published 1977)
kazuo ishiguro, an artist of the floating world (vintage,1989) (first published 1986)
margaret atwood, the stone mattress (nan a. talese, 2014)
jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides (picador, 2009) (first published 1993)
ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015)
virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992) (first published 1925)
michael cunningham, the hours (FSG, 1998)
nikolai gogol, the complete tales (vintage, 1999)
nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage, 1955)

(we combined two months, so i didn't have 10 photos, so i included the nachos i ate when we met to discuss munro's the beggar maid.)

in 2015, i became much more brutal with dropping books because life is too short for books that simply don't hold your interest. i intentionally dropped 13 books.

claire messud, the woman upstairs (knopf, 2013): so. boring. nothing. happens.
cheryl strayed, tiny beautiful things (vintage, 2012): i started reading this in earnest, but then i skimmed it with a friend, and then i never went back to it. strayed’s columns are generally hit or miss for me.
atul gawande, being mortal (metropolitan books, 2014): this wasn’t what i was expecting it to be ... though i’m also not entirely sure what i was expecting it to be. i think i was expecting more profundity, and i wasn’t taken by the writing.
renee ahdieh, the wrath and the dawn (putnam, 2015): omg, the sheer amount of adverbs in this made me want to throttle the book. i always read with a pencil to mark passages i like or to jot down thoughts, but i read this with a pencil to cross out all the adverbs and circle all the different variations of “said” -- i want to ban her from using a thesaurus ever again. and limit how many adverbs she's allowed to use.
rebecca mead, my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014): i really liked what i read of this, but i finished middlemarch and didn’t like that that much, so i never did finish the mead.
rabih alameddine, an unnecessary woman (grove, 2014): i just stopped reading this -- like, i put it down for the day and kind of forgot i’d ever started reading it, which was weird because i started reading it on oyster books and liked it enough that i bought the paperback … and then i never went back to it and probably never will.
ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015): i know; i’m horrible for dropping this; but i did. i never finished reading it for book club, and i didn’t finish it after book club and have no inclination to pick it up again.
jesse ball, a cure for suicide (pantheon, 2015): this tried too hard to be … whatever the hell it is.
virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992): ugh. i'm sorry, michael cunningham, but UGH.
emile zola, thêrèse raquin (penguin, 2010): given the plot, this is going to sound bizarre, but i was bored to death with this. it was so predictable.
philip weinstein, jonathan franzen (bloomsbury, 2015): given my unabashed, vocal love for franzen, you’d think i’d be all over this, but, as it turns out -- and i say this in the most non-creepy way possible -- i know way too much about franzen’s bio already. also, my brain kept going off in all sorts of directions because it’s already full with my own critical analyses of franzen, and weinstein’s writing is very flat. one day, i'll write about franzen.
shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle (penguin, 2006): so. boring. nothing. happens.
nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage classics, 2011): (no comment.)

in 2015, i took a lot of photos of books with food, and i am not going to count them all. here are 5 i randomly chose so that i'd have 7 "in 2015"s instead of 6.

and that's all, folks! stay tuned for my year-end recap coming ... at some point in the next two weeks. >:3 happy new year!

38 in 2015!

December 16, 2015

i went to 38 book events this year and did a lot of hearing authors twice. i heard kazuo ishiguro twice, jenny zhang twice, jonathan galassi twice, patricia park twice, marie mutsuki mockett twice, meghan daum twice, jonathan franzen twice (and i’m still kind of kicking myself about that because i should’ve just gone to the b&n event, too), and the anomaly to that is that i heard lauren groff three times because she was on two of the panels i attended at the brooklyn book festival* before i went to hear her at bookcourt.

(* i counted the brooklyn book festival as one event for my tally of events attended. i did count the two talks [toni morrison and patti smith] i attended at the new yorker festival as two events, though.)

mcnally jackson and bookcourt are tied with 7 events attended at each, followed by greenlight and housing works with 4, then the 92Y with 3 and AAWW with 2. 11 events were attended at other locations.

not too shabby, i say. in 2016, i shall endeavor to attend more! :3

april + may + june reads!

