Recent reads

I haven't read as much as I would have liked this summer, but I have finished a few books of note:

First, I zoomed through four graphic novels based on recommendations from friends: El Deafo by Cece Bell was sweet and a well-told story of a deaf child without being sentimental. I wasn't as impressed with Be Prepared by Vera Brosgel about a girl's experience at summer camp. Not particularly memorable, other than the image of the mother feeling guilty about making her unhappy kids stay a couple extra weeks at camp while she starts a new job in London. I also just finished reading Runaway Ralph (and the Mrs. Piggle-wiggle books) with the five-year-old, which brought back reflections about how many books about summer camp exist - and how I have almost zero experience and my kids have zero experience of sleep-away summer camp, except with boy scouts and a couple church camps here and there. But our neighbors send their kids away for six weeks to a camp in the mountains. A different subculture?

The third and fourth books were Gene Yuen's Boxers and the companion, Saints. These books tell about the Boxer Rebellion in China from the two opposing sides. It reveals the complexity of how history is told and retold, depending on the perspective of the author. I know next to nothing about Chinese history, and my knowledge of Asian culture is minimal, mostly formed from what I have learned as an adult from reading novels, biographies, and the research and experience of visiting Japan and living in Guam. Yuen's books were a quick peek at the conflict between Chinese who wanted to maintain their traditional society and the Christian missionaries from the West at the turn of the 20th century.

My favorite recent read is Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock. Cather never disappoints. I love her writing so much.  Her voice is distinctive, but her subject matter is wide ranging.  This book follows the develop of a young girl in colonial Quebec. Cecile Auclair tends house for her father and helps in his apothecary shop and makes herself beloved around town. Her mother died several years before the book opens, and the action takes place as Cecile is coming of age at the same time that her father is anticipating that they will finally return to France after more than a decade in Quebec in the late 1600s - early 1700s. They came to colonial Canada under the patronage of an aging count, who has offered the apothecary and his daughter portage back to the homeland. As the time draws near for the two to depart, Cecile becomes more reluctant to leave her adopted home.

The plot is slow - the book focuses more on character and on descriptions of life in a time long since past, a world long since buried. The bitter hardships of life in a relatively new colony are compounded by the hardships of life in Canadian winters. The winters are unforgiving, and the work of survival is never ending. Yet the focus of the characters is more on their day to day life, and their ability to hold on to the remnants of civility under duress.  The trappings of society and court have followed them to Quebec.

But so have the traditions of the Church. The book is full of descriptions of the life of faith that Cecile leads. She fosters a young boy, the son of the local prostitute, who has an intense devotion to the Mass and the saints - perhaps partly because the sanctuary of the Church is such a refuge from the life he leads at home.  The old bishop of the town is a stern leader but devoted to his people, while the new bishop is interested in accolades, riches, and growing the size of the diocese, the church, and the apostolic palace.  The conflict between old and new is somewhat turned topsy-turvy here, because the old bishop has adapted to his new surroundings, while the new bishop attempts to bring the courtly practices of France to this new and wild place.

Cather recounts the stories of saints and the founders of the convents in Canada.  She tells of miracles without irony. She gives detailed descriptions of the altar of the church, which has an altar which to Cecile looks just like what the Kingdom of Heaven would look like, "strong and unassailable." A statue of St. Anne is described as "noble, worn and sad," while the statue of the Blessed Mother and Child is "loveliest of all the Virgins in Kebec, a charming figure of young motherhood, - oh, very young, and radiantly happy"  The little Jesus is a 'A child in a bright and joyful mood, both arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome, as if he were giving a fete for his little friends and were in the act of receiving them"  

In another scene, she describes the tradition of All Saints' Day. Young Cecile loves the holy days and the break from routine that they bring, along with the opportunity for storytelling. She and young Jacques look at the book about St. Edmond, talk about the recluse in Montreal, a once beautiful and wealthy young girl who walled herself into a cell behind the chapel of the church her wealthy father built.  On All Souls' Day, Cecile's father recounts the story of old Bichet the knife grinder, who was caught stealing a copper pot in France and hanged for it. Cecil thinks France is corrupt because people are tortured like Bichet. Auclair defends the king but says of the Law "The Law is to protect property, and it thinks too much of property. A couple of brass pots, an old saddle, are reckoned worth more than a poor man's life. Christ would have forgiven Bichet, as He did the thief on the cross. We must think of him in paradise, where no law can touch him."  so they have Mass said for him every year on the day he died.

