An ongoing list of my 2008 reading (the new entries are #s 3-8):

1. The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fourth) by Lemony Snicket
• The endless, near-blind stupidity of the adults in the lives of the Baudelaire orphans (chased from home to home, guardian to guardian by the unscrupulous, Baudelaire-fortune-hungering Count Olaf) is becoming somewhat exhausting. The tone and design of the books is delightful; if only their narratives were less formulaic. [Tuesday, January 1, 2008 ***]
2. Midnight Days by Neil Gaiman, et al.
• Alas, I don't know enough about the background mythologies of these various comics worlds to appreciate fully this collection of short pieces Neil Gaiman penned for various more-and-less mainstream series. Still, like a lot of Gaiman's work (and I always enjoy him more as a comics writer than as a novelist) it was very pleasant reading. [Friday, January 4, 2008 ***1/2]
  
3. The Odyssey: the Fitzgerald Translation by Homer
• Homer is pure delight, the purest of pure delights - the kind that gets richer and richer the more time you spend with it. The only thing that keeps The Odyssey from the kleos of a full five stars is that it never quite achieved (for me) the sustained and consistent richness and density of structure that characterized The Iliad. Maybe it will ripen into my mind into a five-star, however. Or maybe the difference is that I expected to love The Odyssey as much as I did, but I was surprised by delight in my reading of the grim old Iliad. [Thursday, January 10, 2008 ****1/2]
  
4. Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
• I took this along to the MLA (the national conference where I rushed madly from one job interview to another for several days in the Chicago slush) with the idea of having reading that would instantly distract me from my frenzied professional thoughts when it was time to make an attempt at sleep. It served its purpose very, very well. Unfortunately, although the language was always a delight, the plotting was not as ingenious as I expected. (I think this may be the only Jeeves book I have read, and I had read it before, so that may account for a certain... lack of freshness that hung like a miasma about the plot. On the other hand, my last reading appears to have been 15 years ago, so surely the miasma had had time to disperse since then.) [Sunday, January 13 ***1/2]
  
5. The Odyssey: the Fitzgerald Translation by Homer
• A second reading! That's right. I'm teaching it, so it paid to be thorough. [Monday, January 28 ****1/2]
  
6. Homer's Odyssey: A Companion to the Translation of Richmond Lattimore by Peter V. Jones
   
• And I also plead pedagogical thoroughness here. I have to say, however, that it is rare that I read classic works with a line-by-line critical companion, and I have gotten a little bit addicted to it (particularly when I don't have access to the linguistic nuances of the text's original language). [Monday, January 28 ****]
7. Sacred Cows by Karen Olsen
• I live in the town that Sacred Cows takes as its setting, a town that does not often inspire any literary interest, much less enthusiasm. Sadly, Olsen's incredibly detailed mania for the town isn't very well integrated into the plot or thematics (are there even thematics at work here?) of the novel. Often, a plot point would evoke a long digression about a restaurant that the heroine loves on a nearby corner, a restaurant which could only exist in this town, oh and by the way let me tell you in mundane detail about what items make an appearance on the menu of this place.... This happens not once, but numerous times over the course of the novel, and not once does the digression prove to have any relevance to the events of the novel. And bear in mind, I was a reader EAGER to have this town portrayed for me - positively elated by the prospect of living in the same literary world that I move through every day - and even I found it tedious. I can't imagine how people who don't live here got through it. [Monday, January 28 *1/2]
8. An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
• This is my first John Green novel, although he and quirky sibling Hank have delighted me for months with their 2007 video blog project (Brotherhood 2.0). It was indeed an ambrosial whirlwind of a read amidst the madness of teaching prep, the job market, and dissertation-finishing. This YA (but not too Y) novel centers on a washed up prodigy as a painful dumping by his 19th girlfriend named Katherine prompts him to flee with his best friend on the iconic post-high school road trip. [Wednesday, January 30 ****]
9. What will be next? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? The Aeneid? Who knows!

An ongoing list of my 2008 reading (the new entry is #2):

1. The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fourth) by Lemony Snicket
• The endless, near-blind stupidity of the adults in the lives of the Baudelaire orphans (chased from home to home, guardian to guardian by the unscrupulous, Baudelaire-fortune-hungering Count Olaf) is becoming somewhat exhausting. The tone and design of the books is delightful; if only their narratives were less formulaic. [Tuesday, January 1, 2008 ***]
2. Midnight Days by Neil Gaiman, et al.
• Alas, I don't know enough about the background mythologies of these various comics worlds to appreciate fully this collection of short pieces Neil Gaiman penned for various more-and-less mainstream series. Still, like a lot of Gaiman's work (and I always enjoy him more as a comics writer than as a novelist) it was very pleasant reading. [Friday, January 4, 2008 ***1/2]
  
3. What will be next? Very Good, Jeeves? The Odyssey?

An ongoing list of films and DVDs I watched this year (the new entry is #2):

1. Winter Light [The Communicants] (1962, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
   
• As my life has gotten steadily busier and more distressing I have found Ingmar Bergman a perplexing source of solace. This is the fifth or sixth I have watched recently, and I must admit that I have developed a quite a crush on Gunnar Björnstrand. So... this film, in which he plays a existentially despairing pastor incapable of giving comfort to his flock or returning the love of his mistress, was an all-too-real piece of heartbreak. It opens with a long, impressive scene lifted uninterruptedly from a Lutheran service, and as Björnstrand's minister moves anxiously about the church painted demons leer, mourning, over his shoulder from the hallowed walls. [January 3, 2008 ****]
  
2. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
• The short play by Tennessee Williams that lurks behind this film is a well nigh perfectly crafted piece of claustrophobic storytelling, in which the tales crafted by a dead man's domineering mother and possibly-mad cousin are simultaneously deeply convincing and lushly, impossibly heightened in their affect. Mankiewicz's film opens well, but as it progresses much of this narrative intensity and literary vividness (a vividness which, like the bright, precise colors of a high definition tv, seems more real than real) is dispersed by changing scenes (unity of place served Williams *very* well in the original, if I remember correctly) or displaced by melodrama, a poor substitute. In part the film declines in strength because Katherine Hepburn (in one of her best performances - the unnerving power of the severe Violet Venable suits her talents better than any screwball role ever did), who dominates the film's opening, increasingly takes a back seat to the therapeutic relationship between her careworn niece and the doctor Mrs. Venable has called in to lobotomize the girl. This is also the case in the play (and to great effect), but unfortunately for the film both the doctor (Montgomery Clift, still shattered from his traumatizing car accident) and the questionably sane Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor, who demonstrates an enraging lack of control over her voice) turn in really poor performances. If I remember the play properly, the chilling ending is also thrown over in the film for a more maudlin choice. Ah well - it is all almost redeemed by the sight of Katherine Hepburn descending slowly like a god composed entirely of cheekbones into her living room in a contraption that more closely resembles a wrought-iron throne than an elevator. [Saturday, January 5, 2008 ***]
  
3. What will be next? Who can say?

An ongoing list of films and DVDs I watched this year (the new entry is #2):

1. Winter Light [The Communicants] (1962, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
   
• As my life has gotten steadily busier and more distressing I have found Ingmar Bergman a perplexing source of solace. This is the fifth or sixth I have watched recently, and I must admit that I have developed a quite a crush on Gunnar Björnstrand. So... this film, in which he plays a existentially despairing pastor incapable of giving comfort to his flock or returning the love of his mistress, was an all-too-real piece of heartbreak. It opens with a long, impressive scene lifted uninterruptedly from a Lutheran service, and as Björnstrand's minister moves anxiously about the church painted demons leer, mourning, over his shoulder from the hallowed walls. [January 3, 2008 ****]
  
2. What will be next? Who can say?
   

Last year, as some of you may remember, was my Year of Down Under, in which I attempted (and failed, but no matter...) to read one Australian book per month. I didn't get through all the works I wanted to (no Peter Carey, no Tim Winton!), but it still proved to be a really fascinating way to read, bringing out all sorts of interesting ways of thinking about nation and national traditions or fascinations.

So what will this year's theme be? Well, I had felt the pull of a non-English-language theme, one that would require much more reading in translation. China and Japan loomed large in these musings. But I am contemplating teaching courses in Anglophone literature more and more frequently these days, so I decided to go for a different sort of a regional focus: the Caribbean.

Below are some authors I would love to read for the first time or read more of in the next twelve months (I have also noted specific works by these authors that I own or that particularly interest me):

• Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic)
  
• In the Time of the Butterflies
  
• Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba)
  
• Before Night Falls
  
• Edwidge Danticat (Haiti)
• Krik? Krak!
  
• Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua)
• My Brother
  
• Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique)
• Texaco
  
• Paule Marshall (Barbados)
• The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
  
• V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
  
• A Bend in the River
  
• Jean Rhys (Dominica)
• Quartet
  
• Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts)
• Crossing the River
• A Distant Shore
  
• Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia/Trinidad)
  
• Omeros
  
• Aime Cesaire (Martinique)
• The Tempest
  
• Andrea Levy (Jamaica)
  
• Small Island
  
• David Dabydeen (Guyana)
  
• A Harlot's Progress

I have included (in parentheses) the part of the Caribbean these authors are most closely associated with; the literature of this region is particularly geographically complex and diasporic, so I have included authors who are of very recent (within one generation) Caribbean descent, as well as those who were born in the Caribbean, but later left, for whatever reason.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I would be particularly interested in suggestions of good general histories about the Caribbean.

So... I have just returned from the national conference and my mad interview gauntlet (8 job interviews in two days, running about in a short skirt and perilously high heels in the slushy Cocytus that was Chicago* between Christmas and New Year's Eve, barely emerging from the professional frenzy for long enough to eat), and am now trying to get the last of my grading from the fall semester done. But I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and say that I can't wait till I am back to a more bloggy, book-devouring, film-rampaging state. In the meantime, I am going to (try to) keep an annotated list of books, films and plays I see/hear/read on the blog, so that I am not completely absent (see below for my first entry).

I hope everyone is having and has had a wonderful holiday!


*Actually Chicago looked lovely. On the last day I was there, snow fell in the most picturesque manner, with flakes as big as a fingernail. In fact, it fell so quickly, abundantly, and windily that, for the first time in my life I discovered how shocked an eyeball is when a fingernail-sized piece of fluffy ice falls directly into it. (It was my first winter in New Haven that I made a similar discovery - snow, beautiful as it may be, can hurt like %&$* if it falls hard enough.)

An ongoing list of my 2008 reading:

1. The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fourth) by Lemony Snicket
• The endless, near-blind stupidity of the adults in the lives of the Baudelaire orphans (chased from home to home, guardian to guardian by the unscrupulous, Baudelaire-fortune-hungering Count Olaf) is becoming somewhat exhausting. The tone and design of the books is delightful; if only their narratives were less formulaic. [Tuesday, January 1, 2008 ***]
2. What will be next? Very Good, Jeeves? The Odyssey?