July 1, 2015

APRIL!

twenty-two. meghan daum (ed.), selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed (picador, 2015).

any person who marries but rejects procreation is seen as unnatural. but a woman who confesses never to have felt the desire for a baby is considered a freak. women have always been raised to believe they would not be complete and could not be thought to have succeeded in life without the experience of motherhood. (did woolf believe that her husband’s life must also be judged a failure for reasons of childlessness? i doubt it.) that there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. any normal woman, it is understood, wants — and should want — both. (sigrid nunez, “the most important thing,” 109-10)

when this collection was first announced, i immediately started making grabby hands for it, purely for selfish (heh) reasons, as i fall within the ranks of those who do not want and have never wanted or been fond of children. i was delighted when it was published, and, while i loved it, i admit to wanting more. i wanted more from people of color. i wanted more from younger people, people in their twenties and thirties. i wanted more from people who didn’t want children because they don’t like babies/children. i wanted more variety, which isn’t to say that the sixteen essays don’t have much variety — i just found myself wanting more. still, highly recommended.

twenty-three. michel faber, the book of strange new things (hogarth, 2014).

“you are …” said lover five, and paused to find the right word. “… man. only man. God is more big than you. you carry the word of God for a while, then the word become too heavy, heavy to carry, and you must rest.” she laid her hand on his thigh. “i understand.” (474)*

one of the things i found most impressive about the book of strange new things was that we were with peter the whole time, and yet his perspective didn’t get dull or boring. it added to the weirdness of the situation, of being on another planet, unable to communicate with earth except through this shoot, and it added a visceral sense of immediacy because, as he experienced everything for the first time, so did we. i liked how faber wrote about faith, even when peter was being so frustratingly narrow and pastor-first, husband-second — i found it frustrating in the ways that people [of faith] can be frustrating. i think that’s what struck me most about the book, how realistic it felt. like, even though it was mostly set on an alien planet with this unknowable corporation, the heart of the book was human and knowable and relatable. also, this is one helluva gorgeous book.

(edited: god, i was flipping through the book to find a quote, and pages 442-5 still reduce me to a sobbing mess. i don’t know why. there’s something about those pages that are a punch to the gut, this character’s desire to live, her faith that is so different from peter’s evangelistic faith in the rawness, the desperation, of it. in the face of that, peter’s faith comes across as privilege and indulgence.)

* a note: the oasans (the native population), can’t pronounce “s” and “t,” so, in the book, they’re written in special characters that i can’t mimic on my keyboard, so i’ve simply filled in the “s”es and “t”s.)

twenty-four. catie disabato, the ghost network (melville house, 2015).

“what does it matter if you’re not going?” (molly, 279)

i read this in less than twenty-four hours, starting in the late evening and finishing in the morning, pausing only to sleep. the ghost network is a fun, zippy ride that takes you around chicago, and there’s a mystery element to it (a pop star has gone missing!), with a weird sect, underground stations, and mysterious headquarters! there’s also plenty of sass and humor, and it’s just a lot of fun, a great way to pass a summer afternoon with some iced coffee and something sweet!

twenty-five. rebecca solnit, the faraway nearby (penguin, 2013).

something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. the present rearranges the past. we never tell the whole story because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole milky way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are. (“apricots,” 246)

i. loved. this. i loved how solnit talks about stories, how the book is bookended by her mother’s alzheimer’s, and i was surprised by how personally it touched me. my grandmother passed away in 2012 from alzheimer’s, and the faraway nearby took me back to those months of her deterioration, to the ways my family rallied to care for her, and, eventually, to her death. it also made me think of backpacking through japan by myself the summer after my grandmother passed away — and maybe it’s odd to be talking about what the book made me think of, but i say good books take you places, which include retrospective explorations of your own memories. very thoughtful. loved it. can’t recommend it enough.

