Three Generations of Reading Women

My daughter M., whose demanding job keeps her working long hours, recently told me that it felt like such a luxury, almost a mini-vacation, to very occasionally take an hour or two to sit on the couch and read. She is currently reading and enjoying Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth.” (Lahiri is one of my favorite current American authors as well.) In addition, my mother often tells me of how much she enjoys reading even more than in the past, now that she lives in a retirement home and has more time than ever before. I have written here (3/30/10) of how it gives me pleasure to select, gather and give my mom piles of books I think she will enjoy. She just finished, and absolutely loved, one of the books I gave her, Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible” (also a favorite of mine). She told me she got so involved in it that she would rush back to her apartment after meals to continue reading it. I know that feeling! And you all know -- since you are reading this blog -- how much I -- the middle generation -- love to read. I am currently re-re-reading (it is one of the novels I go back to over and over again) “Middlemarch,” which I will post about here soon. So I just flashed on this lovely mental picture of the three of us, three generations of women, each curled up on her respective couch or chair, eagerly and with pleasure reading our various novels, and then sharing with each other what we are reading and how we are feeling about those books. This vision makes me very happy!

Why Don't Boys Read More?

Are there “Girl Books and Boy Books?” as I asked when I wrote here on 4/22/10 about how some of my female and male students responded differently to a novel they read for my class? As I said then, the topic of whether and why females and males, on average, have overlapping but different tastes in books is too large and too fraught to summarize here. But I wondered about the gender question and books again recently when I read Robert Lipsyte’s essay, “The Lost Boys,” in the 8/21/11 New York Times Book Review. Lipsyte states that “boys’ aversion to reading, let alone to novels, has been worsening for years.” He discusses several possible reasons, but posits that one of the main ones is that most Y.A. (Young Adult) fiction is aimed toward girls. “At least three-quarters of the target audience [is] girls, and they [want] to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.” He goes on to say about current Y.A. titles that “books with story lines about disease, divorce, death and dysfunction [sell] better for girls than…for boys.” Whatever the reasons, it is unfortunate that boys read less than girls, and if publishing more high quality Y.A. titles that appeal to boys is the answer, or part of the answer, I hope that publishers will respond to Lipsyte’s essay by trying to do this.

Memorable Novels about War

Another in my "memorable" series: Memorable Novels about War

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal
Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Regeneration, by Pat Barker
Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

There have also been many novels about, or including material on, the aftereffects of war. To me, one of the most memorable of these is Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," in which the character Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked World War I veteran; his pain and suffering are visceral and powerfully portrayed by Woolf.

"One Day": The Film

A year ago, I posted a positive review of English writer David Nicholls’ novel “One Day” (8/16/10), a wonderful take on the theme of two friends who over the years sometimes veer into the territory of romance, but no matter what, always provide staunch support for each other through thick and thin. The suspense of the story is in wondering “will they or won’t they” get together as romantic partners, but there is so much more to the story. I recently saw the film version of “One Day.” Although the screenplay was written by the author, Nicholls, and stayed fairly close to the novel’s story, certain elements were left out or smoothed over, as is common in film versions. The result is that the movie is still absorbing, but less so than the novel. However, once again I got caught up in Emma’s and Dexter’s stories; it is fascinating to watch their lives develop over a period of twenty years. Each year we “check in” on them on July 15, St. Swithin’s Day. We watch their bright hopes for their futures, their stumbles, their confusions, their successes, their failures, their need for each other, their other romances, their relationships with their families, and the way they always lean on each other, and keep connecting and reconnecting. It is an absorbing observation of young adults growing and (unevenly!) maturing, trying to figure out this thing called grown-up life. We also learn much -- indirectly -- about British society, the class system in England, and gender roles. Jim Sturgess is wonderful as Emma; Anne Hathaway is appealing but less convincing as Emma; unfortunately, her struggles with the accent are a bit distracting. Patricia Clarkson is perfect, as always, as Dexter’s mother. Overall I recommend the film, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the novel.

