Memento Mori

If you are a Latin teacher, perhaps you teach the expression memento mori to your students. This reminder of mortality means nothing to most of them. Indeed, laughter sounded through the classroom as I translated the Latin tag, "Remember you must die." We don't think a lot about death, and as I absent-mindedly looked at the Latin, I realized that the gray-haired would ignore it, the dyed would deny it, and those with natural hair color would believe it never could happen to them. 

Muriel Spark, a Catholic writer, knew death would come. In her brilliant novel, Memento Mori, she eerily links a group of elderly recipients of anonymous phone calls which remind them they must die. Dame Lettie Colston, the first to receive the call, is outraged. She notifies the police and, when her brother, Godfrey, asks what the caller said, she replies, 

"The same thing. And quite matter-of-fact, not threatening. Of course the man's mad.... It's been going on for six weeks now."

"Just those words?" 

"Just the same words--Remember you must die--nothing more."

Eventually, all of the elderly characters in this black comedy receive the memento mori phone call. Although Godfrey, an intolerant octogenarian who despises his sweetly senile wife, Charmian, once a famous writer, does not like to think about death, he attends many funerals. And at the funeral of his former mistress, Lisa Brooke, he becomes determined to hire Lisa's attractive housekeeper, Mrs. Pettigrew, as a caretaker for Charmian. This is one of many false steps that leads to his downfall: confusing Mrs. Pettigrew's face-lifted tautness with beauty and her cruelty with pragmatism, Godfrey becomes vulnerable to blackmail.  And when he receives the phone call, Mrs. Pettigrew pretends to believe he is senile.  She, on the other hand, denies she received one:  she doesn't want anyone to know her age.   But the calmness of Godfrey's wife, Charmian--she is polite to Death on the phone--and the similar tranquility of Taylor, her former maid, now in a nursing home, reflect a kind of wisdom that is wrought of everyday realism and Catholic faith.  

Spark's glittering, terse prose is reminiscent of Ivy Compton-Burnett crossed with Patrick Hamilton.  There are no awkward words, there is no sentimentality, and  the precisely chiseled characters are completely realistic.

Classics, Genre Books, & Anthony Trollope

My light reading in September began to leave a saccharine taste in my mouth. Because I was working so hard and my brain was apparently dead, I read a lot of contemporary fiction.  My classics fell by the wayside. I felt slightly dissatisfied, but fell asleep every time I opened Dead Souls. I seemed to have no choice but to read Three to Get Deadly by Janet Evanovich (a fun novel, by the way). Finally I decided to compromise with Golden Age Detective Novels.  Yes, they're classics, but they're also plot-driven and can be read just as easily as the latest best-seller by Stieg Larsson.


As usual I am awed by the brilliance of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey series.  I could happily read one after another.  I am not surprised that people tend to go crazy on the Peter Wimsey listservs, calling themselves after Sayers' characters, Harriet Vane, Miss Murchison, Campbell, and others.  I loved The Five Red Herrings, the mystery of the murder of an obnoxious artist, Campbell, who alienates everybody in a village in Scotland and has several fights on the night of the murder.  This  entertaining novel is interwoven with train time tables, a forged painting in the style of the murder victim,  questionable alibis of six artists, and Peter Wimsey's humor and detection.  One should keep notes on the clues, but somehow the book is too fast-paced and enjoyable to bother.  After rereading the novel, I watched the PBS adaptation. Well, yes, of course I'm in love with Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey.  And this film is really so well-done:  every time I saw the red-bearded Carmichael I had to laugh, because he was simply so over the top.  I have heard there are some recent PBS films of Sayers' Harriet Vane novels and will have to check them out.  

Alice Vavasour in The Pallisers

I've also started rereading Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?  The experience is spellbinding--I can read this for hours--and I am completely sympathetic toward Alice Vavasour, though she is a sometimes unlikable heroine.  She cannot make up her mind whom to marry.  She's brilliant and rich, she needn't marry, and her history is complicated.  She broke off an engagement with her unfaithful cousin, George, and then became engaged to John Grey, a calm, reliable man.  Although she loves John Grey, she isn't sure she wants to retire with him to the country.  She breaks the engagement, influenced by her cousin, Kate, who urges her to marry George.  George, a cynic and a libertine, now wants to marry Alice for her money because he is running for Parliament.  