twenty-six. betty halbreich, i'll drink to that (penguin press, 2014).

if one buys a piece because of a label or a particular store and it is not becoming, that item is worth nothing. it can be the most wonderful dress in the world (and marked down to the best price!), but if it doesn’t fit, it might as well become a mop-up cloth. terribly costly mistakes like this are made all the time — and they come with a lot of guilt. (i know, because i have a dozen pairs of shoes in my closet that are so beautiful. only my feet don’t think so. i would like to wear them on my hands. then i could absolve myself of the guilt i feel at all the money i spent on the shoes themselves and on the shoemaker who tried to stretch them.) (136)

this was frothy fun. i don’t know quite how else to describe it. i find glimpses into the lives of the privileged and wealthy to be fascinating, and i liked halbreich and her frankness.

twenty-seven. kazuo ishiguro, an artist of the floating world (penguin, 2013) (originally, 1986).

“it’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its very validity.” (mori-san, 161)

i am forever in awe of ishiguro’s ability to inhabit the first person. one of the things i loved about an artist of the floating world is how the dialogue read almost like it was in-translation — ishiguro captures the roundabout nature of the japanese language, the deference, even the differences between honorific speech and casual speech. he also captures the voice of an old japanese man, reminiscing back on his youth and his experiences during the war, as well as the generational and cultural/social changes in postwar japan. i make it sound like an artist of the floating world is a historical study, but that’s not it — i love ishiguro’s ability to weave questions about culture, art, memory into his narratives, and, with this particular book, i was very intrigued by how he wrote japan, not necessarily about japan, per se, but how the narrator’s voice is japanese. does that make sense? i feel like i’m not saying this clearly … an artist is great, though, even if i’m muddled up what i find so lovely about it, and i recommend it.

MAY

twenty-eight. george eliot, middlemarch (penguin classics, 2011).

in marriage, the certainty, ‘she will never love me much’, is easier to bear than the fear, ‘i shall love her no more.’ (“two temptations,” 652)

omg, i’m so sick of talking about middlemarch. i finished it. i enjoyed it enough to finish it. i’m glad i never to have to experience it again. the end.

twenty-nine. margaret atwood, the stone mattress (nan a. talese, 2014).

young naveena can scarcely believe her luck. her mouth’s half open, she’s biting the tips of her fingers, she’s holding her breath. she’s embedding us in amber, thinks tin. like ancient insects. preserving us forever. in amber beads, in amber words. right before our eyes. (“dark lady,” 107)

i loved this collection except for the last story, which i’m realizing i didn’t actually finish … oops. i’m still counting this, though. my favorite stories were the first three interrelated stories (“alphinland,” “revenant,” and “dark lady”) because i have a particular soft spot for interrelated stories (the book i’m writing is a collection of interrelated short stories) (how many times can i say “interrelated stories” in one sentence?), and these in particular were fun in how they offered different perspectives, different takeaways. there are nine stories in this collection, but they’re varied, and atwood is one smart, witty woman. love her.

(by the way, i hate deckle edges.)

thirty. amy rowland, the transcriptionist (algonquin, 2014) (via oyster books).

“whatever do you think you learn about people from a newspaper?”
“i suppose you learn things about humanity, but very little about individuals.” (chapter 12)

the funny thing about the transcriptionist is that i kept getting confused because i kept thinking it was set in the mid-twentieth century. i don’t know quite what it was, but the confusion was particularly strong in the beginning. maybe the descriptions or the fact that the narrator lived in dorm-like housing for women only with a curfew? either way, i never really fell in love with the transcriptionist, but i enjoyed reading it now and then when i was on the train. it was my subway read for a few months.