"Enough about Love," by Herve Le Tellier

In the past few months, I have read, enjoyed, and posted here about several novels and memoirs set in France. The most recent is “Enough About Love” (Other Press, 2009, translation 2010), by Herve Le Tellier, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. This novel is the story of two affairs and the complications that ensue among the four main characters and their families. It is all very modern and French (at least according to our American stereotypes about the French…). I enjoyed reading it, and found the characters well drawn. But it seems to me that there is something hollow at the core of the story, or perhaps of the characters. Although the novel is all about love and passion, it somehow seems that at least some of the characters are on some level playing an intellectual game, standing outside themselves and watching the game with great interest. This is particularly true of Anna, a psychoanalyst having an affair with Yves, a writer. Yves, by the way, ends by writing a book that sounds (intentionally) suspiciously like this book, the one sitting on my desk as I write. Very “meta.” The novel is structured a bit like classical farce; the reader can almost imagine a carefully choreographed dance, or stage play, with various characters entering and exiting through various stage doors. This impression is reinforced by the organization of the book, which consists of dozens of short chapters, each titled with the name or names of certain characters, such as “Thomas,” “Louise and Romain,” and “Anna and Yves.” Something that bothered me about the book, though: At the risk of sounding old-fashioned and prudish (which I don’t think I am), a part of me -- the emotional part, not the intellectual part -- feels that the novel doesn’t represent accurately, or enough, the problems, even devastation, brought about by affairs that threaten and sometimes destroy longtime marriages, especially when there are children. In this novel, the characters briefly talk about difficulties, and about feeling torn by the situation, but the problems don’t feel viscerally real. And the young children of the original marriages seem remarkably and -- it seems to me -- unrealistically unaffected by the affairs, even going on outings with and liking their mothers’ lovers. This novel offers many pleasures, including the Paris setting and the virtuoso writing. I am glad to have read it. But finally it seems to me a bit too much of an intellectual exercise that doesn’t truly engage the heart.

Memorable Comic Writers

One of the joys available from books is great comic writing. Such writing not only makes us laugh, but makes us recognize human foibles and see the world in a new way. The terrific writers listed below do not necessarily always work in a comic vein, but each of them has written at least one wonderful comic work and/or has woven comic characters and situations throughout her/his work. I thank these authors for the great reading pleasure I have experienced over the years from reading their work.

Amis, Kingsley
Austen, Jane
Beerbohm, Max
Bennett, Alan
Benson, E.F.
Dickens, Charles
Delafield, E.M.
Fielding, Henry
Heller, Joseph
Hornby, Nick
Lodge, David
Macaulay, Rose
Mitford, Nancy
Pym, Barbara
Shakespeare, William
Thackeray, William
Thirkell, Angela
Twain, Mark
Vonnegut, Kurt
Waugh, Evelyn
Wodehouse, P. G.

This and That: Mini-Stories

Yesterday’s Sunday (8/21/11) San Francisco Chronicle book section had several interesting mini-stories:
1. A page full of colorful images of book covers illustrates the fact that whenever cover designers want to show that books take place in San Francisco, they almost inevitably use images of the Golden Gate Bridge. Seeing these Bridge-bedecked covers -- some quite lurid -- all together on one page is striking and a bit amusing.
2. Although Charles Dickens wrote in his will “I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatsoever,” the first-ever statue of him in Britain will be erected in Portsmouth next year.
3. Ann Patchett, author of “Bel Canto,” “Run,” and “State of Wonder,” will open a bookstore in Nashville in October; she says “I don’t want to live in a city that doesn’t have an independent bookstore.” Brava, Ann Patchett!
4. The highest earning authors in the world last year were James Patterson ($84 million), Danielle Steel ($35 million), Stephen King ($28 million), Janet Evanovich ($22 million), and Stephenie Meyer ($21 million). No comment.

Great Aunt Priscilla's Shakespeare on my Shelf

I have written (5/28/11) about how I cherish the few books I have that were my late grandmother’s. I am also very happy to have a beautiful set of Shakespeare’s plays -- small muted-green clothbound books in the Yale Shakespeare collection, published in the 1910s and 1920s -- that were my late Great Aunt Priscilla’s. Aunt Priscilla was almost like a second grandmother to us, as she was very close to my mother’s family, lived with them for a while when she was a teenager, and was dearly loved by all in my mother's large extended family, including my mother and, later, me. I remember our visiting her in the Okanagan Valley when I was a child, and during my early adulthood had the honor and pleasure of showing her and her friends around San Francisco; she loved traveling and loved her friends, and after she became a widow, traveled more than ever. I loved and admired her and learned from her; she was a longtime schoolteacher, respected by everyone in her community, and a very well-read person. She also had a strong sense of justice, and worked for peace and justice in various ways. Although I don’t believe she used the term “feminist” about herself, she was a great example of an independent woman (married, but independent) at a time when not many women were interested in being, or able to be, so strong and independent. She was a great role model for those who knew her, including my aunts, my cousins and me, as well as generations of her students. So when I see her books on my shelf, I think fondly and admiringly of her, and thank her for being the strong, wonderful, influential woman she was.