"At twelve years it is impossible to sad on holy days, even on a day of sorrow; at that age, the dark things, death, bereavement, suffering, have only a dramatic value, - seem but strong and moving colours in the grey stretch of time.  On such solemn days all the stories of the rock came to life for Cecile; the shades of the early martyrs and great missionaries drew close about her. All the miracles that had happened there, and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out of the fog;. . ." 

It's a surprisingly detailed look at the life of faith of these early Canadians. I wonder how it is read by Cather scholars, who often seem more interested in her status as an independent woman. Many of her books contain references to the faith of her characters, and in this one, as in Death Comes for the Archbishop, faith is central. 

As a contemporary reader who has been affected by the viewpoint that missionaries often made life harder for their converts, to put it lightly, I wonder if Cather struggled with this conflict between evangelism and oppression that is central to the story of imperialism today.  It is my sense that she is writing about faith as a sympathetic outsider, one who perhaps wishes for the simplicity of belief. But am I trying to read too much into the author's intentions?  

For instance, she describes the faith of the colonists as both mysterious but inspiring. One night, the apothecary lies awake fretting about his friend, one of the missionary priests who struggles in his work and misses the life of the mind he had in France. But Fr. Hector has made a vow to continue the hardships of missionary life and to stay in Canada rather than go back to France to be a teacher. "How can there be men in France this day who doubt the existence of God, when for the love of Him weak human beings have been able to endure so much?" Euclide Auclair regrets that Fr Hector decides to stay. He wonders "whether there had not been a good deal of misplaced heroism in the Canadian missions, - a waste of rare qualities which did nobody any good. 'Ah, well,' he sighed at last, 'perhaps that is the box of precious ointment which was acceptable to the Saviour, and I am like the disciples who thought it might have been used better in another way.'" After he comes to this conclusion, he is finally able to sleep. 

As I mentioned, the book does not focus on any one conflict, but instead Cather paints little vignettes of the life of the colonists. As Cecile realizes when she returns home from an unhappy visit to a farm family, she makes "a climate within a climate .. . [from] the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life."   

Cather brings to life these characters by opening a curtain on their daily lives, as well as brief glimpses into their hearts. For instance, as autumn approaches, the ships that arrived in late summer with news and goods from the homeland prepare to return. Auclair plans to go with them, taking his daughter and all his livelihood. He busily and hopefully packs his crates of medicines, while Cecile admires the coming of fall: 
 "The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun. Even the ragged cliff-side behind her kitchen door was beautiful; the wild cherry and sumach and the blackberry vines had turned crimson, and the birch and poplar saplings were yellow. Up by Blinker's cave there was a mountain ash, loaded with orange berries. ... So many kinds of gold, all gleaming in the soft, hyacinth-coloured haze of autumn ... Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content. The spirit of peace, that acceptance of fate..."

Likewise, a certain peace from having faith in the eternal life of the soul descends on the old Count, the patron of the Auclairs, as he suffers an illness that will prevent him from ever returning to France. He is ready to die, as Cather recounts because he has faith in eternity: "He would die here, in this room, and his spirit would go before God to be judged. He believed this, because he had been taught it in childhood, and because he knew there was something in himself and in other men that this world did not explain. Even the Indians had to make a story to account for something in their lives that did not come out of their appetites: conceptions of courage, duty, honour. The Indians had these, in their own fashion. These ideas came from some unknown source, and they were not the least part of life. " 

The death of the old count is a big blow to the apothecary. Auclair realizes his time is over when the count dies.  Cecile wants him to live on in her time.  As Auclair returned from the count's deathbed (after undergoing the trauma of removing his old friend's heart so that it could be shipped back to France and buried in the church of his childhood), he thinks "not without reason, he told himself bitterly as he looked up at those stars, had the Latin poets, insisted that 'Thrice and four times blessed were those to whom it befell to die in the land of their fathers.'"

Cecile does not know how to comfort her father in his deep mourning for his friend, his dreams, and his own youth and visions of life.  Fortunately, their friend the fur trapper Pierre Charron, a real man of the woods, a prototype of the future Canadian, comes to visit her father, who is sunk in depression. They finally eat and drink good wine. Pierre says "Let us cheer our hearts a little while we can. Good wine was put into the grapes by our Lord, for friends to enjoy together"  - at last they can sleep. Cecile falls asleep thinking of Pierre who has an "authority and power which came from the knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge, and from a kind of passion. his daring and his pride seemed to her even more splendid than Count Frontenac's." 

