BlogLily

This is where I keep track of what I’m reading/checking out from the library/buying.

July 18, 2008.

I read, with enormous pleasure this week, Alice Mattison’s The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman. It’s set in New Haven, and Yale’s a backdrop here, and since I went to Yale, I found that interesting, the way you find movies set in San Francisco interesting when you live in the Bay Area (oh, look! there’s the ferry building). But that’s not really the best thing about this book, and if it was, I wouldn’t be writing about it, just like I don’t really write about the alumni magazine’s entire contents. The best things about this book were (a) the wonderful voice of the first person narrator, Daisy, who’s beautifully rendered, complex, and funny; and (b) the observations the book makes about love and marriage, especially the way those things look in the middle of life. I’m so glad I picked it up. Mattison’s such an assured writer — she observes people beautifully, and that’s one thing I particularly like when I read, so she has a fan in me. I checked a few of her books out from the library, but I want to own some of them, particularly her stories, so I’m going to order her most recent book of stories, with the great title: Men Giving Money, Women Yelling; Intersecting Stories.  **As it turns out, that’s not her most recent book of stories, but much earlier.  I ordered her most recent stories, which are called In Case We’re Separated.

What’s ahead for reading? I’ve still got Juno Diaz’s book waiting and I want to read more stories. I think I need to read that Tobias Wolff collection I bought a while back, and also I’d like to read more of Scott Snyder’s stories and some of Alice Mattison’s. How lucky I am to have a little more time than usual this summer — just because it’s summer — to read. Last summer I was still feeling tired after the cancer treatments, and it’s lovely to have all that behind me. Sometimes I forget I went through all that, especially when I feel like my writing is taking forever, but then I remember that I didn’t get to read or write for quite a while, and now I can.

July 8, 2008.

While I was away over the weekend, I read most of Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child, which is a wonderful book of stories. They’re mature, straightforward, generous, beautifully written, and entertaining. Most are in the first person, and all are told from the point of view of aging men (except for a couple that are told from the point of view of pre-adolescent boys). Sometimes I wonder how it is that my novel can be told principally from the perspective of a guy in his mid-forties. And now I realize that the reason that’s not so hard is because a lot of fiction is told from this perspective, so even if I’m not that guy, I have a pretty good idea of what he’s like. This, in fact, is what I love about fiction — all the people who don’t happen to be you, or anything even remotely like you, whose heads you nevertheless get to be inside. And that is what I love about writing — making up people and seeing what they do.

** I’ve just re-read this entry and am struck by how little I seem interested in the obvious question here, which has to do with men and women and male writers and women writers and our subjects. When I was a graduate student, feminist theory was a very important reading tool and I can’t imagine reading and writing about a guy like Richard Russo without talking about the middle aged character and the middle aged white male writer — with an excursion into Cheever, Bellow, Roth, Richard Ford too. And in law school, when I was the editor of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, the same was true of my thinking about the law. As a writer, I have almost no interest in theory. What matters most to me is what makes people the way they are — how they see each other, which is to say, how they fail to see each other, is one of the concerns I have in the back of my mind all the time. I like how fiction reveals character — mostly through what happens to people and what they do in response. But I’m interested in everyone, pretty equally. My main concern is just to get it right. And this also is the approach my reading takes. I read male and female writers without really even thinking about their gender. A guy like Russo, who’s only recently begun to write women characters with any depth, is very good on men — and it’s helpful to see how he goes about getting inside them and what kinds of predicaments he puts them in to find out just what they’re made of. And now William has come upstairs and is lying on my bed and sighing because he needs some company, so I will leave this unfinished thought about the difference between reading as an academic, reading for pleasure, and reading as a writer (I’ve not yet gotten to the middle kind of reading), and go downstairs and give him that company.

July 1, 2008

I’ve written before about my aversion to summer reading lists. But this is a truly funny take on it — plus it’s a cartoon. What’s not to like? Thanks to Kate for the link.

