Family Life

Thu - May 1, 2008

Top 106 unread books

Here's a meme that's been around for a while (invented by Nicholas Whyte) but I just found it. Take the list of the top 106 unread books on LibraryThing -- that is to say, of the books that LibraryThingers own, the ones that have been tagged as Unread by the most people. Then:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to be read list.

Here's the list as of today, formatted to show how I went with it:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
~~One hundred years of solitude~~
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
War and Peace
Jane Eyre -- I loved the Classics Illustrated Comic, but I don't think that counts
A Tale of Two Cities -- ditto
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
The Iliad
Emma
Vanity Fair
Love in the time of cholera
The Blind Assassin
The Canterbury tales
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian (haven't even heard of this)
Great Expectations
The Kite Runner
The Time Traveller’s Wife
Life of Pi
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Atlas shrugged
~~Foucault’s Pendulum~~
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Frankenstein -- I read Margrete Lamond's adaptation
Mrs Dalloway
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Middlemarch
Sense and sensibility
The Count of Monte Cristo -- this was on the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but I still don't want to read it.
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Sound and the Fury
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
A portrait of the artist as a young man
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
The Satanic Verses
Gulliver’s Travels
Mansfield Park
The Three Musketeers
The Corrections
The Inferno
Oliver Twist
The Fountainhead
To the Lighthouse
A clockwork orange
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Persuasion
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
The Scarlet Letter
Robinson Crusoe
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Dubliners
Cryptonomicon
Angela’s Ashes
Beloved
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterly's Lover (though I read the publication of a 'first version', notable for not having the rude words)
A confederacy of dunces
Les misérables
Watership Down
The Prince
The Amber Spyglass
Beowulf: a new verse translation
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Treasure Island
Sons and Lovers
David Copperfield
The road
Possession : a romance
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling
The Book Thief
Gravity’s Rainbow
The War of the Worlds
Tender is the Night
Candide
Never Let Me Go
The Plague
Jude the Obscure
Cold Mountain

I've actually read 44 of them, and here are quite a few I'm perfectly happy never to read.. See how you go.

Posted at 10:05 PM |

Wed - April 30, 2008

Books I read in April

David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper 2007) (finished)
Mary Haire, Place Is People: Annandale 1907/2007 ([Leichhardt Municipal Council?] 2008)
Helen Garner, The Spare Room (Text Publishing 2008)
David Campbell, Selected Poems 1942–1968 (Angus & Robertson 1968)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World (© 2006, Bloomosbury 2007)
David Campbell, The Man in the Honeysuckle (Angus & Robertson 1979)
Ivor Indyk (ed), Heat 16: Inner Nebulae (Giramondo 2008)
David Campbell, The Branch of Dodona and other poems: 1969-1970 (Angus & Robertson 1970)
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Granta 2008)

As I mentioned last month, I started reading Schulz and Peanuts to check its suitability for a young fan. I'm happy to report that in general it passes with flying colours. A young woman has a termination, and the break-up of 'Sparky's' first marriage is gruelling, but these are both handled with a good bit more tact than you'd find in many YA novels.

Every week, for just months short of 50 years, Charles M Schulz sat at his drawing board to produce six daily strips and a longer Sunday piece. He inked every line himself, and penned in every letter until his final stroke meant that the speech balloons in the very last frames were filled by computer-generated lettering. Peanuts was the most important thing in his life; he hated being away from home, and died the day his last cartoon was published. So this isn't a tale of heroic physical exploits or grand public gestures. But David Michaelis seems to have interviewed every living soul who had a meaningful connection with his subject, from the psychology student who gave him an impromptu -- and effective -- counselling session on his agoraphobia at a tennis tournament and never had another conversation with him, to Joyce nee Halvorsen, the main model for Lucy, his first wife and the mother of his many children (one of the best bits of the book could have been titled The First Wife's Story). The result is a fascinating, many-faceted portrait of an artist and of a man. Peanuts strips are scattered through the pages, not as decoration but as integral elements of the narrative. Cartooning was not only Schulz's life work, the fulfilment of a central ambition; it was also, dare I say, a spiritual discipline by which he found perspectives on the difficulties and dilemmas of his life (and the lives around him) that allowed the release of laughter. While Michaelis is very bold (and repetitive) in some of his psychologising, I found his thesis persuasive: that what we common or garden readers received as Schulz's comic reflections in life in the abstract were often if not always born out of particular moments of pain or joy. Schulz seems to have been an excellent exemplar for Neil Gaiman's advice on how to deal with trouble: Make good art.

