From Blog of a Bookslut, to this, to this story at the Independent about how a creepy review by Graham Greene of a Shirley Temple movie got him sued for libel, which spurred him to flee to Mexico, where he wrote The Power and the Glory. Wow. Just, wow.
I recently read/wrestled with Flannery O’Connors short, brutish novel Wise Blood. Researching it, I was surprised at its influences on bands as diverse as Ministry and David Bazan in Headphones. Then today I read kind-of-review/personal-musing (what is with these, today?) by Bill See of Heart of Darkness, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by David Burke, at Popmatters, link via ALoTTFMA
It cannot be overstated just how jarring a release Nebraska was in 1982. The charts were being ruled by such vapid banalities as Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”, Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. Then along comes a quiet folk record made on an old 4-track, basically just voice and guitar about killers, small-time thieves and other forgotten souls. It took some major stones to release it.
What Springsteen gleaned from the songs of Woody Guthrie, the writings of O’Connor and Steinbeck and filmmakers like Ford, Huston and Terrence Malick was a humanity and a curiosity about why certain people lose connection with themselves, their families, their community, their government. And what then happens when that kind of alienation infiltrates the subconscious. Further, the profound effect that has on the people that love those alienated and disconnected souls.
From “Shelf Conscious,” by Francesca Mari at The Paris Review, not so much a review as a broad overview/appreciation/personal musing over Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books by Leah Price, via The Morning News:
My boyfriend was ruthless. He chucked a book if he thought it’d be easy enough to get again for a dollar. ….
I’ve always felt an obligation to keep any book with which I’ve had some sort of relationship, even if it was an insignificant one–an assignment for a short review, for instance.
My husband is a hoarder. I’m a purger, perhaps because I’m a binger with a well-developed sense of buyers’ remorse. We’ve reached a sort of equipoise where I can get rid of some books, and I’ll store others instead of getting rid of them. Thus far, we have enough room to do this.
I simply CANNOT imagine not having organized shelves. Bizarre. That being said, organizing books is crazy and involves weird personal decisions, such as: most of my graphic novels are organized by title (e.g., Sandman by Gaiman is under S), except when they’re organized by author (anything by James Kochalka is under K). Other books are in 2 main groups by size: MMPB get their own shelves as I have bookcases well suited for their short selves. And then TPB and HCs get bigger shelves, but both groups are separated into read/unread.
What I believe my shelves say about me: I believe in organization, and succeed to some degree at a macro level but fail at a micro level, then just start stacking books here and there. Which is pretty much how I manage life.
My husband went DVD shopping a few weeks ago, and brought Scott Pilgrim vs. the World home for me. I had started to watch the Lonesome Dove miniseries, which many of y’all had recommended, but it wasn’t working for me. The overwrought music and the hammer-heavy foreshadowing, and then that closeup of Sean in the river that freezes at the end of Part 1 combined to make me less than eager to finish.
So instead we watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I loved it, again. That may be because I’m a comic book geek and loved the series of graphic novels. Help me test this theory. Did you like the movie without having read the books? But anyway, read the books. So much geeky goodness to be had in them!
At The Composites, Brian Joseph Davis takes book descriptions of characters like Madam Bovary and Rochester, combines them with law enforcement sketch software, and voila, you have truly creepy images of some of the most famous people who never existed. Via The Morning News.
Guppy turned 6 this week! I showed him the cake section of Joanne Chang’s Flour, which I received for Christmas but had not yet worked up the gumption to cook from. Guppy, who knows his own mind, passed by the chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, the chocolate cupcakes with magic frosting, and said he wanted the lemon-raspberry cake. The recipe is in small type over three pages. I asked, “Are you sure?” and showed him the picture of the cupcakes again. He was sure.
The day before Guppy’s birthday, I made a trip to our grocery co-op, since I did not have on hand the requisite: cake flour, nearly 2 pounds of butter, 14 eggs (for 14 whites but only 12 egg yolks), bag of lemons, nearly 5 cups of sugar, and 2 boxes of very lovely, organic, USA, on-sale raspberries.
