The end of “Books I’m reading”.

I thought it was pretty cool when other people did it. When there were cute little pictures of the books people are currently reading sitting there in the sidebar. I thought that was cute and I wanted to do it, too, but it backfired.

I was not meant to have little pictures of what I’m currently reading in my sidebar. If it’s posted, it doesn’t get read. It’s that simple. I can be 300 pages into a book and if I post it, it doesn’t get finished. I can make a conscious and sincere effort to finish the books in my sidebar – nothing will get in my way! – and when I go to pick it up again for the first time since posting the picture in my sidebar, the book has mysteriously disappeared. I kid you not.

So I’m going to get ready to do away with that. I like the way it livens up the blog a little bit, though, so I’m considering replacing it with my recent book purchases, which I think is equally interesting.

Christmas meme.

 

This is stolen from the beautiful Books. Lists. Life. blog.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. It’s way more fun to tear into a present than to lift it out of the bag… not that I complain about either.

2. Real tree or Artificial?
Real. We’ve had artificial, and it’s a pain in the ass to put together.

3. When do you put up the tree?
A couple of weeks into December, but we put it up early for my Christmas part this year.

4. When do you take the tree down?
New Year’s Day.

5. Do you like eggnog?
I’ve never tried it. It doesn’t sound too appealing.

6. Favourite gift received as a child?
The American Girl Dolls, of course.

7. Hardest person to buy for?
My mom. She says she’s the easiest because she likes EVERYTHING, but that’s why she doesn’t give me any sort of idea of what she would like.

8. Easiest person to buy for?
My brother. Piece of cake. Every time.

9. Do you have a nativity scene?
Yes, in the living room.

10. Mail or email Christmas cards?
Mail.

11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
Don’t even get me started on that. I wanted a puppy so badly one Christmas when I was about six, and it was the only thing I asked for. Christmas morning I wake up looking for my puppy and find a little stuffed animal. I was pissed.

12. Favourite Christmas Movie?
The Family Stone, Christmas Vacation.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
This year it was late November.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Nope.

15. Favourite thing to eat at Christmas?
Candy from my stocking.

16. Lights on the tree?
Yep. White lights AND beads.

17. Favourite Xmas song?
That stupid Mariah Carey song. I love it. Or “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
Home.

19. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer?
Rudolph, Blitzen, Donner, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Prancer… Blitzen… am I just making names up now?

20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
We have a teddy-bear angel.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Morning! What the hell???

22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year?
I HATE wrapping presents. I love seeing them pile up under the tree, I love opening them, and love giving people presents with pretty paper, but I HATE wrapping them.

23. Favourite ornament theme or colour?
I like all of our shiny ornaments. Our tree is very pretty, with white lights and a lot of clear, gold or silver ornaments.

24. Favourite memory of Christmas?
Christmas parties at my aunt’s house… before our branch of the family was exiled.

25. What do you want for Christmas this year?
I wanted a subscription to The New Yorker, a pretty Anthropologie necklace, and a bunch of surprises.

BIRD BY BIRD/PEP TALKS, WARNINGS AND SCREEDS.

First I read Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I love finding a good book about the writing life versus the craft. It’s inspiring and motivating, but it’s not the same old bullshit about Setting, Characters, Dialogue, Conflict, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah. I really kind of hate that. Anyone who’s read a damn book knows about setting and character and all. Not to say that they can all construct it effectively, but I doubt reading about it a million and one times helps anymore than reading effective story elements themselves.

But I digress.

Ann Lamott’s book is great, even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in writing yourself. It is laugh-out-loud funny. Hildie Block (Google her) recommended the book to me several years ago (wow, years?) and I should have read it immediately. But whatever, it’s doing me some good now.

 It was a tough act to follow, I admit, so the next book on writing I read, while enjoyable, paled slightly in comparison. George Singleton’s Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds: Indispensible Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers was cute, funny, all that good stuff… Worth a read, I think, if you like these kinds of books. A quick read, anyway.

