Reading Notes

April 10, 2019

What’s on: No music. Just the sound of the dishwasher (who knew that an “eco” dishwasher could take so damn long to go through its cycle? The first time I noticed this, I called in the repair guy. Also, the roaring sound of my very old heater. It’s chilly here in the bay area in the morning.

I stop reading a lot of books at about page 20 (maybe even page 10). The latest? A first person narrative with a great premise, but it took so long to get to the point of the premise and the launch of the adventure that I couldn’t keep going. Had the first person narrator been a more engaging voice, she herself would have been enough, because a good first person narrator tells little stories in her observations and that carries you along to the turn in the plot — which also engages the reader. So you either have a great voice you follow because you want to know whom you’re dealing with or you have a quick launch. And if you have both, well, you have a keeper.

12/14/2016

The New York Times.  Print edition.  After the election, it was hard to read the news

11/1/2014

Laura Kasischke’s The Infinitesimals.  This woman is a remarkable poet.  There is one poem in particular I really like, called Canto One, where she encounters Sylvia Plath (I think it’s Sylvia Plath — who knows, maybe it’s her mother) who says

“So/you followed me this far, Laura.  Good/for you.  You’ve/Come to the right/place to die.”

The next stanza — I love the next stanza:

“Shit, I thought, Oh God They’ve/not sent Virgil to me, they’ve/sent the poet of no way out.  They’ve sent the poet of how to stay. . . .”

10/22/14

Recently divorced and on a serious (as opposed to a fictional) budget, I still left room for books, figuring I can cut down on eating out, but not books.  I buy some electronically, like Sophie Littlefield’s The Missing Place (the love of mothers for their sons features prominently in this novel).  But some books don’t work electronically — and those arrived yesterday:

First, there’s Lynda Barry’s Syllabus:

And Maira Kalman! Not one book, but TWO:

Words and pictures.  So wonderful in the right hands.

10/21/14

Reading as a writer, I look for books that are much better than anything I could hope to write.  Reading something that’s pretty good, but not great, as I was a moment ago, is useful too, though.  I can see my own work in the fair to middling book, can see the occasional clunky movement of a plot, the predictable ways of introducing a character, the metaphor that sticks up and trips you, like the place in a sidewalk that’s been raised by a tree root (haha).  Anyway, it’s hard to write even a middling book.  The one I was reading got some things right — just not enough to move it into the rare category of the book you fly through, knowing you’re in expert hands.  In the end, I don’t want to read more than a chapter or two of these kinds of not-great books.  Mostly, I just want to get back to my draft and see if I can do better than I have (which at this point is the kind of book I was just reading) — or get back to reading someone like Elmore Leonard and dreaming that maybe I’ll be able to do that at some point if I work hard enough.

10/13/14

Also reading Roz Chast’s cartoon collection, the name of which escapes me right now.  I heard her speak at City Arts & Lectures last week.  I’ve never been to hear a cartoonist read before.  It was really great and very odd.  She showed slides of her cartoons.  And then she read them.  With some, you couldn’t hear her read because there was so much laughter in the room.  WIth others — the more complex ones — it was interesting and good to hear her read.  These are my favorites.  Maybe it’s because they’re not about the captions.  They’re this intricate, deeply funny mix of words and picture.  A little bit like my other favorite artist in this genre, Maira Kalman.  And Lynda Barry.  Let us not forget Lynda Barry.

10/12/14

Okay.  I officially love Elmore Leonard.  One thing that’s kind of amazing to me is that this is the second book of his that I’ve read where the title is also the punchline.  I can’t remember the poem that does that, but it was cool seeing that same strategy used in novel.