The musings about marriage seem very real to me.  Perhaps we approach it from a different angle now--should we marry the men we sleep with?--but nonetheless marriage is a serious question and many hesitate before taking the step.  Some prefer not to marry.  The commitment is too final.  This is partly the case with Alice. Alice wants to live in London and be the mistress of her own life.   She tries to convince herself that love does not matter.  She does not have the choice of sleeping with John Grey or George Vavasour before she marries, but we can see at one point that she is repulsed by George, whereas she is attracted to John when he holds her hand.  So how on earth can she consider marrying George?

Alice is not the only person confused about marriage.  A widowed aunt is pressuring Kate to marry a comical farmer who visits them every market day.  These scenes are especially droll because the farmer is courting the widow, not Kate, and the widow is attracted to a penniless man whom she sees on the sly.  Lady Glencora Palliser, an heiress, is heartbroken, married to a man she doesn't love, because she was bullied by her family to give up Burgo, the ne'er-do-well whom she adored. Alice, who believes that, once married, one puts other loves behind,  is scandalized by Glencora's confidences about her feelings for Burgo.  Glencora, one of my favorite characters in literature, is less lady-like than Alice. And she is honest about what she thinks and feels.

Can You Forgive Her? seems very modern.  The novel is realistic and absorbing, the style plain yet compelling and often humorous, and only occasional authorial intrusions remind us that the novel is 150ish years old.  What contemporary writer is a Trollope?  Perhaps Richard Russo.  He popped into my mind because his characters are so engaging, his prose so leisurely and yet precise, and a few of his novels are set in the fictitious Mohawk, New York, and similar depressed working-class towns.  A different class of characters, but just as intriguing.

Omaha Is Rome...

Jackson Street Booksellers, Omaha

Going to Omaha is a bit like going to Rome when you live in a small midwestern town.   It's a much more vibrant city than you might think from the insurance companies (Woodman) and gloomy buildings on the skyline in the Jack Nicholson movie, About Schmidt.  There are plenty of bookstores--the reason this post is appearing--as well as the Joslyn Art Museum, restaurants, coffeehouses, antique stores, and many  shops in a downtown area near the river.


We had originally planned to go to Minneapolis but who feels like that long drive on a Saturday morning?  There's no  "Are-we-there?'-ing when we go to Omaha--we're there before you know it.  


Our first stop:  A Stitch in Crime, one of the few mystery bookstores left in the midwest.  The owner carries many small-press titles I covet and also sells cross-stitch and embroidery supplies.  We've seen her stitching group--is it called Stitch and Bitch?--meeting on Saturday afternoon.  Today, however, it was just she and her cat.


I considered Corpse De Ballet, a novel with a ballerina detective, and wonder why on earth I didn't buy it. I also considered Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting, brilliantly marketed as a mystery,  but I had a feeling it would turn up at the used bookstore (it didn't).  In the end I bought David Wishart's Illegally Dead, a historical Roman mystery featuring the comic detective,  Marcus Corvinus.   His books are hard to find: this was an import.


Couldn't I have bought all those books?  Well, I'd made a deal.  One book at each store.  What a good idea!

Next:  Jackson Street Booksellers is a huge used bookstore, located downtown in a half-touristy shopping area near the river.  The books are on shelves so tall we can't see the top ones, the aisles are so narrow that one stumbles and can't pass another shopper without, "Excuse me.  I'll just climb over you here," and yet it's totally worth it.  I'm afraid I knocked over a stack in the aisle at one point but fortunately the owner ignored me while I picked up the pieces.  It was crowded, a good sign, and we broke the one-book-per-store vow by purchasing more than one William Golding title and a few other books which are now sitting across the room on the table and  I can't be bothered to list them.


And then--let me just mention the Currier & Ives exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum.  Yes, if you're on my Christmas card list, you are getting a Currier & Ives card this year.  There was also a very moving exhibit of 70 paintings drawings, and prints by Kent Bellows, an Omaha artist (1949-2005), whose "hyper-realistic" charcoal drawings and acrylic paintings look exactly like photographs.  Go here to see a gallery of his work.  

