No Frigate

Switching calendars

I'm in the process of switching from my 2009 calendar to my 2010 calendar -- which means going through lots of weird post-its, pieces of paper, and business cards clipped to the pages of the 2009 calendar and figuring out what, exactly, I need to do with them.  I have one tiny post-it that reads:  "This Is Where I Leave You," Jonathan Tropper.  I'm guessing that's a book I intended to read?  Who knows . . .

Literature in translation

The New York Times has a great article on literature in translation, focusing on Open Letter Books (and mentioning Europa Editions, one of my favorite publishers).  I'm looking forward to reading Open Letter's blog.

Questioning Joan

I'm still reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in my few sane-ish moments.  One essay is entitled "On Keeping a Notebook," and Didion writes:

"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

Do you agree with that?  I'm not sure I do . . . As an intermittent keeper of a private notebook, while I sometimes write out of anxiety, loneliness, and fear, I often write in my notebooks to remember happy things -- or simply to remember things, generally.  Later in the essay she writes "keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about," and that I agree with.  Keeping a notebook is, first, a way of keeping in touch with one's self, and second, a way of processing things that will put you in better touch with others.

Making connections

I'm a big Henry James fan.  (What can I say, I like long sentences.)  For some reason, I thought that I'd read almost everything of his.  Right now, I'm not reading James -- I'm reading Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.  I just finished the essay on Joan Baez, in which Joan Didion describes her as:

". . . an interesting girl, a girl who might have interested Henry James, at about the time he did Verena Tarrant, in The Bostonians."

I almost dropped my (NYPL-issue) copy of the book as I realized . . . I've never read The Bostonians!  What a treat to look forward to!  I'm going back to work soon, and even though I'm trying to refrain from buying books, a paperback copy of The Bostonians would be perfect for my commute and for sitting around waiting for cases to be called . . .

A tempered disappointment

I picked up Little Face after hearing great things about one of the author's other books.  The writing is beautiful; the author is a poet, and her prose is beautiful, creative, and evocative.  That said, Little Face is a thriller, and I found its central conceit to be lacking in credibility.  The germ of the plot is great: a woman becomes convinced that her baby has been abducted, and that the kidnapper put another baby in its place.  But the way the central crime is resolved lacks credibility.  Maybe if I'd been reading more closely and not dealing with my own baby I would have felt differently, but I doubt it.  I will still read the author's other books, though, to see if her plotting improves to be as good as her prose.

 

 

Little Face

Sophie Hannah

 

 

The Times' 10 Best

In Sunday's paper, the New York Times published its list of the top ten books of the year -- five fiction, five non-fiction.  I've read none (though I'm lusting after several), but was thrilled to see that of the five fiction books chosen, four were written by women.

From The Times' list . . .

Sunday's paper had the Times' Top 100 of 2009 -- I want to read Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women . . . In addition to Sag Harbor, of course.

Low expectations, high enjoyment . . .

I read Three Junes and thought it was sweet and well-plotted, but it didn't stay with me or anything.  So I when I picked up The Whole World Over, my expectations weren't particularly high.  I'm not saying it's a literary masterpiece or anything (I think there was one major character too many), but the characters are well-fleshed out and realistic, the locations are pitch-perfect, and it kept me wanting more.  For where I'm at right now, it was an unexpected treat.

 

The Whole World Over

Julia Glass

Bloggers gone . . . Bookers?

Although I saw Julie and Julia (and read snatches of it at the bookstore) I'd largely avoided novels by bloggers until recently.  Since having my baby, I've followed www.dooce.com pretty religiously -- the author is a "mommy blogger" who is irreverent, funny, and honest in her posts.  She also wrote a book chronicling her first pregnancy and post-partum depression, which I recently read.  My takeaway lesson from the book is that what works really well as a blog doesn't necessarily transition well into book form.  (A sublesson is that if you tend to write in ALL CAPS A LOT, your editor is not worth his/her salt if he/she does not BREAK YOU OF THAT HABIT.)  I think that, if I'd read the contents of the book broken up into blog posts, I would have enjoyed it, but somehow the book felt like just that -- a bunch of blog posts stuck together.

It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita

Heather Armstrong