But here’s a question for you: I hear very frequently that you need to start with short stories. Don’t like short stories? Too f-ing bad, that’s how it works. But then more recently I have been hearing that there’s no real sense in starting with short stories if it’s not really your “thing.” If you’re dying to write a novel, there’s just as slim a chance of getting that in print as there is of getting a short story in print, so what the hell. Does anyone know any more about this than I do? (Ahem, Amy Shearn?)

Save money by reading!

This article inspired me to take a much-needed inventory of my bookshelves. Listed below are the books that immediately struck me upon quickly browsing to see which books I already own that I am super-anxious to get to… now that I remember that I have them.

Fiction

Nada: Carmen Laforet  
 On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan
 Atonement: Ian McEwan
 Against the Day: Thomas Pynchon
 Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell
 Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque: Paul Anderson
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Irving Stone
 Academy X: Andrew Trees
 The Beautiful and the Damned: F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Veronica: Mary Gaitskill
 Theft: Peter Carey
 Wonder Boys: Michael Chabon
 Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier

Nonfiction

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath  
 The Art of Love: Ovid
 Virgin: the Untouched History: Hanne Blank
 Shop Talk: Philip Roth
 Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England: Sharon Marcus
 Women Troubadors: Magda Bogin
 Misquoting Jesus: Bart D. Ehrman
 Literary Feuds: Anthony Arthur
 Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women: Elizabeth Wurtzel 

To Finish Reading

Small World: David Lodge
Pearl: Mary Gordon
Bleak House: Charles Dickens
The Madwoman in the Attic
The Last of Cheri: Colette
Mansfield Park: Jane Austen

To Re-read

 Absalom, Absalom!: William Faulkner
The Puttermesser Papers: Cynthia Ozick 
How to Make an American Quilt: Whitney Otto
This Side of Paradise: F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway
Inferno: Dante Alighieri
Catch 22: Joseph Heller 

Favorite author meme.

This was stolen from 1 more chapter… even though I have no clue how to answer it.

1. Do you have a favorite author? That is absolutely impossible. And usually, I can be a sport and pick an author I love off the top of my head just to play along, but this is really impossible. I’ll talk about two people: Colette, who I thought could potentially be my favorite author but I’m not liking so much now; and Shakespeare, who I avoided like the plague for so long and can’t help but love now.

2. Have you read everything he or she has written? Not by a long shot. They’re both so damn prolific – don’t you hate that? I mean, how am I supposed to be a die-hard fan when they went around writing every day of their freaking lives?! (It was a joke, Jesus – watch, now people are going to throw a fit.) The more Colette I read the less I liked it; everything was less-good than what I read before. Loved The Pure and the Impure, loved the Claudine books, not big on the Cheri books, which are some of the most popular. Shakespeare, on the other hand, I avoided until I took a class on his early works in college, and I couldn’t help but love everything we read.

3. Did you LIKE everything? I guess I already answered that about Colette. My favorite thing so far that Shakespeare has written was Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare meets Resevoir Dogs. I was also surprisingly fond of The Merchant of Venice.

4. How about a least favorite author? Stephen King, hands down. I’m not being a snob here, either, I swear I’ve tried time and time again to read his crap. But it’s CRAP.

5. An author you wanted to like, but didn’t? Not so much authors but books. I hated On the Road. Oh, here’s one: Walt Whitman. Doesn’t matter how much I read, I just don’t like him. It’s physically painful for me to read Leaves of Grass. Oh, another one! Elfriede Jelinek! What the hell is her problem? I mean, really… Jesus… that woman has problems or something. If you haven’t read her, you almost have to. I mean, you have to read her to believe it. I swear to God, she is what becomes of serial killers with literary leanings. Good Lord. Everyone go read her now and tell me what you think. Uggh.

Bookshelf meme.

I have stolen this from A Striped Armchair since I never get tagged for anything. (It’s okay, I’m around pretty sporadically.) I thought it looked like fun.

The book that’s been on your shelves the longest: I think mine, as well, is an old, beaten-up copy of Little Women. When my great-aunt was alive, she had a copy that was over 100 years old, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. So I made a conscious effort to hang onto my copy until it turned 100. I think I’m looking at another 30 years or so.

