reading disappointments
June 10, 2002
Just now reading about book snobbery in terms of summer reading. Reading as entertainment? Who woulda thunk it? I would have read it last week if…sigh… my internet connection was working. I plowed through several books this weekend.
Finished up Secret life: an autobiography. It was a disappointment. It’s touted as the memoir of a sex addict and then 3/4 of the book is about his (Michael Ryan) childhood, which includes his molestation, but honestly, I was expecting something more about his base sexual encounters as an adult. It was interesting, and quite well-written though. It did hold my attention, but I believe that was because I kept waiting for the good parts. I’ll admit it, I’m out for the occasional thrill when it comes to reading.
Then I read the Glass Harmonica, a quasi-fantasy/sci-fi book by Louise Marley that has an element of time-travel in it. It was an average read, I must say though that I was slightly disappointed in it as well. I must find a better source for picking good books. I just picked this one off the shelf at the local crap bookstore because the back cover made it sound good. It takes place in 2011 or maybe 2018 and also in 18th century London. These two women play the glass harmonica and have visions of one another. The woman in the past is trying to send a message to the one in the future about the restorative benefits of glass harmonica music so that she can then heal her twin brother of his handicap. Frankly, I like the story when it took place in he 18th century best. If you’ve not heard the glass harmonica before you can listen to .mp3 files here.
Then I read Marc Shapiro’s biography of Susan Sarandon. Called Susan Sarandon: actress-activist, it was another disappointment. I hoped for something more in depth, but this was a very surface treatment of her life. Written entirely from magazine and newspaper articles, he never interviewed Sarandon at all for the book, nor did he interview her friends or family. Granted, I learned more about her life, struggles, and activism, but it was quite obviously just a compilation of magazine articles. Well, now it all makes sense. Apparently he’s a biographer to the stars… he’s written about Jennifer Love Hewitt & Freddie Prinze, Jr.
I tried reading Rain by Kirsty Gunn, it looked & sounded promising, but after the first 15 pages I tossed it because it was just too lyrical for my taste. It’s about these two children who entertain themselves at a lake because their parents recover from hangovers everyday and party every night. While I enjoy the “abandoned child” genre, there was too much description of the natural environment and not enough narrative. That really drives me crazy. I’m all for nature, but I prefer to be in it and not read about it. I’ve found that most writers I’ve read get too obtuse and I spend entirely too much time trying to imagine the scenery and that gets in the way of actually reading the book.
Next, I picked up Having faith: an ecologist’s journey to motherhood (by Sandra Steingraber). I read about two chapters of that before deciding that it would be too scientifically complex for me to follow. A great premise, that of motherhood and ecology, but I guess it was more that I cared to chew.
I picked up the other two Bourne books by Robert Ludlum but they are terribly thick looking and I’m slightly daunted by the thought of reading them. Surprising how a thick paperback doesn’t have that same effect on me. I think it’s the whole weight issue. I don’t want to have to lug around a book that heavy. I also have a biography of Woody Guthrie and a biography of some man, can’t recall his name right now, who was once a political conservative and is not any longer. I can’t think of any fiction that’s handy to read other than books I already own. Guess I should start reading those instead of patronizing my public library so frequently, eh?
a week without reading is like…
April 1, 2002
I did finish Wren’s Gift upon the shore, and one of the most interesting things about it has to do with the conflict between books/learning/information and fundamental Christian beliefs. The showdown at the end pits 2 women against each other. One tries to blow up a shed containing quite possibly the last few books in existence while the other woman, thirty or forty years her senior handcuffs herself to the building. The elderly woman, Mary, I believe wants to preserve this legacy for humanity. She and her housemate, Rachel scavenged up all the books they could find and sealed them into a shed so that they could be preserved for future generations who could make copies of the texts.
I read an autobiography/memoir about the only woman to serve in the French Foreign Legion, Susan Travers. Tomorrow to be brave was quite fascinating (here’s the NYT blurb). Travers was quite a wicked woman and wants to be sure that her legacy stresses that above other things. Born into English privilege (which I guess is more decadent than most, or perhaps just manifests itself distinctively?) Travers grew up in Cannes, I believe or somewhere along the French Riviera. The contrast between her early years of excess and later deprivations during the war were great indeed. I always enjoy reading about women who took chances and lived exciting lives, though the excitement seemed to wane after her marriage, who would have guessed that?
I suppose that the next thing that I read was Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, which I’d been on the library’s waiting list forever. And, it was actually quite good. I guess you could say that I devoured it. As an aside, I always have trouble spelling Jonathan. It’s one of those weird names that has several variations, and one never knows quite how the owner spells it.