Day one. On Guppy’s birthday, his older brother Drake vomited for the second morning in a row. Dealing with that left me less than energized to start a major baking project, but I rallied in the late morning and made the three cake layers and the homemade lemon curd. The cakes involved whipping egg whites then folding them into a very thick batter. The lemon curd used up my bag of lemons and I needed more to make the lemon syrup, so I asked Guppy if I could finish his cake the next day if we got dessert out that night. He graciously agreed, and I was able to procure more lemons.
Day two. The recipe says to make the buttercream frosting before the lemon syrup, but since I read the recipe beforehand, and the syrup needs to cool to room temp, I did it in reverse order.
Here is lemon syrup cooling in back and sugar syrup in front. Buttercream frosting involves making a sugar syrup heated to a certain temperature, then taking the warm syrup and adding it very slowly to an egg mixture, and then adding a $hit-ton of butter and whipping for a long time. Note candy thermometer, one of those kitchen tools that denotes this recipe as hard core, IMO. It’s a kitchen gadget I use about once a year, if that, but I always feel competent that I have it when it’s called for. Also, my neighbors know that I have one, so they borrow mine when needed.
This is the egg/syrup mixture, before I added butter and whipped it to a total end volume of about six cups. I nearly forgot to put in a pound of butter, as putting in half a pound made me think I was finished. Silly me.
To assemble the cake, each layer needed to be brushed with about 1/3 cup of the lemon syrup, then topped with a cup of buttercream, to which a flood barrier of frosting was adding around the edge to prevent the subsequent raspberries and lemon curd from oozing out. Which they did anyway in a few spots, so I should have been more aggressive in my frosting flood barriers.
So then, lemon curd inside barrier, topped with raspberries, next layer, soaked with syrup, frosting, flood barrier, lemon curd, raspberries, and that got me here:
I topped that with the third layer, brushed it with lemon syrup, then the whole thing needed to refrigerate for at least an hour to firm up. I took a nap.
Now firm, the cake needed a crumb coat–a thin layer of all-over frosting to make sure the crumbs stay under the outer layer of frosting. This took another cup of frosting, then had to refrigerate for 30 minutes, during which I washed some of the eight zillion dishes and tried to wipe up some of the butter, which seemed to coat every kitchen surface now.
Next up was the all-over frosting, about a cup and a half, and then the remaining lemon curd, spread on the top. By this time, the boys were home from school, and big brother Drake said he wanted to put the raspberries on top of the cake. I asked that he test his design on the bottom of a cake pan before transferring it.
He wanted a ring around the cake, and I suggested using the few remaining berries to make a 6, which conveniently also looked like a “G.”
Here is what it looked like once we cut into it
And on the plate
Throughout the two days of making this cake, I was fearful that it would not be good, that it would be too sugary, soggy from the syrup, etc. I knew as I was doing it that it was way too much work unless the end result was going to be delicious. But it was. So: giant pain in the butt, yes. Worth it for a special someone on a special occasion, like my very happy six-year-old boy? You bet.
If you were reading to the end of this hoping for the recipe, sorry. It’s three pages of tiny type. No way am I transcribing it. I spent 2 days on the cake (and probably more hours making it than I did laboring to have Guppy himself), and all morning uploading the photos for this entry.
Daily Delicious has the recipe with European amounts here. But I suggest you borrow the book from the library, or just buy it. I think it’s worth it for the photos alone, but it’s full of other recipes I want to try too, like home-made Oreos
A fixture on many of last year’s Best-of lists, Swamplandia! was going to get read sooner or later. But when it was picked by both Books and Bars and The Mornings News, well, that just made it jump the queue.
