Nom de Plume

One of the footnotes in some book commended the great historical detail of Valerie Anand’s Bridges Over Time 6-volume series, so I put the three books they had at the library on hold. I read the second to last one first — and was instantly hooked. When the next two books came, I sucked those down. The library didn’t have the remaining three; I managed to find them all in online used book stores and order them (one from Australia), and I have finally finished the entire series.

They are fabulous.

In the first novel, Ivon de Clairpont is a pre-William the Conquerer Norman knight who is captured in battle and sold into slavery. Each subsequent book tells the story of selected descendents, and the entire series spans 9 centuries–from slavery to serfdom to yeoman farmers to gentry. These are not great literature, but the stories are riveting (most people are completely miserable, which is immensely gratifying in its own way) and the historical detail truly amazing. Anand also links all the stories so that what happens in one appears as history distorted by time in the next; we, as readers, are filled with a knowing glow.

I read these out of order, and enjoyed them immensely. However, if I had my druthers, I would read them in order:

The Proud Villeins (Bridges Over Time, Book I)
The Ruthless Yeomen (Bridges Over Time, Book 2)
Women of Ashdon (Bridges Over Time, Book 3)
The Faithful Lovers (Bridges Over Time, Book 4)
The Cherished Wives (Bridges Over Time/Valerie Anand, Bk 5)
The Dowerless Sisters (Bridges Over Time)

Well, maybe one and a half. There is masking tape residue and staining at the top, but it’s pretty localized and the tape itself peeled up easily.

I have coveted this one for a while.

I like this too.

This one I wasn’t quite so wild about at first–it was part of the lot–but it’s now growing on me. Kind of like what appears to be a fungus on the upper lefthand margin.

Steve is being quite industrious in the kitchen today.

Awwww, look at that cornbread.

Emily’s mother is so overbearing that it’s no surprise that she agreed to marry Viscount Ashton to gain a measure of independence. After only six months of marriage, her husband dies on safari. It pains her to admit that she is not sorry. But as she discovers his journals and starts to explore some of his interest, she finds herself falling in love with her dead husband — even though it seems he may have been involved in some shady art deals involving ancient Greek art. Emily starts to investigate, and what she discovers keeps the reader sitting at the very edge of her chair. Add to this mix two more-than-eligible suitors, and you get a fun historical confection.

Colleen is watching the old safety and training videos her aunt Madeleine had made years before. In one, a man puts his head into an alligator’s mouth. The alligator snaps down on his head, twitching him back and forth as though he were spineless. Colleen assumes the man died. But no, her aunt tells her; he lived.

This first chapter sets the tone of Alligator perfectly; everyone in this novel has his or her own alligator. Colleen is trapped by rage, her mother by grief. In fact, all the characters in this Newfoundland town are yearning for something, for more, and they are all trapped by one thing or another. Moore conveys such rawness; she makes us, too, want more for her characters.

That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a stark landscape of undiluted solitude and bad weather. It’s possible to go through life without becomin who you are, but it is better, in the long run, to come across yourself in an insanely ordered forest where nothing has been left to chance. She wishes every twenty-one-year-old girl a Black Forest of her own.

Or this:

At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered through a carboard box of junk for a lid to the sugar bown, he knew it should have a lid, and was surprised by how much he wanted a lid. He did not want to be someone without the lids to things. He wanted whole sets of whatever he had, or nothing at all.

He wanted, when he went to the pain store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. he wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had workin there, who said he coudln’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.

This is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time.

I like to take Harry on his tromples late at night, usually around 9 or 10. We drive to different (read: better than ours) neighborhoods; I slip on my podcaster and away we go. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Here on Earth. And that’s where I heard an interview with Steven Rinella. He was so enthusiastic that I placed The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine on hold. I read it over the weekend, while we were in Soap Lake.

Basically, the premise is this: Rinella has always been what he calls a scavenger. He hunts, fishes, and lives pretty close to the land. He gets ahold of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, and decides to spend a year gathering the ingredients for a feast, which will be held on Thanksgiving. The book is the story of that year.

It was an entertaining read. Rinella writes as one would expect; his prose is vigorously and colloquially straightforward. He writes about trying to catch pigeons and sparrows, hunting for antelope and sheep, frog gigging, and, most of all, trying to convert his vegetarian girlfriend into a carnivore.

