Posts Tagged ‘reading’
End of Summer Reading Review:
The end of the summer is here and I thought it would be nice to list everything that I’ve managed to read over the summer.
- RASL by Jeff Smith [ Graphic Novel ]
- Burma by Guy Delisle [ Graphic Novel ]
- Zot! by Scott McCloud [ Graphic Novel ]
- The Newford Collection by Charles de Lint [ Urban Fantasy Short Stories ]
- Lush Life by Richard Price [ Thriller/Crime Fiction ]
- Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West [ Fiction ]
- The Years by Virginia Woolf [ Fiction ]
- The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann [ Biography/History ]
- The Debt to Pleasure by John Lancaster [ Fiction ]
- Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead [ Fiction ]
- A Better Angel: Stories by Chris Adrian [ Fiction Short Stories ]
- Dragonlance Chronicles & Legends by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman [ Fantasy ]
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy [ Fiction ]
- Death of a Cozy Author by G.M. Malliet [ Mystery ]
This has been one of the slowest reading summers in quite some while. I usually manage to read a bit more than this but being at work so much of the summer I sometimes struggle to read. Also, for most of July I was unable to read anything. I just found myself unmotivated and uninterested in everything I picked up. A reading summer-slump.
I have so many “half-started” books as I like to term them, chapters two and three being popular points of abandonment. Woolf, Lancaster, & Whitehead were some of the best works that I read this past summer and I recommend them to everyone. I’ve linked to the various postings and individual reviews.
Still, despite the fact that I fell into a bit of a summer-slump, I enjoyed this summer’s reading variety. Cheers.
“Imagined Reading”
I’ve mentioned on this blog at various times how I frequently wander over to the Washington Post Book Section and how I am a member of Michael Dirda’s “Reading Room”, a forum for all things literary. Each week Michael poses one or two threads about various aspects of reading:
- What books get you through tough times?
- What works shaped you as a reader?
- Snacking while enjoying a good book.
- Do movie ruin a good book?
And etc. For those as passionate about reading and literature as I am, it is a great resource for those: What would you put on your top 5 or 10 lists.
Recently Michael Dirda posted a thread asking “What are your ‘Get Well’ Books?” The following is from his post and I felt it was worth blogging and asking with my fellow readers: 
Hi, Reading Roomers. (Every time I write “Reading Roomers” I imagine semiologists trying to decipher the subtext of the latest gossip.) I’m still in Ohio with my Mom and— in the way of these things—have just learned that my middle son has broken his leg playing basketball. It’s not the worst break in the world, but it’s changed the complexion of Mike’s summer. Right now he’s been reading through The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes instead of getting ready to hike the Appalachian Trail. When you are sick or your life strands you in a place where you can’t really do much, what books do you imagine reading? Under what conditions would you like to recover as you read them?
So, let me piggy back off of his discussion, what are your ‘imaginary reads’?
I think that if I knew I was going to have a fairly long recovery time in a bed or a hospital (*knocks on wood&), that I would attempt some of the larger literary giants that have up until this point scared me off, largely due to their length: The Brothers Karmazov by Dostoevesky, Les Miserable by Hugo, Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon, The Regulations by Gaddis. These are all 500-700+ reads and while I’ve read books of that length before, these authors tend to be fairly well known for being dense. How about you Erin, in what imaginary future do you foresee yourself starting and finishing Oblomov or The Kindly Ones? Some day eh….someday 😉
I recently participated in that loathsome atrocity of the Internet that is known as a “meme”. Thank you for time-wasting activities Faith. 😉
The meme in question asked people to list 30 books that come to mind that they consider impacting on their lives, books that we “carry” with us everywhere, you know, those books that we consider foundational to our personalities. At least those of us who consider ourselves avid readers, bibliophiles if you will.
A number of people cited the standard canonical English Lit. Canon, and there is much in that list that deserves mentioning and most of us have at least 1/3 of our list devoted to such titles. 
One thing I saw absent from a number of people’s lists though were children’s books. Often times I think we forget how important those first few books, those first “giant” (or at least what we thought of as giant) reads were and how they subsequently shaped our entire reading future.
