Category Archives: Reading habits

Book Serendipity: 2020, Part I

By Rebecca Foster on April 2, 2020 | 22 Comments

I call it serendipitous when two or more books that I’m reading at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once – usually between 10 and 20 – I guess I’m more prone to such incidents. I also post these occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. (The following are in rough chronological order.)

A Wisconsin setting in three books within a month (Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler, This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner)

I came across a sculpture of “a flock of 191 silver sparrows” in Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano while also reading Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones.

Characters nearly falling asleep at the wheel of a car in Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

There’s no escaping Henry David Thoreau! Within the span of a week I saw him mentioned in The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell, The Snow Tourist by Charlie English, Losing Eden by Lucy Jones and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Plus I’d just read the whole graphic novel Thoreau and Me by Cédric Taling.

Discussions of the work of D.H. Lawrence in Unfinished Business by Vivian Gornick and The Offing by Benjamin Myers

That scientific study on patient recovery in hospital rooms with a window view vs. a view of a brick wall turns up in both Dear Life by Rachel Clarke and Losing Eden by Lucy Jones.

The inverted teardrop shapes mirror each other on these book covers:

Punchy, one-word titles on all these books I was reading simultaneously:

Polio cases in The Golden Age by Joan London, Nemesis by Philip Roth and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

An Italian setting and the motto “Pazienza!” in Dottoressa by Susan Levenstein and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Characters named Lachlan in The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson and The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts

Mentions of the insecticide Flit in Nemesis by Philip Roth and Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

A quoted Leonard Cohen lyric in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott; Cohen as a character in A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

Plague is brought to an English village through bolts of cloth from London in Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks and Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell; both also feature a woman who is a herbal healer sometimes mistaken for a witch (and with similar names: Anys versus Agnes)

Gory scenes of rats being beaten to death in Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Nemesis by Philip Roth

Homemade mobiles in a baby’s room in A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson and Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

Speech indicated by italics rather than the traditional quotation marks in Pew by Catherine Lacey and Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?

Posted in: book serendipity | Tagged: Ann Napolitano, Anne Lamott, Benjamin Myers, book serendipity, Carmen Maria Machado, Cédric Taling, Charlie English, D.H. Lawrence, Geraldine Brooks, Henry David Thoreau, Italy, Joan London, Laurie Frankel, Leonard Cohen, Lucy Jones, Madeleine Watts, Maggie O’Farrell, Nancy Campbell, Nickolas Butler, Philip Roth, plague, polio, Polly Samson, Rachel Clarke, Rose Tremain, Sally Magnusson, Susan Levenstein, Tayari Jones, Vivian Gornick, Wallace Stegner, Wisconsin

Library Checkout: March 2020

By Rebecca Foster on March 30, 2020 | 10 Comments

(Unusually, here is a second post in one day from me. Library Checkout runs on the last Monday of every month; exceptions are rare!)

The only stockpiling I’ve been doing this month is of books. My public library system finally announced its full closure on the 21st, to last through at least the end of May, so I have no real excuse not to get through most of what I’ve borrowed.

I’ve been working my way through a selection of new releases (notably, skimming Hilary Mantel’s trilogy-ending doorstopper – it’s exquisitely written, of course, but far too long and detailed), plus a few backlist books that coincide with my interests in bibliotherapy, health and life writing. Some very short books – a graphic novel, a poetry collection, and a few essay- or novella-length works – make the “Read” list look longer than it really is.

Once again, I had a lot of DNFs this month because I’d placed holds on buzzy books but found that within a few pages, or after the first chapter, the voice or style didn’t click with me. This is no problem, though; I’ll just think of it as my way of sampling new releases while supporting the library service.

What have you been reading from your local libraries? Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part, and/or tag me on Twitter (@bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout). As usual, I give ratings where applicable, plus links to reviews of books I haven’t already featured.

READ

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke
A Story about Cancer (with a Happy Ending) [graphic novel], India Desjardins, illus. Marianne Ferrer [trans. from the French by Solange Ouellet]
Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
The Golden Age by Joan London
The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde
The Cockroach by Ian McEwan
A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson [poetry]
Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell
Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

SKIMMED

Literary Values by John Burroughs
Actress by Anne Enright
Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health by Dr Jenny Goodman
A Short History of Medicine by Steve Parker

CURRENTLY READING

Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
Reading with Patrick: A teacher, a student and the life-changing power of books by Michelle Kuo
Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle
Other People’s Countries by Patrick McGuinness
Nemesis by Philip Roth
Pine by Francine Toon

CURRENTLY SKIMMING

The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Aging Well by Daniel Levitin
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
What Are We Doing Here?: Essays by Marilynne Robinson
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman
Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Cruellest Month by Louise Penny
Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

PLUS an exciting new batch of university library books

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
Property by Valerie Martin

ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
Can You Hear Me? A Paramedic’s Encounters with Life and Death by Jake Jones
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni
The Accidental Countryside by Stephen Moss
Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

RETURNED UNFINISHED

The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan – The premise was awfully tempting, but even in just the first 20 pages I found the writing ponderous and repetitive.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid – I’m not hip enough for this one. Zadie Smith on turbo charge.

RETURNED UNREAD

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara – The voice didn’t grab me.
The Night Brother by Rosie Garland – The story didn’t lure me in.
The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes – The historical setting didn’t convince me.
My Wild, Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud – I DNFed Stroud’s last book, too; I should have known better that I don’t get on with her style.
Our Fathers by Rebecca Wait – This was requested after me, so I didn’t get a chance to try it.