Running a close second in the “authors I love” category is Steven Pinker (whose book The Sense of Style is what I’m reading now).   This crush developed last week when I heard him speak about the book in Palo Alto.  I love him not just for his wild white halo of hair — or his Canadian refusal to get hot under the collar about matters grammatical — or his good manners and sense of the ridiculous.  But because the first line of the book is “I love to read style manuals.”  Me too, Mr. Pinker.  And I like it that he can simultaneously admire Strunk & White and have smart things to say about his disagreements with them.  It’s hard to disagree without seeming cranky or defensive (or offensive) but part of doing it well is to note your points of commonality.  If you have them, I mean.  Turns out, the most interesting disagreements involve commonality and divergence.  If it was one or the other, you get something like those discussions where everyone nods their head like “oh, yes, opera is wonderful” or “OMG opera sucks” and never exploring the opposite possibility– or you get people clapping their hands over their ears and yelling “lalalalalalalala” because the opposite possibility is going to END THE WORLD.

10/9/14

Still reading Elmore Leonard.  I like how he makes the unexpected decision.  Which reminds me of something my agent says about the third choice.  It’s this:  After you write down the first thing you think should happen or someone should say or you will describe something, write down a second thing.  And then keep going to the third thing — and that is often the best thing, the surprising thing.

10/6/14

Elmore Leonard, The Switch.  The first time in a long time that I can’t wait to get back to a book.  Except I’ve got to work and write now and don’t have time to read.  So I left the book back at a friend’s house, to keep myself from going there.  What I love about Elmore Leonard is that he’s a feminist.  He’s got these women characters — housewives — who find in unexpected circumstances wit and courage no one expects them to display.  I also love his criminals — they’re funny and complex.  And he is a remarkably good writer.  I want to be Elmore Leonard when I grow up.

9/28/2014

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady.  You’d think James would take FOREVER to get to the point.  And then you read this novel and you see that, in fact, he introduces the entire conflict in about two pages of really truly gorgeously written prose.  But first, the opening paragraphs of this novel, which are among my favorites:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not–some people of course never do,–the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

“The perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon.”  And “an eternity of pleasure.”  Virginia Woolf also locates that moment of eternity in her fiction.  I think this is in fact one of the functions of art — it looks at life and says, “stay you are so fair.”

And of course it never does.  Which is why well written post apocalyptic fiction works so well.  Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s new book offers that particular pleasure, which I’m enjoying so much right now.

And my other favorite?  The Synonym Finder.  In The Moonstone (I think that’s the right book), the butler uses Robinson Crusoe kind of like a fortune teller’s ball.  When he’s stuck, he opens it to a page, and there’s his answer, in the text of a story that has nothing to do really with anything at all he’s struggling with.  At least not directly.

So, when I’m stuck, I open The Synonym Finder.  Like right now, writing here when I should be writing over there, at my novel.  I open to the “mal” pages — malefaction, malefact, maleficient, malevolence, malevolent, malformation, malformed, malice, malicious, maliciously, malign, malignant, maligner, malignity, malinger, malingerer.

And then?  MALL.

Haha.  After mall came malleable, mallet, malnutrition, malodorous, malpractice, maltreat, maltreatment, mama’s boy, mammon, mammonist, and mammoth.  I love it that “mama’s boy” is on the “mal” page.  The “mal” page is exactly right for writing about a book where people kill each other.

And so ironic, because just a couple of days ago, a friend was telling me all about a medical thing where there’s a biopsy and how you’d rather see “benign” than “malignant.”

Time to get back to work.

5/31/2014

Reading with enormous pleasure Mark Helprin’s WInter’s Tale.  I began thinking I would like to see what winter in Manhattan is like, and know that I will finish this because it is so very, very good.  And it makes me think about writing:  like — what can a character NOT do without?

5/26/2014

I started the Eustace Diamonds and after the first chapter realized that the Victorians — or at least Trollope — are not working for me right now.  The Eustace Diamonds is sort of like Vanity Fair and even like Portrait of a Lady — it follows the exploits of a woman who begins with nothing, acquires wealth, is single and off she goes … And yet in the hands of these writers — at least Thackery and Trollope — the women are sort of unpleasant.  And Isabel Archer, who IS pleasant, gets royally screwed.  It would be so interesting if someone wrote the Eustace Diamonds and made the woman in it not so much sympathetic as courageous and fearless and perhaps foolish but not unattractive in her pursuit for what she wants.  And perhaps what she wants could be something more than just a man.  Or diamonds.