JUNE

thirty-one. paul fischer, a kim jong-il production (flatiron books, 2015).

kim jong-il had invented the mass games in 1972, for his father’s sixtieth birthday, and it was one of the ways he hoped to demonstrate his virtues as an heir. the games were at the center of what came to be known as “succession art,” write historians heonik kwon and byung-ho chung, “considering that the central objective of the era’s artistic production was to sublimate kim il-sung’s authority in preparation or transforming his personal charisma into a historical, hereditary charisma” that could be passed on to kim jong-il. (128-9)

this was fun and interesting, and i liked it particularly because it focuses on a specific series of events (the kidnapping of a south korean star actress and star director by north korea because of kim jong-il’s obsession with film and desire to make a name for north korean cinema) and because it gives us a different look into north korea than other books about the country tend to give us. there’s less politicizing and more story-telling here, but i must admit that i found fischer’s writing to be a tad dramatic. he kept ending his chapters/sections with these cliffhanger-esque, reflective sentences, and, after a while, i found it a bit overdone. it’s still a lot of fun and interesting — recommended!

thirty-two. jonathan galassi, muse (knopf, 2015).

so people [at p&s] — those who lasted — relaxed and homed in on their work, endlessly complaining about the peremptory, ungrateful, self-involved authors whose writing they idolized. they were utterly mad, of course, but they did their level best to ignore one another’s foibles since they were the same as their own. and to many of them the cramped, filthy offices on union square were a mind-bending, topsy-turvy little heaven on earth. (18)

muse is one of those strange reads where i liked it but i’m also not sure how i felt about it. i’m interested to read galassi’s next fictional offering, though, so that’s a positive sign. i think my quasi-ambivalence comes from being familiar with a lot of the relationships/people in the novel, so some of the history and background read as a bit long for me because it was mentally redundant, though it wasn't narratively. which means that you don't have to know anything about publishing to read and enjoy the book -- i actually think that might be better? at the same time, though, i also admit to this being a case of the publishing geek side of my brain going into overdrive and trying to make connections subconsciously, which probably affected my reading of the book. regardless, i'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in a bit of publishing history! it was also a huge pleasure to hear galassi read and talk about the book.

thirty-three. yangsze choo, the ghost bride (harpercollins, 2013) (via oyster books).

(i made no highlights, therefore no quote)

this was interesting because i zipped through this in one night and enjoyed it … and then a friend of mine started reading it, and she reads slowly, so i would revisit it with her as she read … and we both ended up disliking it. the ghost bride had a whole lot of potential; it was set in a rich, layered, interesting world; and the main character was set up for an awesome adventure. instead, there was quite a bit of historical/cultural explanation, predictable turns, and damsel-in-distress moments — instead of the main character actively saving herself, she kept getting into binds and calling out for the hero to rescue her, which got old after the second time.

thirty-four. lily king, euphoria (atlantic monthly press, 2014) (via oyster books).

‘do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she [nell] asked.
[…]
favorite part? there was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. i shook my head. ‘you first.’
she looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. she narrowed her grey eyes. ‘it’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. suddenly it feels within your grasp. it’s a delusion — you’ve only been there eight weeks — and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. but at that moment the place feels entirely yours. it’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’ (chapter 5)

a few friends recommended this to me, and i am so glad i finally read it. i’ve never thought much about anthropology, not in the sense that i think little of the discipline but rather that i’ve never given it much thought, just kind of assumed people went off to hidden corners of the world and tried to observe cultures and societies from as objective a view as they could get. never once did i think of what that entailed, and euphoria did a wonderful job of exploring what anthropologists do, without resorting to exposition. king tells the story of three anthropologists whose lives become tangled up as they study different tribes with different approaches, and there’s a love triangle, too, but it doesn’t feel trite or cheesy. i actually quite enjoyed it because it fit seamlessly into the whole big picture of the novel. thanks for recommending this to me! and i pass the recommendation along!