Reading Contemporary Blockbusters and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

I decided a few months ago to read one contemporary novel a week.  This has its ups and downs.  If I state the truth–and if you blog,  you might as well write what you think–it’s good for my journal but might hurt somebody’s feelings.  Occasionally a writer does show up here and I’ve been very pleased to read her comments.  But on the other hand, what if I trash the book?

So far, no twitters saying, “Never go to this blog.”  

Since I prefer older books, which are often better-written (some people were better-educated back in the day), I have a difficult time adjusting to the simpler style and uneven structure of popular new books.  Take Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  I got my library copy today.  Everybody LOVES this book, so shouldn’t I be excited?  I enjoyedThe Corrections.  I threw up on one copy–literally, I was sick–and had to buy another copy.  Well, here’s what I think.  Freedom looks ordinary.  Okay, I’ve only read ten pages.  But he’s not Michael Cunningham or Peter Carey, for God’s sake.

I loved Franzen for saying 10 years ago on the radio that The Corrections wasn’t really meant to be an Oprah book.  I understand the kind of person who says what he thinks and then suddenly has a hundred powerful enemies (like Oprah).  But I can’t stand the marketing of Freedom.  Critics and writers were already calling this a classic before the damned thing was published.  And it’s an Oprah book.  That really doesn’t recommend it to me at this point

So I’m staring at this book and think I’ll wait a bit to read it.  

So the novel of the week is more obscure,  Mary Helen Stefaniak’s enjoyable novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia.  It is neither very good nor very bad.  I read part of it at Barnes & Noble, decided it wasn’t worth buying, then did a turn-around and decided I wanted to read her portrait of Miss Spivey, a one-room schoolhouse teacher in Georgia in 1938.  

It’s very difficult to believe in Miss Spivey.  She is radical, a free spirit ahead of her time, a WPA teacher who winds up in Threestep, Georgia. She reads The Thousand and One Nights to her students–she recently made a long trip to Baghdad– and structures her school year around the theme of Baghdad.  She plans a bazaar based on The Arabian Nights and gets the town involved with painting, building, and electricity.  But just before the bazaar she stages a kind of sit-in, bringing Negroes into her classroom, and almost loses her job.  The town decides they can’t do without her for the big Baghdad bazaar, as she has even tracked down some camels and brought them in for the show.  Miss Spivey is part Miss Jean Brodie and part Mary Poppins.

Stefaniak takes the easy way out:  instead of showing us Miss Spivey’s point of view, she presents her through the eyes of the narrator, 11-year-old Gladys Cailiff.  So you know where you are:  a perspicacious Southern child observes the teacher, not always understanding what she sees and hears, and it’s all very cute and sentimental.

I do enjoy this book, and if you like any of those book group-y kind of books, like Water for Elephants and The Lace Reader, you’ll enjoy this novel.  I haven’t finished it, and I’m thinking Miss Spivey is going to turn into a Miss Brodie:  there are plenty of hints.  But we shall see.

The Kramer Girls

"Ruth Suckow is a living answer to those critics who have damned the small town as a place where no artist can flourish."

Yes, I love this, too. This dramatic quote appears on one of the back pages of my 1930 copy of Ruth Suckow's The Kramer Girls. Pasted on the opposite page is something so charming I felt the need to photograph it: an index card labeled "Portage Book Club" with a list of names and dates of members who borrowed this novel in 1930 and 1931.


Portage, Wisconsin, is a small town of 9,000, located north of Madison. I love to think of the Portage Book Club passing around this book in 1930. Suckow, a minister's daughter and beekeeper who lived in Iowa for many years and wrote short stories and novels about small towns in Iowa, was encouraged to write by H. L. Mencken. Born in Hawarden, Iowa, and raised in small towns, including Grinnell, where she went to college, she was living in New York when this novel was published in 1930.

There are 20 names on the Portage Book Club index card. Seven of them borrowed this book. They are (I've guessed at some of the names that are illegible with age):

Margaret R.J. 1/24-1/31/31
Ethel Kerr Oct. 18, '30
Mattie K. H. Oct. 25, '30
Narisa K. S. Nov. 1, '30
Ethel Klemment Nov. 8, '30
Mamie Mae G. Nov. 10, '31
Metu H. J. Nov. 25, '30

I will write more about this charming novel later. It's very complex, despite Suckow's very plain style--plainer than her 1942 novel, New Hope (which I wrote about here, here, and here), which I would recommend you start with. The Kramer Girls tells the story of three sisters, of whom the older two, the dominating Georgie and the good-natured Annie, sacrifice themselves to care for their paralyzed mother at home so the youngest, Rose, can go to college.

