MarysLibrary

New Year's Resolutions

Yeah, I know. But better late than going right to broken. I think I will just adopt, mutatis mutandis, the resolutions of Jackie the YA Librarian, which she posted on her blog, interactivereader, two weeks ago. It's encouraging that someone as organized as she is almost as late with her resolutions as I am.

So here we go:

1. Read more and with more focus

2. Review more and sooner after reading the book

3. Blog more and less formally

4. Publically keep track of the books I read on my blog

5. Knit more

That's about it. I would add the usual - go to the gym and get some real exercise, eat more fruits and vegetables and less Tillamook chocolate ice cream . . . you know the sort of thing. But for some reason, and while I wasn't looking, I started doing those things. Inexplicable.

The 2009 Newbery Winner

The ALA has announced this year's winner of the Newbery and it's Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (Harper Collins, 2008.)

I didn't make a prediction this year because I haven't had time to read enough children's books, but I do have half a dozen books out of the library, making them a sort of shortlist. And Gaiman's book is among them.

I haven't read it yet. Obviously it will now go to the top of my reading list.

I'm getting closer to predicting the winner. This year the book's on my short list; last year the book I chose for the Newbery, Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugh Cabret, won the Caldecott. Maybe next year's the year I'll ace it.

The Dante Club

  I've been reading a biography of William Dean Howells in which I learned that The Dante Club of Matthew Pearl's 2003 novel was an actual group who met weekly at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house to assist him in his translation of The Divine Comedy. I remembered that a book of that name was published a while back so I picked it up last time I was at Auntie's Bookstore.

Alas, this is another of those books that starts out as a spectacularly well crafted mystery and ends up disappointing. There are too many characters, too much busy activity by the club members: James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, and J T Fields, the owner of the Atlantic Magazine.

Matthew Pearl's previous book, The Poe Shadow, was similar. It began very cleverly and sputtered to a standstill about two thirds of the way through with increasingly unrealistic plot and characters. These both should have been first rate books - they both started that way. I felt cheated when they dried up.

The Dante Club really did exist in post-Civil War Boston and it developed eventually into the Dante Society which is still alive today. Longfellow's translation was highly regarded in its day.

The Results of Freezing Fog

A taste for literature . . .

.

No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.” Industrialist Richard Teller Crane in 1911, quoted by Stanley Fish

.

Animal Farm - 105 minutes

Elaine at Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover posted a while back about her reading speed: fast. Very fast. She read Animal Farm in half an hour.

I proceed at different speeds depending on what I'm reading, though not always logically. If I'm reading a detailed history of the Civil War I might read more quickly than when I'm reading a murder mystery. From the history all I really want are the author's conclusions. I don't need the details. It's enough to know they are there and they appear to be legitimate.

But when I read a mystery I want to figure out whodunit and that takes slow, detailed, careful reading.

Anyhow, I sat down today to read Animal Farm, timing myself to see how I compare to Elaine. It took me more than three times longer. If I hadn't read it before it would have taken me much longer than that because I would have had to take the time to figure out who and what the animals and events represented.

That was fairly easy in this reading, though I never have been able to figure out who or what the cat stands for.

Elegy for Iris

I'm deep in the imbroglio about John Bayley's books about his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her descent into Alzheimer's. He wrote three books: Elegy for Iris (1999), Iris and Her Friends (2000), and Widower's House (2001.) Better he should have stopped with one. He is frank in exposing every detail of Murdoch's despairing descent into chaos, which is sad and distressing. The story might better have been left untold.

Along came A N Wilson, who knew Iris Murdoch and John Bayley well. Bayley was his tutor at Oxford. Wilson was deeply offended by Bayley's books and the movie made from them. Or at least he said he was in a vituperative book, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her(2004) in which he accused Bayley of playing the same power games that his wife wrote about so astutely in her novels.

The reviews were just as sharp and as opinionated as Wilson's book. And around and around it went.

Forgotten in all this is the fine work Iris Murdoch did as a philosopher and the exceptional qualities of her novels. She created characters of great charm and intellect and she devised clever and complicated plots that leave the reader shaking her head in admiration.

She was very different from the other, now more popular, women writers of her day, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor. Murdoch's fiction seems to have drifted out of favor. I can only hope that with time it will drift back and be recognized for its exceptional creativity and charm. Perhaps all the hoopla about Bayley's and Wilson's books will entice some people back to the novels that are the basis for all the original interest in the sad end to Iris Murdoch's life.

Cooking

I've been doing it. Cooking. I almost never cook. But just since the big snow began I've made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, vegetable soup, Hoppin' John, and today Swedish meatballs. I don't believe there's anybody even in Sweden who makes better Swedish meatballs than I do.

I've been doing no knitting. You'd think snow would give me the itch to get out the wool and stitch up a warm hat or something. But not this winter.

And I'm not doing all that much reading either.

So what am I doing? Spending too much time drifting about the Internet. Running errands, visiting the doctor and the dentist and the nutritionist. Going to the bank, dry cleaner's, library, grocery store. Refinancing the house. Walking the running track and pedaling the recumbent bicycle at the gym.

This listing is part of my development of New Year's Resolutions for 2009. One of which will be to quit procrastinating.

The Sayings of House

.

"It's one of the great tragedies of life — something always changes." - Dr Gregory House

.

The Defining Moment

I read somewhere that president-elect Obama was reading this book about FDR's first 100 days so I decided I would read it also.

I'm about a third of the way through a long and detailed biography of Roosevelt but I put it aside to read this book, and I'm glad I did. Alter focuses on the innovative programs of the New Deal that Congress passed in those early days of the new administration. Clearly FDR used the "honeymoon" period and the advantage of a Democratic Congress to great advantage.

Obama's new administration is being called the New-New Deal and I'm sure he's going to have many dramatic new pieces of legislation that he will want passed immediately after he in inaugurated. Reading Alter's book gives me an idea of how he may go about making the changes he wants. I'll be interested to see if he takes ideas from this book.

Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Simon and Schuster (2006) 415 pages, ISBN 0743246004 3.5 /5 stars.