(also, i loved the twist with the narrative voice in the first chapter. that was great.)

thirty-five. bill clegg, ninety days (little, brown, 2012) (via ibooks).

how many times had i been convinced there was a dark conspiracy of intricately placed people observing, entrapping, stalking, and circling? so many. now, with this kind, sober woman sitting next to me in the thicket of a challenging dinner party, i experience the flip side of this paranoia — the opposite of all that wild-minded dread, the feeling instead that there are forces conspiring on my behalf, placing people in my way at precisely the right moments to guide me on whatever path i should be on. (“shoulder to shoulder”)

i woke up a week or so ago, needing to reread ninety days. there’s so much rawness and vulnerability in this slim book (well, i assume it’s slim because it’s a fast read — i read it in a few hours — but i read it on ibooks, so i haven’t actually held the physical book in my hand) (D:), and i like clegg’s voice. a lot. he’s not a very fancy writer who gets caught up in beautiful sentences, but i like that. (i describe it as “clean.”) ninety days is about his struggle to get and stay clean, to get ninety days sober (the first milestone), and he talks frankly about his relapses, his temptations to relapse, the ugliness of addiction, about how it’s people who save you, how it’s community that keeps you going in the day-to-day, that it’s about being there for each other, with each other. that’s something we all need to be reminded of, i think — and there’s something very humbling about ninety days, too. it’s easy for us to think that we’re better than addicts because we aren’t addicted to a substance, but that’s not true — we’re all human; we’re all flawed; and we all fuck up. we all alienate and isolate and hurt the people who love us, and we all destroy relationships. we all need people and second and third and tenth and hundredth chances. who are we to judge?

thirty-six. megan whalen turner, the queen of attolia (greenwillow books, 2000).

“nahuseresh, if there is one thing a woman understands, it is the nature of gifts. they are bribes when threats will not avail.” (attolia, 298)

read this for the second time this year because i loved gen and attolia and wanted to read something light and fun. there’s a lot of heavy-handed plotting and politicizing in queen of attolia, but i love it, anyway. the romance kind of comes out of nowhere, too, but i love it, anyway. i love the characters, which means that i can overlook a lot of the other weaknesses because i’m that emotionally taken.

thirty-seven. bill clegg, did you ever have a family (scout press, forthcoming, 2015).

it is raining now. somewhere on upper main street a metal mailbox slams shut. she thinks she hears footsteps again, this time rushing away, but soon there is only the sound of raindrops tapping the fallen leaves, the parked cars, the gutters. she closes her eyes and listens. no one calls her name, there are no more footsteps behind her, but still she turns around before unlocking the door and stepping inside. she takes a long, late-day look at the town where she has lived her whole life, where there are no friends, no family, but where her feet are famous to the sidewalks. (46)

clegg’s debut novel has been getting a lot of praise, so i was a little nervous going into it because i didn’t want it to disappoint. the novel follows the aftermath of an accident at a wedding, and the chapters each focus on a different character (kind of like in claire messud’s the emperor’s children, but better). i loved how the book unfolds, introducing and delving into the different people who are somehow touched by this tragedy, whether directly or indirectly. it's done beautifully and poignantly in lovely, sparse language, and, while the different voices aren’t so markedly, dramatically different, they are varied in voice, tone, and color, which is no small feat. i can see where all the high praise is coming from and highly recommend this — it’ll be published on 2015 september 8, and i can’t wait for the book tour!

we are now in the second half of 2015! i'm happy to say that i am right where i need to be in my goal to read 75 books in 2015!

and, YEY, i caught up to my monthly reading recaps! sorry for the delays -- it's been a rough three months, but things are better now! thanks for reading!

middlemarch, part two.

May 5, 2015

in chapter 1 of my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014), rebecca mead notes that "one of the odd things about 'miss brooke' is how little of the heroine's personal history is revealed." (mead, 38) i didn't even realize this when i was reading, but i wonder if part of that is also just me. i realized a while ago that i'm not that big on descriptions or factual histories of characters, in that i don't necessarily require them; i tend to form images in my head off more abstract descriptions than detailed, physical renderings; and i'm not very good at taking a written spatial description and creating a corresponding visual image in my head. the realness or authenticity of a character [in a book] lies more in personality and character [of said character], the ways that s/he is fleshed out as a thinking, feeling human being, and, from the beginning of book one of middlemarch, dorothea has been just that. i may not know her history, and i may not be able to offer you a description of how i see her in my head as a reader, but i don't question who she is or, even, and maybe more importantly, that she is.

