MarysLibrary

Giving Atwood another Chance: Oryx and Crake

I was determined to give Margaret Atwood a fair trial. Today was a great day to do it. I set aside an hour, made a mug of hot, sweet tea, settled into the gold chair in the library (see picture at far left). Miss Woodhouse was warm, heavy, furry, and purring in my lap. It was raining pretty hard outside and the wind was rising. About 50 degrees. The radiator was warming up. We could hear it ticking.

I opened. Oryx and Crake and turned to page 3 (the first page with text), which has 20 lines. Somewhere between the end of line 17 and the beginning of line 18 I fell asleep. I was out for nearly an hour. Very refreshing.

So, back to line 1. The story begins in a ruined world some time in the future. A combination of bioengineering that got out of hand, climate change (much for the worse), and some as yet unnamed catastrophe has made America unrecognizable and nearly unliveable.

In theory I should have loved the book because it's the sort of story I like: a self-reliant man re-creating a livable world through self-reliance and ingenuity.  (Think Tom Hanks in Cast Away.) In addition, the prose is very smooth. No editorializing, just a straightforward story. We meet Snowman, a Robinson Crusoe-like character, a man left in a destroyed setting where he forages for what he wants and needs in abandoned houses and crashed cars. He is a kind of guru to the band of semi-human children who roam the beach gleaning flotsam that has washed up onto the shore.

We flash back to Snowman's childhood, when he was Jimmy, with parents and a recognizable home. His mother is apparently bipolar or severely depressed and we suspect it is because the family lives in a company-owned house in a company-owned hyper-gated community in which she feels trapped. His father is a bioengineer working on combined life forms. Pigs that can grow organs for human transplant. Pets that are a cross between a skunk and a racoon. The world has become extremely dangerous with the gulf between the privileged like Jimmy and his family and the people who live in the cities, called Plebeland, having widened to unbridgeable size.

I gave this book my best shot. I read through page 53, slowly and as open-mindedly as I could manage. I was as fair to Atwood as I could manage. But I couldn't tolerate the anxiety and sense of foreboding that drenches this story nor could I manage that suspension of disbelief that the reader has to achieve before a story can become worthwhile reading. I don't tolerate science fiction or fantasy very well.

And so Oryx and Crake is on its way back to the library and Margaret Atwood is crossed off my list more or less permanently, with the understanding that this is my problem and not the author's. The fault is not in Margaret Atwood but in in ourself.

I love the library . . .

After my last haul from the library I took the librarian's advice and suspended many of my book requests. But then I requested more. Reading book blogs is dangerous because on some days I pick up ideas from as many as half of them. In the case of My Porch, where I find I want to read eighty percent of the books Thomas mentions, I can sometimes add half a dozen a day to my various lists. He has recently listed his favorite 80 books by women and 105 books by men, by the way, and you might want to go take a look.

So here I am again, with a tall pile of juicy-looking books. Some of the titles in previous piles have gone back to the South Hill Branch as I've finished reading them or they have failed the 50-page test. Others were borrowed for reference rather than reading and have served their purpose (Salinger books.) But many of them are smiling at me from across the room so these new books have a lot of competition.

The Man Within by Graham Greene (1929). As you know, I like to read the books of an author in chronological order. This is Graham Greene's first published novel. My plan stumbles on his next two books, which are hard to find and expensive to buy because the used copies are all First Editions, there never having been another edition of either since they sold only about 1,000 copies each: The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932.) But this earliest novel may be worthwhile.

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678). I've tried to read this so many times with very little success. Well, with no success really. But the online book page I read every day is undertaking to read a quirky list of The 100 Best Novels and I plan to read along with them and this heads the list. So I'll give it another try.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate and Espresso Tales (both 2005) by Alexander McCall Smith. I began both the Isabel Dalhousie and 44 Scotland Street series but I don't recall where I stopped reading. I think I've read both of these but I want to check to be sure before I take up the next volumes and find I've skipped one.

