Beautiful little accidents of everyday experience (Books - You Do Not Need Another Self-Helf Book by Sarah Salway)

Sarah Salway, friend and author of the novels Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture (among others), has just published her first volume of poetry! What better way to ring in March? It boasts the smile-inducing title You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book, and after reading it, you probably won't. The book features verse and prose poems, mostly contemporary subject matter, and a good deal of first-person voice (but not exclusively). They are sexy, reflective, funny, clever, even cheeky, but mostly these are intimate and generous poems. You can feel the poet reaching beyond her comfort to give you something of herself. I admire the way Sarah courts everyday experience, like shopping or little moments of regret, for accidents which reveal something fresh about being inside of our lives, and how she then uses her craft to create something of lasting worth and beauty from them.

I am delighted to participate in her virtual poetry reading by presenting Sarah's own reading of "Dad Plays St George."




You may purchase the book here: http://www.pindroppress.com/?page_id=440 or here.

For other stops on the virtual poetry reading tour, click here for the list of links.

Embracing the paradox (Books - To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf)

I revisited To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's great meditation on how connection to people and to things we love helps us transcend life's transience. It must have been the third or possibly the fourth time I read it. I had bought a new edition last year as my old one is falling to pieces. I am less inclined to do a full-on review than to make a few appreciative observations.

People most often describe the style of Woolf's prose as stream of consciousness but I was aware in this reading that the cadence was more like speech than thought - as though as I was being read to. This legislated a speed for the progress of my reading that I could not exceed without losing the meaning - a kind of enforced luxuriousness.

Representations of Jews changing in film (but only for Jews and only in film?) - (Books The New Jew in Film by Nathan Abrams)

Nathan Abrams, a lecturer in film from Bangor University in Wales, has written The New Jew in Film, about to be released in paperback, about the representation of Jews and various aspects of Jewishness in film since 1990. It's a contemporary take in the era of identity politics, meaning the book is about representations of self in the medium of film. However, in this case, these selves have been historically appropriated and given the role of 'other' by society (at best) or mercilessly persecuted (at worst) for a few thousand years. Abrams traces the evolution of the depiction of Jews in film prior to the last decade. He starts with the classic anti-Semetic stereotype such as the male lascivious money grubber, intellectual nebbish, and hairy sex-addict, and female chicken soup-pushing interfering loudmouth, followed by films that tried to depict Jews as anxious but cute - Fiddler on the Roof or Woody Allen's heroes, and films that attempted to show that Jews are just like everyone like The Graduate, and then films that took on the subjects of anti-semitism in general and the Holocaust in particular.

Walking through versions of the past (Books - Interpreters by Sue Eckstein)

Susan Eckstein's Interpreters starts with an eye-opening paragraph.

I think I was about six when my mother tried to kill me, though I didn't know it at the time. It was probably somewhere around here - where the privet hedges give way to barriers of leylandii and high wrought-iron gates. I don't suppose it had anything to do with the hedges and gates, though they can't have helped. This place could induce a yearning for death in even the most optimistic.

Conflict anyone? Aside from the efficiency with which she dispatches with the central relationship of the book (one that provides not just pathos but also tension and narrative structure), Eckstein sets up a first-person narrator, Julia, in one paragraph who we know is haunted by the past. She has an eye for detail and a strong sense of irony - both means by which people distance themselves from emotion. Most of all, she feels trapped by convention.

Wislawa Szymborska, spirited Polish poet - Her poems make me say 'Yes, exactly.'

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature, died on Monday at 88 (hat tip: Bookslut)

I posted some of her irrepressible poems here in 2007, in addition to this excerpt from her Nobel address:

Parallel lives of determination and vigor (Books - A Saving Remnant by Martin Duberman)

Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are social and political radicals who worked during the tumultuous decades spanning the 1950s - 2000s. Their personal transformation through radical political action is the subject of Martin Duberman's dual biography A Saving Remnant. This sometimes messily organized narrative seemed almost suited to McReynolds and Demings's unusual lives of outward determination and vigor, and their parallel personal journeys which included much internal conflict, however, I was disappointed by the writing, which I found curiously flat and carelessly repetitive. Additionally, in a story whose central characters were active in many political organizations and who published in numerous journals, Duberman gave me too little background to help distinguish the Social Democratic Front from the Students for a Democratic

Grown-up fantasy that is more than good versus evil (Books - The Magician King by Lev Grossman)

Since finishing Lev Grossman's dark, magical coming of age fantasy The Magicians almost exactly two years ago, I have been anticipating its sequel - The Magician King. The sequel shares the original's strong plotting, dark tone, and layer of ironic commentary on the fantasy form's popularity and most well-used devices. In the first book Quentin, a smart, less than popular boy, is trained at a magic school called Brakebills, eventually travels to Fillory, the land of his childhood fantasy, and is crowned king. When we meet him in the sequel, he lives the luxurious life of a king, but rather than being content with ruling the land of his dreams, he is bored and restless. He decides to go on a quest to far-off parts of his realm, making some unplanned for and surprising detours along the way. While the first volume focused on power, love, and fantasy, part two was about a sense of belonging and purpose, and ultimately the putting away of the utopian fantasies of childhood.

The alternative to positive thinking is not despair (Books - Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich) - The Tyranny of Positive Thinking I

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided is a feisty analysis of the American obsession with positive thinking that includes its hypothesized origins, the areas of culture that it infiltrates - big business, religion, psychology - the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around coaching and products to maintain that cockeyed optimism no matter what the weather tells us, a debunking of many of the beneficial outcomes claimed by proponents of positive thinking such as improved cancer prognosis or material wealth, and finally the usefulness of negative emotions, stress, and vigilance. The anecdotes as well as the facts (if you choose to listen to them) are delivered in accessible prose with a hefty dose of irony. In addition, Ehrenreich is emotionally open about the part her own experience plays with the subject she writes about as in, for example, this about her wait for test results to confirm or reject a cancer diagnosis:

Breakfast reading, superpowers, and other important matters...