mead goes on to write:

the only growth that matters is that which occurs within the novel's pages -- the growth that turns her from a prematurely opinionated, occasionally priggish, alarmingly passionate, and inchoately ambitious young woman into something else. (mead, 40)

i love this. i love the principle of this, and i love the execution of it in middlemarch. we know enough about dorothea going into her marriage that we can see the trajectory of her arc in the novel, not in that we know what "something else" she will become but that she will become "something else." it's a narrative way of practicing good faith, i suppose, because, as readers, in general, we like to think of arcs and "journeys," though, whenever i think of arcs and journeys now, i think of meghan daum and how she advocates for it being a triumph, too, to emerge from the other end of a journey the same person. instead, as a culture, we tend to sentimentalize these things, whatever these "things" may be, near-death experiences, a loss of a loved one, an accident, etcetera, all of which are indubitably profound experiences, but we go looking for change, in some alteration of beliefs or behavior, like the experience is wasted if one does not come out from it a "better" person.

while i see daum's point, i also recognize in myself the desire to see dorothea grow, more in the ways that we anticipate teenagers leaving behind their adolescence and becoming young adults. the truth, though, is that much of that also comes hand-in-hand with disillusionment, a sometimes crushing realization that one's ideas and ideals are not held up in reality, and i fear for that with dorothea, the impending disappointments that are already starting to show, the unhappiness that seems so inevitable, at least where i am now moving into book four.

loved this, the end of chapter 1 of my life:

as miss brooke, dorothea remains for me the embodiment of that unnameable, agonizing ache of adolescence, in which burgeoning hopes and ambitions and terrors and longings are all roiled together. when i spent time in her company, i remember what it was like to be eighteen, and at the beginning of things. i remember going for my entrance interview at oxford and meeting with the senior english literature tutor at what was to become my college -- a forbidding-seeming scotsman who, i learned much later, was possessed of a magnificently dry sense of humor and was particularly partial to bright, ambitious, state-school students from the provinces. his study was furnished with low-slung easy chairs upholstered in mustard-colored corduroy; one could either perch on a chair's edge or sink into its depths. during my interview i shifted uncomfortably between one position and the other while talking passionately about middlemarch. afterward i walked across the cobblestones of a narrow lane and stepped onto the wide, lovely sweep of the high street in a state of exhilaration and anxiety. i felt as if my life were an unread book -- the thickest and most daunting of novels -- that i was holding in my hands. i didn't know what the story would be, or where it would lead, and i was almost too overawed to crack its spine and begin. (mead, 43-44)

as far as religion goes: when eliot was twenty-three, she stopped going to church and "left" faith, something that resulted in tension between her and her father until they reached a compromise where eliot would still accompany him to church every sunday, though she could maintain her own opinions about what she heard. i didn't know this, and it surprised me when i learned of it because i've been finding eliot's treatment of religious people to be fair and free of judgment -- it's not that she doesn't criticize intense religiosity (as demonstrated in dorothea) or the hypocrisies that often accompany it, but she does so fairly, allows it the berth of human complexity.

in chapter 2 of my life, mead writes:

one of the things that makes middlemarch a book for grown-ups -- a book for adults, even -- is eliot's insistence upon taking moral questions seriously, and considering them in their complexity. the loss of faith that she underwent in coventry was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual process of separating morality from religion -- of determining how to be a good person in the absence of the christian God. (mead, 72)

and

eliot's novel is intensely moral -- but it is not a moral codebook, and no one would want to read it if it were. rather, through her delineation of human passions -- romantic and intellectual -- eliot reveals her morality. middlemarch demands that we enter into the perspective of other struggling, erring humans -- and recognize that we, too, will sometimes be struggling and may sometimes be erring, even when we are at our most arrogant and confident. (mead, 73)