I thought I’d list off a few books from my childhood that I know helped shape who I am as a person and my passion for reading.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
This book is cliche to the point of tackiness. As if someone jumped into Norman Rockwell’s mind and said to him: “I want an image of Americana set in the mountains about a young boy and his love of dogs and the outdoors.” Rockwell projected his image into Wilson Rawls and there we have it. [ Reading that back I realize how stupid that comparison sounds, but it works somehow. ]
I have a worn out copy of this somewhere in a box and I mean worn, the pages are starting to fall out from having been read so much. I think that all children go through that phase where they desperately want for a young puppy. This book captures that feeling admirably and if you’re looking for a very simple and clean story, this is worth picking up, and it is about a day’s worth of reading.
A young boy who comes from a poor family that cannot afford any puppies, so the young boy listens to some common advice: God helps those who help themselves. And this is exactly what he does, works hard at his chores and at odd jobs so that he can save up enough to purchase the dogs himself. A simple enough story but it’s full of adventure, violence, love, death, so much more. Check it out. Cheers.
Jodi Picoult and the Tragic:
Reading an article in the New York Times about Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent, a look at a recent book trend:
“THE ENDANGERED OR ruined child has emerged as a media entity within a culture that has idealized the responsibilities of parenthood to a degree, as has been exhaustively noted, unprecedented in human history. The more we seek to protect our children, the more we fear the consequences of an inability to do so. Increasingly over the past decade, writers of crime fiction — Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane among many others — have made a recurring subject of children violated by predation, abandonment, neglect.” […] ““I think I gravitate toward these subjects because I’m looking for answers and I don’t have them,” Picoult told me. “But mostly I think it is superstition. There is a part of me that believes that if I think about these issues, if I put myself through the emotional ringer, I somehow develop an immunity for my own family.”
Picoult’s thoughts on putting herself “through the emotional ringer” is something that I often think about when reading literature. I’ve had many different discussions with my friends, most of whom are as passionate as I am about literature and one thing that consistently comes up is how the stories that resonate the most with us, as people, are the ones that are often the most violent, most emotionally crippling, or tragic.
There is no doubt that we all enjoy light comic reads from time to time, but personally, the stories that I re-read over and over again center on the tragedy. Two books that I can read over and over again, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas & The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien both rely heavily on tragic and often destructive story lines that take characters into intense and often destructive places. Yet, I turn to these books whenever I seek comfort because I take comfort in these characters and their ability to face these situations, whether they win or lose.
It seems that literature often depends on the Tragic, a way of working through these issues. Random thoughts.
“The strangest thing I’ve signed is a woman’s artificial leg,”
To Marty, This bespells doom! A recent reading in Manhattan at the Strand bookstore by David Sedaris, whose most recent book is “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” may have offered a glimpse of the future. A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” (The signed Kindle was photographed, but its owner’s full name is unknown.) CLICK FOR MORE
Reading Reflections
Just started The Road by Cormac McCarthy and my first thoughts; I’m truly blown away by the style of writing (sparse and fragmented) and how McCarthy is able to place the reader alongside the two traveler protagonists. Glad I settled on this after Sag Harbor, needed something dark to get away from the happy go light summer read that was Whitehead.
“The most thrilling of all known pursuits!”
Here is a list of authors I have wanted to read but for one reason or another I have simply not had the motivation to pick up:
- John Irving
- Ian McEwan
- Gabriel García Márquez
- John Updike
- Sherwood Anderson
- Joseph Heller
- Sylvia Plath
- Flannery O’Connor
- Amy Tan
- John Galsworthy
- Saul Bellow
- Toni Morrison
- Thomas Mann
- Hermann Hesse
- Ray Bradbury
- Isaac Asimov
- Harper Lee
- Thomas Hardy
- Somerset Maughm
- P. G. Wodehouse
- Gustave Flaubert
- Henry James
- Agatha Christie
- Mikhail Bulgakov
- Octavia E. Butler
- Daphne Du Maurier
I have a few of these authors on my shelves but I have just not had the inclination towards picking up these authors. I am sure many of you know this feeling as at times you just have to be in the right frame of mind for the right kind of book and author. These are all authors that have made a name for themselves and I have heard only the best of their works, but still for one reason or another, I have been unable to pick them up. Ah well, here’s hoping. I have a long life ahead of me, I hope, and I plan on checking these authors off as the years roll by. Feel free to make your own list and share them with me, cheers.
