Fifty Books: January
There's a challenge going around to read fifty books in a year. (Not counting any required reading you might have to do.) I really don't think that's going to be hard. This month I read:
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. It's her first novel, and the only one of hers (I think) that I hadn't read. I don't think Kingsolver gets enough credit, compared to other people writing domestic realist fiction: Franzen, say, or Updike. Some part of me, an angry part, thinks it's because her stories are so female, full of mothers and daughters and sisters and domestic complication, and also people who don't make much money. But mostly I think it's because she has such a breezy, easy style, a kitchen-table style. Guess what: making it look easy is hard work.
Anyway, The Bean Trees specifically has an odd contrivance or two and generally feels like a first novel. Not half as good as my favourite, Animal Dreams. But while Kingsolver isn't a sky-walking bodhisattva of a writer, like Alice Munro, she remains my favourite living American novelist. I know, I know, I should like Toni Morrison more than I do -- but Kingsolver's the's the one I'd gladly hope in an old Ford and head out cross country with.
High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver. She also writes essays. I love essays. I found both these books at the wonderful Bluestem Bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska. Used and Rare and maybe 20 linear feet of poetry. My kind of place.
Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. Actually James is reading this to me at night, so it might not really count. Also we're still ten pages from the end, but we should finish tonight, so I'll put it in January. YA fantasy/adventure, swashbuckling, lighter-than-air, lovely, makes me want to give up on Plain Kate. Sweet as Indiana Jones. Just fun.
Russian Fairy Tales collected by Aleksandr Avanasev and translated by Norbert Gutzman. From the Pantheon series, always a good first stop in a new folklore. A big book, seven hundred pages, of which only 30 or so at the back are commentary. The real thing, a collectors' lifetime of folktales. I've been reading this for so long that I owe the library nearly enough to buy it, despite the occasional belated renewal. So buy it I did (at the Bluestem, again: it's down under the bridge in the Haymarket), and I finished it this week. About the tales -- Yikes! And more Yikes! Not as familiar as the Grimm tales, but with that same inevitability, rightness, like something happening in a dream. They get under your skin. And they make me want to keep going with Plain Kate. I've got to use some of this stuff!
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. This is one of those books that makes me want to call up random people and read them bits. And not just occasionally -- ever other page. But not for the exquisite prose (though it is, in an invisible sort of way) -- for the glimpse of a teenaged heart. How rare! I wanted to go to East Village, which I'm absolutely convinced is real, and buy Nomi a bus ticket to Montreal. Or New York. I wanted her to get her dream, to have everyone say: "Hey, isn't that Lou Reed and his Mennonite family of roadies?" I'd lend this book to everyone I know, except it isn't mine: Kim leant it to me. And I don't think it's hers, either. It's one of those "you've got to read this" sort of books, passed hand to hand.
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield. Essays -- did I mention I love essays? -- from my favourite poet. Rich and sharp. Turn-your-head-inside-out stuff. Now that title is Buddhist chutzpah, and she must know it. But Hirshfield is an honest person, and false modesty is dishonest. (And its own sort of arrogance.) This is a truth-telling book, though not a comfortable one.
The Book of Job, translation and commentary by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Finest piece of biblical translation I've read since Alter's wonder-filled, masterful Genesis, a book that changed my life.
The Book of Job, translation and commentary by Steven Mitchell. Mitchell is one of my favourite contemporary translators, perhaps for sentimental reasons -- his gorgeous Rilke was one of the first books of poetry I ever bought. But he should stick to his heart's calling, which is further east. His translation of the Tao is a masterpiece. His biblical translations are a bit off key, and his psalms should be avoided. Dunno. Maybe it's just not satisfying to me to have the Bible treated as a neutral text. I realize it is a text, of course. But for me it's more. For Mitchell it isn't. I recognize that's more my issue than his -- but those psalms are really awful. Trust me.
Dead Men of the Fifties by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco. Just plain fun. A Coney Island of a book of poetry, rattling, painted,
historic, sad, childish, joyful. I've read it only once and it needs another read. Not as soul-sourching amazing as Di Cicco's last book, Dark Time of Angels, but still big and wild and freeing in its use of the everyday, the common. He can write "� my heart / behind the eight ball" and not only get away with it, make us all forget he's getting away with anything. Amazing.
I also read a book of poetry I didn't like. No names, please.
What is that, ten? And I'm not reading as much as I'd like, because I'm deep in the time-consuming last edits stage with Seal up the Thunder. So, nope, this is not going to be hard. Well, if you take a broad view of "required reading," I suppose I might have to strike off the two Jobs and the Russian Tales, which are kinda in support of two writing projects, which is more or less what I do professionally. (It just doesn't pay well, so I also do other stuff.) That still makes seven. So, nope, not hard.
I need a new novel. Any suggestions?
1 Comments
I know you’re wary of Douglas Coupland…but read Elanor Rigby!