My reading then turned to something more fun, Beth Saulnier’s latest mystery in the Alex Bernier series, Bad seed. Great topic though, Frankenfoods and GMO’s, really pits the community against one another. While I enjoy reading the Bernier series, I’m waiting for Saulnier to develop more as a writer. I don’t think the books are as tight as they could be though the plots are well-conceived and the characters are real enough.
Now I’m reading Laura Lippman’s In a strange city. More about it later, but it’s really quite fabulous, except for a few things…
falling behind, again…
March 20, 2002
It seems as though there’s just no time for much of anything these days, much less reading or writing about what I’ve been reading. I did finish Half a life on Friday the 15th, though. It was not my cup of tea. But I did like the ending, which was rather abrupt, because I was ready to close its covers for good. I really wonder who “decides” that books are award winning, etc. I’m sure the choice is more political than aesthetic. I’m not just talking about this book, but many “award-winning” books are not all that; they’re certainly not books that I would pick, nor are they to my taste. So who are those with “taste” who tells the rest of us what is good? Well, it’s so arbitrary and subjective, perhaps book awards should be done away with.
I finished reading Michelle Brattain’s Politics of whiteness: race, workers, and culture in the modern South over the weekend. Although it was difficult for me to get into and really quite odious reading at times, I quite enjoyed it. I feel as though I have a firm grasp on labor, race and conflict in the Rome, Georgia textile mills. It was really difficult reading for me though and I’m not quite sure why. Normally I will read with music playing or the TV on in the background, but I had to cloister myself in a silent room to truly concentrate on the text. Several times in my reading I actually lost my place and would read over paragraphs and pages again and again before truly digesting the text. I found the experience quite a departure from my usual reading experience because normally I don’t have any problems reading non-fiction.There really was so much information to digest. But it’s really quite an excellent book. Well-researched and well-written as well. It’s not typically dry as academic books go, but it is certainly not something to casually read on a train, in a plane, or at the beach. Brattain confirmed something that I’m coming to understand more and more about history and life in general: there is no standard experience or universal model; you can’t just apply blanket statements or judgments about anything. There exists within each region or movement or whatever, many layers and differences, the old myths don’t hold true. The old ways of categorizing events, issues, people just don’t work. History in particular has concentrated more on developing over-arcing generalizations, well in general but then also regionally, or racially (is that even a word?), instead of really delving into the details, reseraching and discovering that things are not as they seemed.
So sorry, I shall climb down from my stump at this point. Oh, one last thing that was quite interesting about the book is that my favorite library school professor’s father was mentioned in the book on several pages. While I knew that James V. Carmichael, Jr. was from Georgia, I had no idea that his father ran in the gubernatorial race in 1946. JVC, Sr. was a lawyer and owned a furniture plant as well. The William Russell Pullen Library at Georgia State University contains information about Carmichael in their Special Collections & Archives (Georgia Politics, 1946-48) as does the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory.
These are the contents at Emory:
CARMICHAEL, JAMES VINSON, 1910-1972 (#576) Papers, 1913-1982; 89 boxes, 71 OP, 4 BV, 24 OBV, 1 OH Carmichael, a Marietta resident, served as the president of Scripto, Inc. (1947-1964), as general manager of the Georgia Division of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation (1951-1952), and as a member of the Georgia legislature (1936-1940). He also ran for the governorship in 1946 and was active in Atlanta civic and social organizations. The collection includes correspondence, speeches, legal documents, financial documents, clippings, photographs, and memorabilia regarding Carmichael’s business and political careers, his service on various committees and advisory councils, as well as some personal and family material. The collection also includes material on the Atlanta Art School and the Atlanta Arts Alliance.
So there’s your Georgia history lesson for the day.
I’m reading MK Wren’s Gift upon the shore now. It’s post-apocalyptic, and the chapters are arranged so that one is in the present and the next one is in the past. I don’t really like that set-up, but what can one do? So far the story is moving along at a quick pace, and I’m eager to discover the secrets in the story. Mary is living at the Oregon coast when “THE END” comes; nuclear war. She and her housemate survived nuclear winter & it’s 2 years later. They just traveled about 200 miles in two weeks time searching for other survivors. No luck, but we know eventually there are other people because Mary tells her story to a young man who lives at her compound, which has sort of been taken over by a fringey christian group. I’m interested to see how that all happened.I’ll finish that up in a day or so.
Also started reading Crandall Shiflett’s Coal Towns: Life, Work and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia,1880-1960. Really quite interesting as well, though I think that the Brattain book really helped me understand a lot about company towns, organized labor, and issues of class and race. This one will really be a breeze. It’s completely easy to read. And its so grand that I already know exactly what boosterism, paternalism, and the New South creed are.
