"Have I Read This Book Before?": Discovering the Answer

After I wrote yesterday’s post on not remembering if I had already read Sue Miller’s 1993 novel, “For Love,” the question nagged at me, and I couldn’t resist taking the time to flip back through my “books read” notebook. Sure enough, I found that I had in fact read “For Love” in 1994. I have resigned myself to this kind of forgetting, and rationalize that it is because of the many years I have been reading and the many books I have read. Also reassuring is to hear that my friends have the same experience, so I am not alone in this. While I was looking through my list notebook, I ran across titles of some other books I had forgotten reading, as well as many that I well remembered. I was reminded too of some of my reading habits, such as going on “binges” of certain authors, or countries’ authors, and such as re-reading old favorites many times over the years. I am glad I have kept this list all these years; it helps me remember, and it gives me pleasure to revisit past reading.

"For Love," by Sue Miller

I have mentioned, and I know others have also had the experience of, forgetting if I have read a certain book. Even though I have kept a list of what I have read since I was 10 years old (see my post of 1/24/10), that list is in three notebooks (so far!) rather than computerized (OK, it was a while ago that I started the list!) and I don’t have the time now (maybe I will someday...) to go back and enter all the 5200-plus titles and authors into an online database. So it isn’t easy to check if I have already read a specific book, especially for books I may have read 20 or 30 or more years ago. I have read most if not all of Sue Miller’s novels, so when I recently picked up her book “For Love” (HarperPerennial, 1993) (as in “what I did for love”), I thought I had probably already read it, but it didn’t look familiar at all. And even when I read it, at which time a formerly-read book usually starts to sound familiar, it still didn’t ring a bell. It is possible that I had never read it before; it is also quite possible that I did read it 19 or so years ago and forgot it. Disconcerting but true. As for the novel itself: This is the story of Lottie, her brother Cam, and her childhood friend Elizabeth, who is also Cam’s lifelong object of love and desire. Middle-aged now, they reunite by happenstance in Cambridge, Massachusetts one summer, in and between their respective parents’ houses on their childhood street. Much drama ensues, including a tragic event. This novel focuses on the psychological, and on the way our childhoods continue to influence us into middle age and beyond. It also illustrates the longterm effects of social class; Lottie continues to resent the way Elizabeth, who lived in a much nicer house and whose parents were much wealthier, acted superior to Lottie during their teenage years. Although Lottie is a fairly successful writer now, and although Elizabeth is much friendlier now, Lottie is still wary of her and her heedless sense of entitlement. Although the novel is quite intense psychologically, it drags a bit at times. Still, overall this is a novel worth reading. Some critics have said that because Miller’s work is quite accessible (and I would add: because she writes about “women’s subjects”), she has been underestimated as a serious literary author; I think this assessment is correct.

My Current Favorite Contemporary Authors

I have in the past posted a couple of “favorite authors” lists on this blog; I now post my current favorite contemporary authors of fiction (either living, or having died recently). By favorite I mean not only that I very much like reading their novels and stories, but also that I consider them among the best writers writing. This list is not inclusive, and I will probably think of others soon after I post this list. And I do recognize that perhaps there “should” be more writers from outside the U.S. and Great Britain, more ethnic and racial minority writers, and more male writers; if the list were to include all writers I have ever read from the past as well as current writers, the totals would be more “balanced”; for example, overall I may have read almost as many male as female writers, and I have at times read many novels from India, Africa, South America, Europe, and elsewhere, as well as much fiction by Asian American, Hispanic American, and African American authors. So, without further ado, here are my favorite contemporary authors as of right now, in alphabetical order: Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Carolyn Cooke, Anita Desai, Emma Donoghue, Margaret Drabble, Anne Enright, Jane Gardam, Barbara Gowdy, Tessa Hadley, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Humphreys, Tania James, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Antonya Nelson, Stewart O’Nan, Lori Ostlund, Julie Otsuka, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Tom Rachman, Anne Raeff, Richard Russo, Carol Shields, Mona Simpson, Zadie Smith, Jean Thompson, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Valerie Trueblood, and Anne Tyler.