Michaelis places Schulz interestingly in the history of comics -- though he barely mentions comic books, as opposed to strips, and surely the moral panic in the 1950s epitomised by Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (which led to a nun confiscating a Phantom comic from me in Grade Three, and to our teachers recommending that we read the boring Catholic comic Topix) had something to do with the runaway success of Schulz's wholesome creation. It's surely not entirely coincidence that for a time in the 1940s, before he got his big break, Schulz did lettering for Topix

[I passed the book on to my young friend, whose mother reports that after dipping into it he said, 'It's not all that interesting to me, even if it is to Jonathan. But he reads everything.' Then, softening the blow, 'Some of it is pretty good.']

Place is People is a strange little book, neither an attractive collection of photographs to introduce the suburb to visitors nor a quick historical overview. It's got elements of both those, but is something more personal, less orderly than either; if it was even more personal, it might have been an extended prose poem, but it isn't quite that. Mary Haire leads walking tours, and the book has something of the serendipitous feel of such tours: here's a little girl walking to school; let me tell you about a boy that age who went to the same school a hundred years ago. I know more about my suburb's history having read it; some errors have been corrected, and some tantalising trails laid in my mind: Cardinal Freeman was born here, for instance, and the young woman at the florist's is a single mother. How can I put those two snippets in the same sentence, you ask? I plead that the book sets a precedent with its gloriously unconcerned pot-pourri approach to its subject.

Talking at Gleebooks recently, Helen Garner paid tribute to Elmore Leonard's essay, 'Ten Rules of Writing': she has his sentence, 'If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,' on the wall above her desk. In The Spare Room, she has given us a feminine Elmore Leonard story: it's about the emotional tangles between two women, or at least those tangles provide the language for its telling, but it has the clean lines, the sure forward movement, the lack of hooptedoodle, that give such pleasure in Leonard's tough-guy narratives from The Tall T to, say, Pagan Babies. It's a very quick read, and an intense one. There's plenty of complexity, some of which I've found making itself known to me weeks after finishing the book. For instance, 'Helen' the character, who is manifestly a version of Helen the writer, claimed my allegiance and assent to her judgements while I was reading, but has since come to seem much less reliable, much too caught up in her own emotional reactions to be able to give us the full picture (some of which the book gives us in spite of her). It's a magnificent achievement.

I doubt if David Campbell (1915–1979) is still studied in Eng Lit courses at many Australian unis, but I hope he is fondly remembered and occasionally reread by more than just me. He and Martin Johnston share a posthumous moment in John Forbes's elegiac 'Lassù in Cielo'; he cropped up in a footnote in the John Manifold collection I read last month; a recent Poetica featured his correspondence with Douglas Stewart; lines and images from his poems arrive in my mind unbidden from time to time. Most of the poems in this selection are a strange mixture of the bucolic and the erudite (and just in case I've misused those words, I mean rustic and scholarly), and there's a pleasant music to them. When I read the sequence of twelve twelve-line rhyming poems of 'Cocky's Calendar', I found myself wondering how he managed to pick up his pen again after writing something so wonderful. Back in the early 1970s, in an Aust Lit seminar on this sequence, a student from North America totally didn't get them: while the rest of us were being drawn into the poetry's intensely personal relationship with the landscape, he lost patience altogether and said the whole thing read like verse you'd find on a Norman Rockwell calendar. I thought then that he was missing something, and I find I still do. This is the ninth poem, for September:

Under Wattles
Now, here and there, against the cold,
The hillsides smoulder into gold
And the stockman riding by
Lifts to the trees a yellow eye.

It's here the couples from the farms
Play in one another's arms
At yes and no -- you'd think the trees
Sprang from their felicities.

So may our children grow up strong,
Got while the thrush drew out his song,
And love like you and I when we
Lie beneath the wattle tree.

How about that present tense 'lie', eh? But I think the sequence as a whole speaks to me so strongly because of my father. At a family gathering once, another farmer, of a younger generation, had said something about the boredom of spending a whole day driving around a paddock in a tractor (this was before the days of air-conditioned tractor cabins and iPods). When my father said mildly that he didn't get bored, one of my cousins asked him what he did with his mind when he was out there all day. As he drew breath to answer, my mother came to the rescue by changing the subject ('Oh Jenny, you know you've been asking me about tatting, I have a pattern here I can show you'). Probably to his relief, my father didn't get to answer the question. I like to think that David Campbell's contemplative poems, even though his is a sheep property while my father grew sugar cane, provide some version of what my father might have wanted to say back then over tea and scones.