Cecile and Pierre are the Canadians of the next generation. They don't feel the longing of exile experienced by their fathers - a sense I get from my own daughters who love California as their home, while I sense I will never feel at rest here, other than out in the mountains.  Cather's book might be critiqued for the way it moves from theme to theme, or from character to character, without really delving deeply into the souls of any of them, but I loved these brief glimpses, the peek into the daily actions that make up lives and the moments of beauty and friendship that sustain them. 

At any rate, I was transported by the book, and Cather remains one of my all-time favorite writers. 

Singing Larks

In Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark Thea Kronberg visits the Art Institute of Chicago and feels a connection to this painting with the same name. She revisits it regularly during her time as a struggling music student from the western frontier newly arrived in the big midwestern city. It becomes "her" painting, a picture that expresses something "right" with its depiction of the flat country, the lighting, the look on the girl's face.

The girl in the painting resembles Thea and perhaps was Cather's inspiration. She is a strong young field worker expressing herself in song as she begins a new day. She has found reason to overflow with music, just as Thea does.  Talent alone is not what finally brings Thea success; rather she is distinguished by her ability to lift out her heart in her song, as this girl seems to be doing, recalling the gift of the meadowlark to bring joy to the listener.


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Song_of_the_Lark_-_Jules_Breton.png

I think I love Willa Cather's books because I love her strong female characters and her strong, rural landscapes. Her books are everything opposite of "chick lit" except that she writes about women who recognize beauty.

I can understand how Thea could be off putting. She alienates people by being so sure of herself, but her certainty is not self-absorption, but rather a faith in and a desire to capture vitality in art. Thea's strength of purpose and the cultivation of her talent begin as a young girl growing up in the west.  She sleeps in a tiny room with a window she leaves open all the time:  "Life rushed in upon her through that window -- or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardour and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but on passion and four walls."

Thea thrives in the open air. When she returns to Colorado from Chicago, crossing the Platte River she feels she is "Going back to her own land." "This earth seemed to her young and fresh and kindly a place whose refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance... It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the lark sang and one's heart sang there, too .. . It was somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air that had never been sung in the world before. It was hard to tell about it, fir it had nothing to do with words; it was like the light of the desert at noon, or the smell of sagebrush after rain; intangible but powerful. She had the sense of somehow going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was somehow going to strengthen her, a naive, generous country that gave on its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers."

Leaving this beautiful place is necessary for Thea to study with brilliant teachers and to be introduced to the musical world, as well as the world in general. Cather's book is not concerned with whether she will become a great singer, but rather how.  Her first talent is for playing the piano, but her piano teacher realizes that her true gift is her voice.  She leaves first her family, then her beloved teacher; eventually she gives up for a time her true love.  She gives everything to her love of singing.  She doesn't even come home to her mother's deathbed because she is on the verge of her first big break.  One summer she returns to the west, near the Grand Canyon, to recover a connection with the spaces that developed her voice, and this trip frees her and somehow helps her see what she can become.  While looking at a piece of broken Indian pottery, she realizes "the stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment that shining elusive element which is life itself - a life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars.  In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals,"

Cather captures that elusive element of life in words.  She must have seen that life in the painting by Breton, too.

Another painting with the same title has a similar quality.  In this painting by Winslow Homer, a young man also seems to be listening to the lark. He also holding the tools of his field work, just as the girl is in the picture known by the same title.  Cather's book takes its title from the slightly later work by Jules Breton of the girl, but Homer's work could be of Thea's companion, Fred Ottenburg from a wealthy beer brewing family, although he never worked in the fields.  This man is not singing, but his attention is focused, and in his appreciation of the song, he has removed his hat, an act of reverence.  Fred also is full of reverence for Thea's songmaking. He is Thea's greatest admirer, her first promoter, her faithful mentor.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Song_of_the_Lark_Winslow_Homer_1876.jpeg

These two paintings reside in my two favorite art museums, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. We lived just a couple miles from the Chrysler, a small, but beautiful building with an impressive collection.  I would take the kids there frequently for their family day activities, or home school outreaches, or just to kill some time when their dad was gone and I was desperate for connection with something other than diapers and bickering. I would run there sometimes.

Art museums resemble churches for their ability to inspire quiet meditation and prayer and connection with something -- that elemental quality of life? --  that transcends the natural and normal.  My older kids rarely complained about going.  My younger kids, with their busier social lives and stronger attraction to video games, are less appreciative, less curious, although when dragged to a museum, they eventually become absorbed into the drama of the art.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that these two museums are connected by pieces that share a title and similar composition and subject matter, as well as sharing my love.  The book, likewise, is connected in the same way. I love Cather's descriptions of strong young people driven by passion to be a part of something bigger than themselves, just as they have been a part of the expanse of  the plains, and a part of the imaginations of those who likewise want to hold on to the elusive moments of beauty that give life meaning and purpose.