This novel must have meant so much to women of my grandmother's generation. Like Rose, my grandmother taught school. Suckow describes in detail social events like church suppers, Rose's dates with a "bad" boy and later reluctance to marry, her receiving the Phi Beta Kappa key, Georgie's envy and thrill at vicariously living through Rose.

Wouldn't the book club's descendants be thrilled by this book?

It's Not about the Books

It's not about the books.  It's about the space.

There's always a place for a new book, right?  Only sometimes there isn't.  My husband stumbles upon my Amazon boxes or Abebooks packages before they are recycled and sighs.   He does not share my passion for owning books. His call for frugality should be printed on a ball cap. 

"No more books." 


I sometimes feel like the woman standing beside the farmer with the pitchfork in Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Then a new unsolicited review copy arrives and suddenly I, too, am dismayed by the plethora of books.

There are bookcases in every room except the bathroom. If a guest feels like reading Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons over dinner, it's right there on the second shelf of the cabinet to the left of the table. Maybe he/she wants to read The Diary of Virginia Woolf over coffee.  That would be in the third box on the left on the porch. 

I now have two tables covered with books because I honestly can't think of anywhere else to put a shelf.  Unless I get rid of the TV.

So I've made a temporary vow.  It's the kind of vow that all of us make from time to time to the household gods.  I WILL stop buying new books.  And I WILL be taking estimates on that addition to the house, by the way.

How did this new mysterious unsolicited book end up here?  A publicist got my name somewhere--I don't remember dealing with this publisher before so it's probably from a very old list. Alas, I don't want the book. It doesn't look good, it doesn't look bad, someone's going to love it, but I cannot accept more books from publishers.  

"It was kind of you to send an advance copy of _____, but I have a backlog of books to review.  Please take my name off your publicity list."

That's the note going out to publicists.  I'm not on that many publicity lists, am I?   

Meanwhile, it's time to get back to Mrs. Oliphant, Ruth Suckow, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and some of the other hard-won old favorites.

Homer's Daughter

Robert Graves' small masterpiece, Homer's Daughter, is not in print. This is not surprising. Graves' compelling novels about men, I, Claudius, Claudius the God, and King Jesus are still in print. But the feminist classics are disappearing in the wake of desperate pop publishing decisions that have, if Publishers Weekly is to be believed, nearly bankrupted them.


Publishers are mad not to exploit the commercial potential of this absorbing, well-written, mythic masterpiece, a perfect candidate for revival in the current classics boom that embraced David Malouf's much-revered novel, Ransom, and a misguided remake of the film, Clash of the Titans.  In Graves’ feminist novel, The Odyssey is not the work of Homer, but of Nausicaa, an intellectual princess and rescuer of the shipwrecked Odysseus in Book VI of The Odyssey.  She has listened all her life to bards’ poems about Odysseus’ homecoming.  Nausciaa reshapes the narrative to accommodate her own experiences and to invigorate the characters of women like Penelope. According to the post-Homeric sagas recited by a guild of traveling bards known as the Sons of Homer, Penelope was found “living riotously with fifty lovers, all of whom he killed on his return to Ithaca.” And then Odysseus sent her home to her father.  Not so in Homer/Nausicaa's Odyssey, in which Penelope forever unwinds her weaving at night to delay her suitors--a trick Nausica also plays to deceive her rustic suitors.

Graves speculated that the Odyssey was composed 150 years later than the Iliad and was written by a woman.  Apollodorus informs us that the scene of the poem was traditionally Sicily;  Samuel Butler in 1896 comfirmed this from his own research and speculated that a woman was probably the author.  Graves came to the same conclusion while compiling a dictionary of Greek myths.  

