frumiousb

(Yes, my first Sunday Salon post in several months. I am distractable.)

Some years ago, I burned myself out on Auster. I read one book, Moon Palace and then I started reading his work compulsively-- ripping through everything that I could find. It was sort of like eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches for three months. Very satisfying, but quite difficult to look at the jar after that. And then I left him alone. I ignored newly released books. I wanted nothing more to do with the man.

Then two years ago, someone gave me The Brooklyn Follies right after it came out. I sighed, but read it. I liked it a lot more than most of the critics and fans. I was back on the slippery slope.

Then this year I picked up and read a copy of his collected prose. And I was doomed. I've started reading everything that I can get my hands on. And re-reading.

The New York Trilogy was one of the first things that I read by Auster, and one of the most dearly beloved. Rereading City of Glass was an interesting experience. I wondered whether I would find the same things moving, whether I would still like it as much. I knew that my reading experience would be affected by Auster discussing why he had written the book in his collected prose.

In the end, I found that my own experience of grief/tragedy deepened my connection with Quinn. His need to find threads in the seemingly random is something that I understand better now-- it added some holdfasts to the text that I had lacked before.

It remains a great book.

hy read it if you haven't already? Detectives, writers, identities, loss, intrigue, mistakes, death, sex and consequences. (Putting these things in a line gives the wrong impression, but read it all the same.)

I'm curious whether I'll burn myself out again on Auster a second time.

Any writers who you read in waves? What happened to you when and if you went back a second time?

( more )

She was not so young any more. It almost happened that she would be not sad not tired not depressed but just not so young any more.
pg. 61

I first read Ida in college, when I had just started on what would be my life-long love affair with Gertrude Stein. While I've reread other works, I haven't revisited this one since then.

I always find it quite difficult to review Stein. I love her work, but as much for the poetry in it as for anything else. I find myself continually surprised and delighted by her wordplay and I have a hard time understanding why it seems to be pretty generally thought that she was difficult on purpose. As always, I don't find the text particularly difficult and I found myself coming away with a smile on my face from the fun and wordplay-- sensual love of the text. I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm just not genius enough to appreciate the really inaccessible bits, but then I don't really miss them.

Ida is an ordinary woman, with parts of her life extraordinary-- much like the lives of everybody. She has a twin (real or imaginary), dogs, husbands, ideas. And what happens is what happens to us all-- she lives her life.

I'd recommend it, but then I know that I really love Stein's work.

( quotations )

I have to confess that Stafford was a writer who I only knew of because of her famously stormy relationship with Robert Lowell. When I saw one of her books available second-hand, I was delighted to finally have the chance to read some of her work.

Boston Adventure is the story of Sonie Marburg, a young girl who grows up on the seaside longing for the calm and cool lights of Boston. Where most young girls want love and adventure, Sonie only wants to be a prim old maid just like her idol, Miss Pride of Boston. Miss Pride is a regular summer guest at the hotel where Sonie's mother works, and Sonie longs to belong to her, go home with her, be part of her family. Her own family is not what it should be. Her mother is a mad Russian who lives in a constant state of resentment against men and her life in America. Her father is a German cobbler, weak and eventually ultimately absent. Nothing about her own life, her parents' passion and beauty, appeals to her.

Eventually Sonie gets what she wants (or thinks that she wants). She goes to Boston with Miss Pride as her Ward and companion. As you expect, what she finds there is not exactly as she imagined. The major themes in the story: class and identity, the American notion that talent/intelligence can lift you above your born station, immigration, madness, the different kinds of desire. If there's a one sentence point that I could distill, it would be something like a meditation on how every choice has a price.

I am really interested, now, to read the short stories by Stafford. I really loved this book, but it wasn't perfect. There's something a little bit odd about the pacing-- particularly in the Boston section. It is almost as though having gotten Sonie to Boston, Stafford had a difficult time with her life there. As a reader, there was a long dangerous becalmed section that was very nearly frustrating. I've seen this kind of pacing issue before in the novels of short story writers, and it makes me rather more anxious to read her short work.

She's a very good writer. I really loved her long looping sentences and the strong visual nature of her descriptions. Really delicious prose.

