One way I gain a little more reading time during the workweek is to listen to books on tape (unabridged only, of course!) in my car. I'm just finishing a terrific one: Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It's one of those books that you feel like recommending to everyone you know. The language is absolutely gorgeous--poetic, in fact-- and in addition the book is full of great stories that make you laugh or cry, or keep you on the edge of your seat in suspense. It was one of my favorite writing gurus, Natalie Goldberg, who inspired me to read this book. In her latest, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft, Goldberg quotes the entire opening of West with the Night. I'll just give a tiny taste here:

How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other."

But there are a hundred places to start, for there are a hundred names--Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru."

Imagine hearing a perfect reader's voice recite this to you as you drive home on a snowy Ohio night. My encounter with West with the Night has led me to re-see Out of Africa and to my next book on tape, Judith Thurman's award-winning bio of Isak Dinesen.

I have a great book by Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner called About the Author: The Passionate Reader's Guide to the Authors You Love, Including Things You Never Knew, Juicy Bits You'll Want to Know, and Hundreds of Ideas for What to Read Next. There is a two-page spread on just about every modern fiction writer you can think of, as well as some classic ones. Anyway, I read something there that, as a Joni Mitchell fanatic, I have to do further research on. In the part about Saul Bellow, the Glossbrenners say that Joni got the idea for the title of "Both Sides Now" from Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. I'm very curious about this. James Atlas's new bio of Bellow is high on my to-read list, but my copy of it is a free set of bound galleys that I picked up at ALA, and there's no index! As far as Joni goes, there's only one Web site worth mentioning: jonimitchell.com. Started by Wally Breese, who died last year (he suffered greatly from a form of cancer--but, wonderfully, Joni had him over to her house for the weekend shortly before he died, a visit he chronicled on the site in words and photos). I'm sure one of the many ardent fans I became acquainted with on the related Joni Mitchell discussion list would have the scoop on this Bellow connection. Alas, I followed that list daily for a brief period, but it's a very high-volume one, and I couldn't keep up.

Ooops!--now I've finally done what I have sometimes feared I would do. Our book club's December selection was Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons. I knew I owned some book by Gibbons, but I wasn't sure which one, so without looking, I checked a copy of Ellen Foster out of the library. In the meantime I found my own copy--the same paperback edition I had borrowed from the library. It came due last week, so I returned it. But...I just discovered that I returned my own copy and still have the library's! Alan is going to go explain to the librarian tomorrow, while I return to work.

Ellen Foster is a great book, by the way. I liked this passage especially:
"I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have that time when your brain has nothing constructive to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do someting right up until you fall asleep."

A friend who loves Gibbons says that Charms for the Easy Life is even better. For myself and the library, I will note here that I have acquired a copy of it and do not need to look for it at the library when the urge to read it strikes.

I first read about weblogs in the Circuits section of the New York Times , and then researched them a little more, including reading the 11/13 New Yorker article about them. I also visited beebo, a site that the New Yorker says has a list of the best weblogs, but, interestingly, beebo doesn't do that anymore. Beebo's author also notes that being mentioned in the New Yorker didn't do much for his site in terms of traffic, which is surprising. I liked beebo, though. One of his, mine, and many people's favorite blogs is Arts and Letters Daily, which I do wish I read daily.

Anyway, for some time now I have wanted to set up a page on the Internet about reading. In part this is so that I will have a log of what I read or contemplate reading. Often one of my New Year's resolutions is to keep a reading diary, with titles, authors, and reactions, or at least a list of the books I've read. I have kept such lists and even a diary at times, but I never keep them up for a prolonged period. That's one reason I thought that doing this as a weblog would be a good idea. They're supposed to be kept up consistently. The other reason I want to do this is for my friends who are also passionate readers. I am separated geographically from many of them, and unfortunately because of busy lives and the way time passes faster and faster, we don't often find time for a phone call. When we do and ask each other about what we've read recently, all too frequently we both draw a blank or can only think of one or two books, missing out on the chance to share the many other great reads of the past several months.
When I read about what weblogs originally were--links to good Web sites with a bit of commentary--I was a little concerned that this one wouldn't fit the mold because it would mostly be about reading of non-Web materials. But (1) it's obvious that a weblog can be whatever one wants it to be, and (2)as I write I find that I am referring to some sites after all. Which isn't too surprising, of course.

So, what have I been reading? This is a particularly good time to write about that, because over the holidays my husband Alan and I finally took a long-dreamed-of reading vacation, in which we took a bunch of books to a cabin in the country, where there was little to do but read.

When we left, I was immersed in Barbara Vine's latest book, Grasshopper. I had trouble putting it down, as is usually the case with me and a work by either Vine or her alter ego Ruth Rendell. I admit that I have a tendency to think that the latest one I've read is her best one, but...Grasshopper really is Vine at her best. The closest to it in quality for me is The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, but I liked Grasshopper better because I became very fond of the narrator/protagonist. It annoys me no end that the publisher put a blurb from Patricia Cornwell on the back of the book.

Biography being my next favorite genre, after literary fiction, I turned next to Victoria Glendinning's Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions. I've long heard that Glendinning is a great biographer, and although I've collected a couple of her works (Elizabeth Bowen and Trollope), I hadn't yet read one. (I did love her novel, Electricity.) I was disappointed with the first third of the book--felt it was sloppy in places and didn't give a good feel for Sitwell's inner or outer life. I was really surprised. When we returned from the country I sought out a review of this 1980 book on the New York Times site. No less a biographer and writer than Michael Holroyd gave it a great review. I got that too-familiar reader's insecurity: "What am I missing here?" Embarrassingly enough, I felt the book got much better after that. I think it really did. I'm almost done with it, but slipped in a quick read of Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington before finishing. What a fun book! I mean laugh-out-loud funny, and also touching. Wow! I liked Memento Mori, but I think Far Cry is far better. And today while following Web links I found some lists of people's favorite books, and one mentioned another Spark title. I didn't write it down, but I hope that keeping this blog will help me improve in that department as well.

Why was I reading about Sitwell? Well, I'm in an intense T. S. Eliot phase--have been since the book group at my office read Martha Cooley's The Archivist early last fall. The latter is a novel about some real Eliot letters that were under seal at Princeton until the year 2000. I went from there to the poetry. "Four Quartets" moved me as few poems have in my life ("One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, "Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon, and "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy are several of the others.) I have memorized the opening and closing lines of the Quartets. Next I read Eliot's great play The Family Reunion. And I've now listened to a tape of him reading "The Wasteland" twice. The other day I found a tape of Ted Hughes reading it at the library. That will be interesting to hear.

It's about time to get the New Year's Eve festivities underway. I have a great Indian vegetable stew on the stove, and Alan is bringing in some firewood.