Swamplandia! is a Florida novelty park owned by the Bigtree family. The park’s star is the mother, Hilola, who swims with and wrestles alligators. When she dies, the rest of the family falls apart in various and interesting ways. The chapters alternate between 1st person by thirteen-year-old Ava, the youngest daughter, and 3rd person about Kiwi, the seventeen-year-old son. A large section in the middle of the book had me anxious for a long time to see what would happen. It took some strength of will to accede to the intervening alternating chapters, and not to groan when chapters ended but the suspense was sustained. I was impressed with that continuity of tension, as well as the fully engaging characters. I also appreciated that Russell left many interesting questions open for the reader to decide.
Swamplandia! goes up against Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table in round 1 of The Morning News Tournament of Books, to be judged by Haven Kimmel. Now I’m on to The Tiger’s Wife, which my friend Amy lent me. I’m going to try not to go crazy about the Tournament of Books this year, but I really enjoyed The Sisters Brothers and Swamplandia!.
My friend Amy of New Century Reading sent me a link to 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer on The 99 Percent. I’m sure you’ve seen some variation of this article, where writers give advice on writing. It’s always useful, though, and this is a nice update with many modern writers. I’ve made good progress lately on the current draft of my novel, and these were particularly useful:
3. Esther Freud: On finding your routine…
Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.4. Zadie Smith: On unplugging…
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
Once, when I was lost, I took this advice and was able to quickly get back on track:
7. Bill Wasik: On the importance of having an outline…
Hone your outline and then cling to it as a lifeline.
And #25 is a great “grain of salt.” Hope you enjoy this, too.
I put The Sisters Brothers on my request list at the library even before it was picked as one of the contenders for The Morning News Tournament of Books 2012. (I think it was recommended at Good Reads by trusted reading friends Kate and Patricia.) So I was doubly glad when it finally came into the library. (Especially as the library has now cut off my crazy requesting at the knees by limiting the number of requests to 30, down from 100. Stupid budget cuts.)
Two brothers, Eli and Charley, are on a mission in the mid-1800s Pacific Northwest. This is a western, though one blurber called it cowboy noir. Aren’t all westerns kind of cowboy noir? In any case, it has shooting, crime, horses, weird people, and only a few women. Not too different in those respects from Lonesome Dove. But where that was an epic, this is a ripping yarn, pulling me through from beginning to end at a breakneck pace. One brother, Eli, is the narrator, and for all the bad things he does, is a tremendously endearing character. This was a ripping, tragi-comic yarn. I look forward to seeing how it plays in the Tournament of Books. It’s going up against critical darling Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, judged by geek icon Wil Wheaton. (Yes, _that_ Wil Wheaton, aka Wesley Crusher and now on Big Bang Theory.) It’ll be an interesting match.
Two things: I hate the new TPB cover. I really liked the HC one. Also, by searching at Amazon for Sisters Brothers, I got the book I was looking for, and then a lot of unpleasant other books. Yikes. Don’t let the kids try this at home.
In addition to Sweet Tooth, one of my favorite comic book series in The Unwritten, a twisty take on literature and pop culture that has gone from meta to hyper meta in the latest volume 5, The Unwritten: On To Genesis.
Tom Taylor is the real human (or is he?) who inspired his father to pen a Harry Potter-esque series of novels about Tommy Taylor. Along with sidekicks Lizzie Hexam and Richie Savoy, they try to dodge the bad guys (a meta-literary cabal, enforced by a guy named Pullman, who can turn things into fiction with his touch) while attempting to figure out who the bad guys are, why they’re after them, and well, quite a lot of things. This volume takes a detour into comics history (pleasantly reminding me of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) and noir.
It’s engaging, thought-provoking, and I really hope the author, Mike Carey is going to be able to pull these many fascinating strings together, but even if not, it’s a grand ride.