On a side note: Bill Murray also was "saved" by the painting by Jules Breton.  He mentioned it in an interview after his move "St. Vincent" came out (which was a great movie, by the way.) Here's his quote:

...the Chicago Sun-Times' Cindy Pearlman notes the Illinois-born actor, who's in Toronto promoting his latest film, "St. Vincent," credits a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago with saving his life.

After his first experience on a stage did not go well, Murray has said, he headed toward Lake Michigan thinking, "If I’m going to die, I might as well go over toward the lake and float a bit." Before he reached the water, however, he arrived at the Art Institute and saw the "The Song of the Lark," a painting that truly moved him.

The painting, by 19th-century French realist painter Jules Breton, depicts a young peasant woman working in a field at sunrise.During a February press conference in London, where Murray was promoting "The Monuments Men," he said: "I thought, 'Well there's a girl who doesn't have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun's coming up anyway and she's got another chance at it.' So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I too am a person and I get another chance everyday the sun comes up."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/14/bill-murray-art-institute-chicago-painting_n_5984018.html

And here is the little fellow whose expression of vitality has inspired so many artists:


https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Meadowlark/id

To read, to see, and not to see

A  couple brief reviews:

DO NOT, in whatever circumstances you find yourself, DO NOT WATCH NORTHANGER ABBEY circa 1987.  Unless you want a good laugh. This is the WORST Austen adaptation I have ever in my life encountered. How this possibly came to the screen - let alone was reproduced in video and DVD - is a bafflement to me. The actors were unattractively coiffed and hilariously melodramatic, the music befuddling (sexy saxophone? scary heavy breathing? new agey moaning?), and the script hatched and cobbled. What a farce! My husband slept, while I laughed in amazement, and my kids were, like, "What?" "Why is he saying that?" "What's happening now?" Who knew a Jane Austen movie might cause nightmares?

I should have been alerted to the travesty by the eyeshadow Catherine is wearing on the cover.

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On the other hand, I finally saw Austenland, a movie I thought was going to be silly and disappointing, but I found it silly and hilarious in an entertaining way. The concept is that a young woman, down on her luck in love, decides to treat herself to a vacation at Austenland, a resort in the form of a Regency manor, offering an immersion experience replete with actors, costumes, and entertainments from the early 1800s, where Janeites can pretend to live in one of her novels for a week. A romance is guaranteed! The movie is charming and lighthearted, and while it pokes some gentle goodnatured fun at Jane Austen's obsessive fans, it does so in a way that acknowledges why people love Austen so much. I would MUCH rather go to Austenland than Disney!

Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade! Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made! And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain, Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!

from Rudyard Kipling, courtesy: http://www.jasna.org/membership/janeites.html

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And if you are tired of Jane Austen, DO read Willa Cather over and over again. I love Willa Cather. If I do ever have a daughter again, I am determined to name her Willa Jane. If I don't, maybe I will get a female dog and name her this just to say this name daily.  I am currently reading Song of the Lark again after many, many years.  It is beautiful and heartbreaking. I am reading a library copy, but I am tempted to buy my own.

This novel doesn't replace My Antonia, O Pioneers, or Death Comes for the Archbishop, as my favorite Cather novels, but reading Cather is an "immersive experience" in itself. I can understand why she doesn't have the broad appeal of Austen. Her landscapes seem to be the main characters at times.  Her heroine is hard and could be considered selfish or at least self-absorbed.  The plot plods along with little action.  Thea Kronberg is not particularly likeable, but Cather creates such memorable characters and invokes such admiration for the strength and perseverance that built the west and found beauty in hard places.  Perhaps it is her understanding of human desires that transcend sexuality, and of the capacity of the human soul for both nobility and disgrace, that makes her both brilliant and an outsider.  Cather's world is full of color and light contrasting with dark crevices, like the canyons and sand hills that nurture Thea's talent.  I haven't quite finished the book; it doesn't read quickly, but each time I dip into it, it takes me a few minutes to return, sometimes reluctantly, to the present after closing the cover.

More Book Notes

Book notes are something I primarily do for myself. Someone - I think it was Melanie Bettinelli but I can't find it - shared a link to an article about how people are reading in order to post about it, or they are thinking about what they are going to post about a book while they are reading it. At first I felt defensive when I read the article: I don't post on Facebook what I'm reading! ... but I do on my blog. And I have asked myself, "Is this a bloggable book?" I pick books to read based on other people's social media recommendations and I also admit I read books that are lists of books that someone says you should read to be well read in order to be well read.

Is it a problem to read a book with an eye to what you can say about it? Book reviewers do it. There's an air of vanity about reading in order to look smart.  But didn't people used to read books so they'd have something to talk about at parties? Weren't people motivated by the desire to look intellectual at the next salon? I used to be inspired to read more by characters in books who were well read. I wanted to be a great books major so I could recognize the references to Homer and the Bible and Shakespeare in old books.  And I wanted to read all the books on the list of books to read to be well educated in order to look well educated as much as to be well educated.

Who doesn't have mixed motivations for reading, along with so many other things we do? Yes, I sometimes read with an eye to what I can post on a blog.  But I like reading what other people write about books in order to determine what to read next or to see what someone else thinks about a book I found difficult or confusing. I have many times gained a greater appreciation for a book I thought was so-so by reading or listening to someone else point out what they like about a book or a connection I missed.  This sharing of insight is also why I like reading in groups - book clubs in real life or online. Book clubs encourage me to pick up a book I might not have read otherwise. And sometimes I feel justified in not having read that book before... but talking about even a mediocre or bad book over a cup of coffee in someone's living room, or at the coffee shop, or in front of the computer, creates connections between people as well as between the reader and writer.

One last reason I post on a blog about what I read is so that I will actually learn something from a book. I find that although there are many books that I really enjoy reading or that I find very inspirational or beautiful or whatever, I can't really say why I like them unless I go back a second or third time to the book and start looking at the text more closely. Blogging about a book (or taking notes for a class) forces me to do this. When I go back to pages I marked and copy out passages, I gain greater insight into the book - and into what I was thinking at the time. Sometimes I wonder, "Why did I underline this?" or why not that... Sometimes I see connections I didn't see before.

So yes, sometimes I read books for vain reasons. But there are a host of other reasons to be a social reader. Conviviality and sharing ideas override vanity in the ranking of motivations, in my mind.

Hence, some book notes:

Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer  also recommends copying out favorite passages for books, not just to remember content but to study an author's style.  I'm a big fan of writing as a means of remembering - and I wish I had made my kids do more copy work than what they did.  In the end I gave up on handwriting programs and just picked sentences or stanzas for the kids to copy those last couple years of home schooling.  Perhaps that is why they have such bad penmanship, but they did learn a couple Bible verses, retained for at least for a week.

But about Prose's book - it's a book about reading and writing and helpful in many ways. She devotes chapters to Word, Sentences, Paragraphs, Character, Dialogue, Gesture, Narration, and Details, among other topics important to both writers and readers and wannabe writers.

From the chapter about Prose's love affair with Chekhov, I copied this long passage, from one of Chekhov's letters:

"That the world 'swarms with male and female scum' is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect. But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth -- unconditional and honest. A writer is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound under compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objection as a chemist.
It seems to me that the writer should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how and under what circumstances. The artist should be not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased observer.
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees -- this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward."

Makes me want to read Chekhov.

Which is why it is hard to write a book about writing and to try to teach writing.  Prose wishes she had told her class: "Forget observation, consciousness, clear-sightedness. Forget about life. Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world."

Some of the writers Prose recommends I'm not familiar with and some I am.   Prose praises the oddball characters, the unlikable, unsympathetic, insane, obsessed, criminals in novels by authors like Beckett, Gogol, William Trevor, Patricia Highsmith (the later I've never read). Other authors she mentions: Dorothy Sayers, Isaac Babel, James Baldwin, Balzac, Barthelme, Brodkey, Baxter, Bowen, Elizabeth, Jane and Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Stuart Dybek, Junot Diaz, Mavis Gallant, Gogol, Henry Green, Randall Jarrell, Diane Johnson, Denis Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Nadexdha Mandelstam, John Le Carre, Marquez ,Alic Munro, Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, Tatyana Tolstaya, William Trevor, Tolstoy, Tugenev, Rebecca West, Joy Williams, Virginia Woolf, Richard Yates, et al.

Prose muses at the end: "Reading can even offer the writer courage during those moments when (given how much suffering there is in the world, the dangers looming around us) the very act of writing itself begins to seem suspect. Who can be saved by a terrific sonnet? Whom can we feed with a short story?"

Then she closes with Czeslaw Milosz's translation of Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Five Men," which she sent to a friend concerned that she was writing "weeds" instead of "roses."  Prose's answer is "So one final reason for reading is to confront this problem of roses versus weeds in the company of geniuses, and with the pleasure of looking at the roses that have actually been produced, against all odds. If we want to write, it makes sense to read -- and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would."

"Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation." Can social media compare?

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The novel I read next, The Known World, by Edward P Jones, is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's the story of the interconnected world of a fictional Virginia County - Montgomery. The largest landowner, William Robbins, allows a couple of his slaves to buy their freedom and that of their son, Henry Townsend. Robbins also frees his slave mistress and her children by him. These free blacks make a life for themselves in the County, not fleeing to the north. Henry marries another free black woman that he met through their teacher, Miss Fern. They also become friends with Dora and Louis, Robbins' children. Robbins makes Henry his protege and schools him in running a plantation. Tensions rise as Henry buys slaves and  becomes a landowner.  And when Henry dies, his small empire begins to crumble under Caldonia's lack of leadership.

This book was my distraction during labor. My mom had finished it on her trip out here. I enjoyed reading it, and it fulfilled its purpose: it was distracting.  I can't say I loved it - it's written in an interesting style: a non-linear narrative, shifts in focus, fabricated "facts" about Montgomery County mixed in with the plot. And the characters and the context are interesting, but it hasn't haunted me. In fact, I had to go back and look up the names when I was writing up this summary. It would be a good book to read with a book club. My current book club tends to read books like "A Child Called It" and "Language of Flowers," pretty accessible.  This book was perhaps most interesting because of the interplay between the free blacks and the black slaves they owned. 

While we watched Twelve Years A Slave over spring break, this book came back to me. The movie makes the slave owners seem so wholly depraved, while this book, written by a black man, acknowledges the mixed influences that contributed to the perpetuation of slave holding in America.  What is perhaps most fascinating to me is the complex and seemingly swift change in perception and mental attitudes towards slavery.  Maybe it wasn't as quick a shift as I imagine, but how did it go from being legal to being abhorrent in the course of a couple generations? I wonder if the cultural shifts regarding marriage and Christianity will follow the same pattern. 

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The last book I wanted to make notes about is Willa Cather's A Lost Lady.  I have the same feelings about Willa Cather that Prose has for Chekhov - Cather has a wideness of vision that makes you feel that the whole world is beautiful and interesting but dangerous and full of sympathetic, disillusioned characters. She presents characters who are beautiful but flawed and whose motivations are not entirely clear. In this case, it is Mrs. Forester, the beautiful young wife of a railroader who settles in a little western town and is admired by the town boys, especially Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her. As a boy, Niel admires her for her beauty, sophistication, and kindness, but as he ages, he is disappointed by her failure to live up to his admiration.  Her husband, many years older than herself, falls ill, and she can't go to Colorado Springs for the winters any more. She begins to drink and to associate with another man.  Gradually, her shining exterior is blemished, and Niel's youthful idolatry changes into a sense of disappointment and loss. Does she fall from grace out of loneliness, vanity, desperation?  Her husband seems blind to her indiscretions, but "The longer Niel was with Captain Forrester in those peaceful closing days of his life, the more he felt that the Captain knew his wife better even than she knew herself; and that, knowing her, he, - to use one of his own expressions - valued her."  So even when she is false to him, he admires her.

But is this "valuing" not the same as loving? Do Niel and Mr. Forrester both betray her by not admitting her betrayal? Maybe she wants to be caught, to have the excitement of an argument and the consolation of a reconciliation?  Is there some irony in Niel's conversation with another friend from his childhood who brings news of her last days:  "She was well taken care of till the end. We may be glad of that"  Maybe she didn't want to be well cared for? Maybe she wanted a little more independence. Cather makes Niel's voice and vision the perspective from which the story is related, but as I'm reading this the second time in middle age, I have a little more compassion for Mrs. Forrester than I did when I read the book as a young person.  Her position doesn't excuse her behavior, but it's easy to see how ideals can fade as you age if you don't keep them burnished. Perhaps that is why the Captain continues to value his wife even as she betrays him.

*****

Also just finished reading Mr. Popper's Penguins with the kids - I'd never read it myself, even though the older boys read it at some point. Good fun. Although right after I praised Mr. Popper for making the right decision about what is good for the penguins, he runs off on his wife and kids for a couple years of arctic exploration. And all Mrs. Popper can say is that she's glad she won't have to work so hard to clean the house when he's not around. She's such a good sport. She'd make a good military wife.

2012 Reading Review

I just finished my first book of 2013, What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha and want to talk about it with someone, but in the meantime finishing a book inspired me to look back over my reading in 2012.

Here’s a summary:
Books read:  60. More than usual, but out of those 20 were kids’ chapter books, so really about average.

Favorites: My daughter loved the Mother-Daughter Book Club books, but I preferred Emily of Deep Valley and The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Dare I admit how much I try to hide my laughter over the Diary of a Wimpy Kids books?

I sometimes wish I kept a list of picture books checked out from the library that we loved so that I could remember them later. A few standouts I still recall: a picture book biography of  J. R. R. Tolkein, the biography of Martha Graham, a photo essay on the Fibonacci sequence, an old book about a little girl living in Thailand.

14 or so books I read were non-fiction, essays or poetry.  Favorites: Sally Thomas’ book of poetry, Brief Light.   I also really liked de Boton’s The Art of Travel and Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I’m not sure where to include V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, but it was fascinating.

As far as spiritual reading goes, I really like Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water. It’s the kind of book you dip in and out of and every time find something to chew on.  Call to Holiness was also good, but light.

From the classics:

Shakespeare: The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (should I continue to teach this or switch to Othello?)

Dickens: Great Expectations: LOVED

Bronte: Wuthering Heights: Somewhat disenchanted. Lovely writing, but honestly, I got fed up with Cathy and Heathcliff. So selfish, and eventually tiresome

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex

Also pulled out some Thoreau when my son was writing on Civil Disobedience.

FINALLY finished The Wind in the Willows, which I have started many a time and can never seem to truly love, although I love the setting and the idea.  It was a read aloud with the kids, but they frequently wandered away from my reading in boredom. Did I just put it down too much to get drawn in? Or does it jump from episode to episode to quickly to feel attached?

The rest were novels. I meant to post about my very favorite, Willa Cather’s One of Ours when I finished it, but I never had time. Every time I read a Cather book, I love her more. Is she underappreciated? I’m not sure of her contemporary reputation in academic circles, but every time I read one of her books I am surprised by the depth and eloquence of her writing. 

One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, who chafes under the business acumen of his father and the religious fervor of his mother. He yearns to live a life devoted to seeking something noble and good – and his friendship with the Erhlichs in his college town, Lincoln, give him some insight about what this life looks like, but he always feels like an outsider during their intellectual, lively comversations. His father calls him home to manage the farm, and he ends up in an ill-suited marriage, mainly because the girl who would share his vision seems to be dating his mercenary older brother. It is not until he joins the Army to fight in World War I that he feels a part of something bigger than himself. In France he discovers true brotherhood, nobility, and a purpose for living. But of course, it is a war…

Some favorite quotes: One night while reading Paradise Lost aloud with his mother, he comments on how Milton needed the wicked. His mother questions him, and Claude points out how if all the sinners were taken out of the Bible, it wouldn’t be very interesting. “Except Christ” says his mother.  “I only mean that even in the Bible, the people who were merely free from blame didn’t amount to much.”   Mrs. Wheeler replies “As I get older, I leave a good deal more to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I . . . . I believe He is sometimes where we would least expect to find him, - even in proud, rebellious hearts.”

In the midst of a blizzard, Claude looks out the upstairs window “There was a solemnity about a storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite end. A fain purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and shoulders.” His mother looks out into the night and quotes “Ever thicker, thicker, thicker,/ Froze the ice on lake and river; Ever deeper, deeper, deeper, /Fell the snow o’er all the landscape.” Mrs. W feels the poetry in the moment, even if she isn’t as witty and lively as Mrs. Erhlich, (Claude’s first love?)

Feeling ever more discouraged with farm life when his brother Ralph comes home at Christmas throwing money around, Claude reflects on what prosperity has done with the community. Preceding Wendell Berry by sometime, he remarks that for the wheat, corn and pigs, things with intrinsic value, that a farmer takes to market he gets manufactured gods with poor quality and big machinery that is goes to pieces, 3-1, outlived by the horses. Even the neighborhood has changed: “Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the neighbors were poor, their houses and farms had more individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up. Joust why nobody knew…. with prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. .. . It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.” 

But Claude sees little chance of escape from this life.  He is a farmer with little love for the job. He often suffers failures. He has security, but “Sometimes he thought this security was what was the matter with everybody; that only perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in people and develop the mean ones. . . . but if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep, was like being assured of a decent burial.  Safety, security; if you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to them."

But Claude does not despair completely: “Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain, -- the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!” 

Well worth reading for the characterizations, the writing, the history, the effect…

  

I also really liked Oscar Hijuelos’ Mr. Ives’ Christmas, although it leaves something to be desired as an uplifting Christmas book since it is about how Mr. Ives marks time after his son’s murder a couple days before Christmas.  He doesn’t mark it well for a number of years. He and his wife had been artistic idealists, living in a rough part of New York as a sign of their open-mindedness. But Mr. Ives had settled into life as an art director in advertizing, and his wife became an art teacher; their son shares their idealism, but had wanted to become a priest. After he is shot by a Puerto Rican, Mr. Ives must confront some latent racism in himself, as well as feelings of betrayal. He and his wife drift apart, but manage to stay together. Eventually, a generation later, Mr. Ives finally meets the man who shot his son.  Hijuelos’ writing is matter of fact, without many embellishments, but he creates a complex portrait of a man who deals with disappointment and survives.

Other favorites: The River Ki, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Mr. Pip.

Worst book of the year: A Confederacy of Dunces. Yuck. Pass. And I like New Orleans and odd characters, but I regret wasting time on this, despite Walker Percy’s intro.

Reconnecting with an old favorite

Before posting that last bit, I finished rereading an old favorite for the third time – My Antonia. Sigh – (imagining a sunset with plow silhouette and heroic movie soundtrack music (A western Tara's Theme) every time I say the name). And I’ll probably read it yet again before I die. My grandfather gave me this book when I was about the age of Antonia when Jim met her on the way to Black Hawk, Nebraska. Maybe he knew it would be an easy book for a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan to love. My name is scrawled in atrocious black marker printing on the book plate inside the front cover, even though it’s only a paperback, and a faded yellow violet has been pressed so long between the pages that it left a silhouette 2 pages back. I loved the cover, the typeface, the heft, the story, the characters, and I fell in love with Willa Cather. At a time when I had little spending money, I saved up enough to buy half a shelf of her books. O Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop I’ve reread not too long ago, and I’ve pulled One of Ours to revisit since my husband’s at war. (After I finish Franny and Zooey, my upstairs book, and Summertime, my downstairs/swim lesson book).
In a way, the book has become a part of the myth of my own youth, just as it is the story of Jim’s revisiting the places and people of his past that have formed his present person. Does his attachment to his memories strengthen who he is or prevent him from falling in love with anyone else?

On the surface, there isn’t much complexity to the plot to My Antonia. And maybe it’s sentimental and nostalgic. I thought about picking it for Reading for Believers, but I was afraid others might think it dull. And I didn’t know if my love for it would stand another read. But it is moving and beautifully, though sparely, written. I’ve dogeared a lot of pages.


If Home tells the story of a good life, badly lived (by Jack), My Antonia is the story of a hard life, well lived. Despite the setbacks Antonia faces time and again, she is still full of joy when Jim meets her 20 years and 12 kids after her disgrace. She doesn’t even begrudge the years she spent working in town. Her immigrant peers from the country have made money and found gold, but none have found the happiness she possesses, not even Jim, whose love for Antonia isn’t big enough to accommodate her spirit. She never loses the “fire of life.” An achievement.


I suppose it is that unfulfilled connection between Jim and Antonia that made the book so heartwrenching to me as a young teenager addicted to romance. It’s clear that they remain in love with each other, but that love is not possessive, and from the beginning it honestly recognizes how unsuited they are for each other while also recognizing each other’s worthiness.

Could Jim and Antonia have made a life together? Jim recognizes that even Cusak, with whom Antonia has such a fruitful relationship, is not living the life he planned to live: “I wonder whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!” A challenge to the Catholic idea of marriage, but Cusak recognizes his sacrifices have merit in the enjoyment he gets from his sons. That line jumped out at me, as a military wife. I certainly never planned on living in the deep south, separated for months from my husband, but I had a moment of real happiness to be here the other day, while admiring the resurrection ferns green on the dark live oaks against the blue sky. And perhaps the question could be turned on Jim: Is he living the life that is right for him?

This time I enjoyed the book as much for its love affair with the land as the affair between Jim and Antonia. When Jim arrives in Nebraska from Virginia, he is in awe of seeing the complete dome of the sky. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, Blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” The sunflower lined roads seem roads to freedom. Jim’s grandfather can see the plains will someday feed the world. The golden fields, the plow silhouetted by the sunset, the harsh winters, the hot summers, all fed the nostalgia for my own semi-rural Midwestern youth.

Some favorite lines:

“The prayers of all good people are good.” Jim’s grandfather comments, in a nod to the Shimerda’s Catholicism.


“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I know that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thing of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. . . . But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences.”


Among the garden vegetables “nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun. . . I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”