Nausicaa, a princess and priestess of Athena, is the lively narrator of a political drama that comprises the disappearance of her brother, her father's departure on a quest to find his son, political manipulations of rustic suitors, squashed coups, strangers, and returns.  As Graves says in his Historical Note:  "Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

This novel is exactly the kind of thing that should be in vogue.  Retellings of myths are popular this year.  David Malouf's Ransom (reviewed here), a reworking of the episode in the Iliad about Priam's ransom of Hector's body, was hailed in The New Yorker as a great novel.  John Banville's The Infinities (reviewed here ) is even better, I think, though the New Yorker writer liked it rather less.  

An aside:  I am reading this novel in the company of the former owner of the book. She marked it with red ink, random underlinings, and comments that usually are along the lines of “Interesting!” but left one charming note that almost makes me forgive her.  She defines “oleaster:  a small Eurasian tree having oblong silver leaves...”


I wouldn't have bought this edition, however, if I had known there were notes in the margins. How I hate that!

Why Blog? Bacchantes of the Book World

Bloggers all over cyberspace, the boundaries of which are infinite, have considered the question, "Why blog?" Who posed this question first?  Socrates, Kant, or dovegreyreader?  I’m never in the vanguard and this question trickled down to me through a charming essay at Stuck in a Book , in which Simon, an Oxford student, considers his position as the  writer of an engaging blog in which he gracefully conveys his boundless enthusiasm for books. Although he may be the youngest and among the most exuberant of the writers on my Blogroll, all of them read and blog as if inspired and frenzied by a God of Reading, whoever that might be.  They are the Bacchantes of the Book World.

Some bloggers write actual reviews, others keep a journal of their notes or impressions (I'm the impressionistic type). Many admit they prefer writing without the pressure of reviewing for newspapers or magazines, a task which entails tact and tempering criticism to be fair, overpraising because one is intimidated by the fame of the writer, or, worse, overemphasizing the flaws because trashing is amusing.  There is less negative “attitude” in the U.S. book pages because space has shrunk to a premium and why waste space on bad books (unless they’re by really famous people)? But I’m constantly shocked by the slash-and-burn reviews in UK newspapers of pretty good books.  In the U.S., book reviewers have begun to adopt a more conciliatory tone.  In the UK, ironically, it is often bloggers who are wishy-washy.  (Sebastian Faulks, in his excellent novel, A Week in December, portrays a book reviewer who lives to eviscerate books--no doubt a writer's nightmare.)

I love to complain about book whores, though I don't really care one way or the other:  some bloggers are one-man-or-woman PR firms.  I watch with fascination as self-referential English bloggers (Americans don’t go in for this so much) make self-congratulatory lists of books they’ve received free from publishers (who cares?) and assure us that all of the many books of which they’ve no doubt read a paragraph or two are excellent.   

In a way I understand them.  If there’s a lot of traffic at one's blog and publishers and writers drop by, it’s embarrassing to remember that one's review might not have been 150 percent positive.  And so one might gradually become a PR flack.

On the other hand, who cares if one blogger reviews and another does PR?  Blogs are personal, self-edited, and free--and can be whatever the bloggers choose!

I’d like to change the name of my blog to Book Whore because I believe I coined the phrase, but as my husband pointed out, I’m not one.  I no longer accept any free books from publishers  because it makes me unhappy to stare at a shelf of books I will probably never read.  There are just too many good books in the world to waste time on the mediocre, especially if one isn't getting paid 

Brenda Peterson, D. H. Lawrence, & Miscellaneous

High on my TBR list is Brenda Peterson's Animal Heart, a novel about a wildlife pathologist's investigation of "an eerie mass stranding of whales and dolphins," according to the cover flap.  And it went to the top of the list today because Brenda Peterson stopped by and left a comment on my review of her new memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth. In this charming and innovative memoir, she interweaves an engaging narrative about her upbringing as the daughter of a well-educated fundamentalist forester with thoughts on the origin of her lifelong reverence for animals, her rebellion against religion, and her work as a writer and an environmentalist. Her ideas about disseminating positive pro-active information about ecology are sensible:  many of us emphasize what not to do as opposed to what to do. Thank you for stopping by, Brenda!  In theory I know that some people read my blog, but in reality I don't believe it. You can visit her website at Iwanttobeleftbehind.