Oh goodness.  That pretty much describes Mary McInerney, the main character in my novel.

5/21/2014

Raymond Chandler.  Collected Stories.  Library of America.

I’m going to learn to write really good mystery short stories as practice pieces for my novel.  S0 — I’m going to read a lot of them.  “”He got glasses, mixed whiskey and ice water, went to the davenport with them.  ‘Are they keeping Targo on ice?’  She moved her chin an eighth of an inch, staring into her glass.”

Just an eighth. Not a “little” or “slightly” — but an eighth.

5/6/2014

W.G. Sebald.  From his last book, just recently translated into English, A Month in the Country:  

To borrow:  originates in a feeling of affinity and meant as a sign of respect

To steal:  the grasping of an impoverished writer

Depends on your intentions and also how you make it your own.  I borrow, not steal.  I really like Sebald — and think Austerlitz is such a fine novel — but I didn’t know he thought about this.  Makes sense, though.

5/1/2014

More Eudora Welty.  The Wide Net — the beautiful, hilarious, and really odd story about dragging the river for pregnant Hazel, who leaves a note saying she’s pissed at her husband (who stayed out all night sleeping in a ditch with his friend Virgil because he had too much to drink at the fair) and she’s going to drown herself.  I could not make this up.  Nobody but Eudora Welty could.  And that is why I love her so.  Sui generis.  This is how Hazel’s husband, William Wallace, tells his friend about it:

“I’ve lost Hazel, she’s vanished, she went to drown herself.’

“Why, that ain’t like Hazel,” said Virgil.

William Wallace reached out and shook him. “You heard me. Don’t you know we have to drag the river?”

“Right this minute?”

“You ain’t got nothing to do till spring.”

“Let me go set foot inside the house and speak to my mother and tell her a story, and I’ll come back.”

“This will take the wide net,” said William Wallace. His eyebrows gathered, and he was talking to himself.

4/24/2014

Last night, at the literacy tutoring thing I just started doing at San Quentin, I listened to a 60-something inmate who’d been reading for three years read to me from a mystery written for eight year olds.  The main characters were a policeman, two boys on bikes, and their dog, who seemed to be the one who solved this particular mystery.  Toward the end, the police officer arrested the bad guy and before the cop could say one thing, the bad guy said, “I don’t have to talk to you.”

The inmate and I looked at each other and after a guilty pause (because we both knew we were thinking the same inappropriate thing), started laughing.  How nice that the literacy trainers are teaching people how to exercise their Miranda rights at the same time as they’re teaching them how to read.

That totally counts as a reading experience.

I also taught an inmate his 8 times tables and now have imbedded in my long term memory that 8×12=96.  I never knew that.

That totally needed to go someplace.

4/20/14

OMG!!!!! I finished Can You Forgive Her.  I’m too exhausted to say anything except that I liked it more when Alice (main character) was getting herself in trouble than I did when she got herself out of it and lived HEA.  I think Trollope might be interested in the woman of independent means, but he never thinks of anything better to do with her than send her into a marriage.  I guess he couldn’t very well send her to get a law or business degree.  But still, wouldn’t it be great if a novel ended with a woman deciding – as Lily Briscoe does in To The Lighthouse when she looks at the tablecloth and solves a problem in her painting – to happily remain single?  Why are there so few stories like that? Why do we either die or get married?

She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation.

4/6/14

OH!  I love this.  Love this.  It’s completely utterly perfect:

Gift, by Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Berkeley, 1971

4/5/14

Is it possible that I have been reading Can You Forgive Her for a month now?  I’m going to get some coffee and get back in bed and read until I finish the damn thing.  Oh.  Except I need to write my novel.  And clean up in this house, which is becoming woefully messy because all the writing and reading and working and parenting and general fucking around with my friends keeps me from hanging up my clothes.  I’d take a picture but it is way way way too humiliating to be this messy.

4/1/14

Talk about weaving.  The three strands of Can You Forgive Her are coming together.  How exciting!