"Dreams of Significant Girls," by Cristina Garcia

I have -- unlike many children and adults -- never read the Harry Potter books. But I am glad that they have provided so much reading pleasure to so many. As I wrote on 8/13/10, I don’t read much Young Adult (YA) fiction, and I especially don’t like or read science fiction/fantasy, whether YA or adult. But I have very occasionally read YA books when they relate to girls figuring out their lives, female friendships, sisterhood, and related topics. One such YA novel I enjoyed some years ago was Ann Brashares’ “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” which was later made into a movie. I have just read a new YA novel, “Dreams of Significant Girls” (Simon & Schuster, 2011), by Cristina Garcia, author of the critically well-received book for adults, “Dreaming in Cuban.” “Dreams of Significant Girls” attracted me because of the sisterhood topic, as well as the fact that it is set at a boarding school in Switzerland. As a person who attended a (very nice but much less posh) boarding school (Kodaikanal School) for five years in India, many years ago, I am drawn to such stories. In addition, as I have written before, I am interested in issues of social class, and this story raises some of those issues, albeit indirectly. The three main characters from three very geographically dispersed places all attend the elegant Swiss boarding school every summer for three summers, are very different, initially don’t get along, but become fast friends and great sources of support and comfort for each other during those summers and for a long time after. Despite the fact that these girls are quite privileged, they all have serious issues to deal with. (I know, I know, the “poor little rich girl” theme is a bit worn, but the author makes it fairly fresh in this novel.) The characters are appealing and the story is fairly interesting, but what most appealed to me was, as I predicted, the female friendship/sisterhood theme. The story is in some senses too predictable, and lacks depth, but it is enjoyable to read, and it does reinforce the important idea that girls’ and women’s friendships are crucial elements in their lives.

Memorable Birth Scenes in Literature

Another in the "memorable" series: Memorable Birth Scenes in Literature

Morgaine gives birth to Mordred (The Mists of Avalon)
Tristam Shandy is born (Tristam Shandy)
Kitty and Anna both give birth (Anna Karenina)
Melanie gives birth (Gone With the Wind)
O’lan gives birth (The Good Earth)
Milkman is born (Song of Solomon)
Denver is born (Beloved)
The narrator is born, and her aunt gives birth (The Woman Warrior)

Writing Colonies

I wrote on 2/16/11 about unusual places that some writers write, such as a remote island. Most are more conventional, writing in home studies, at dining room tables, in university offices, in libraries, or in coffeehouses. But some writers are fortunate enough to be given, for a few days or weeks, the opportunity to write at various writers’ colonies. Some of the most famous ones, entrance to which is of course very competitive, are Yaddo, Macdowell, Bellagio (on Lake Como!), Ucross, Hedgebrook, Dorland Mountain, and the Virgina Center for Creative Arts. Most of these colonies are set in physically beautiful surroundings, which provide inspiration and a sense of well-being. Writers are given quiet, comfortable places to write, with all meals and other needs provided. They may stay for as little as a week or as much as several weeks. Even if one is not fortunate or well known enough to be accepted to one of these, some writers have access to shorter stays at conference centers or other sites that provide congenial and quiet spaces for writing. For example, some universities, such as my own, sponsor weekend writing retreats; I have participated in several of these. It is amazing how much writing can get done in a weekend in which one’s complete focus is on writing. And there is always the self-constructed writing retreat; for example, my colleague P. and I have created two three-to-four-day writing retreats in the beautiful city where she lives. We focused on writing all day, and then had delicious dinners and talked about what we were writing and how it was going, providing each other with advice and encouragement. The key to all of these colonies and retreats is having the luxury of a good place and uninterrupted time to write.

Memorable Couples in Literature

I have already listed here (on 7/7/11) some memorable weddings in literature ; today I broaden the list to some “memorable couples in literature.” In some cases the couples are memorable because of their great (if sometimes doomed) romances; in other cases they are remembered for being spectacularly unsuited to each other.