We've been bicycling lately because we're having a hot April. The day goes like this:  start with your sweatshirt zipped up and pedal along a trail for a couple of hours to a pretty small town.  By the time you get there it's hot enough to sun oneself in one's shirtsleeves. My bicycling book of the moment is Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, which I carry around in my panniers as my paperback for breaks. Reading Hardy this winter made me think of Lawrence, who considered Hardy the only good writer of the 19th century, if I remember correctly. One of Lawrence's best novels is Sons & Lovers, the story of a miner's son, Paul Morel, who is loved too much by his mother.  The first part of the novel is actually the story of his mother Gertrude's agony as the wife of a drunken miner and her passion for her children.  I'm still reading about Paul's childhood, but I do remember Paul later in the novel is miserable in his teaching job and embarks on an affair with a woman to whom his mother objects.  Freeing himself from his mother is one of the main conflicts of the book.  Typical anti-family-pro-sex-preaching Lawrence!  But the situation is realistic and I understand all too well.  His writing is exquisite and poetic, but I can't read him endlessly.  Hardy is poetic, but less obtrusive. 

April, the cruellest month, is National Poetry Month, so I should be reading T. S. Eliot.  But being a big fan of I, Claudius, I’m reading Robert Graves’ quiet, undemanding poems instead.  The language washes over me, but I don’t have to think (as I do with T. S.). And, weirdly, it reminds me a bit of Lawrence’s.   

Sebastian Faulks

People love or hate Sebastian Faulks. I heard such incredible things about him in the '90s that it led of course to disappointment. Birdsong, declared the 13th most popular novel in Britain in a BBC "Big Read" survey in 2003, let me down when I read it: one of my friends recommended this as a "sexy" novel, had fallen in love with the hero (her own husband was busy managing a hospital and God knows what else), and praised it to the skies. What I noticed about Birdsong was that the affair between the hero and the French woman turned sentimental very quickly.  The man was basically emotionally a woman.  I don't mean the woman was "on top," or anything like that:  I simply mean he was more emotional than the average man.  

But the novel was very well-written--rather as Pat Conroy's are.  Yet there is a point where these two writers deliberately turn away from literary and go pop, though they’re perfectly capable of writing a literary novel.  I like pop novels but World War I romance isn't one of my genres.  So I dismissed this.

To further complicate my feelings toward Faulks, he wrote the new James Bond novel a year or two ago.  Ugh, ugh, ugh!

But his new novel, A Week in December, is exactly my cup of tea.  Reading between the lines of reviews, I knew I would enjoy it.  I love books with ensemble casts of characters, especially when the author takes the time to describe their professions in detail and to a certain extent defines the characters by work.  And Faulks does a convincing job in this novel, set the week before Christmas in 2007, of showing us the characters' attitudes toward work.    

Jenni Fortune loves her job.  She is an Underground Tube driver.  A thoughtful woman who loves books but also plays a complicated internet “virtual reality” game at night, she is tense because a “jumper” was injured on the tracks during her drive.  Ironically, the jumper is suing the railroad, because Jenni couldn’t stop the train in time to avoid hitting him (nor could anyone, and she knows this).  Although the lawyer, Gabriel, explains that she isn’t responsible nor is she being sued, Jenni can’t quite take it in.  Gabriel is a depressive.  He doesn’t care about his job.  He doesn’t understand people who love their work.  And he is interested in Jenni.  She doesn’t fit into the class of people he knows best.  And she is a reader, staring at his Balzac books in his office.

One of the main characters, Veals, is an emotionally dead financier who lives to make semi-legal trades--and Faulks is very detailed in his explication of Veals’ job.  We learn, too, all about his paranoia--he never says anything important in his office, because the place is bugged and his employees could gossip.  He prefers to do his business on an orange phone in an alley.  His son is a dope fiend (well, he smokes a lot of marijuana and has made deals at a pet cemetery).  His wife is appalled by her family.

My favorite character is the terrible but funny Tranter, a book reviewer who lives to eviscerate novelists. He seems to be right out of the pages of Anthony Powell and is a kind of small-time Veals, who trades on a much smaller level--criticizing literature.   He lives off a number of freelance review assignments, combined with gigs running an upscale women’s book group and editing teachers’ comments on reports at a fancy private (or public, as they say in England) school.  He is one of the funniest characters in this novel.  Reading the newspaper, he focuses on the book review pages.