It has been a while since I participated in BTT. Here's the meme posted today.
1. What’s your favorite time of day to read?
I'll read any time but end up reading most often before I go to sleep.
2. Do you read during breakfast? (Assuming you eat breakfast.)
I usually read blogs during breakfast but if I'm at the tail-end of a really good read, I'll sometimes try to finish it over breakfast.

False fronts on depression-era Main Street (Books - As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross)

Although Canadian author Sinclair Ross had to drop out of high school to work, he demonstrates a deep understanding of the human heart and writes in spare, unequivocal prose about life on the prairie during the depression in his first novel, As For Me and My House (1941). In this story of eroded communication between the Bentleys, a preacher and his wife, Ross's first person narrative takes the point of view of Mrs. Bentley through a diary she keeps in their twelfth year of a tense and childless marriage as they assume the parish of a dusty town called Horizon.

Dickens Month II - In which the characters, rich and poor alike, attempt to advance themselves (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

250 pages into Our Mutual Friend and Charles Dickens Month, it has struck me that Dickens is something of a naturalist - sketching studies of his characters that are rich enough in detail so that the reader may see them and that always refer to their habitat.

Reginald Wilfer is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on first acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass windows, and generally the De Wilfers who came over with the Conqueror...But, the Reginald Wilfer family were of such commonplace extraction and pursuits that their forefathers had for generations modestly subsisted on the Docks, the Excise Office, and the Custom House, and the existing R. Wilfer was a poor clerk. So poor a clerk, though having a limited salary and an unlimited family, that he had never yet attained the modest object of his ambition: which was to wear a complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time. His black hat was brown before he could afford a coat, his pantaloons were white at the seams and knees before he could buy a pair of boots, his boots had worn out before he could treat himself to new pantaloons, and, by the time he worked round to the hat again, that shining modern article roofed-in an ancient ruin of various periods.

Bookish things...

2012 has begun as a less than typical reading year in that I am participating in multiple challenges which involve long books. The result has been that I have finished just one book. So I thought I would do more of a Salon-like post, so I can touch on the many books I have in-progress.

Above and to the left is the main culprit, Our Mutual Friend. In order to keep pace so that I might post the last of five weekly posts on Dickens's birthday, February 7, I must read 200 pages per week. That's not a hardship as the book is delightful, but it is just enough to keep me from finishing anything else on the longer side. For that reason, I found I had abandoned Geert Mak's travelogue/history of post-war Europe In Europe, despite finding it fascinating and beautifully written in favor of...

Charles Dickens Month I - In which we are introduced to key players (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

This is the first of my five January posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which I began reading just yesterday in this month preceding his 200th birthday. I have barely scratched the surface at about 50

Charles Dickens Month, in which I finally tackle The Pickwick Papers, um, correction Our Mutual Friend

Thomas led me to Amanda's Charles Dickens Month, which excited me because I realized I could indulge in triple action by reading either a copy of The Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend (but not both) that have been festering on my TBR pile: participating in Charles Dickens Month, the Tea & Books Reading Challenge as they are both biggies, and stay true to the TBR Double Dare all at the same time! Rock on.

Update: Let's make that, Our Mutual Friend.

Art as access to the authentic experience (Books - Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner)

I have finished my first read of 2012 Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, a suggestion of Brad Listi's and a gift from my in-laws. This smart, funny, occasionally infuriating novel is about a young American poet's experience of alienation and the art he makes out of his experience while on a fellowship in Spain.

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

2011 - the year that was... (A meme)

Happy 2012. I got this meme from Katherine, who, she tells us, is always walking into things, well into bookstores anyway.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

Published an article in a science journal.

My best fiction reads of 2011

Of the 40-odd works of fiction I read in 2011 I'm going to name some favorites. I'm still working on Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, we'll see if I have time to finish it and write about it. This year, I won't break this group into further sub-genres as the representation of YA fantasy, classic literature, or short works are not significant enough. The original reviews are linked to each title, with an excerpt below. My favorite novels this past year were:

BIG books in 2012 - (The Tea & Books Reading Challenge)

For Birgit (and her hero C.S. Lewis) size matters, which is why she has posed the Tea & Books Reading Challenge, which demands that we tackle 2 or more books that are 700 pages in length or

My best non-fiction reads of 2011

Now it is time for my annual best reads lists of 2011. I will choose from just two categories this year - fiction and non-fiction, beginning here with non-fiction. I read 25 works of non-fiction including the genres of memoir, science, and history/politics. I won't count re-reads, such as two works of Joan Didion's I revisited, as they were re-read because they are favorites. The original reviews are linked to each title, although I excerpt them below. The most memorable given these criteria were:

Living in the World but in Exile from Almost Everyplace (Books - Open City by Teju Cole)

Teju Cole's Open City received strong responses from crack critics and fellow bloggers and made a number of Top 10 fiction lists for the year, persuading me to check it out. In it Julius, a Nigerian immigrant to America who is completing his final year of psychiatry residency at Columbia, walks the streets of New York City. Although the book is short, it does not invite quick reading. The emphasis is not on any sort of plot, but the novel seethes with ideas and scenes of humanity, otherworldly fantasy, and terrific tension.

The form of Open City is a flaneur's diary, only in the case of Julius, his strolls are not idle. He seems to be running from something. Coles's evocation of the