It was this last bit that finally did Rinella in for me. Because frankly, I liked his book just fine — but I thought he was a jerk. Like when he takes his girlfriend home to meet his folks for the first time and his father automatically takes them out fishing. Diana looks ill, but Rinella says nothing. She does it. She’s served up a huge plate of fish at dinner, and Rinella says nothing. She eats it. And all he says is, “Goodie, she’s changing her ways for me.” Finally, at the end of the book, he realizes that it’s fine if she’s a veggie. Of course, by the time he was on the radio, they had broken up altogether.

But jerkitude notwithstanding, I still enjoyed reading this.

Steve left at 5 this morning as usual, but was back within an hour and a half. The freeway was shut down. Yay for snow days — we went for a quick jaunt around Kubota.

For someone who is unabashedly addicted to regency romances, this novel was a breath of fresh air, illuminating the era with multi-dimensional characters and rich prose. It offers fictionalized portraits of the actress Eliza Farren, her longtime swain Lord Derby, and their friend Mrs. Anne Damer. Amid the turmoil of their relationships, Donoghue also writes vividly of late 18th century England, a time when England and France seemed on the verge of collapse. I was expecting this novel to be like Donoghue’s novel Slammerkin, which I read years ago, but it was far denser and more satisfying.

Obviously, my soapmaking posts have gotten fewer and less frequent; I confess, my interest has waned. This is, in large part, due to the fact that my last three batches have used fragrance oils (sandalwood, some fresh linen thing, and honeysuckle). I don’t like them. At all. They smell cheap. I need to order more essential oils. And it’s probably a good thing, but no one surprised me with the still …

My excuse for buying this Noda Kyuho print is that it’s for Steve, who sails.

Steve dug this out of the front yard and brought it inside for the winter. And it bloomed!

It smells heavenly.

Steve and I have rented a cabin on the shores of Soap Lake for the long holiday weekend, arriving around noon on Thanksgiving Day. Which, of course, leads to the question of how to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I think we should be okay if we get a super-small bird. The question is, what is the smallest turkey you can get?

You know, there are certain books that achieve critical acclaim less because of their content, and more because of their topic. This is one. It’s not bad–sections were movingly written–but it’s all so obvious. Basically, think of the overt misery and suffering of Rohinton Mistry–and then imagine those characters were female and interviewed by Oprah. That’s The Space Between Us in a nutshell, which follows the lives (told in a series of flashbacks) of Bhima, a slum-dwelling servant for whom things have gone from bad to worse, and her mistress Sera, an upper-class Parsi woman who suffered an abusive husband. The two women are intimately connected and share many of the same restrictions imposed by being female in Bombay–yet at the same time, there is an insurmountable chasm between them. Gender and class, class and gender. It’s just so boring. It gets so old. I felt like this was the literary version of a Hallmark card, something designed to elicit a very specific and predictable response.

So all in all, this wasn’t bad, per se — it was just completely expected (and sometimes a bit awkward). I just put Richard Powers’ Echo Maker on hold at the library, and was remembering the last Powers novel I read, The Time of Our Singing. Now that was amazing take on the race issue.

Once again proving I am out of control, here are three prints I just had framed. BTW, I wasn’t sure if the Toshi Yoshida was pencil signed; it is.

Mom also sent me this Sekino bijin-ja for my birthday. Apparently, it was my grandfather’s favorite print. Hmmm, wonder why …

Also, Steve got me all sorts of great gifts for my birthday, but by far the best was Helen Merritt’s Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints. I am thrilled with it. On the other hand, you know you’re getting old and boring when you start requesting reference materials for gifts.

This is fun. From Kate’s Book Blog and via The Literate Kitten.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?
I was four. My mother read to me every night. One night, she was late. I picked up a new library book to look at the pictures until she came in. It was a fairy tale, the one where the beautiful stepdaughter goes down the well to another land. When I looked at the words, I could read them! I tore into the living room, screeching, “I can read! I can read!”