Lancelot and Guinevere
Heloise and Abelard
Romeo and Juliet
Othello and Desdemona
Anthony and Cleopatra
Elizabeth and Darcy (Pride and Prejudice)
Mr. and Mrs. Bennett (Pride and Prejudice)
Emma and Knightley (Emma)
Dorothea and Casaubon (Middlemarch)
Lydgate and Rosamond (Middlemarch)
Cathy and Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)
Lady Chatterley and Mellors (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)
Rose of Sharon and Connie (Grapes of Wrath)
Celia and Shug (The Color Purple)

And here are some real life memorable literary couples:

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
James Joyce and Nora
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda

"Being and Becoming a Speaker of Japanese," by Andrea Simon-Maeda

My colleague in Japan, Andrea Simon-Maeda, has written a very interesting book about her process of learning the Japanese language over the 35 years she has lived and worked there. She married a Japanese man and has a grown son, so her personal as well as her professional life (as a university professor) have facilitated and intertwined with her language learning. The book’s title, “Being and Becoming a Speaker of Japanese: An Autoethnographic Account” (Multilingual Matters, 2011), indicates its academic roots, but it is definitely accessible, informative, and enjoyable for the general reader as well. Fellow academics will find this book valuable; general readers who prefer to skip some of the language theory can do some judicious skimming and still benefit from and enjoy the book. I recommend it to anyone interested in languages, in language learning, in Japan, in expatriate life, in mixed marriages, or any combination of these topics. Simon-Maeda has an engaging style, and she is good at providing the kinds of specific examples that make her points clear and vivid.

Guest Post: Scribbling in Books

Thanks to my friend Mary for the following guest post:

"There is something that's always bothered me, but I recently found out that not everyone feels this way -- some even find it charming. I wonder how other readers out there feel about reading a library or other borrowed book, and coming across little marks or scribbled words written by a previous reader. For instance, someone may have underlined one word (usually but not always in pencil), or perhaps corrected a spelling or punctuation error. Or, worst of all, written in a little comment or maybe just a word, often cryptic, in the margin. I find that annoying and distracting. It pulls me right out of the moment, and makes me aware of some other person and his pencil, rather than the voice I am hearing in the novel. Of course, if a person wants to do that to his own book, that's fine. But to write in a book that others might read, and especially a library book, seems rude and self-indulgent. Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just a curmudgeon?"

How Candid Should a Memoirist Be?

Memoirs, by definition, are authors’ own stories about their pasts. But no one can tell her or his own story without mentioning other people. How can a memoirist be honest and open, as memoir demands (although of course all self-portrayals are selected and shaped), yet be fair to these other people in their lives, and preserve their privacy? So one way for a memoirist to possibly hurt other people is to portray them unfairly or violate their privacy. Another (related) way is, as author Dani Shapiro writes about in a recent (7/17/11) New York Times Book Review essay, titled "The Me My Child Mustn't Know," to write something about oneself that might – at the time or later – embarrass oneself and others in one’s life. OK, let’s be specific. Shapiro writes about how her first memoir, “Slow Motion,” was written “with abandon, a kind of take-no-prisoners story about dropping out of college at 20 and, in a booze- and drug-induced haze, becoming involved in a destructive affair with a much older married man, the stepfather of my best friend.” But now she realizes that at the time of writing the memoir, she “wasn’t projecting forward to a lifetime later, when, as a Connecticut wife and mother in my 40s,” she would worry about how her son would feel reading or hearing about the events in her book. She ponders ways in which her identity as a writer and her identity as a mother clash, with different priorities and concerns. If she had known she would have a child, would she have written the memoir? On the one hand, she believes that if a person is to write about herself, she should be honest. On the other hand, she wants to protect her son, and worries about the consequences of his reading the book at some point. She concludes that “as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page….Without these attempts…I am lost.” So she chooses openness. Is it the right choice?

Like a Book? Tell the Author!

I have been very honored and pleased when a few of the authors whose books I have posted about here have contacted me to thank me for the posts, and in some cases have said how much such encouragement meant to them. I know that I, as an academic writer with the very limited sales that usually come with academic writing, treasure every positive comment about my own books and articles. But I think we sometimes assume that writers of much more widely distributed books of fiction, especially those that have received a certain amount of acclaim and good sales, are very confident and don’t need encouragement. The notes that I have received indicate otherwise. This may not be true for the few authors of huge bestsellers, who probably get bags full of fan mail, but I think it is true for what used to be called midlist authors. I think the need for positive feedback and affirmation is especially present after the initial excitement of publication and the first reviews is over, and perhaps particularly when the author embarks on her/his next novel, short story, or memoir, wondering if she/he can repeat the success of the earlier book. All this is a long-winded way of saying: If you particularly like a book, please consider taking a few minutes to send the author an email or note to say so. You can often find an email address, or a place to comment, on an author’s website, or through her/his publisher’s website, or by Googling. I believe your notes will be much appreciated.