I’ve told you before: you should be reading the comic book series Sweet Tooth. I just tore through volume 4, Sweet Tooth: Endangered Species. It’s about a boy named Gus. He’s a human/animal hybrid in a world that was largely wiped out by a plague, after which all children were born as hybrids. Where did the plague come from? Does it matter? In this fourth collection of the series, there’s a lot of questioning and blurriness about who is good and who isn’t. Another devourable installment in this ripping, post-apocalyptic yarn with an utterly endearing narrator. Reminds me of Y the Last Man and Riddley Walker.
I recently read Lonesome Dove, that a friend told me long ago was her favorite book. We’ve fallen out of touch, so I don’t know if it is, still. But I’ve always found that question interesting, so long as the responder doesn’t go all geekier-than-thou and make a long list of erudite works.
If I had to pick one favorite, it would be Possession by A.S. Byatt. I’ve only read it once, but it changed my life by helping me see the profound passion I have for religion and literature that I continue to explore today. I’ve recommended it many times, as it contains so much in one grand story: mystery, history, romance, literature, poetry, science, religion. I look forward to reading it again.
So I’m going to ask you a question. Gun to the head, about to depart for a desert island. What book (not the Bible or collected works of Shakespeare, but one work) do you pick?
I’ll post answers from the comments. Unless you list more than one. Then I will mock you. Pick one. Just one. You can do it.
Edited to add:
At Flavorwire, they have lists of favorite books by 10 authors from David Foster Wallace to Karen Russell. I like those two as they’re less pretentious than the rest of them. Big surprise: Franzen’s is LONG. Wonder what he’d do if I made him pick just one?
Amy from New Century Reading says:
If you won’t let me pick more than one, then I’ll have to (slightly) circumvent by saying that this is what I would pick today. Tomorrow? Could be different.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.
Hee, I love that you love this book and I actively hated it. I think it makes our book friendship so interesting. Also, Larry McMurtry studied with Wallace Stegner.
Jennifer from Tipsy Baker says:
This is going to sound so pretentious, but Anna Karenina.
Sigh. This is one of my shelf sitters. I don’t think it’s pretentious; it seems like a blanket-y epic a la Lonesome Dove.
Kate F says:
I cannot do it.
Comfort v. challenging on a desert island. Which I could reread over and over and over. I’m not sure if these confines lead to my favorite book, though . . .
Austen or Wodehouse, Austen or Wodehouse.
Fine. Sense and Sensibility.
(But you know, Little House in the Big Woods would have a lot of useful tips in addition to being comforting).
I understand Kate’s dilemma. I think she gets a little too literal when she tries to sneak a THIRD book in under the rubric of useful. Nice try. But I think what makes some books my favorites are that they’re both comforting and challenging. Wodehouse is delightful, but not necessarily challenging. Austen, to me, is both.
Jay says:
Usually when asked this I would say The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, but I recently retread Once a Runner and that really struck a chord so that’s what I will go with today.
Jay! You are one of the people I’ve asked this of before, and a previous answer of yours was A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, which I then read and now love.
Patricia from O Canada, Y’all, says:
Gun to my head? Lolita by Nabokov.
Don’t give me time to think. As I am writing this I am already wavering.
I am amusing myself by picturing someone actually holding a gun to a book geek’s head and waiting for it to decide (Sense and Sensibility!), then the book geek changes its mind (Wodehouse!) causing the gunholder to lose its temper and go all Tarantino on the book geek.
Patricia, I noticed Nabokov was on a lot of the lists at Flavorwire, some of which (at least the DFW) were from the Top Ten book you link to in the comments.
Gretchen says:
My favorite is, oddly, also Possession – which I think is probably why I so enjoy your blog!
Possession works on so many levels for me; it’s a mystery, a satire, a myth, and a romance, all bound up into one epic of an adventure story. And the ending never fails to makes me cry.
She tries to sneak in a few more, but I won’t be putting up with that, except to acknowledge that Gretchen, Jennifer, Amy and I have all been talking about reading Middlemarch, so I think there’s a Middlemarch zeitgeist going on. I’m choosing it for my book group for May. And now Patricia comments she’s wanting to read it too. I wonder if there’s a general Middlemarch groundswell out there, or just in our little corner of the world.