i think that second quote sums up why middlemarch is so compelling. it's why i'm enjoying the novel as much as i am -- because the people who populate the pages aren't flat, two-dimensional ciphers. they're living people with their mistaken ideals and preconceptions, their notions of the marriages they should have or the partners they should seek or the lives they should lead, and, even though these social relationships seem very utilitarian (you don't want to marry or be too close with people who won't benefit you socially), there's still something about these mentalities that's compelling. i'd say a lot of it is that none of it is somehow obsolete; we can relate to these characters, if not directly then at least relationally; and these "struggling, erring humans" of the nineteenth century still populate our present world. we like to think we're so advanced because of technology, but the truth is that we're still human, still prone to the same sorts of pride and arrogance and ambition and prejudice.

book three, "waiting for death," of middlemarch went faster than books one and two. now that i'm fully familiar with these characters, i feel more invested in their lives and more curious about the outcome of these life decisions they're making, and i'm loving how astute and witty eliot is. she is, in many ways, making judgments of societal expectations and behavior, but she does it with such generosity of spirit and with such ease and absence of preaching or moralizing, with a naturalness that befits the naturalness of her world. i'm loving it so far and looking forward to diving into book four!

and we shall close this post with the last paragraph from chapter 3 of my life:

a book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. now when i read the novel in the light of eliot's life, and in the light of my own, i see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel -- not as part of the book's obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one's stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one's heart wider. (mead, 110)

hello friday! (150403)

April 3, 2015

a week-in-review then, because i'd still like to post something on fridays and books are the most comfortable (and obvious) choice!

i finished reading selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed (picador, 2015) today. favorite essays were those by sigrid nunez, anna holmes, danielle henderson, jeanne safer, and elliott holt.
- i would've loved to see an essay or two by people in their late-twenties/early-thirties because i think (or, at least, i like to think) that you can be in your late-twenties and early-thirties and have decided not to have kids -- some of us have known this about ourselves since we were young.
- someone (i'm pretty sure it was laura kipnis) on the panel of contributors at the event on tuesday said there seemed to be a preponderance of writers defending that they liked kids, and, having finished the collection, i agree that there is. i don't doubt that they genuinely love children; sometimes, though, it did feel very defensive; and i admit it was refreshing to come across the writer who baldly said s/he didn't like kids. (this was mostly personal, though; it's hard in general to come across someone who doesn't like children.)
this week, i started doing a buddy read of michel faber's the book of strange new things (hogarth, 2014) with a friend on instagram. this is one of the reasons i can't dismiss social media; i've had the pleasure of meeting some incredible people via the internet; and i love the fact that this friend (who lives in japan) and i can actively read a book together.
speaking of the book of strange new things, faber writes with such ease, and his prose is natural and lovely. his descriptions are vivid and alive, too -- i dreamt i was on oasis because i'd been reading right before going to sleep, and it felt so real, the humidity, the atmosphere, the colors, that i woke up feeling kind of disoriented, wondering, wait, that wasn't real?
books i've been reading off-and-on the last few weeks (yes, weeks):
- cheryl strayed's tiny beautiful things (vintage, 2012): when i was in LA, the illustrator friend and i went flipped through all the columns, and i haven't felt very inspired to go back and give them all a thorough reading.
- rebecca solnit's men who explain things to me (haymarket books, 2014): i'm thrilled this was reissued in hardback with new essays!
- joan didion's white album (FSG, 2009): i love lingering over my didion, taking little morsels and letting them melt into me. (i'm not quite sure how to credit these publication years ... right now, i'm going with when the edition i own was issued.)
- kazuo ishiguro's an artist of the floating world (penguin, 2013): there's such a lovely tension and unease simmering through this book that i'm afraid to find out what the narrator did during the war. this is my book club's next selection, though, so i'll have to grit my teeth and find out!
- catie disabato's the ghost network (melville house, 2015, forthcoming): this is a cheat; i found this ARC at housing works on tuesday and was so very excited; so i had to share.

march reading recap will be up by the end of the weekend! have a great weekend, all!