What appeals from my stacks?

Posted in: Library Checkout | Tagged: library books, Library Checkout

Adventures in Rereading: Julian Barnes and Jennifer Egan

By Rebecca Foster on March 2, 2020 | 24 Comments

My last two rereads ended up being as good as or better than they had been the first time around; these two, however, failed to live up to my memory of them, one of them dramatically so. My increased literary experience and/or the advance of years meant these works felt less fresh than they did the first time around.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984)

Barnes is in my trio of favorite authors, along with A. S. Byatt and David Lodge. He’s an unapologetic intellectual and a notable Francophile who often toggles between England and France, especially in his essays and short stories. This was his third novel and riffs on the life and works of Gustave Flaubert, best known for Madame Bovary.

Odd-numbered chapters build a straightforward narrative as Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widower, retired doctor and self-described “senile amateur scholar,” travels to Rouen for five days to see the sites associated with Flaubert and becomes obsessed with determining which of two museum-held stuffed parrots Flaubert used as his inspiration while writing the story “A Simple Heart.” Even-numbered chapters, however, throw in a variety of different formats: a Flaubert chronology, a bestiary, an investigation of the contradictory references to Emma Bovary’s eye color, a dictionary of accepted ideas, an examination paper, and an imagined prosecutor’s case against the writer.

There are themes and elements here that recur in much of Barnes’s later work:

History – what remains of a life? (“He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper.”)
Love versus criticism of one’s country (“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.”)
Time and its effects on relationships and memory
How life is transmuted into art
Languages and wordplay
Bereavement

Indeed, I was most struck by Chapter 13, “Pure Story,” in which Dr. Braithwaite finally comes clean about his wife’s death and the complications of their relationship. Barnes writes about grief so knowingly and with such nuance, yet his own wife, Pat Kavanagh, didn’t die until 2008. Much of what he’s published since then has dwelt on loss, but more than two decades earlier he was already able to inhabit that experience in his imagination.

As a 22-year-old graduate student, I gobbled this up even though I knew very little about French literature and history and hadn’t yet read any Flaubert. I wasn’t quite as dazzled by the literary and biographical experimentation this time. While I still admired the audacity of the novel, I wouldn’t call it a personal favorite any longer. I think others of Barnes’s works will resonate for me more on a reread.

My original rating (c. 2006):

My rating now:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

This makes up a pleasing pair as it shares Barnes’s experimentation with form and meditation on time. Before my reread I only remembered that it was about washed-up musicians and that there was one second-person chapter and another told as a PowerPoint presentation. Looking back at my original review, I see I was impressed by how Egan interrogated “society’s obsession with youth and celebrity, the moments of decision that can lead to success or to downfall … and the way time (the ‘goon’ of the title) and failure can wear away at one’s identity.” Back then I called the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “achingly fresh, contemporary and postmodern. It is, in fact, so up-to-the-minute that one wonders how long that minute can last.” I was right to question its enduring appeal: this time I found the book detached, show-offy and even silly in places, and the characterization consistently left me cold.

This was probably the first linked short story collection I ever read (now a favorite subgenre), and the first time I’d encountered second-person narration in fiction, so it’s no wonder I was intrigued. “Each chapter involves a very clever shift in time period and point of view,” I noted in 2011. This time, though, I found the 1970s–2020s timeline unnecessarily diffuse, and I was so disinterested in most of the characters – kleptomaniac PA Sasha, post-punk music producer Bennie, musician turned janitor turned children’s performer Scotty, a disgraced journalist, a starlet, and so on – that I didn’t care to revisit them.

The chapter in which Scotty catches a fish and takes it into Bennie’s office was a favorite, along with the PowerPoint presentation Sasha’s daughter puts together on the great pauses of rock music (while also revealing a lot about her family dynamic), but I found the segment on PR attempts to burnish an African general’s reputation far-fetched and ended up mostly skimming five of the last six chapters.

This was a buddy read with Laura T. (see her review); we came to similar conclusions: this may have felt fresh and even prescient about technology in 2010–11, but it didn’t stand up to a reread; still, we’ll keep our copies if just for the 75-page PowerPoint presentation.

Note: Egan has said that her next project is a companion piece to Goon Squad that uses a similar structure and follows some of its peripheral characters into new territory. Based on this rereading experience, I don’t think I’ll seek out the sequel.

My original rating (June 2011):

My rating now:

To reread next: Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Done any rereading lately?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, rereading | Tagged: A.S. Byatt, biographies, David Lodge, France, Gustave Flaubert, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Julian Barnes, linked short stories, Pat Kavanagh, PowerPoint, rereading, Rouen, second person, Zadie Smith

Library Checkout: February 2020

By Rebecca Foster on February 24, 2020 | 14 Comments

The public and university library systems I use came to my aid and supplied lots of books for Paul Auster Reading Week and my Valentine’s-themed reading project. I’m now reading a mixture of brand-new releases and backlist novels and memoirs that caught my eye for one reason or another. I’m eagerly awaiting some high-profile fiction that’s still on order – new work from Sebastian Barry, Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell! Still a fair few DNFs this month, but never mind.

What have you been reading from your local libraries? Library Checkout runs on the last Monday of every month. Feel free to use this image and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part. As usual, I give links to reviews of books I haven’t already featured. I had a couple of very high ratings this month!