Jack says:
I have been talking about books I read when young with the boys. Willy Wonka. Or… no, you said only one.
Yay! Just one!
Kristi says:
The Outsiders by SE Hinton
I am ashamed to say I still haven’t read this.
I’m leading a book discussion soon on Flannery O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood, which I found both fascinating and confounding. To research it, I thought I’d glance at Brad Gooch’s recent Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, but instead I read the whole thing, even though the beginning is slow and dull. (Do we really need so many quotes from schoolmates and teachers in grade school?) But once O’Connor begins to write and pursue being a writer, things get interesting. I appreciated the context the biography provides for her novels and stories, though it did spoil a few endings of some of her stories I hadn’t yet read. If I could have finished The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor before the biography, that would have been a better order of operations.
I wrote already here on how I enjoyed reading Lonesome Dove. It’s book that’s sat on my shelves the longest unread since the mid-90’s. Yet I never stopped hoping I would read it, and this month I finally did.
Post Civil War, two former Texas rangers lead a cattle train north, and cross paths with many and various people. It’s easy for me to see why so many people love this book, as several people, some strangers, shared they did when they saw me reading it. It’s huge, with a giant cast of characters who are complex and engaging, which makes it all the more upsetting when bad things happen to them, as was wont to happen back then in the West. Yet for all the tears I cried over these characters, I wouldn’t take back one.
I loved the experience of reading this book and resented when life interfered with that. I remember feeling similarly when I read A Suitable Boy years ago, another book a friend had recommended highly. Lonesome Dove has that same epic, sprawling, populous, blanket-i-ness that I just want to wrap myself up in, and not crawl out of when I’m done.
This was a great book to take on a trip and not worry I’d finish it while I was gone. I look forward to renting the mini series.
Edited to add: What got me thinking about the book was Rosecrans Baldwin’s piece on it at The Millions:
The novel is excellent, sustained with constant style, and its dramatic excellence increases, withholding and rewarding, as the cowboys move their cattle north. Even the ending fits together. It’s not incredibly deep. But it’s deep enough. And I couldn’t remember the last time I was similarly floored by a long, dramatic, entertaining literary novel.
Bossypants made me laugh. Out loud. A lot. From Fey’s larger-than-life father through her ugly duckling years (and years) to Sarah Palin and beyond, we get a front row seat to Fey’s hectic life, and she makes it entertaining. Like Mindy Kaling did in her book, Fey gushes about Amy Poehler. Who I hope will be writing her own book soon, though Pawnee is a good bathroom book in the meantime.
Bossypants is like spending time with a friend who’s great at telling stories. Fey has made an art out of self-deprecation, and it really works for her.
Ostensibly, I bought Sarah Varon’s graphic novel Bake Sale for my kids, who enjoyed her Robot Dreams and Chicken and Cat books. Really, though, it was at least as much for me. Sarah Varon art and story with recipes? I’m in.
Cupcake runs a bakery, is in a band, but dreams of going abroad and meeting his culinary heroine, Turkish Delight. In his quest to meet his idol, his priorities get a bit mixed up (no pun intended, sorry) but his friend Eggplant helps set things straight. Like all of Varon’s work, it’s charming without being twee and emphasizes friendship and loyalty in ways that speak to this adult as well as my kids.
(I’m beginning to suspect the English are going to try and take the US back. Spell check insists on English spellings lately, not American ones. It wanted me to correct to “emphasises” in the above paragraph. What’s next? Aluminium instead of aluminum? GUESS WHICH ONE WAS UNDERLINED? You heard it here, first. The British are coming…)
Our little family just returned from a quick trip south. My husband G. Grod’s elderly grandmother is declining and confined to bed. We wanted to see her again, and to have her see our boys, 8 and nearly 6, so we finagled last-minute flights.