"French Lessons," by Ellen Sussman

The blurbs on the back cover of Ellen Sussman’s “French Lessons” (Ballantine, 2011) lead the reader to believe the novel will be a frothy, fun, sexy romp through Paris. And there is definitely that element. The main characters also, though, bring much sadness and loss to the events of one day in Paris, and the main theme of the novel seems to be a kind of renewal and redemption experienced by the characters, each in her or his own way. There are six main characters: three French tutors and three clients of those tutors. Each pair of characters – a tutor and a tutee – has a chapter; the story is framed by introductory and concluding chapters about the three tutors, who meet at the end of every day and have their own complicated relationships. The idea of teaching a language through strolling through a city, speaking in the target language, and flirting madly, is intriguing if unorthodox. And the conversations and the Paris experiences are certainly enjoyable to read about. The story reminds me of the (excellent) movie, “Before Sunset,” (a sequel to “Before Sunrise”) in which Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy play a couple walking through Paris in nonstop conversation. I have to say that some of the characters can be a bit annoying in their self-preoccupation, but perhaps they are just fallible human beings trying to get through the days and figure out what they want in life. In any case, this novel is great fun to read, evokes the beauty and romance of Paris that we all love to read about, and is well written.

Gender Stereotyping?

Re-reading my 8/6/11 review of Adam Ross’ “Ladies and Gentlemen,” I see that I used terms such as tough, violent, vigorous, strong, sure, both about the characters and about the author’s writing. I note that these are words traditionally used more often about males and male writing than about females and female writing. I like to think that these words just happened to be appropriate for this particular writer’s stories, and not that I automatically viewed the stories differently because the author is male. And it is true that most of the narrators and main characters in Ross’ stories are male. But they are (mostly) not macho-style stereotypically male, in the way that Hemingway’s characters and writing are, for one of many possible examples. What I am trying to figure out, and get at here, is which comes first, the maleness or the perception of maleness? Do I use words like those listed above because the stories elicit them, or do I go into the stories expecting to find these kinds of stereotypically male characters and characteristics and writing styles? If this book were exactly the same but had been written by a woman, would I perceive it and write about it the same way? But I don't use these kinds of words about all books by male writers. What makes the difference? Of course these are questions that have been asked and explored by many; I don’t claim they are original. But my choice of words when writing about this book for some reason brought these questions to the fore for me. I don’t know the answers to the questions, but it is good for all of us to be aware of possible automatic, unconscious biases that lead us to frame literary work in a certain way.

"If You Knew Then What I Know Now," by Ryan Van Meter

Ryan Van Meter’s “If You Knew Then What I Know Now” (Sarabande, 2011) is a set of connected autobiographical essays, focusing on the author’s gay identity and the long process of coming out to himself and then to others. The essays are honest, moving, and sometimes quite funny. Van Meter, who teaches at the same university I do (University of San Francisco), is an engaging writer. His stories of his childhood are all about his own innocence and his many years of denial about his sexuality, despite being teased and called “faggot” by classmates and others. What helped him get through that difficult period, it seems, was his loving parents. Although they didn’t quite know how to respond to their “different” son, they were unwavering in their love and support, and he dedicates this book to them. I heard Van Meter read from this book at a recent author event on campus, and he has a candid, humorous demeanor. It seems that writing about himself, his relationships, and his life has been therapeutic for him as well as informative, touching, consciousness-raising, and even entertaining for his readers and listeners.

Oops….I Forgot the Spoiler Alert!

The other day I made the kind of mistake no reader likes others to make: I gave away the ending of a novel to someone still reading it. I can’t believe I did that! I was talking with my daughter, M, about Jane Austen’s novel “Emma,” which she has been reading on her commute to work. (And I won’t make the same mistake again here, so if you, dear reader, haven’t read “Emma” and think you might read it someday, please stop reading this post now.) This is how it happened: Our discussion of “Emma” reminded me to tell M about my 7/31/11 post on how the author of the book “Agewise” theorized that Austen’s character Emma’s father had early dementia. I went on to say, as I did in the post, that Emma accepted her responsibility to take care of her father, despite knowing that it would probably keep her from marrying; I obliviously continued, saying that only because Knightley was willing to move into Emma’s house with her and her father was it possible for Emma to marry. Just as I made that last point, my daughter looked at me exasperatedly and pointed out that she had not finished the novel yet, and I had just given away the ending! I felt terrible, and apologized profusely. She was mildly annoyed with me, but took it well; she said she could see the ending coming, but wryly remarked that she would have preferred to discover it on her own. I think I am so immersed in the world of the Austen novels that I forget -- even though I knew it perfectly well in this case, and we had JUST been talking about it! -- that not everyone already knows the plots of the six novels backwards and forwards. I am thankful that my daughter wasn’t too upset, and I will try not to ever do that again! (Note that my book reviews, like all book reviews, describe a few plot points, but do not give away endings.)