"Reckless Driver," by Lisa Vice

I read “Reckless Driver” (Plume, 1995), by Lisa Vice, because the author is the wife of a friend. I had a little bit of that feeling one has when reading something by a friend, or a relative or friend of a friend: “What if it I don’t like it? What will I say to my friend?” Fortunately, in this case I didn’t have to worry, because the book is wonderful. It is beautifully written and the characters are perfectly drawn. Most of the story is told in the voice of a young girl, Lana. She tells of her family -- her father, her mother, and her older (teenaged) sister Abbie -- and of her neighbors in their small town in Indiana in the 1960s. The family is rather poor, although hanging on, so one focus of the novel is social class. The larger focus is how helpless children are in their homes and lives, how vulnerable they are. In this case, the father -- called “The Old Man” by the girls -- loves his daughters but is (it soon becomes clear) mentally disturbed -- probably at least partly because of his war service and experiences -- and abusive. The girls even fantasize about his death, although Lana feels -- despite everything -- a sort of residual love and loyalty to him. Their mother is unhappy in her marriage, cheerfully unfaithful to her husband, and -- although she seems to love them -- does very little to protect the girls from their father. The story is profoundly sad. Yet there are moments of happiness, of love and of fun. Despite everything, the voices of the girls are surprisingly strong and even resilient. Lana especially seems to have an unquenchable spirit; some of this may be due to a caring neighbor, Marvella, who unobtrusively but consistently watches out for Lana. I must say that this book was depressing to read, yet it was compelling, with surprising notes of hope.

"A Short History of Women," by Kate Walbert

Regular readers of this blog would probably think, as I did myself, that I would immediately want to read a novel titled “A Short History of Women” (Scribner, 2009), which was written by a respected author, Kate Walbert, and which was well-reviewed. I remember picking it up and looking at it in the library and then in a bookstore, and somehow -- despite the title and the good reviews -- not being drawn to it enough to buy or borrow it. Recently, however, when browsing in an excellent independent bookstore in Healdsburg, Copperfield’s, I saw the book on the sale table, and this time I decided I wanted to read it. I knew I was going to be taking a long plane trip soon after, so I put it on my mental packing list for that trip. Although it is not the kind of novel that keeps a reader turning pages quickly, it is a thoughtful and engaging book. It tells the story of five generations of women, from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, in a family spanning England and the United States. (I happen to be a big fan of “generations of women” novels.) The first woman, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, was a suffragette who starved herself for the cause. The succeeding generations are all, directly or indirectly, influenced by her life and cause. The story cuts back and forth among the characters and the time periods, which is sometimes a bit jarring, but overall is effective. The strength of the novel is its reminder of how the discrimination women have experienced from generation to generation is an ongoing factor in women’s lives. Some women are more aware of it than others; some suffer from it more than others; some are more dedicated and/or braver in their fight against it than others (often because they have enough privilege and capital -- financial and social/cultural -- to do so). This description perhaps makes the novel sound like a polemic; it is not. The “women’s issue” forms a connecting thread throughout, but the stories of the women’s lives over the years are full of family, relationships, careers, and more, and are compelling in their own right.

"Old Girlfriends," by David Updike

Until a recent trip to the Mill Valley Friends of the Library book sale (which I have mentioned several times on this blog as a favorite source of books), I hadn’t realized, or at least hadn’t remembered, that the late great John Updike’s son David Updike is also a published writer of fiction. (Such instances always make me wonder, as I imagine they do you, what it must be like to be the child of a famous author who also wants to write. Of course there must be advantages regarding role modeling, influence, and access, but what a burden to be constantly and very publicly compared with one's parent.) At the sale, I picked up Updike Junior's short story collection, “Old Girlfriends” (St. Martin’s, 2009). It turns out he has published several books, including a quartet of books for “young readers.” He also illustrated a children’s book written by his father. Although it may not be fair to read the son’s work in the light of the father’s, I of course couldn’t resist doing so. However, as I read, that focus faded. There are definitely influences from the senior Updike’s writing, not only in style but also in settings and subject matter (families, relationships, infidelity, suburbia). Surprisingly, though, I also detected -- in some of the stories -- the stylistic influence of Hemingway. But because the main focus is on human relationships, and because the stories are well written, I enjoyed this collection. Would I go out of my way to find more of David Updike’s work? Probably not. But if I ran across another of his books, I would pick it up and leaf through it, and possibly buy or borrow it.

Read Them When Young, Read Them When Older?

Yesterday I wrote about rediscovering and resubscribing to The New York Review of Books. One passage in the 5/24/12 issue particularly caught my eye, as it so well expressed a feeling about books that I have also sometimes felt. In Giles Harvey’s review of Geoffrey Dyer’s new book, “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews,” he quotes Dyer as writing that “at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought – and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.” Although I do not share his feelings about some of the specific examples Dyer lists, I do relate to his point. When I was in high school, college, graduate school, and for a while after, I also “plowed through” many books I didn’t actually enjoy all that much, but wanted to know the books, to engage with them, to have read them, to have them as part of my experience. Now these many years later, I am more likely, as I have written about here before, to let myself off the hook if I am not enjoying a book, or even if I think in advance that I will not enjoy one. This may not be ideal, but I accept it about myself. I must say I appreciate Dyer’s expressing his feelings about this (although it is quite possible he is exaggerating a bit for effect).