A book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time, etc.): The “Great Love” of my life – not the one that counts, but the one that sets the precedent for the rest – requested that I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. This was his way of telling me that I had always understood him. Long story, don’t hold it against me.

A book you acquired in some interesting way (gift, serendipity in a used bookstore, prize, etc.): Hm. Off the top of my head, Tropic of Capricorn. It was one of those bittersweet moments when, after my boyfriend gave me a sweater for Christmas that his mother had picked out, his best friend, who was crazy about me, gave me a copy of Tropic of Capricorn after watching me pour over books on Anais Nin and Henry Miller and finally finish a copy of Tropic of Cancer. Put the nature of the books out of your head – it was sweet.

The most recent addition to your shelves: Probably New Moon. I was going to hold off for a while after having finished Twilight, but one of my students started on it right away and demanded that I join her.

The book whose loss would traumatise you the most: Good question. The loss of any book would traumatize me. Let’s say, again off the top of my head, the David Lodge book that Professor Mathur gave to me when I graduated. I miss her.

A book that’s been with you to the most places: Another good question. There are probably others that have been more places with me, but I’m going to say Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene makes the most sense, only because I was working on that damn paper for so long. It went with me EVERYWHERE for four or five months.

A bonus book that you want to talk about but doesn’t fit into the other questions: Mick Foley stopped the line at the signing to chat with me about his novel Tietam Brown. That was pretty awesome. Good book, by the way.

THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS by Ann Patchett.

Let me begin by saying this: I <3 Ann Patchett. Reading Bel Canto was practically a life-changing experience for me. It showed me the kind of writer I wanted to become. (Granted, I have since come to accept that I write the way I write and can only improve upon that, not writing like Ms. Patchett. But the way she constructed an entire layered and complex microcosm continues to affect me.) I also read Truth and Beauty, which was fantastic; it’s no small feat to present an enjoyable read with a character as unsympathetic as Lucy Grealy was for me.

The Patron Saint of Liars was Ann Patchett’s first novel. After meeting her, I decided to read her books beginning to end. I was enthralled and inspired at her reading of Run. I stood at the end of the line for the signing, my father next to me, behind a woman who was out of her damn mind. (Ms. Patchett was very kind to her.) I approached the table with my new copy of Run and my old copy of Bel Canto. I didn’t quite know what to say, and I don’t know that I could tell you what I did end up saying. All I remember is that my dad immediately blurted out the exact thing he was instructed not to say.

Ann Patchett: Hello, how are you? It’s nice to be last, we can chat.
Dad: (gesturing toward me) You know, she’s a writer, too!

 Uggh.

This was in late 2007, before I even graduated, so I guess it took me a while to get back to Ann Patchett’s novels.

As I said, I adore Ann Patchett, but now her record is two-for-three with me. Make no mistake, her style is impeccable as ever in The Patron Saint of Liars, but there’s not much else to it. That is, not enough to make it terribly memorable, to set it apart from everything else I’ve ever read.

Rose spends her life looking for a sign from God, and thinks that Thomas Clinton is it. So she marries him. When she finds out she is pregnant, she fully realizes the depth of her mistake and takes off for a home for unwed mothers on the other side of the country. Women come to have their babies and give them up, which is Rose’s original plan although her plans eventually change.

The story is told in three parts, narrated by Rose, the caretaker of St. Elizabeth’s, and fifteen-year-old Cecilia. The three voices are amazingly distinctive. The prose is beautiful. But it strikes me as one of those novels that populates itself with quirky characters and bizarre minor occurrences to compensate for the fact that there is little substance to the overarching structure of the novel.

I still intend to get around to Taft eventually.

A neat finding.

I thought this Daily Lit dealie was pretty neat. You pay about the price you would if the book were used, and you read it by email or RSS as you please. Pretty cool.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to do a whole lot of that. Remember I’m the sick-o who needs to own the books she has read, like trophies. (I know, I know… my psychologist had a field day with that one.) I could see myself being able to do that, however, with, for example, the Skinny Bitch books, which I have been curious about and wanting to peek at. Even that, however, will not be doable for me till after Christmas.