"The Spoken Word: British Writers"

I saw an magazine ad for a CD set that included Virginia Woolf's voice, and was surprised and excited that her voice had been preserved....I had to have it! So I ordered the British Library's 3-CD set, "The Spoken Word: British Writers" (2008) containing excerpts from speeches and interviews from BBC radio shows. The earliest of these date back to the mid-1930s. The 30 authors on the CDs include (in chronological order of their birth dates, as they are arranged on the CDs) Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Harold Pinter. As I knew I would be, I was thrilled to hear Virginia Woolf speaking. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing many of the other writers. They speak about their writing, their lives, their reputations, and more. One of the most inspiring was, to my surprise, Rudyard Kipling, who spoke eloquently about how "the word" is the one way that human experience is carried from one generation to another. Also inspiring was E.M. Forster, who gave a timeless message: laissez faire is a bad concept for the economy and a good concept for "morality" (meaning, for example, that it prevents censorship and laws restricting individual freedom). I highly recommend this fascinating and literarily significant CD set. It is available from the British Library Online at http://shop.bl.uk/.

"Ladies and Gentlemen: Stories," by Adam Ross

The short story reading continues....I just finished a new collection of stories, each of which burst out and grabbed my attention. The book is "Ladies and Gentlemen: Stories" (Knopf, 2011), by Adam Ross. The stories are gripping and immediate. Most of the narrators are male; reading the stories, I alternated between feeling I was able to get inside the characters' minds, and then suddenly feeling I didn't know them at all. The latter feeling is partly due to the surprise endings of some of the stories. The writing is vigorous and at the same time intimate, with even the tough male characters showing their vulnerabilities. My favorite story was one of the longest, "Middleman." The narrator and main character is a 13-year-old, Jacob, who lives in New York City and tells of his relationships with his two best friends, the sister of one of the friends, and his own father. Although it is not foregrounded, the relationship with his father is particularly touching. Jacob also explores what it means to be Jewish; although his family is non-observant, he is drawn to learn more about the Jewish part of his identity, especially when he sees how others position him as Jewish, and his father tries to give him information and help him understand. Jacob is also learning about girls through his infatuation with his friend Kyle's older sister, Elsa, who alternately ignores him and uses him for his ability to introduce him to the world of modeling for commercials. Some of the other stories, with adult characters, are more fraught in different ways, focusing on male longing, awkward relationships among men, the nature of marriage, connections and misunderstandings across social class divides, what we don't know about our relatives and friends, violence, betrayal, and more. Interestingly, the author gives the last word, in the last story, "Ladies and Gentlemen," to a female character. Sara is a busy journalist, wife, and mother in her late thirties who is trying to decide whether to drop everything, at least for a brief time, to have an affair with a man she almost had an affair with in college. A part of her feels this is her last chance, in a life that has grown too predictable, to make up for the missed opportunity 20 years earlier, and to do something daring and intense, something just for herself. On her way to meet her prospective lover, she has a conversation with another man on the plane that makes her hesitate. This story is a fascinating meditation on marriage, connections, choices, missed opportunities, and commitment. Ross is a writer who has complete control of his material; his writing is strong and sure. Finishing the collection, I feel I have just visited a very different and yet strangely familiar world.

Guest Post: Podcasts of Short Stories

In response to my noting with a bit of surprise how many short story collections were included on my list (8/1/11) of "Highly Recommended" recent books, my friend Sonja e-mailed me as follows (I post her e-mail here with her permission):

"Stephanie, thanks for your interesting reviews and blog. I do prefer novels to short stories, which is strange because I have written short stories (unpublished) myself and enjoy the form as a writer. I just wanted to say however that I have gotten a new appreciation for reading short stories through the New Yorker's podcasts of stories read by various writers. I have discovered some writers I want to read through listening to these fabulous stories (some of the writers are on your list). You can get the podcasts for free from itunes. I found the listening and the discussion afterwards to be excellent experiences."