June 28, 2008

All appearances to the contrary, I do occasionally read. When I went to the east coast over the weekend, I read two things: Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence and Frank O’Connor’s book about short stories, the name of which escapes me. What the two had in common was lovely writing marred by intermittent failures to connect with the reader. This was due, in both cases, to the writer’s inattention to the reader’s experience. With the Rushdie, the story’s thread kept getting lost — partly because he’d chosen to give his characters similar-sounding names (sort of like what happens in Russian literature), and partly because he gave them predicaments that, while incredibly entertaining and beautifully written, had that fairy tale-like quality that sometimes made it difficult to really get any traction. In contrast, a book like Midnight’s Children, which has many things in common with Enchantress of Florence, manages to pull off the magical elements because it is so well grounded in history (in the case of Midnight’s Children, the separation of India and Pakistan). Still, he’s such a beautiful writer that it’s easy to forgive these missteps. I’m not finished yet — I have a few chapters left to go — and I’m not sure I ever will. It was enough to read what I did and to enjoy it. And there’s a problem with the book too — if you feel that it doesn’t matter if you finish it, then there’s something not quite right about the story.

As for the Frank O’Connor book about the art of short story writing, I had a similar problem of not being able to get traction. I’d read along, nodding to myself, and saying things like, Of course he’s right about this, and then I’d be totally thrown by something like his invention of a category of life that the short story is meant to illuminate — submerged lives, I think he called it. I’m going back to this book, though, because I only read a few chapters, and I think there’s more here.

Something else I read a bit of is a collection of John Updike’s non-fiction (mostly book reviews, mostly for The New Yorker), called Due Considerations. Here’s something that really struck me, about the art of reviewing books

A book review, in the spacious magazine that William Shawn edited back then, should be, he said, ’something more’ — an essay of sorts, with personal and humorous riffs allowed.”

I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly the sort of thing I like to read.

June 5, 2008.

This has been a week of occasional short story reading. Because I write often about love that’s well on its way to becoming something else, someone recommended I read Alice Munro. What I read was restrained and non judgmental, two qualities I like very much — the danger is that when the writing is too distant, you fail to care. She doesn’t go that far. (Also, she makes me think about writers who write about ordinary things in extraordinarily lovely ways and writers who write about quirky things and whether that choice is a way of avoiding having to write well about those quirky things.)

Let’s see — oh, yes, I also read a few Tobias Wolf stories in a collection whose name I cannot now recall, although its mode of delivery was certainly memorable. It was a book I ordered from an Amazon seller and it fit perfectly in a Hungry Man frozen meal box, so perfectly that the seller just slapped a label on the box and taped it up without bothering to wrap the hungry man box in brown paper. (The book was shrouded in plastic wrap, making it look for a moment almost like something you might put in a microwave). I wish I could remember anything about the story, but fear I cannot. I’ll get back to him, though. I think he might be a good person to help me think about Hemingway.

And I am still reading Nuala O’Faolain. I like her very much.

May 29, 2008.

These were waiting for me today in my in-box. The paperbacks. The hardbacks came to me a long time ago from Ella, at box of books, who asked me to keep them for her, which I want her to know I am doing. They look great in my office and they make me think about her.

These two books — the Lorri Moore and the Richard Russo — are part of my plan to work on my stories. The guy who recommended them had asked me what I read in the short story line, and all I could think of was Chekhov, which is true, but still… Anyway, I remember that the Russo stories got kind of a negative review in the new york times (what do they know, though, honestly?), and for the longest time I thought the title of the collection was something about a widow, probably because (as you will see) that’s the word I most associate with women who aren’t accepted by society. Or something. Anyway, he told me the title, which was not about a widow and I wrote it down as “The Horse Child,” maybe because we’ve been reading a lot of narnia books. And then it showed up, “The Whore’s Child” and totally made me laugh.

What a lot of good reading there is to do.

May 28, 2008.

