First, a happy discovery late last year was Alexandra Johnson, who writes about writers, writing, and diaries. I loved her book The Hidden I: Writers and Their Diaries, which was published several years ago but which I found serendipitously at Borders and devoured. It has a chapter apiece on many of the great women diarists--Nin, Sarton, Woolf, Alice James, Katherine Mansfield, Sonya Tolstoy, and a fascinating chaper on a Scottish young girl diarist I had never heard of. She died very young but was made into a legend in Scotland and England, in part because of an encounter she may or may not have had with Sir Walter Scott. Johnson corrects the inaccuracies of the legend and rectifies the way she had been fetishized by several male writers. I can't remember the girl's name and can't look it up because I have lent the book to a friend. I want to press the book on all my close friends. It made an impression on me in a number of ways. For one, it got me writing in my journal again. Also, it reminded me of the great joy I took earlier in life--mostly in college and just after--in reading the great women's diaries, and made me long to return to them, especially Woolf's. I immediately sought out Johnson's other book, Leaving a Trace, which is more of a journal-writing manual, but I was very disappointed. Mostly it repeated a lot of the material in the other book. She is such a talented writer and there is so much to write on the subject--a shame she simply repeated herself. By the way, I thought that the opening of the Scottish girl chapter and of the next chapter, I believe it was Tolstoy, were great models of biographical writing. She was able to set the scene of life in countries foreign to me over a century ago in an extraordinarily vivid way but without pretending to have been there or imputing thoughts on people that she didn't have sources for. If only I could write as good biography. I am still plugging away on my own humble project. Which reminds me of something I just read in another of the books I'm going to return: How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Boton. This was my second encounter with this book. I enjoy reading it and it makes me chuckle, but I must say it doesn't seem to me to carry any unforgettable insights. Mostly it has a lot of fun fragments of Proust's biography, which I am gettng a great deal of in my car by listening to Ronald Hayman's Proust, A Biography. In fact, I'm about to exceed the 8-week checkout period on that one. It has 16 cassettes! Because I listen while driving, I definitely am not absorbing every word, but I have enjoyed it a great deal and learned a lot about Proust's life and gotten a lot of food for thought. Last November was the second winter in my life that I was struck by a yearning to read Proust. The first time I read a good portion of Book I of A La Recherche (in English); this time I have confined myself to reading about Proust and his masterpiece. Not deliberately--I think of it as preparation, but at the same time it does seem that I might not necessarily get to the book itself anytime soon. Why? Well, when I think of reading it, I also think about the fact that there is a new English translation of the Tale of Genji, my poor abandoned dissertation topic, and I may have this notion that if I'm going to read a huge psychological novel, that should be it. Occasionally I really go off into the deep end of fantasy thinking that I could go back to grad school and do some comparative work on the two masterpieces. Wouldn't that be cool? Despite my love of reading a zillion different books and keeping up with the literary fiction of my own day, I am also attracted to the idea of spending a year or more doing a deep read of a big book. Anyway, Boton does relate a sad story about Woolf's feeling suicidal after reading Proust. She felt that he had done such an outstanding job of something she wished she could do, that there was no point in attempting it herself. When she did write, she felt her own efforts pale terribly in comparison. Boton contends that she eventually made peace with this creative dilemma. It is a striking one and one I can relate to, though on a level that is needless to say many magnitudes remote from the geniuses mentioned. I'm also going to return Proust's Way, which I have now dipped into twice as well. It's worth knowing about because the author is the one who ventured to say you don't have to read all of A La Recherche and suggests which parts can be skipped. It's an interesting and bold concept.
I am not one to enjoy short stories--I prefer series and loooong books--but I did read a short story collection that impressed me a lot over the holidays: Murakami Haruki's After the Quake. At least two of the stories affected me and are likely to stick in my memory, in particular the one that became the title of the collection in the original Japanese Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru, "All God's Children Can Dance." A man believes he spots his unknown father in a crowd (his mother told him he was missing part of an ear), so he follows him, ending up alone in nature and having a kind of joyful epiphany about life. Beautiful.
Also today I finished reading Pat Barker's World War I trilogy. I liked the first book, Regeneration, but found the ending so upsetting that I didn't want to continue. Then I skimmed it again before reading the second book The Eye in the Door. I liked that one tremendously, especially its focus on Rivers and his therapy work. I'm afraid I didn't appreciate it the last book The Ghost Road, as much as it deserves. I began to get oppressed by all the other books I want to read and also depressed, because the trilogy is so strongly antiwar, as am I, and here we are about to go to war for no good reason. There's a modicum of antiwar sentiment now, but people are already saying that once the war starts most everyone will turn rah-rah and supportive. It's terribly upsetting and depressing. Also, I didn't like the passages about Rivers' anthopological work with the headhunters. I'm sure she included it for a good reason, but for sheer reader's enjoyment I could have read on and on about Prior, Rivers, and Sassoon.
I'm going to return Anita Shreve's The Weight of Water without reading it this time around. I thought The Pilot's Wife was gimmicky, but many friends have urged me to try her other stuff, which I'm willing to do. I picked Weight because I read a movie review in the Times and thought I would read the book first, but I've seen no mention of the movie for several months. Also a friend told me it's a devastating read for anyone who has lost a child, so I may be shying away from it for that reason. There are times I don't mind or even want to have feelings about that experience, and times I don't.
Speaking of books into movies, I also read About Schmidt. Terrific and touching, though it ended a bit abruptly--that is, after a day by day kind of plot it sped up at the end. This I read in preparation for seeing the acclaimed film, and I've been shocked to learn from the reviews that the plot of the movie is different from the book in what to me are several significant ways (the son-in-law working at the father's law firm, the NYC-Hamptons setting, the father being a lawyer!). I hope I can see the movie with an open mind because Jack Nicholson is supposed to be great as Schmidt. Ther's supposed to be an article in tomorrow's Times about how Begley feels about the process of his book being made into a movie, which should be interesting. I sure envy Susan Orlean for Adaptation!
Thanks to friends at work have discovered two great new (to me) mystery writers. One is Charles Todd, who writes about a detective haunted by his wartime experiences. The other is John Harvey, whose hero is the very amusing and endearing Charlie Resnick. Harvey seems like a really neat person based on his web site--a poet, briefly had his own publishing company, loves jazz...I've read the first book in each series and rushed out to get the next, though I got sidetracked and will have to save each for another time.
My next read will probably either be a book by Mary Wesley, about whom I became curious when reading her obituary recently, or Sue Miller's The World Below, which a friend recommends highly. Wesley died at 91, having published her first book at, I think, 71. Her fiction sounds a bit like Barbara Pym's--funny, insightful, and sad at once. The two I borrowed from the library both have suicide as a theme--another issue close to my heart.