(This is Stephanie writing again): You can also get the podcasts directly from The New Yorker, and either listen to them online or download them; either way they are free. Each month a contributor chooses a story from the New Yorker archives and reads it. For example, to tie these podcasts in with this blog's two recent posts on John Cheever: you can listen to one of my favorite contemporary writers, Anne Enright, reading Cheever's "The Swimmer." The Guardian UK has a similar collection of podcasts of short stories. The two web addresses are below. These are wonderful resources, and it is a pleasure to hear the stories read aloud. Thanks, Sonja, for drawing our attention to this great way of experiencing terrific fiction!)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/short-stories-podcast

Sorry, But They Really Are Boring...

The New York Times Book Review (7/31/11) had a brief paragraph (p. 22) about a 1950 Columbia University Press survey that asked about the most boring classics of all time. Topping the list were "Pilgrim's Progress," "Moby-Dick," "Paradise Lost," "The Faerie Queene," and Boswell's "Life of Johnson." So far, so good...I can't disagree on any of these, even if it makes me feel like a bit of a traitor to my English major identity to admit it! But continuing on, I read that "George Eliot placed four books in the top 30," and I was incensed....no, no, no, no! My beloved Eliot's books boring? Serious, sure. Mature, yes. Sometimes slow-moving, true. Let's call them stately. But so wonderful, and so NOT boring! Ask me which other classics are boring, and despite my fear of being labeled a Philistine, I will admit that although I greatly admire Joyce's work (while greatly preferring Woolf's), I struggled through both "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake," and yes, they were definitely boring through most of their many pages. Creative, yes. Breakthrough, yes. But still boring. A couple of other classics that bored me were "Don Quixote" and "The Old Man and the Sea." Again, I admire them both, I see their virtues, but I can't lie: I had to drag myself through each of them. I hope I haven't forfeited my book blogger credentials with these true confessions!

Guest Post: On Reading John Cheever as a Young Man

When my friend "Z" said he liked my recent (7/22/11) post on John Cheever, and had read a lot of Cheever at one time, I invited him to write a guest post on this author. What follows is his thought-provoking and vivid take on Cheever, in the context of "Z"'s own life, with some comments on what Cheever's work shows us on that so important but seldom openly discussed topic, social class. Thanks, Z!

From "Z":
I began reading John Cheever’s work when I returned to New York after living in New Orleans for a short while. I was glad to be back in New York even though I was broke and a bit dispirited. I’d just gotten a job at a news-photo agency, and I was living with my parents at the time. Riding into the city on the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station, I would fantasize I was one of Cheever’s characters who lived in the suburbs and rode the train into the city. However, I understood that I lived in the wrong kind of suburbs – the fairly typical ‘middle-class’ one that might be best characterized as Levittown Lite – not quite row after row of identical box homes filling up the landscape, but since my family lived in what was called a “model home”, it was close enough.

There was also the issue of arriving at and departing from Penn Station. As anyone who was alive at the time could tell you, it was a criminal travesty that the city demolished the original structure in 1963. It was an irreplaceable architectural and cultural loss. What I remember of the new Penn Station as a young man was seeing drunken New York Ranger fans after a hockey game finished at Madison Square Garden – which sat on top of the now subterranean Station like some hideous toad – running amok through the ghastly narrow corridors of the Station. Worse was when they boarded the same train as me, full of fan-fueled testosterone and shoving horrible hot dogs and other noxious substances passing for food into their gaping mouths, ready to vomit.

No, this was not the aptly-named Grand Central of Cheever-land, where, albeit similarly inebriated beings also lurched onto the trains – the Metro North (even the name bespoke of its connection to the city unlike the regionally distinct “Long Island Rail Road”) going to the suburbs of which he wrote: leafy green neighborhoods where none of the houses were identical, and many considerably older than the “model home” of my adolescence. These passengers might have been as drunk as those hockey fans, but they held their liquor.

And there it is – the inescapable, the big unsaid in American culture: the issue of class. Not ‘class’ as in ‘classy’, but the real issue of class – the kind which gives lie to the American narrative of equality and opportunity. It was as big a divide as I can remember, seeing those people – the kind Cheever wrote about in his magnificent short stories and the worthy “Wapshot Chronicle.” Those people. You know, them. WASPs. I forgot exactly when I learned of this word and what it meant, but I came to know what it really meant in college. I attended a small, private East Coast one (how and why I ended up there is another story for another time), where I first met people with names like “Prescott” and “Suzanne,” and who played squash but never looked particularly sweaty afterward. They had of course been going to private schools their whole lives, and so by this time, they had figured out the academic and social game a long time ago. I was the interloper, the kid from Long (hard ‘g’) Island (the South Shore of course), not from the City or its leafy green suburbs to the north.