19th century novels are so wonderful — but sometimes I wonder what happened to the crappy ones.  Who sifted through what must have been a ton of Victorian novels and made sure that George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes, Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, Thackery and then, later, — but still essentially Victorian — Thomas Hardy:  who made sure they were there for the 20th and 21st century reader?  And who’s going to sift through the 20th and 21st century, the stuff after Edith Wharton and Henry James?  I don’t read much contemporary fiction.  I read my friends’ books, I read the masters of genre fiction, like John LeCarre, P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers, I read Mary Wesley — because I love her so — and Woolf and Forster.  Wait!  I also really like Anne Tyler and for good atmospheric Europe during the war stories, Alan Furst.  Quite a few years ago, I read the Corrections to see what all the hoo-ha was about (I cannot see it), and I went through a Richard Russo phase and I really like Wallace Stegner.  Also James Salter.  And then there is Sebald — now there’s someone who’s pretty recent, who will certainly  last. Austerlitz is one of my favorite contemporary novels.  In fact, it is the best contemporary novel I’ve read.  And Ishiguro — I love the unreliable narrator in that book about the butler (shit, how can I have forgotten the name — right!  The Remains of the Day — also the dystopian one is really good.)  And I read short stories.  Tons of them. Alice Munro.  Mavis Gallant.  Flannery O’Connor.  Eudora Welty.  How nice — I’ve never noticed that my favorite story writers are all women. And novelists mostly seem to be men.  But I have just not thought hard enough, I’m pretty sure.

But the ripped from the headlines, or the latest MFA flavor, or the book group book about, say, the wife of a famous writer or architect, or the subject of a painting, well, I stay away from that stuff, some of which is just crappy writing and poor storytelling, and some of which is just a great disappointment.  It has always been like this, I’m pretty sure.  And I can figure out where the good writing by my contemporaries is located — it’s rare enough when you think of all the crap out there — but it is indeed there.

3/26/14

Can You Forgive Her is epic.  Epic.  I guess when you’re telling three full romances, you have the equivalent of three full books.  I have no idea how far in I am, but I can see some decisions coming and disasters brewing, so I’m guessing 3/4.  I still love Trollope.  I’m not sure I’m going to love the political world that this series of books (Can You Forgive Her is the first of quite a few books (the Palliser novels) that are set in the world of parliament.)  But I love this one because the heroines are all sure of what they want.  And they are sometimes wrong-headed, but they are never wrong-hearted.

3/24/14

This is one of the most beautiful poems I know, a poem that rewards re-reading, which is what I did a moment ago:

The Beautiful Changes
BY RICHARD WILBUR
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

3/16/14

Reading Can You Forgive Her electronically, and in the collected works, without any page count, I cannot tell how long I’m going to be employed with the story (the percentage counter thing counts the entire collected works, so the fact that last week I moved from 27% to 28% after a LOT of time spent reading, is not helpful.)  When, a few days ago, I got to a page announcing I was now in the second volume I realized that I might not know the length of the book, but it is safe to say that “big-ass” would be a fair adjective.   That’s in part because he’s telling three parallel stories, all of women who are entangled in the drama of marriage — that’s a lot of story.  Those Victorians.  I love them.  They had all the time in the world to tell stories and to read them too.  I want to be more like that myself.  In fact, this morning when I woke up in my friend’s house, I actually read for a little while in bed, until I was given some coffee and then got too excited and jumpy to keep reading.  I never read in bed. I am going to do that more often, that’s for sure.

3/11/14

I continue to read Trollope, with a little bit of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando mixed in there.  With the Trollope, I really do want to know what behavior needs to be forgiven.  With Orlando, I just want to know what happens when the Thames freezes.  Both are such interesting things to discover.  So read on, I will.  Also, I think it counts that my friend Toni read the story she’s working on.  It made me cry, so I’d say it was a good story.