A Man Lay Dead (1934) by Ngaio Marsh. Again, I'd like to read the Roderick Alleyn mysteries in order and this is the first. I had slowly acquired almost all of Marsh's mysteries and lost them all in a small flood we had in our basement. But I still want to re-read her. She writes so very well.

You'd Better Believe It (1985) by Bill James. I can't recall why I wanted to give the Harpur and Iles mystery series a try.

Catching Life by the Throat: How To Read Poetry and Why: Poems from Eight Great Poets (2008) edited by Josephine Hart. The book is accompanied by a CD on which noted poets like Auden, Eliot, Kipling, and Larkin are read by noted voices like Edward Fox, Ralph Fiennes, Roger Moore, and Harold Pinter. This is a treat. Sort of like apple pie after the Brussles sprouts of JD Salinger.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters: Seymour -- An Introduction (1963). Speaking of JD Salinger. I may or may not re-read it.

The Apprentice (2002) by Tess Gerritsen. Another mystery series that I started, this one while visiting my sister. I came home and lost track of what I had read. The detectives are, incidentally, Rizzoli and Isles.

Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood. I do not like Margaret Atwood. I've read three or four of her novels and didn't like any of them a bit. But Thomas at My Porch (see above) has recently raved about this first book in Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy so here I am giving her another chance. Trying to wipe my mind clean of her previous works and my attitude towards them.

Dog Sense (2011) by John Bradshaw. I've just been reading Cat Sense and learned so much about cats that I figured I should give dogs equal time.

Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still (2000) by John Golding. I'm still in pursuit of a third-grade knowledge of art. I chose this book because Rothko is included.

Cecil B DeMille's Hollywood

Published in 2004, Cecil B DeMille's Hollywood by Robert S Birchard is neither a biography of Cecil B DeMille nor a history of Hollywood. It's a listing of DeMille's movies, starting with his first, early silent, Squaw Man in 1914 and finishing with his last movie, the blockbuster, The Ten Commandments (1958.)

This is not a book for beginners. It is not a narrative history but it does provide some of the history of Hollywood, in its way. The early films especially, are enlightening for the speed with which they were made and the settings, lighting, and camera techniques early directors developed as they went along. The public couldn't get enough of the new "movies" in the first decade of the 20th century. DeMille made 15 full length feature films in 1915. Other directors were just as busy.

Basically, the book is an annotated filmography, with much detail and some enlightening commentary about each movie. If you want to know who the cameraman was or who did the final editing on any DeMille film, how long it took to film and whether it made money, this book will tell you. Illustrated with stills from all of DeMille's films, the book gives you a good idea how DeMille molded the careers of early stars. And in later years DeMille went to considerable trouble to make sure these people were hired for bit parts or as extras when these same actors had trouble finding work elsewhere. He was loyal to the people who helped him build his own career.

Not that he was especially known as a kindly man. He was a despot. But he was also an exceptionally good director. He did not tell actors what to do -- he set the scene, provided the dialogue, set up the camera, and left the rest to the people on stage. This was a challenge, but for really good actresses, like Gloria Swanson, it was what they needed to achieve some of the best performances of their careers.

The early history of the movies, the companies created by Lasky and Goldfish and the other pioneers, the development of film, cameras, and other technology, the move from New Jersey and New York to Los Angeles and eventually Hollywood, the identifying and developing of first-rate actors and directors, not to mention script writers, cameramen, and others behind the scenes -- for all this you need another book. David Thomson's The Whole Equation (2004) and Jeanine Basinger's The Star Machine (2007) are your best bets. But if you are really interested in DeMille, Birchard's book is invaluable.

Liza of Lambeth by Somerset Maugham

Liza of Lambeth, this first novel by the young Somerset Maugham - he was 23 when it was published in 1897 - has its good points. It's an introduction to Maugham's fiction, a place from which to begin watching the honing of his novelistic skills. It is a glimpse into working class life in London's East End slum, Lambeth. And the plot, although a bit worn, is worn because it works.

It's a story of a good girl gone wrong with plenty of blame to go around. Liza is 18, lively, laughing, and popular with everyone in her neighborhood, children and adults both. The early scene where she plays cricket in the street with the young boys is charming.