What was it about them that fascinated me, and why did I find similar characters in Cheever’s novels equally fascinating at the time? Besides the quality of his writing and his careful observations of what actually lay beneath those well-worn exteriors, looking back, I can now perhaps attribute it to a perverse kind of longing to belong – a not altogether unexpected desire stemming from my status of being seen as a “stranger from a different shore” despite my having been born here, but also something else: a budding scorn for what I perceived to be their conducting their public lives with a certain style that has been named as displaying “class,” but which kept the rest of us looking in and left out.

I haven’t read Cheever since that time, but I recall an old joke from the Marx Brothers which seems to be a good summary of his work, and why I liked it so much:
“Say I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you, by the name of Emanuel Ravelli.”
- - But I am Emanuel Ravelli!
“Well, no wonder you look like him!”

Difficult Decisions about Thinning One's Book Collection

I have written (4/1/10) about the struggle to know when to keep books and when (because of space issues, mostly) to get rid of (give away) books. I had this discussion with my friend and professional colleague P when I visited her recently; her house is crammed with books and journals and she doesn’t have enough space to put them all. She said that she knew she should thin her collection, and was making some halfhearted efforts to do so. But as a prolific academic writer, she uses her books more regularly than most of us do. Many of us say about books or other items that we keep, despite not having used them for years, that “you never know when you might need them.” In her case, this statement is actually apt. Despite that, I urged her to trim her collection a bit, saying that there must be books and journals that she really would never use again. She said she would try, but clearly she was hesitant. Soon after my visit, P let me know in a humorous email that not only once but twice the day after my visit, she had needed to find a passage or reference and had been able to find them in books she hadn’t looked at for years. And then, ironically, she suddenly found she needed an article that happened to be in the one journal she had managed to get rid of, as she seldom used material in the subdiscipline it represented. This matter of deciding what to keep and what to let go is a tough one!

Designated “Highly Recommended”

Readers may have noticed that I occasionally – very occasionally – end a review post with the words “Highly Recommended.” This phrase indicates not just that I liked the book or thought it was good – many other books reviewed meet that standard – but that I found the book particularly outstanding. It reached out and grabbed me, pulled me in; it was an exciting discovery, a “wow” experience. Below I list the books (all fiction) that I have recently designated as “Highly Recommended,” as well as a few that I should have so designated (but didn’t, because I wasn’t yet consciously and consistently using this term for the very best books). Because I posted my list of “Ten Favorite Books of 2010” on 12/9/10, I only include here books that I have reviewed since that time. The dates indicate when I posted about each book.

12/12/10 “The Imperfectionists” by Tom Rachman
12/21/10 “The Bigness of the World: Stories” by Lori Ostlund
12/24/10 “Selected Stories” by William Trevor
12/28/10 “World and Town” by Gish Jen
1/15/11 “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Stories” by Robin Black
1/28/11 “The Empty Family: Stories” by Colm Toibin
3/2/11 “Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia” by Anne Raeff
4/9/11 “Marry or Burn: Stories” by Valerie Trueblood
4/16/11 “Seven Loves” by Valerie Trueblood
4/22/11 “Binocular Vision: Stories” by Edith Pearlman
5/1/11 “Swim Back to Me: Stories” by Ann Packer
5/17/11 “Emily, Alone” by Stewart O'Nan
5/21/11 “Pulse: Stories” by Julian Barnes
6/20/11 “The Lemon Table: Stories” by Julian Barnes
7/14/11 “The Bostons: Stories” by Carolyn Cooke

A few points about the above list:
1. Fifteen “Wow” books in a little under eight months is pretty good!
2. I am surprised to see how many of these books -- 10 out of the 15 on the lists -- are collections of short stories. As I wrote on 7/24/11, despite novels’ having always been my first reading love, I seem these days to be reading and appreciating short stories more and more. I don’t know if this tendency is a coincidence, something temporary, or something more long-range.
3. Six of these books are by writers I was already familiar with and whose new books I watch out for; nine of them are either first books, or by authors I was not familiar with before reading the current book. I am pleased with this, because it means that while I honor and continue to read and enjoy the work of established writers, I am continuing to “discover” new authors, and because it indicates that the state of fiction is still healthy, with more and more new writers being published.