Nom de Plume

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.