But she is not firm in her decisions. She dismisses her doting suitor, Tom, but then when she sees him going with her friends on an outing she wants so much to go that she gives in and says yes to his invitation. This is a foreshadowing of a later and more serious compromise after her initial rejection of another man.

I can't remember now where I got the idea that the book was a very long one. But I did think so and I almost quit reading near the end of the novel thinking I was only a fifth of the way through. This is one of the problems with reading on a Kindle something that is part of "the collected works." You have little idea where you are in a novel without poking around and doing a little arithmetic. But I persevered and the end came quickly - a bit too quickly, as though Maugham got tired of the story and decided to end it all abruptly.

The novel is late Victorian and so everyone must get his or her just rewards, which makes the ending predictable. But the most serious problem with the book for me was the Cockney dialect, which is heavy and difficult to read. I understand the non-rhotic R (I practice it myself), T pronounced F, TH pronounced V, the glottal stop, double negatives, and dropping the initial H. Nonetheless, it can be difficult to understand when listened to and frustrating to read.

So how did a man like Somerset Maugham become so familiar with the language and lives of the people in Lambeth? He trained as a doctor and spent a good deal of time at St Thomas' Hospital, which is in Lambeth. And I do understand that Lambeth is not within the sound of Bow Bellls or even technically in the East End. But it was close enough in the late 19th century when Maugham was treating and coming to know the people there, with whom he had great sympathy.

The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler

Esme Garland is studying art history at Columbia and falling in love with New York City. She has her undergraduate degree from Oxford, and has mastered that very English trait of making allusions to literature at all times and in all places. (Did you catch that one?)

Early in her visit to study in the US she meets and falls in love with Mitchell van Leuven, wealthy scion of old New York society. She accidentally becomes pregnant but before she gets a chance to tell Mitchell about it he breaks up with her. He wanders back later and and it takes most of the book for Esme to figure him out. But the reader knows a sadistic monster when she sees him in print and the balance of the story is Esme's struggle to deal with her love for him and her increasingly difficult life and cloudy future. Her salvation comes from a small independent bookstore on Broadway and 87th, based it would seem on the real bookstore, Westside Books, where the author worked for four years.

The Bookstore tickled me. A quick glance at the reviews on Goodreads points out that it doesn't tickle everybody. Some are put off by those allusions I mentioned, which must put them off most of modern English fiction. Others thought it was a bit too close to chick lit to be convincing. None of them seemed to notice Meyler's sometimes laugh-out-loud humor often drawn from our mutual misunderstanding of the English language:

The first gallery I went to in New York was the Met - like everyone else - and I saw a sign that said "No strollers on the weekend" so I zipped through all the rooms at breakneck speed, looking reprovingly at people if they seemed likely to loiter. When I reached the picture I most wanted to see -- Garden at Vaucresson by Vuillard, whose exuberant joy you can feel as you walk into the room -- I barely stopped to look at it for fear of Met officials bearing down on me with a loud-speaker: "Miss! No strolling! Step along there, miss. Look lively. It's the weekend."

Esme's witty comebacks in dialogue and her clever interior monologue are unusual in such a romantic, although not entirely predictable love story. They intrigued me and sent me off to figure out where the ones I didn't catch came from. (I need to determine who said, "That I should love a bright particular star." Is it from a sonnet? Shakespeare? It must be Shakespeare. I really should know this . . .) These quotes and allusions add greatly to the pleasure of reading about the characters who frequent the store and about this young woman whose self-doubt slowly -- and sometimes quickly -- segues into a feeling of solid self, a process most of us went through in our youth, though not in so entertaining a way.

An uncontrolled stream of books is coming from the library . . .

Today I picked up another 12 books from the library. "Too many books at one time!" I exclaimed. And so the circulation librarian told me about the bibliographic equivalent of birth control: you click on the "Change Status" button on your request page and it suspends whichever books you choose until you are ready to put them back into the stream.