Just a quick note to say that Nuala O’Faolain is doing two interesting things in My Dream of You and Chicago May, both books I’ve been reading for the last week or so: first, she’s writing about a subject you don’t see a lot (or at least I don’t) which is how women in the middle of their lives continue to find love and passion. The second thing she’s doing, which is the most interesting, is working through the question of how a writer tells the story of a real person’s life — I haven’t read her memoir, which I think preceded My Dream of You and Chicago May, but these last two books both involve a character (in the first book an actual made up character and in the second book O’Faolain herself), who tries to understand Irish lives when there’s very little actual record of those lives. I’m pretty sure in the end she decides to just make up a lot of stuff, much of which has to do with her own Irish life. She seems to be wrestling with how you define the success of these projects — is it in literal factual accuracy? Or in emotional accuracy? I think, although this is the thought of a moment, that it lies in whether she makes a good story out of it. She does, by the way, make great stories out of these fragments of lives. And if you are interested in biography, these two books are elegant explorations of how one might go about telling the stories of women on the margins.

All kinds of things are flowing in, beginning with lots of journals: the new issue of Boston Review (what an ethical, thoughtful journal that is, with important essays about Africa in this issue), the new zyzzyva (all caps and italicized, though), and three other zyzzyva publications, which I got for the two dollars in postage I paid them when I subscribed. That deal is worth checking out. After I chose my three free-ish publications, about two days later I got in the mail my choices: two story collections, and a very cool compilation of excerpts from writer’s journals, something I love, especially when it’s in people’s actual handwriting, which this one is. A writer I like, and took a class from and work with sometimes, Thaisa Frank, blurbed this book, which makes sense, because she is a woman who respects and understands the process of getting things from a notebook of scrawled bits and pieces into the form of a story or a novel or a poem.

And then I’ve ordered, and will soon receive, Scott Snyder’s Voodoo Heart, and Richard Russo’s Whore’s Child, and the new Rushdie, and Lorrie Moore’s Birds in America and several other things I can’t now remember, but hope I will find a little miraculous bubble of time within which to sit and read all these great things.

Oh, look, it did come today, left on the doorstep by the UPS guy! What a gorgeous cover.

I also read a few Hemingway stories, early ones, and you know what? They’re awful. They’re boring, for one thing, and they don’t ring true. When I have more time I really need to read more Hemingway and figure out why on earth I feel like that.

May 19, 2008.

I need to read more Penelope Fitzgerald. Which can wait a little while, now that I’ve written that down, and won’t forget as a result.

What I did do today, reading-wise, is pre-order the new Rushdie novel because Marie liked it. I loved Midnight’s Children when I read it about eight years ago because it delivered an entire world, and was hugely interesting from an historical point of view, and was magical in a way that didn’t bother me, but had me going.

May 18, 2008.

The first story in Stegner’s Collected Stories is called The Traveler. At first, it doesn’t seem to be about what it’s actually about but instead presents itself as a straight ahead, man vs. very cold night, tale. There’s nobody but the man and the night in the first 3/4 of the story. And then, in his interaction with the only other character in the story, you realize that it’s a story about origins, and youth, which is what most first stories by young writers are probably about. I don’t know if people still write in this order, from the pastoral to the tragic, and this story could hardly be called pastoral, but as a person who began writing seriously much later than most, I wonder sometimes where my bildungsroman, the one I’m not in the least tempted to write, lives.

Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You reads like a memoir and tells a terrific story of a woman in her late forties who’s facing the question of whether passion and love are finished for her. It’s thick, and I’m busy, but I keep looking at it and wanting to pick it back up. Which is exactly what I’m going to do right now, this sunny, quiet Sunday morning at 8:31 a.m.

Sunday night. 10:00 p.m. W and I had a lovely evening out on Telegraph Avenue. For one thing, the students are gone, or going, which means you can park. It also means that they’ve unloaded lots of books at Moe’s. I think my preoccupations will be obvious from the four used books I picked up:

• Willa Cather, Collected Stories
• Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories
• Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

And no, I don’t plan to read them each straight through. I’m going to read more Stegner, and pick these up when I have a chance.

May 16, 2008.

From the San Francisco Public Library. After lunch, I picked up the things I’d put on hold (Nuala O’Faolain and Shakespeare), and then went over to the fiction section. I stood there for a minute, trying to think about what I’m working on in my writing. And then it came to me: marriage, short fiction, beautiful, clean writing. Wallace Stegner, of course.

• Nuala O’Faolain: The Story of Chicago May, My Dream of You
• Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shew
• Wallace Stegner: Collected Stories, Recapitulation

These are due back in three weeks. Yikes.