I'm back--many months and many miles of business trips later. I'm reading Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas and think it's wonderful, but I keep getting distracted by other reading, so I'm not getting through it very fast. So many books, so little time...Especially since I'm preparing to write a book of my own and have a lot of reading to do to research my topic. I did read Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections and really liked it a lot. It will be interesting to hear what my book club has to say about it in January. I'm quite proud of the fact that I read the entire work on my Palm Pilot--all 3,000 screens! It was a very handy format for reading on planes and while traveling around Tokyo, and now I'm an e-book convert. I'm skipping book club this month--no time, and they are reading The Cape Ann. Next month is Talking from 9 to 5, which I do intend to read.
What inspired me to write tonight, of all nights since March 17? Well, I was investigating book collection software, and one of them has a journal function that lets you export your reading journal entries in html form. Pretty cool. I'll give the program a trial run over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Pathetic. It's been an eternity since I last posted. What have I read? Ah, yes. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. What an amazing book--one of my all-time favorites. Instead of posting here, I dropped a line to Oprah in an attempt to get on the show discussing it, but alas...I thought I might bring a probably underappreciated aspect of the book to the fore--the role of pets and the love of animals, particularly the importance of these in the healing of psychological wounds. It was gratifying to learn from an essay on the Oprah site that Oates has particular fondness for this book among all those in her vast oeuvre, and that one of the most moving pet situations in the novel was based on a real event in her life. I'm eager to read some other novels of hers that have been highly praised, especially Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart and You Must Remember This.
Next, for our book group, I read a hugely enjoyable book that made me laugh until I cried in several places: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I almost missed reading this, because, as sometimes happens, it wasn't the kind of book I was in the mood for when time for the group rolled around. But very fortunately, I was out with some group members right before the scheduled discussion, and after hearing them rave about it, I had to read it. Good humor writing is a rare and wonderful thing. I went on to check out another Bryson from the library, but it slipped out of the queue when in the same trip I found Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. I still have that one by my bed, and I understand why many reviewers have said it's a delightful and ambitious intellectual romp, but I abandoned it after a goodly number of pages. I'm a strong candidate to love it--I know Japanese, which plays a bit of a role in it, and I do love the premise, of having the Seven Samurai be a brilliant fatherless son's role models, but it just wasn't what I needed to be reading right then or something. I'm not sure I'll get back to it this time around. Maybe after a friend reads it and praises it and I'm in a different mood I'll give it another try.
I went from the samurai to a book that two trusted recommenders spoke very highly of: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. It didn't grab me immediately by any means, but finally one day the story clicked with me and I got hooked. I'll probably finish it in a day or two. What surprises me about it, though, especially considering how highly recommended it came, is that it's pretty depressing. Or at least very very sad. It's pretty clear from the beginning that something awful has happened. I keep hoping against hope that that won't prove to be true--there has to be something uplifting here--but I'm not getting it so far. I do love the characters and care about them, and I think the writing is very good, imaginative and intelligent.
I did finally finish listening to the Dinesen bio. It was riveting to the end, and my fascination with her is endless. I thought a good follow-up listen would be Dinesen's own Out of Africa, and it's good, but I have to say that Beryl Markham's West with the Night strikes me as far better. Maybe it's just that having seen the movie of OOA twice and read the bio, there's not enough new in it to take my breath away. I may read the other Dinesen bio soon--I'll post the title and author later because they escape me right now.

The entire rest of January was jangly and eventful. not at all conducive to reading. Today, though, I feel like I'm finally beginning to get my bearings.

Well, it wasn't conducive to reading whole books, but I did come upon some real gems. One was "The Space Heater," a poem by Sharon Olds in the 1/15/01 New Yorker. It brings me almost to tears every time I read it or think of it. The 1/29/01 New Yorker has a great story by Stephen King called "All that You Love Will Be Carried Away." Profound and funny, too.

I'm still listening to the Isak Dinesen bio on tape--it's 15 cassettes! Today at the wonderful Dark Star used bookstore in Yellow Springs, OH, home of Antioch College, I found three of Dinesen's books: Winter's Tales , Seven Gothic Tales , and one I hadn't heard of (actually, two books in one), Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. I made a number of other great finds, too: a biography of T. H. White by Sylvia Townsend Warner (fortunately, it was still there--I had first seen it there in November but hadn't bought it then, to my great regret since); Steinbeck's To a God Unknown, which I remember being deeply moved by in high school, but I can't recall why; and Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys, which has now reached bestsellerdom as an Oprah selection. I want to remember to tape that episode of Oprah--the thought of JCO and Oprah discussing books intrigues me.

Last week some friends with whom I meet monthly for mutual encouragement in practicing Stephen Covey's Seven Habits recommended I read Hyrum Smith's 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. I've read quite a bit of it, and in the course of doing so came upon a very profound statement: "Books don't ring." It was in the context of a discussion about the need to distinguish between urgent matters and vital matters. A ringing telephone signals urgency, but, needless to say, far from everything communicated by telephone is vital. Books don't ring, but reading them is a vital matter to many of us. The challenge is to make more time for what is vital and not get carried away by matters that may be urgent but are unimportant.

My current reading is Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, which is wonderful, but which I haven't been able to enjoy as much as I otherwise might have because of the jangliness mentioned earlier. I want that to change beginning tonight, and I'm going to start by curling up with it in front of a fire.

Found a great blog yesterday thanks to Library Journal. It's librarian.net, by Jessamyn West. No, not that Jessamyn West, who's dead. This one was born in 1968. She's an irreverent, witty, fascinating librarian and lover of books. (Speaking of name confusion, that's Sylvia Townsend Warner mentioned above, and she is not to be confused with Sylvia Ashton Warner, who wrote Teacher and Spinster.)

Alas, a long and hectic business trip came between me and reading for about a week. But I did read one entire novel that's worth mentioning: Trans-sister Radio, by Chris Bohjalian. It has a great plot--very hard to put down--and is thought-provoking, too. A woman gets involved with a man just before he is scheduled for sex-change surgery. This book will really get you thinking about gender and sexual preference. I recommend it highly as long as you aren't squeamish about those issues.

I found a great Web site about Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen: karenblixen.com. It has a Beryl Markham link with lots of information about her as well. The site appears to be hosted by the (small) publisher of a biography of Dinesen--not the biography I'm reading, which is the Judith Thurman. Karenblixen.com has a page of "corrections," which purports to rectify what its writer says are frequently repeated pieces of misinformation about Dinesen. I haven't checked yet, but it's obvious that some of them are directed at Thurman's work. That doesn't bother me--it makes the whole thing more interesting, in fact. And even though I've only read a little bit of Thurman, the writing is outstanding, and you immediately get the feeling that you're in the hands of a very skillful biographer.

Another interesting debate goes on about whether Markham really wrote West with the Night. There are links to pieces about that from the site above, too. The book is a great piece of writing--whoever did it. I just wish they'd have given us more!

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.