The dog ate it (really)
September 7, 2009
Annie is my six-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi. She likes my reading chair and jumps into my place the moment I get up for something. When I return, we engage in a scootch-over tango so we can both fit in the chair. Webster, my Cardigan Welsh Corgi, doesn’t care about the chair, yet he knows about the power of books in the house. Often we get ready for a walk, the dogs hooked to their leashes, and I sit down to read a few pages in a book. “In a minute,” I say, and Webster slumps to the floor. Annie sits and patiently, steadily stares at me.
Not all dogs are patient with reading habits. I house-sat for friends in Chicago who owned a Dalmatian named Spencer. One night he wanted me to toss the ball for him, but I wanted to stay in bed and read The Stories of John Cheever. Clearly, he was annoyed by that choice because I came home from work the next day and found Cheever chewed like a rawhide bone.
Reading resentment (or is it bibliophilia resentment?) happens. I’ve had people in my life who resented my hours of reading like Spencer, although they didn’t destroy the book. They emitted heavy, resentful sighing or made comments about books being more important than them. The habit is consuming. Corgis, though, seem to adapt fairly well. But then, they know how to jump into the chair and get right in there beside you for the reading hours. They’re smart dogs.
9/10/09 addition: Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain imparts the wisdom of a dog named Enzo. While it’s “best-seller lite” fiction, not the type of book I gravitate toward, I found it a delightful respite from my usual, more intense literature picks. Enzo observes his master weather misfortunes with a steadfast spirit. “The car goes where the eyes go” is the message. It has nothing to do with patience for those who love to read. It’s just a good dog story.
10 books to anticipate this fall
September 4, 2009
Summer Beach Reads behind us now, the fall brings with it new books to read by the fire or tucked in bed before turning out the lights. Here are a few I have on my radar screen.
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith (Peguin Group)
Kirkus Reviews says, “Rarely does a book that seems to promise so little deliver so much.” It’s divided into four sections: Reading, Being, Seeing, and Feeling and covers a range of topics.
The Price of Love and Other Stories by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins)
This is Robinson’s first collection of stories. He’s got a fan base for his best-selling Inspector Alan Banks novels, described as “perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature.” I haven’t read then. I’m thinking this might be a good entry into his fiction.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
Publisher’s Weekly has given this autobiography a starred review. Bloomsbury’s website says, “A memoir of the sociel [sic] and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White.”
Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (HarperCollins)
The HarperCollins website says Lit is about, “getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; and learning to write by learning to live.” Library Journal claims it will be the memoir of the season.
The Humbling by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
The Chicago Tribune says this novel will find favor with Roth fans. From the synopsis, it appears to be in keeping with Roth’s current fictional focus on illness and death, featuring an aging actor.
Family Album by Penelope Lively (Viking)
The Guardian says Lively’s new book ”should be rated as one of her most impressive works.” It also says Lively ”plunges us into an entirely convincing world of bustling family life, yet at the same time keeps her distance with lethally sharp observations.”
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins)
Kingsolver’s first new novel in nine years gets a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. The protagonist Harrison Shepherd embarks on a journey that begins in Mexico in the 1930s, connecting him to artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro (Alfred A. Knopf)
10 new stories from this Grande Dame of short storywriting.
Invisible by Paul Auster (Henry Holt & Co.)
From the Holt website: “Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.”
Devil’s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon)
A fictionalized story about a Confederate Civil War General. Pantheon’s description: “Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.”
A new rotation of books on TLC
September 2, 2009
New books have been added to My Reading Table with reasons why.
Also added, a brief explanation of how this table works; likely a description for how all reading tables work.
The additions to My Reading Table:
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
- Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
- Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition edited by Margaret Scott
- Prague in Danger The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War by Peter Demetz
- Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (This was briefly removed from My Reading Table and on the Currently Reading list. Now it’s back on.)
The removals from My Reading Table:
The Collector by John Fowles
I picked this up last night, after reading The Cry of the Sloth. The first novel by the author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman published in 1963.
The dust jacket flap of the fourth edition says, “Rarely does a publisher introduce a novel of such devastating power.” This is now on the Currently Reading list.
Putting books to be reviewed on My Reading Table doesn’t mesh with the way the table works; hence the removal of these two new releases, soon to hit Currently Reading:
- Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece by Declan Kiberd
- The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
“Homer & Langley” is now available
September 1, 2009
New York City’s Collyer brothers are the subject of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel. He’s taken the folklore of their early 20th Century lives in a Fifth Avenue mansion and turned it into a gorgeous and affecting tribute to eccentricity.
Check out this b&w photo from The New York Times/Paper Cuts when authorities got into the house after the reclusive brothers died: It’s a pack rat’s heaven, with floor to ceiling stuff.
In Doctorow’s fictional rendering, the older brother Langley saves all the newspapers he reads every day. His goal is to figure out how to create one universal edition that will remain eternally current and always up to date.
He also brings home mountains of junk to hoard, from useless furniture to miscellaneous machine parts, and even dismantles a car and puts it back together in the dining room.
The younger of the two, Homer, blind from childhood and a professional pianist, narrates the story with forgiveness of his brother’s oddity — Langley is mentally changed from exposure to mustard gas in WWI.
Doctorow uses major 20th Century events to move Homer & Langley forward. Homer narrates from Prohibition to the Depression to WWII and so on. The obvious stepping-stone effect at first felt cheap, but I forgave it because the brothers’ bizarre life is so invitingly imagined.
What I loved about these hermit, junk-loving brothers of upper class heritage is here, in what Homer says: “After all, we were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention – could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?”
The real Collyer brothers died in 1947. There’s a park now where their house used to stand.
Random House provides an excerpt of Homer & Langley on their website.