This was an emotionally difficult book in some ways for me. I wasn't escaping from the same kind of madness as Sonie, for sure, but I experienced my life and my decision to go to Bryn Mawr as a very similar kind of conscious escape. I wanted to find the cool and gracious people of the world. The folks who didn't have rotting bathrooms or cousins with ten children. It's sort of usual to say that you discover that those people don't exist, but as Sonie finds out-- that isn't true. It's more complicated than that. They *do* exist and you *can* live like that-- sort of. But there's a price for everything, sometimes too high of a price. I wish that I could have read the invisible other book-- what happened to Sonie once she finally outgrows Miss Price. If she does.

Anyhow, I would recommend the book. The introduction by Anita Brookner is good, but more useful after you have finished the novel.

Several questions:

There seem to be two or three different biographies of Stafford available. Can anyone recommend one in particular?

Has anyone read other work by Stafford that they can recommend to read next?

Many of you probably already know Dorothy Canfield Fisher, even if you don't know why. Her book Understood Betsy (1916) remains a childhood classic. Most people don't realize that Canfield Fisher was an educational reformer, and that Understood Betsy actually was part of her effort to bring Montessori education to the United States. There's no trace of the didact in the story of orphaned Betsy and her Vermont cousins, and its central message about responsibility, learning and family is still quite resonant today.

Even the people who know that she wrote children's books, aren't aware that she wrote adult novels. Her larger body of work has unfortunately slipped into obscurity today. She was quite famous in her day-- Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in America.

There are probably reasons for her general critical neglect. Her books tend to focus on stories of everyday life. Common themes for her include the role of women in married life, the importance of family and personal roots, the small efforts that one can make in the face of strife and war, children and child-rearing and the fabric of rural and urban life in the US of her day. She wasn't a writer for broad experimental technique or for violent plotting.

( possibly not very hip-- more about the novel itself )

This book holds a special place in my life because it is the first book that I ever read by Louisa May Alcott. I suspect that I stole it from my grandmother's library. As the first, it was my favorite for a long long time-- particularly since it didn't make me cry buckets the way that Little Women did (does). It left me with an enduring love for idea of little gifts from foreign lands-- one of the things that happened to Rose that just seemed to me so very wonderful.

Over time, this book has been a little bit eclipsed for me by the other Alcott works. Although I still enjoy reading Eight Cousins I have to admit to the occasional sigh of annoyance at how didactic Dr. Alec manages to be. It seems clear to me that Alcott was using this book to work out a lot of her notions about how to raise a child-- a common enough theme in fiction of that time. Although this is more or less an issue in everything that she wrote, it is perhaps a little stronger here than the plot can manage?

None of this, however, should dissuade the reader-- particularly not the younger reader. The usual lovely Alcott moments are all here to be unwrapped. I'm going to see if I can get my hands on a copy of Rose in Bloom because I realize now that I remember it much more vaguely than I do Eight Cousins.

As is usual for me, after reading this book I took a look at some of the reviews. Certain words come back again and again: "gentle", "touching", "poignant", "restrained", "understated". In that sense, I don't have very much to add besides yes. yes, yes, yes and yes again.

I guess that it could be argued that the book is a little bit slight, but at the time of reading it was a very emotional experience for me. Maxwell details the intense claustrophobic relationship between mother and children in a real and painful way. Saying that it was moving isn't quite enough for me, but I'm going to have to let it suffice.

I read They Came Like Swallows based on a recommendation. I won't hesitate to read other works by Maxwell. Any suggestions?

I'm really a long way behind with book reviews this year. Probably do a bit of posting this weekend in an effort to catch up.

Why does anybody write? I think I write because as Saul Bellow once said, "I'm a reader moved to emulation." It's as though you hear someone sing and you want to sing, like a mockingbird. I read this book of Cheever's and suddenly this world opened up to me and all I wanted to do was write. The unknowable interested me, not the knowable—the knowable being how fast the ball rolls at the bottom of the ramp, which tells you how far I got in mechanical engineering. It was a romantic rather than a practical decision to try to be a writer;

--Ethan Canin from a conversation with Barbara Lane.

( disappointing )

Writing a review for this book has forced me to think a little bit about the politics and ethics involved in ARC (advanced reading copies). I have reviewed enough over the years at Amazon that I am fairly regularly offered ARCs. When this first started happening, I was overjoyed; I accepted everything. I don't seek fame and fortune with my reviews. I use the systems to keep track of what I have read. I have never had aspirations or desire to be any other kind of reviewer.

But then I realized that most of the books that are offered to me as ARCs aren't very interesting. Let's face it. You have to be kind of desperate to send a reading copy to someone who isn't really anything more than a Top Amazon Reviewer.