With The Omnivore's Dilemma I was back to farming, in three categories: industrial, of which I read with a mixture of horror and curiosity; pastoral, which is not synonymous with 'organic', but tends to have the virtues claimed for it; and personal, in which the author creates a meal from things he has personally grown, hunted and killed, or foraged. I don't know that anyone could read this tremendously engaging book without changing the way they think about food. It's very heartening that it was a New York Times best seller. If you want a quick look at the central part of the book, which deals with 'intensively managed grazing' or clever grass farming, here's a video from Michael Pollan's recent TED talk:

The book integrates into its narrative any number of lively essays: on the ethics of meat-eating (in which Pollan engages with Peter Singer), the joys of hunting (ditto Ortega y Gasset), attempts at humane design in modern abattoirs (Temple Grandin), the US domestic and international politics of corn (in which he doesn't discuss the so-called Free Trade Agreements that leave the US free to subsidise its grossly inefficient corn agribusinesses while preventing other nations from continuing with similar protections, but he makes their absurd brutality abundantly clear), on just about anything you can think of that's related to his central question, 'What should we have for dinner?' Some of it is very funny. Some is inspiring. Some horrendous. All of it is engrossing.

I hadn't read David Campbell's The Man in the Honeysuckle before. As with Selected Poems, I'm fairly indifferent to the learned bits, mainly translations and imitations from the Russian, but some of the lyrics, especially the Aust Pastoral pieces, are extraordinary. The book was published posthumously, and it's hard not to read a number of the poems as being poignantly suffused with a sense of death as imminent. 'Crab', 'The Broken Mask' and the whole 'With a Blue Dog' section stand out for me in this first encounter. How's this:

Wind in Casuarinas

Camped under the she-oaks
With a dog and swag

The woman a white sapling
A straight flame
Blown all ways
And the children off
On their several roads

Lives rounding like river stones
Or washing out in wheel ruts

A high sky over tree and hill
And the clouds taking fire
I am spread out I burn
Yellow and rose -- blessing and blest
A still flame in the arms of the she-oaks

Life butting into the world
With five wants and a howl
And shambles out with a blue dog.

I want to put 'five wants and a howl' right up there with 'helpless, naked, piping loud'.

I don't imagine Elmore Leonard would care much for this Heat. There's hoptedoodle galore ... not that there's anything wrong with that, of course: it's generally very high quality hoptedoodle. Ironically, the one article that seem to me to be 90 percent hoptedoodle is by a crime writer whose point seems to be that crime fiction has advantages from being bound to an absence of hoptedoodle (but maybe I was just irritated because her essay on the relationship between genre fiction and literary fiction totally ignores the existence of children's literature and science fiction). There's a terrific piece on blogging by Kerryn Goldsworthy, not hopt or a doodle in sight; a lovely pairing of a story by Eva Sallis ('Abattoir') and an essay by Elizabeth Campbell (called 'Why Little Girls Love Horses' on the contents page but 'Envy Worship and Passion' on its own title page); chiming mentions of the catacombs of Paris, of which I'd never heard, first in one of Jennifer Maiden's still-intriguing George Jeffreys–Clare Collins poems and then in an engrossing essay by Sarah Knox about researching historical novels, her own and Hilary Mantel's; and as we expect of Heat a number of memorable pieces on aspects of migration: Elisabeth Holdsworth's memoir 'New Holland', a short story by Hoa Pham, poems by Ali Alizadeh (on his unborn baby) and Peter Skrzynecki (on his late father). There's lots more. I'm a happy subscriber.

<curmudgeonly grumble>I understand that it must be a nightmare to copy edit a magazine like this: so many words, so many different voices, so little time. But there are enough lapses to present a significant obstacle to the reader, at least to this one. At one point, havoc is 'wrecked'; as something wreaks havoc just a few pages later in the same article, it seems likely that the error resulted from an editor's dependence on a spellchecker that didn't recognise the author's 'wreaked' (fair enough, I'd prefer 'wrought' there myself). In the sentence "The memoir becomes a book about illness to many reviewers; a 'survivors' tale; a plumbing of the issue of women's health, and the continuing masculinist paternalism of the public health system" it looks very much as if the apostrophe after survivors was misunderstood by someone who inserted another before it to make it function as a quote mark; and the comma after health almost derails the sense. I don't want to go hunting for similar moments, but the erratic comma and absent apostrophe in "reconstruction, so redolent of the historian's duty, and the re-enactors fancy" just leapt up at me from further down the same page (p 172). This might be just the irritated snitchiness of an underemployed pedant, but in this context it becomes hard to tell if the truly eccentric punctuation in a number of the poems is what the poet intended or the product of editorial inattention.</curmudgeonly grumble>

How could I resist reopening The Branch of Dodona, my only other David Campbell book? This one had pride of place in the bathroom for a week, to allow for contemplative reading in short bursts. Again, it's his farming poems -- in this volume, the 'Works and Days' sequence, with its love–hate relationship to sheep -- that speak most strongly to me. Even his 'My Lai', which I remember him reading at Vietnam Moratorium Readings in another age, works so powerfully because of the farmer-to-peasant solidarity it embodies:

I was milking the cow when a row of tall bamboo
Was mowed by rifle fire
With my wife and child in the one harvest,
And the blue milk spilt and ruined

I'm not sure what K-- had in mind when she gave me Diane Athill's reflections on old age, Somewhere Towards the End, as a present for my 61st birthday. As Ms Athill is almost exactly 30 years older than me and still going strong and luculent, I'll assume she wasn't hinting it's time I hang up my spurs. In terms of my current reading, the book's matter-of-factness, its almost belligerent steadiness of gaze play as a sober counterpoint to the rage and evasion of The Spare Room: both books generate what Athill calls an 'addictive excitement of the mind', and they speak to each other. Ms Athill's brief reference to Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety endorses Sarah Knox's praise of it in her essay in Heat. The book has in spades a (to me) miraculous quality that I think of as Protestant integrity, a quality also displayed, ineffably, in the manner of my friend J's leavetaking. I wouldn't mind having a mind like Diana Athill's when I'm 90. She manages to be remarkably cheerful about things usually discussed, if at all, in gloomy mode. One chapter begins, for example (the italics are mine):

When you begin discussing old age you come up against reluctance to depress either others or yourself, so you tend to focus on the more agreeable aspects of it: coming to terms with death, the continuing presence of young people, the discovery of new pursuits and so on. But I have to say that a considerable part of my own old time is taken up by doing things or (worse) failing to do things for people older, or if not older, less resistant to age, than myself.

Come to think of it, can't you just see that paragraph, followed by the word 'Discuss', as an exam question on The Spare Room?

Posted at 08:47 AM |

Mon - April 28, 2008

'the only god / who comes as a servant when he is called'

Here's something I hesitated to blog about, but it's shaken me, and in some odd way reassured me about the nature of this world and the people in it, so here goes.

In today's mail there was a small, bright pink envelope with a computer printed label addressed to the household. Expecting an invitation, perhaps to yet another 60th birthday, I tore it open and found a creamy piece of note paper with our names in fountain pen ink on one side, and on the other, laser-printed in an elegant italic font, a message that began:

By the time you are reading this I will have gone on my journey.

Suddenly the day turned solemn. The note was from J, an older friend we haven't seen for almost a year. She went on:

I have lived a long and interesting life, my health conditions are now chronic and not likely to improve. It is enough, time to let go.

I have always said I would like to have a dignified and peaceful death at the time and place of my choosing. Be happy for me that I have achieved this. I also wished to have a private cremation.

J had been dealing with constant pain for years. Surgery and glucosamine had each helped for a time, and she had made determined efforts to live life to the full: she'd mastered Desktop Publishing when well into her 70s and used it in her volunteer work for OWN (the Older Women's Network); she'd taken out a reverse mortgage on her flat and used the money, among other things, for an exhilarating trip to Paris, a city she had loved for decades but only visited once, decades before. Now she has made this big decision. I imagine her sitting at her desk night after night composing notes of farewell to her many friends. This wasn't a generic letter:

I have wondered often about Mollie. As I have never heard from you I assume she is still with us. Poor darling – it is the last thing she would have wanted. I think fondly of you all.

I don't take 'I have never heard from you' as a reproach -- this wasn't a relationship built on obligation -- but it does produce a sharp pang of regret that we haven't been in touch. Before outings became too difficult and disturbing for Mollie, we would drive her to meet up with J for a cup of coffee every fortnight or so. Their friendship survived the impact of Alzheimers, and J was consistently kind, affectionate and respectful as Mollie's ability to keep up even the pretence of conversation dwindled. She was a big soul.

Possibly because of my Catholic upbringing, I recoil from the idea of suicide and have been enraged when people close to me have taken that path, enraged either at them, or more defensibly at the circumstances that drove them to it. But this letter, and the action it announces, are in a different realm altogether. J certainly isn't asking my approval. I don't know the detail of her passing yet, and I may never know it. What I do know is that she has made her exit graciously, with kind attention to the ones she's leaving behind, even with flair: the note goes on to invite us to 'a gathering for a Celebration of my Life, and I hope a few laughs ... at one of my favourite haunts (no pun intended)', and ends:

I wish you health good enough to enjoy the pleasures still to come in your life, and peace and contentment.

[My title is from Stevie Smith's poem, 'Come Death (II)', written shortly before she died of a brain tumour.]

Posted at 10:25 PM |

Wed - April 23, 2008

More small pleasure

This is what you see when you do the washing up at my place:

And since that doesn't for a moment capture the shimmer of it, the sheer thrill of its movement as it catches and releases raindrops, here's another inadequate attempt from a different angle: