On the subject of the Bronte sisters…

Kate Beaton is a genius.

Book Lust: Man Booker prize edition

Today I’m pleased to introduce Book Lust, a series where I’ll be talking about… well, book lust. As all true bibliophiles know, part of the pleasure of reading lies in acquiring piles and piles of books, which will then sit around your house in all their delicious inky goodness. I’ve always loved the sheer tactile sensations that accompany the act of reading: the snap and creak of new spines, the delicious paper and ink smell of new pages, the pleasing aesthetics of different fonts and covers. To this day, one of my first acts whenever I get a new book is to bury my face amidst its pages and take a good whiff of that delicious brand new book smell (I do not do this with used books, since most of them seem to have belonged to smokers who lived in moldy houses filled with cats and this aroma sets off my asthma). Book Lust will be a place where I’ll talk about the sheer, undisguised pleasure of acquisition and I will admire all those shiny editions I wish I had the money to own.

I found several beautiful things to lust after on the Man Booker website this week.

The first item (or items) was these beautiful Folio editions of seven previous Booker winners: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Possession by A.S. Byatt, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey,The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell,The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally. The books look absolutely gorgeous and I’m sure they’re incredibly expensive. The Folio Society website indicates that they specialize in this kind of thing and made me long for a career which would provide me with the kind of cash flow necessary to buy the Society’s entire back catalogue. Alas, I think I’ll just have to look and long from afar.

The other set of beautiful editions that caught my eye    were these Vintage paperbacks. Vintage (a publisher you  might recognize from their very classy editions) has released  nine former Booker winners in a beautiful matched set.  Wouldn’t these look great all together on a shelf? Or on  display in your home? Or even under your bed, where you could  gloat over the fact that you owned them all?

The good news is that the Booker website is having a drawing and that the lucky winner will get to take all nine of these beauties home for free. Follow the link to enter, and if you win, be sure to share the wealth!

It’s like Christmas! (Booker Prize longlist announced!)

Man Booker official logo

Well, it’s that time of year again– the longlist for the Man Booker prize has been posted. I’ve only read two of them (I would have read three, but Wolf Hall isn’t out in the U.S. yet and I didn’t feel like ordering a copy from Amazon.uk, as I did for Byatt’s newest).

I was, as usual, very impressed with Byatt, though The Children’s Book hasn’t been getting favorable reviews. It’s certainly a dense, richly layered book and it’s not something you can breeze through on the beach in a day. However, Byatt’s erudite writing always seems more like a tantalizing game than a literary boast— she scatters scholarly quotations and asides like a trail of bread crumbs for the hungry mind to follow. I don’t see any problem with a book that asks a lot of its reader. After all, “Fine things are difficult” and I would rather have a new Byatt tome than any half a dozen transparent texts that won’t last once the novelty has worn off.

The other book I’ve read off the list is Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. The premise— a ghost story set in a decaying mansion after the War— is promising and the writing is beautiful, but somehow the end result left me feeling hollow. I’ve had the same experience with Waters’ other books: I’m interested in the idea and she has an eye for detail and a deft way with words, but the entire project falls short of anything ultimately meaningful.

Other than the Mantel, I’m also excited to see William Trevor’s latest offering. I haven’t read it, but if it’s anything like his back catalogue it will be a worthy contender. So, any bets on who’s going to win?

The List:

The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt (Chatto & Windus)

Summertime, J. M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker)

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)

The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O’Loughlin (Penguin)

Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Penguin)

Love and Summer, William Trevor (Penguin)

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Little, Brown)

Best Reads of the Year… so far.

I’m a big fan of rites of passage: birthdays, New Year’s resolutions, crisp calendar pages, and, of course, Best Of… lists. In honor of the fact that six solid months of 2009 have slipped away (where has the time gone? I don’t know about you, but I feel like January was yesterday), I’ve compiled a brief list of the best things I’ve read so far this year. I’ll be revising it come December, but for now here’s my Best of 2009 list, arranged by categories for convenience:

Fiction:

1. 2666, Roberto Bolano. Technically, I bought this book in 2008 the day it came out, but I didn’t finish it until January and it was too good to be excluded. I’ve loved Bolano since I read The Savage Detectives, and 2666 didn’t disappoint. I was especially excited to see that it was translated by the lovely and talented Natasha Wimmer, who also translated The Savage Detectives. Her translation allows the beauty of Bolano’s prose to shine without sounding awkward or stilted, which is a fault of many translations.  2666 is darker than some of Bolano’s other work, but it’s well worth a read. I won’t give a plot synopsis, since it’s almost impossible to summarize a book this epic, but I will say that once I started it, I couldn’t stop. I walked around for weeks in a kind of daze, feeling as if I was half-living in his fictional city of Santa Teresa, and half in my home. This is also the book that increased Bolano’s profile in the English-speaking world, and I predict it will be a classic.

2. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Ben Fountain. I realize I am very, very late to the game in discovering this collection of short stories by fellow Texan Fountain, but I am so glad I did. Most of these eight stories involve Americans abroad, and several concern the abuses of power and social issues. However, I was especially taken with the hilarious and sharply written “The Good Ones Are Already Taken,” the story of a young military wife who finds out that her husband, recently returned from a mission in Haiti, has become “married” to the voodoo deity of love and passion, Maitresse Erzulie. It’s a subtle story, with very, very light touches of magical realism and I hope that Fountain returns to this vein and writes some more stories set in his native South.

3. the Inspector Rebus series, Ian Rankin. I’ve recently become a huge mystery fan and I never realized just how good the genre could be until I read Rankin on the recommendation of a former professor. These books are everything police procedurals (and indeed, mysteries) should be. The series follows Edinburgh policeman John Rebus, a sharp-tongued, hard drinking, and eminently likable cop. Whether he’s listening to the Who, standing up his girlfriend yet again, or hounding a witness, Rebus is the kind of character you can’t stop reading about. Rankin recently wound up this series with 2008′s Exit Music, but I can’t help but hope for a little more Rebus one of these days. In the meantime, I’ll have to console myself with the backlist— and believe me, at 17 volumes, there’s plenty of it.

4. the Merrily Watkins series, Phil Rickman. Rickman’s series follows the life of an Anglican priest, Merrily Watkins. Watkins is a widow who lives in a small village with her teenaged daughter, Jane. She’s petite, empathetic, and very pretty— and she’s also the Diocesan Deliverance Consultant, or exorcist. These books turn the familiar cozy genre on its head and are worth reading for that subversive touch alone. I love them because they are high-octane reads and rarely offer easy, clear-cut solutions to the problems facing Merrily. Merrily herself is a very well-drawn character and is surrounded by an equally convincing cast of secondary characters. If you’re looking for a little light reading of the sort that keeps you up at night sweating and turning pages, then Merrily’s your girl.

5. A Field of Darkness and The Crazy School, Cornelia Read. These two mysteries were described to me as chick-lit noir and I think the term may be accurate. The first, Field of Darkness, is loosely based on aspects of Read’s own life and upbringing (she provides some helpful endnotes in the back for the curious). Her heroine, former socialite Madeline Dare, lives in exile with her husband in Syracuse, NY and hates every minute of it. The discovery of some new evidence in an old cold case (the chilling murder of two young women in a field outside the fairgrounds) which links Madeline’s favorite cousin to the crime causes Madeline to attempt some amateur investigating on her own.

To me, the strengths of this book and its sequel lie not in realism of plot (there is very little) or in glittering prose (Read has her fair share of awkward phrases), but in the character of Madeline herself. Read doesn’t falter in her portrayal of her protagonist, and Madeline is both fallible and likable— even when you want to throttle her for making a series of boneheaded mistakes. To me, it’s Madeline’s gritty, realistic voice that makes this more noir than chick-lit, and well worth a read.

6. Villette, Charlotte Bronte. In my mind, Villette is a sadly neglected classic. Everyone is familiar with Jane Eyre, but this (to my mind) much more complex work remains largely ignored. I did a quick and very unscientific survey of my more literary-minded friends, and none of them had even read this one, though we’d all read Jane Eyre.

Villette, like her more famous sibling, is the story of an orphaned girl forced to make her way in the world. Lucy Snowe, Bronte’s plain and prim heroine, accepts a position teaching at a girl’s boarding school. Once there, she must grapple with love, jealousy, and her attempts to maintain her independence during a time which was decidedly hostile toward unmarried and poor women. This book is unlike Eyre both in the depth and complexity of Snowe’s emotions and in its famously ambiguous ending. Though it contains some Gothic elements, this is no fairy tale and there is no miraculous salvation or Rochester for Snowe, who must learn to make her own way in the world.

Non-fiction:

1. Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America, Jay Mathews. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction (essays and lit crit aside), and I especially don’t tend to read feel-good, overcoming the odds memoirs, so believe me when I say that this book made me laugh and cry. It tells the story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin who founded the groundbreaking Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a controversial charter school model that has had unprecedented success in many low-income schools. The book follows them from their days as Teach for America participants to the present day, where there are over 82 KIPP schools open across the U.S. I read Work Hard. Be Nice. in an afternoon, which should be an indicator of how readable it is.

2. Flannery, Brad Gooch. There’s very little to say about this acclaimed biography, except that every Flannery fan should read it. If you haven’t heard of Flannery O’Connor, hie the at once to the library and start reading. Or, better yet, grab this book for a witty and thoughtful introduction to O’Connor as both writer and woman. Gooch doesn’t shy away from the more controversial aspects of his subject’s personality, but he always treats her with respect and a measure of distance. I loved this book and my copy is already dog-eared from the pages upon pages of hilarious passages I wanted to remember.

Let’s get texty!

Welcome to Textual Healing, a site where I’ll be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart: reading. I’ve been an avid reader since I first encountered the Bob books at the age of three, but due to my recent brush with classical education I’ve become terribly picky about things like prose style. This handicap doesn’t prevent me from reading widely in genre fiction where (contrary to scholarly prejudices) some gems of style and substance can be found. I plan to use this site for the purposes of reading and discussing any books I happen to be currently carting around, as well as for general chat about reading, writing, and publishing. 

So please, come along for the ride and don’t hesitate to comment!