She said, “Why is everybody comin’ to see me? I’m not goin’ anywhere!”
There was a constant stream of visitors, relatives, and food. The boys did get to see her, though young Guppy was acting up, I suspect out of an inability to grasp what was going on. 8yo Drake, though, was happy to go in, see her and chat for a bit.
There’s not a lot to do in rural SC, and no other kids to play with, so we let the boys have free rein with the Gameboy, Angry Birds and other handheld games. They ate fried chicken several times, dessert after every meal, white-bread sandwiches, and were allowed Coke on the flight home. They seemed a little delirious with their good fortune and the uncharacteristic laissez-faire parenting. I wonder if later in life they’ll make the connection between what was happening and why they were given so much freedom.
I’m reading Lonesome Dove, the book that’s sat the longest on my shelves without me giving up on it, and I’m loathe to put it down. I should be working on an article. Cleaning the house. Writing my novel. Doing laundry. Shovelling snow. (Why is spell check rejecting ’shoveling’? I thought the rule of thumb was ‘get the ell out’?) Yet all I want to do is read this book, and get lost with these characters, even as I get a mite too attached to them. They keep dying, which is what I suppose happened, way back then in the west.
Casper Newbolt’s advice on how to watch a film from “The Rules” at IFP, link via The Morning News:
The Rules make absolutely no prejudice, they allow you to love anything you want, but simply ask that you think for yourself.
I’ll be thinking on this one for a while. I try very hard to determine whether a movie or book will be worth my time before I go see it so I break Rule 1, which is
Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.
Yet some of my favorite viewing experiences have been films I had no knowledge or expectations about, such as Short Cuts and Shadowlands.
I’d heard great things about Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids even before it won the National Book Award. Having finally gotten around to reading it, I kind of fell in love with it.
It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of “Crystal Ship.” Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flame in Monterey. AM radio played “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter changed the course of my life.
It was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe.
What I knew about Smith was that she was the godmother of punk, and the iconic photo of her from the cover of her album Horses. What I knew of Robert Mapplethorpe was censorship scandal over S & M photography, and he died from AIDS-related illness.
What I didn’t know filled a book. I was surprised and interested to learn that she started her artist’s life in poetry, and he his in painting, sculpture and other medium. She didn’t become a musician and he didn’t become a photographer for quite some time. And that time, their youth and their young love affair as they grew into the artists they’d become, is the subject of Smith’s book. She paints gruesome pictures with beautiful words of the early years–rough jobs, no jobs, starving and scrounging for food and art supplies. But she also details their many years in the art culture of the 70’s in NYC and specifically in the Chelsea Hotel. These parts of the narrative were like reading a history of a time I knew little about and was fascinated to learn. Directly after finishing, I did some further research online and plan to explore more of her music and his photography. Perhaps not the latter when the kids are around, though. Like Wise Blood, this book involved me and provoked me to find out more.
A word of warning about e-books. I read this on my nook. My edition had a lot of pictures, but not nearly as many as did the paperback edition. Do not read this electronically. Get the paperback edition of Just Kids. A book about a photographer should contain the maximum number of photos possible, not be limited because of ridiculous permission battles.
We got a nook color because it was well reviewed, we thought it was time to check out an e-reader, and because we could get Angry Birds to distract our boys in restaurants. On the Angry Birds front: big win. But as a reader, while I do like the ability to adjust the text size, I don’t like it as I do a physical book. I’m travelling this weekend and mulled whether to take the nook or a book. Downside to nook: have to take charger and the nook color only has about 8 hours of battery, which is about the length of my trip. Also, it can’t be used during takeoff, and landing. Thus, it’s staying at home, and I’m taking a real book, the oldest shelf sitter I have, one I’m unlikely to finish it in a weekend. I’ll have to see how I do with the tiny text, though. I’ll take my magnifying glasses, as the bifocals I just ordered won’t be in till next week. Happy reading, folks, in whatever format suits you!