Yesterday I received a book I ordered (Reel Knockouts Violent Women in the Movies –here’s an editor), and I can’t wait to get started on it, but it will have to wait a while as I have several library books that I’m already obliged to read.
And I’m off, it’s lunchtime!
courtney, being good, and other stuff
March 11, 2002
I have been reading regularly. I just haven’t had the time to write about it. When I have had time, the server doesn’t seem to want me to leave an entry, so my attempts have been foiled for a week. Early last week I finished the Courtney Love bio. It was good, and I learned more about her than I already knew, but really, not so much more. I wished it was meatier. I understand that she’s just 30-something, so maybe there’s not a whole lot that can be written about her life at this point, but I really wanted one of those thick densely packed biographies that you find about Edna St. Vincent Milay or Churchill. Courtney really isn’t in the same league at those folks, but…. I like her just the same. Most surprising is that she is quite a reader, and I really wish that Brite delved more into Love’s literary influences and reading patterns and all that.
While still in Courtney mode I started Grrrls: Viva rock divas (sorry I couldn’t find any reviews, so it’s just an amazon link, yech!), and read most of her entry, but haven’t picked the book up again to read about all my other favorite women rockers.
I also started MK Wren’s Gift upon the shore, a sci-fi mystery hybrid, but have only read about a chapter in it.
I had been reading on Polar for about a week, and finally finished it Friday. I liked TR Pearson’s perspective/point of view and the way he approached his characters, but it was awful hard to struggle through the thing. I didn’t think I’d have much trouble because I really enjoyed his previous book, Blue Ridge.
Then of course I totally thought that Nick Hornby’s How to be good would make a great movie. I’m wondering who would be cast in those parts. Hornby’s book has such a good message, actually there are several, and I will have to think about them some more before really analyzing them in depth here. Great book though, highly recommended!
John Colapinto’s About the author was surprisingly good. It’s not that I doubted that it would be good, but my luck selecting leisure reading recently has been bad. It was refreshing and a tight little mystery, well…. not really a mystery, but close enough. It was a fun read, that’s for sure. And now I know why his name sounds familiar, he’s the one who wrote that As nature made him that I heard about on NPR.
I’m almost through reading VS Naipaul’s Half a life, and though I am enjoying it, I somehow am questioning why it won a Nobel Prize. Perhaps I’ll better understand once I’ve completed the book. It’s not my favorite, that’s for sure, but the story is well written, it flows well. The characters are somewhat intriguing, but his female characters lack depth and are purely incidental to the story. But what else is new, eh? Time to blow this Popsicle stand and get home for some quality reading time!
labouring away
September 4, 2001
My pace has slowed. However, I did read 2 chapters in Richard Maruis’ A Short Guide to Writing About History (1998), which is infinitely readable, entertaining, and ultimately educational.
Then, I read Donald Wright’s African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (The American History Series) (1993). Really enlightening. I learned so much, and it was really well written as well.
For fun reading I finished Slow River (1995) by Nicola Griffith. I read Blue Place (1998) sometime last fall, I believe. I hoped that my library would purchase her other books, but so far they have not. I’ve had to rely upon ye olde standby-Interlibrary Loan. But, Blue place was rather haunting. I still recall the imagery and character, Aud, who I imagined in my mind the whole time as Angelina Jolie. Although the woman in the photo on the book jacket looks like a model, there’s something in her manner/carriage that reminded me of Angelina. I found an interview with Griffith at January Magazine.
The next book I’ll start reading is Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000) by Lerone Bennett, Jr.
And, I’ve got another Nicola Griffith ILL to retrieve from my local public library. Lots of reading to do, so little time!!
weekend round-up
August 19, 2001
Back to Nice girls finish last (1997), for a brief moment. I was struck by a sentence on page 25:
…where viewers were less likely to notice if he confused Liberian rebels with librarian rebels.
It’s wonderful that others have noticed the remarkable similarity between Liberia and Library. Of course, at our favorite place of work, we have a saying that, “At least it’s better than Liberia.”
I did finish Gibbon’s Decline & Fall (1996); it was most excellent, one of the best books I’ve read all year. And, I regret that the link in my previous mention of the book gave it a rather negative review, calling it much to feminist. Whatta shock! My, my, my. It was really great until the end, when it got kinda freaky (not that kind of freaky though). And, the end was rather ambiguious, so I didn’t especially appreciate that as a plot device, although it probably was pretty durned effective.
Then, I indulged in a bit of fun with Jennifer Crusie’s Manhunting (1993). Not one of her better one’s, mind you, but still above average writing in the romance genre.
I tried a Tami Hoag novel, Dust to Dust (2000). It was well-written, with good characters. I especially liked her Nikki Liski, her sense of humor is quite good. The plot was twisted enough to confuse me a bit, but I figuered out 80% of the ending before it happened. I might read another one sometime.