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?
I had lots and lots of books, and a little bookshelf right beside my bed. We also used to go to the library every weekend and to bookstores (where my mother had a standing rule that I could pick two books and she would buy them for me). The first book I remember actively acquiring was a library book. It was a gorgeously illustrated alphabet book with a picture of a rabbit on the cover. I went into paroxysms of grief every time my mother tried to return it. Finally, she reported it lost and paid the fine so I could keep it. Now if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?
I have no idea.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?
I honestly don’t know how I had the patience to reread books the way I did when I was a kid–so yes. I reread everything many times, often skipping certain sections, or picking up a book to reread a single chapter. The Betsy-Tacy books, A Little Princess …

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?
I was a stubborn little beast–no surprise–so at age nine when my mother told me I couldn’t read John Irving’s The World According To Garp, I sneaked it into my room and read it when no one was around. It disturbed me for years. You know what I’m talking about.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?
I only read one of the Narnia books as an anklebiter, and I remember having Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, but didn’t read it until I was an adult.

Just logged into Amazon and saw a new link called “Zia’s Plog.” It even had a TM sign after the plog. In their words:

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

Oh good grief.

Someone actually came up with the word plog? And then they felt the need to trademark it? Stupid marketing ideas … smog? F**** dating mining … fog? Yikes.

Democrats in da HOUSE.

My skylight is leaking again after Steve fixed it the other night, the dog’s eyeball is puffy again, and I came perilously close to pulling an all-nighter. All this is to excuse the fact that I am going to do something I hate. Yes, that’s right, I am going to join the ranks of the literblogi and post a review of a book review.

First, a little history.

Becky over at A Book a Week just read Sittenfeld’s Prep, a book that she had avoided because it looked like chick lit. But then she read something something called This is Not Chick Lit, which Sittenfeld had contributed to or something. So she changed her mind and read the novel anyway. She was not impressed.

This sparked an interesting conversation with Nonfiction Readers Anonymous about the chick lit/not chick lit debate. NRA also pointed out that Sittenfeld wrote a scathing review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot.

So naturally, being sleep-deprived with a damp keyboard and an impending vet bill from hell, I googled the review. Sure enough it was the NYT Reviling of Books, which lets face it, is essentially a temptation for writers to write horrible reviews of other writers they are jealous of or that they’re afraid they’ll become. It was beyond scathing. She even admits it:

To suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut — doesn’t the term basically bring down all of us? And yet, with ”The Wonder Spot,” it’s hard to resist.

Hoo boy. It goes on.

A chronicle of the search for personal equilibrium and Mr. Right, Melissa Bank’s novel is highly readable, sometimes funny and entirely unchallenging; you’re not one iota smarter after finishing it.

Isn’t this GREAT?

I’m as resistant as anyone else to the assumption that because a book’s author is female and because that book’s protagonist is a woman who actually cares about her own romantic future, the book must fall into the chick-lit genre.

Don’t you love how woman are always women’s worst enemy? Here’s the kicker:

So it’s not that I find Bank’s topic lightweight; it’s that Bank writes about it in a lightweight way.

Good freaking LORD.

You know what? I liked Prep. I liked it enough to read her second novel. I liked that too, though not as much. I also don’t really care if people know that I have weakness for well-written chick lit novels or regency romances. They’re like candy. They’ve got to be better than TV. And there’s no doubt they’re a LOT better than the US Weekly subscription Sittenfeld admits to having in one of her Salon.com articles.

If our argument is sexism in the literary world (which is what This is Not Chick Lit is all about), I have no quibble. One need only look at any copy of the New Yorker or any bookstore display to agree.

But if, on the other hand, the underlying argument is that Sittenfeld herself is not chick lit, well, that’s another story altogether. Because that’s just obnoxious.

The thing is, I wouldn’t characterize Sittenfeld as being a chick lit author … yet. Her first novel certainly wasn’t. But if she follows the trajectory she’s set forth with her second (self-obsessed, neurotic teenager to self-obsessed, neurotic twenty-something), she might have a problem. That’s why she is so dismissive of Banks’ novel.

In my original post, I wrote that there were peeps of maturity in her writing and that I am interested in seeing where she goes from here. I took out the first part because it sounded so condescending, and have I published anything? No.

I hereby put it back in.

But with a caveat, because I am completely vindicated in my theory that Sittenfeld’s two protagonists are really herself: completely neurotic and utterly self-obsessed.

A new meteorological term? Someone having a little bit of fun? At least someone is. Let’s not even get into the skylight situation.

For all of us lexicographical curmudgeons. Check it out.