“None of this interested Tranter.  His years in the business had trained him to go straight to the fiction pages, which he read with the eye of a fund manager scanning market prices.  The difference was that Tranter had no investment and no favorite; he didn’t want to see a modest growth, still less a boom.  He was interested only in bad reviews.  Crash was what he wanted:  crash and burn--failure, slump, embarrassment.”

See what a good writer he is?  Fluid and precise.  I’m only halfway through this novel but it’s one of the most entertaining I’ve read this year.

Now i’m going to have to go back and read Faulks’ other stuff.  I have read Charlotte Grey and I liked it.

Greensleeves, Library Snaps, and Damned Good Books

"So does Greensleeves do that?" my husband asks.

"What?" 

"Or Green Jeans." 

"Who?"

I'm snapping a picture of my library books. It’s a satisfying stack of library books--the kind of musty out-of-print middlebrow English novels I read for comfort, as well as a book of Elizabeth Bowen's letters.  I gloat over my treasure.  I vaguely register what he has said.  I have no idea who Greensleeves is.  Green Jeans is a character from Captain Kangaroo.

Finally it occurs to me he's talking about bloggers. He persists in believing the bloggers are some kind of virtual reality show. This Greensleeves thing is coming up a lot. Now all women bloggers are known as "Greensleeves" and all men as "Green Jeans."  

“Pictures of library books are a blogger stand-by. It's endemic to the blogging system. You feel like blogging, but haven’t read any books today.  So you take pictures of books.”

“But you’re always reading,” my husband objects. "And does anybody want to see pictures of library books?"

"Sure they do.  They like to see any pictures of books."

Okay.  I admit it.  I’m reading Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December, but I'm not ready to blog about it. His  Birdsong was a great favorite of my friends, but somehow it never appealed to me.  Then I got around to Charlotte Grey, which was a damned good read.  A Week in December, however, is something altogether more--a Hensherish/Drabbleish sociological fictional portrait of London, with a fascinating gamut of characters ranging from a tube driver who loves to read to a financier who barely observes the letter of the law to a drab lawyer to a snotty book reviewer who devotes his reviews to the evisceration of contemporary novelists.  I spent an hour reading it in the car on our way to the university library 40 miles away and could barely tear myself away.

The university library is a great luxury.  If only we could move to the university town!  But it’s too far away for a commute--what’s the point of living in a small city if you’re going to commute the distance you did in the big city?  We haven’t been to this library in a while, because the last time we came we forgot our library cards.  This university library is very fussy.  They won’t accept a driver’s license instead of a library card.  They won’t issue library cards on the spot--they have to vet you, as though you’re Sarah Palin.  (The ghastly Repubs certainly didn’t vet her very well, and thank God for that!)

Checking out books here is very trying.

I didn't quite make it to the American literature section.  My attention wandered here and there in the English stacks, and I was first drawn to this Hogarth Press edition of E. F. Benson's An Autumn Sowing. Not that I've had much luck with Benson.  I love his Lucia novels but have never made it through any of his other books. And I was a bit daunted by John Julius Norwich's daring words in the Introduction.  Brace yourself:

"...indeed, I know of no other novel that reminds me so much of Jane Austen, or that strikes me so forcibly as being exactly the sort of book that she would have written had she lived a century later than she did."  

Hm.  But I decided to let it pass.

A. A. Milne's Two People has been roundly praised by Hannah Stoneham and Stuck in a Book.  Inspired by these two excellent reviewers, I decided to take a chance on this, though I've never had a desire to read Milne's adult books (because I didn't really like Winnie-the-Pooh.  I keep hoping to go back to it, though). Capuchin Classics has reprinted Two People, as I see from jumping over to their reviews.  And their editions are always lovely!

As for Rose Macaulay, I adore her!  Some of her books are good, some are medium, and others are just plain bad, but I like her saucy point of view and took a chance with I Would Be Private.  Going strictly on the Macaulay brand name here.

I was very keen on getting Love's Civil War, the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and her Canadian lover, Charles Ritchie.  Perhaps this will inspire an Elizabeth Bowen revival.

And that's it!  Tomorrow:  More on Sebastian Faulks.