Oh, then I read Miracle Strip (1998) by Nancy Bartholomew. I’ll definately read ther rest of the series. They’re brilliantly funny, a fabulous heroine with a great right hook who’s also an exotic dancer in Panama City, Florida. Yeah, I know, couldn’t quite help but read ANOTHER of those wacky books that takes place in Florida. What is it about the place? And I picked up one of Bartholomew’s other wisecrackin’ (I hope) mysteries…can’t recall the title, but the protagonist is a country western singer. Likely another fabulous heroine with great wit, wisdom, etc. And, there’s more (just one though!)….
Discovered another great writer, Katy Munger. I read Legwork (1997), goody, her first. I really wasn’t sure if I started reading far into the series becase she refers back to things in her past a lot, like other writers do just in case one begins their series in the middle. It must have been a Carolina weekend because both Munger and Bartholomew live in the northern state (Munger in Raleigh, Bartholomew in Greensboro–my alma mater–ahem!). Hmmm, I wonder if North Carolina has festival of books? I may read a few chapters in something else this evening before bedtime. All in all, I’ve been pretty pleased with my reading this weekend.
on with the show…
August 17, 2001
Ok so the plot of Letting Loose (1998) was pretty predictable. I guessed it, wound up being correct, and now wonder why I even bothered reading the durned thing. Oh, but the great thing about the book is that the heroine has moved from Mass. to some fictional “Paradise Island” on Florida’s Gulf Coast to open a bookstore. That was the part that made it so promising and appealling, but alas there wasn’t much abou the bookstore in the book. I assumed she opened it, the book ended with the typical wedding on the beach at sunset…blah!
I did read A Darkness More Than Night (2001) by Michael Connelly. I read one of his books a few years ago…Blood Work (1998), which I recall as being entertaining. And for some reason Void Moon (2000) sticks out in my head, though I don’t think that I read it. Well, after consulting my reading log of six years, I actually did read Void moon last year. Believe it or not. But they are entertaining, well-written, and probably good airplane books. The plots are better than average, but not with the twists and turns that I’m used to ala Jeff Deaver. Btw, don’t you think it’s interesting that almost every author has their own website? Wow, if I didn’t write this stuff down, there’s no way I would have remembered that! My memory is already shot at such a young age.
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letting loose? uhm, er…as a goose?
August 16, 2001
Well I’ve picked a ….where’s the word?…book to read, that’s for sure. Letting Loose (1998) is really not my cup of tea….it’s more like liptons (i prefer tetley or even better, celestial seasonings), or some of that horrid instant mix with water tea. Oh the book is not terribly bad, but I’m bored with it. It has potential, some of the characters could be more quirky, after all, it is one of those would-be humorous books set in Florida, you’re familiar with the genre, right? I guess I decided to read it because it was likened to Jennifer Crusie’s novels. I’ll be glad when I’m done with it. I’m already 2/3 of the way through with it, so I really have some time invested in it.
I did finish Beauty (1991) last night, and parts of it were really well done, but then there were sections that just dragged along. It was tedious, odious, terribly painful to digest. I must say that Beauty (1991) is not my favorite Tepper book. But I have plenty of books at home to read, I can’t wait to read something GOOD, for a change!
sparkle, beauty, et al
August 15, 2001
Although I really try not to patronize amazon.com (for many reasons), a sweet, thoughtful friend sent me a $25 gift certificate for one of those _0 birthdays. I indulged by purchasing a few mass market paperbacks one of which I read last night.
Sparkle Hayter is such a great writer. I’ve read most of her books, and finished Nice Girls Finish Last (1996), last night. And, I’ve got Revenge of the Cootie Girls (1997) checked out so I can read it later this week as well. The main character throughtout the series is Robin Hudson, girl (ah, she’s a woman, really!) television news reporter.Witty, clever, good humor, they’re really fabulous and I would highly recommend them to almost anyone.
Then I began Beauty (1991), by one of my favorite authors, Sheri Tepper.
reading update
July 5, 2001
Finished the Arthur Alexander story, Country music annual 2000 (2000) Mendoza in Hollywood: A Novel of the Company, Book 3 (2000) (Kage Baker writes these fascinating stories about a time-traveling group of folks who run around the world saving artwork, plants, endangered species, etc.), Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (1992) (another one about time travel back to the 15th century…are you seeing a pattern here?), Sheri Tepper’s Family Tree (1997) (fantasy/sci-fi about trees, preservation, and endangered species), Never Change (2001) (simple yet sweet love story) by Elizabeth Berg, and both books Big Stone Gap (2000) & Big Cherry Holler (2001) ) by Adriana Trigiani.