So now I find that the offers I get fall into two categories:

People who have actually read my reviews (or some of them) and have some idea what interests me.
People who have a more scattershot approach-- trying a good number of the Top Amazon reviewers until a few accept.

It has gotten so I accept no ARC books from category 2, and almost none from category 1. I often send a warning note back explaining that I am both dilatory (don't promise a review within a month) and uninclined to grade inflate if I have any interest at all. Amazingly enough, most drop out after that letter.

A few don't. And those I get. And I do try to read them in a timely fashion.

(I find it amazing, by the way, that I ever give any books when I consider how many stars I tend to give things on Amazon. Even books I like only often rate three stars. Nobody is going to call me The Gravedigger anytime soon, but I am doing this for myself-- no incentive at all to give things a higher rating than I think that they deserve.)

Which brings me to A Cross Estate, by William Thomas Kinsella.

( not to be confused with W.P. Kinsella )

As noted, I'm unhappy these days with using Amazon to store my reviews. Every new site redesign puts a higher emphasis on reviewer ranking and competition rather than review community.

Amazon recently started testing a beta of the new product page design, and I pretty much hate it. (You can probably see it by clearing your cookies and logging in again, if you really want to do so.) Some feedback from Jim Robinson, a guy who works in the design of community and reviews at Amazon, really stressed that they're actually trying to foster competition among the reviewers. (Essentially, they only put the so-called spotlight reviews on the front page. Recent reviews go immediately to the back. Amazon's reply to reviewer concerns about this was "we'll give new reviews a chance to see if they can knock the spotlights out of place." Stupid. Anyhow.)

For those of you who don't know it, Amazon reviews are part of a strange world of fairly obsessive people. I'm a top reviewer (whatever that means) by virtue of reading a lot, and having used the site to store my reviews from the very beginning. My highest rank was 92 (back when you could only review books), and these days I generally hover somewhere between 160-165.

I have gotten a lot out of the system. It's been a good place to group and keep track of the books that I read. (Bear in mind, with all the traveling that I do, I generally read several hundred books per year.) I've had some great conversations with authors based on reviewing. I get the occasional free book offer (which I generally turn down since they are often bizarre. My most recent offer for a free books was from who I can only assume is one of Bill Bradley's aides for his new book). I've had great correspondences with other readers. Once I swapped books for a while with a doctor in Hungary who couldn't get access to Iris Murdoch novels. I'm not a very professional reviewer-- I have always used the system for my own purposes more than for anyone else. I did it for the reading record, for the convenience of it all, and for the friendly book community.

Over the last few years, Amazon reviewers have gotten crazy about rank. I guess that I understand why. Top Reviewers can end up getting an awful lot of free books. I get only the occasional offer because I live in Europe so it is expensive to ship over here. But the top 10 reviewers can have access to crates of free books every week. Tempting for a bookaholic, since books are a pretty expensive habit.

As a result, reviewing on Amazon got a lot more professional (?). There are a lot more fake reviews and reviewers and an awful lot of nastiness. Many of the top 100 actually send out little newsletters about what they've read lately and encourage people to vote for their reviews. It's kind of a complex system, because while those votes often don't count towards rank they do seem to count in terms of a review making it into the spotlight which can attract votes which genuinely do affect rank. And so it goes.

For me, it's gotten a lot less fun since it got so competitive. And the new site redesign makes it really clear that Amazon is de-emphasizing the review community part and is instead putting the focus on the competition. That's really not interesting for me. And actually has highlighted the fact that I have somehow put over 1000 reviews into a system run by a commercial company whose primary purpose is to sell stuff. That's pretty foolish of me, really.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm planning to switch my primary reviewing site to my lj. It makes more sense. I wish that they didn't have such strange limitations on tags here because it means that I can't use tags to reliably retrieve them. So I'm going to have to figure the tagging part out. I need to get the tags granular enough so that I get less than 100 per category. I'll probably still cross-post with Amazon for the time being, basically just to see if they bother to take reviewer feedback into account with the new site redesign. I honestly don't expect them to do so because of the way that they've reacted to communication about it so far; they've made it pretty clear that reviewer needs are not exactly interesting. On the other hand, pretty much all the more active reviewers who I have spoken to hate the new format. So perhaps they will take some of the feedback in account.

( anyhow, on to Geek Love )