3/9/14

I’m reading Trollope — Can You Forgive Her? I love how he addresses the reader directly. And he’s funny.  Like a guy at a party is funny.  Self-aware, self-deprecating.  He says things about the story he’s telling — like how he’s going to skip the boring parts.  It’s wonderful.  And the other thing is that he takes his time.  He lets us see what his character — his close third person character — thinks and muses and he also lets us know where she might be wrong — but we will of course forgive her because we have watched her struggle to come up with the right decision.  And no, she doesn’t get it right at first — but watching her with her flaws — her vanity and silliness and temptation and stubbornness  — we still like her because we watch her struggle.

3/6/14

Thanks to a writer friend who posted this poem, I am adding my next reading report.  You can’t do this with a novel or even a short story, but with a poem you can just paste the whole damn thing into your reading notes, which is what I’ve done.  I’m not actually sure how I feel about this way of loving.   Is this the sturdy, mysterious, sustaining thing I think of as love?  And that’s why you read.  To ask questions like that first thing in the morning before you begin to work.

Sonnet XVII

3/3/14

OMG!  As we like to say around here when we get out of hand.  I just realized that poems should count as finishing something.   I’ve got a lot of volumes of Collected Poems of a lot of poets.  In fact, the miracle of the kindle in general for me was that all of a sudden I had in my purse all of western literature.  Seriously.  Hardy, Austen, Dickens, George Elliot, Yeats, Dickinson, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Trollope, Twain, Wharton, some of Woolf, some of Forster, tons of other poets and fiction writers– all the stuff that was published before 1921 — that’s the free stuff.  I’m all about free.  Now I can remember a fragment of something and search for it and there it is — there it is.  Man is that exciting.  My heart still races when I think about it even now.

So back to those poems:  I like how poetry slows your brain down.  You’re walking all of a sudden, not running full tilt into things.  I love Billy Collins when I want to laugh and be touched.  And Wallace Stevens when I want to think and feel at the same time.  Dickenson on the eternal.  Elizabeth Bishop when I’m thinking about courage and wanderlust.  And lately, Yeats.  Actually, Yeats a lot of the time.  Like the Wild Swans at Coole:

The Wild Swans at Coole
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

2/27/14

I feel like dancing around the room singing Kill Shot, Kill Shot, Kill Shot.  I love you Elmore Leonard.  I finished your book and it TOTALLY ROCKED.  The trouble is that I can’t say why it rocked, in the unlikely possibility that anyone who likes to read and reads this page finds out how it ends.  But man, what an awesome ending!!!!!!!

2/27/14

In an effort to break the bad habit of never finishing anything, I’m almost finished with Elmore Leonard’s Kill Shot.  My kindle tells me I have read 93% of the book!  And it’s good.  Still.  The problem for me with finishing isn’t time.  I read all the time — it’s more than I seem to have some weird aversion to getting to the end.  That’s mostly because a lot of endings disappoint.  They don’t live up to a book’s promise that it will be at the end the way it was at the beginning, or, better, it will be a deeper, even more interesting version of its beginning.  It’s like when you’re going home after the third date, the one where you’ve committed more of yourself than you usually do.  And then you realize, oops, that was not as good as I thought it would be.  Except it’s not “oops,” it’s a much worse feeling than that.  Bad endings do more than disappoint.  They’re broken promises — and like most people, to me, promises matter.    So one answer is to just never go on a third date.

  2/23/14

The first thing to get out of the way is that ever since I finished Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending (appropriately enough), I have not read any other book through to the ending.  That I can remember anyway.  (That hardly seems possible!  But it’s close.)  In any event,  I’m in various stages in Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, and Can You Forgive Her.   My friend Karen made the charitable observation that I’m not actually lazy or inattentive, but that I seem to be reading to find answers to writing problems, and when you do that, you don’t really feel compelled to read the whole thing (the last three books are actually ones I’ve read before, but a very long time ago).  But I do want to find time to read just for the pleasure of reading. I did that on the plane to the northwest — I’m almost finished with Elmore Leonard’s Killshot.  God I love that guy.

Also, I do plan to finish writing Queen of Mercy. And you can’t really find models for how to write the ending of a book if you don’t reach the ending of the great books you’ve begun reading.