Also, I just discovered one of the most hiliarious web comics. Check out Wondermark.com
What happened to all those Rabbits and Portnoys and Rojacks and Wapshots and Herzogs?
Over at the Washington Post Book section I recently read two articles that can essentially be summed up by the following two bullet points:
1. Males don’t read. (Only 20% according to the article.)
2. It’s because we no longer have strong masculine fiction, we’ve moved away from the Hemingways, Roths, Updikes, & Bellows of the world.
Let me explain.
The first article is a review of a book entitled The Signal by Ron Carlson. It’s not so much the content of the book that is the focus of this post but the type of ideological critique of how men read and how women read (as if we still need to gender reading and intelligence in the sexes, so glad we’ve learned from our past mistakes and history).
Ron Charles, not to be mistaken with the author of the book that is being reviewed, starts his article by citing that he has accepted the fact that men do not read any more and that this battle was lost long ago as he writes: Norman Mailer published right on this spot!). Chuck Palahniuk and his “Pygmy” vibrator gags notwithstanding, polls suggest that only 20 percent of fiction readers are male. Ian McEwan warned in the Guardian that “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
But not to worry my fellow men, those 20% of us that are capable of reading intelligence, there is a solution. Take Ron Charles’s advice and read The Signal by Ron Carlson because there are some books out there just for us. This is when Mr. Charles refers to an article posted sometime last week by Michael Lindgren who seems to be mourning an older style of masculine fiction that he sees missing from the world of fiction and literature today. As he states:
What ever happened to the American Man? You know, the one who bullied and swore and drank his way through novels full of cigarette smoke, big cars and red meat? The one who’d abandon his family for a prostitute, or coerce his girlfriend into a threesome, or sleep with the housekeeper after murdering his wife? What happened to all those Rabbits and Portnoys and Rojacks and Wapshots and Herzogs? And does anyone really miss them?
Apparently Mr. Lindgren and Mr. Charles both miss this style of fiction. Both men seem to agree that what is missing from our literature is that rugged masculine style of fiction, the type referenced above. I think these gentleman fail to see something about all of the canonical American authors they cited above. People enjoy reading Hemingway, Roth, Mailer, Updike, not because of the types of rugged, misogynistic, arrogant, often homo-phobic male characters that they present to the reader, but IN-SPITE of them. 
Their fiction and writing is beautifully crafted and enjoyable to read, the only problem is that often they seem to be a product of their generation which for the most part has seen fit to perpetuate patriarchal systems of authority and socially constructed roles of gender.
I take offense to the fact that first off, men do not read, and secondly, when we do, we need to have fiction at less than 200 pages and that it must be focused on rugged outdoor activities or some antiquated notions of masculinity that rely on violence and sexuality as primary themes of interest.
Why are Mr. Charles and Lindgren mourning the fact that as a society, writers today have moved beyond these issues. I am certainly not saying that we couldn’t use more writers like Roth or Hemingway, god forbid, the more the merrier. But, that style of writing was appropriate back then, writing today should reflect our current concerns and issues, and I would like to think that as a society we’ve progressed beyond these types of gendered readings and associations. Sadly, these two writers for the Post have simply reinforced and reminded me that we have not.
Mr. Lindgren writes: that men want to be bad boys, kind of, but they can’t quite get there. They’re too comfortable, and they like women too much, to be engaged in all that operatic despair. Why is this a bad thing?
Read and form your own opinions but I for one could do without this type of gendered bigotry.
Seasonal Reading:
I was reading a column over in the book section at the Washington Post and Michael Dirda (writer, literary critic) asked people to post about reads that are appropriate for the month of may: “it is May—the springiest of springtime months—and I was thinking about books for this happy time of the year.”
Does your reading change with the seasons? As an academic whose calendar centers around the opening and closing of university, my answer will always be yes. With Summer comes lighter more fantastical readings. I tend to read more fantasy and science fiction this time of year. With Fall and Winter, my readings tend to be more serious and literary.
How about you? I know that Erin and myself both enjoy reading heavier works when it’s colder. There is something enjoyable about reading Russian literature in the winter, Dostoevsky’s prison experiences with the snow beating against the windows at night, it’s just beautiful and fitting.
Your seasonal readings or comments?
Cheers.
'ahems and ahahs' 