I learned about this a week too late, because now I have some 30 library books in and about MarysLibrary and no time to read them. But in the future I should be able to control the stream of books coming from the library.

Today's books fall into two categories, ordinary books I want to look over and possibly read and books by and about J D Salinger. Here are the general books:

The Fig Eater by Jody Shields. This is a mystery set in Vienna. I'm starting to get serious about reading about Vienna in anticipation of a trip in the spring.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. I've read one too many glowing reviews of this book. I have to look at it myself and see what I think. It can't possibly live up to expectations.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I want to read this book with a blog group but the size is such a problem. I'll start reading it and see what happens.

Edward the Confessor by Frank Barlow. I'm still reading English history and still lingering over the Anglo-Saxons. After this second biography in the Yale English Monarchs series, I'll be moving on to William the Conqueror.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth L Ozeki. The plot of this book appeals to me. So now that it's on the Booker short list I'm going to give it a 30-page try out.

The second set of books is for reference purposes. The 22nd Avenue Book Club will be reading The Catcher in the Rye and in preparation for that I'm doing a little research into the life and works of J D Salinger. So I don't plan to read all of the memoirs and biographies. I do plan to re-read all of Salinger's fiction. Perhaps even the fiction published in the New Yorker but not collected in book form. Because I subscribe to the magazine I get the entire collection of New Yorker back issues and can look up things published in past years.

I won't bother listing all of these books, except to note the newly published biography, Salinger (the fat red book), by David Shields and Shane Salerno.

Civil to Strangers

With Civil to Strangers we come to the last of the Barbara Pym novels my online otherlit group has been reading. We have gone through her entire oeuvre, starting with Some Tame Gazelle and finishing with this posthumously published collection.

Barbara Pym is, as Philip Larkin said in 1977, one of the underappreciated writers of the mid-20th century. Her novels about excellent women, including Excellent Women, are a delight to read and her characters, especially her men, starting with the incomparable Archdeacon Hoccleve, are incomparable.

She has a sharp eye for the relationships between men and women from the woman's point of view and is especially observant of the unrequited love of women. There is a sadness in her novels, but there is also a rich vein of irony and humor. Her descriptions of food and meals and her mis-quotations - both found in every novel - build an understanding of women's lives, the satisfaction they can achieve with daily housework, and a regret that their often first-class educations are allowed to erode over the years.

A Trip to the Library

 More books that I requested have come home from the library and they are going to give last week's books some real competition in the scramble to be on top of the TBR list.

• My book club has decided to read Catcher in the Rye. (Needless to say I wasn't at the meeting.) So I borrowed the book from the library. The cover is still the same as it was when the book was first published in 1851. (There was a sequel, Holden Caulfield: The Civil War Years.)***
• The Violets of March by Sarah Jio. It takes place on Bainbridge Island in Washington State and I like reading stories that take place in locations I'm familiar with.
• Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker. A 1940 novel in which two men invent an old lady, Miss Hargreaves. Imagine their surprise when the imaginary woman shows up on their doorstep.
• The Human Factor by Graham Greene. I requested this but then I decided to buy a copy. It's for my online otherlit group, which is about to undertake a reading of Le Carre. But we are starting with this spy novel by Greene.
• A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. I have the first one. I just felt the need for a little of the wit of H L.
• The View from Penthouse B. The latest Elinor Lipman. She is always a delight to read. Laugh out loud funny. I'm looking forward to this.
• Paradise Screwed, a collection of Carl Hiaasen's columns from the Miami Herald.
• J D Salinger. A biography by Kenneth Slawenski.
• Cat Sense by John Bradshow. How to understand your cat. Hopeless, I know, but one can try.
• At Home in the World, a memoir by Joyce Maynard, who dropped out of Yale and moved in with J D Salinger in his hideout in Cornish, NH, when she was about 18 and he was 53. Should be entertaining.
• Dream Catcher by Margaret Salinger. A memoir about life with her reclusive father by the daughter of J D Salinger.

*** The book was published in 1951, of course. Seeing my error in the date, Wilhelm suggested a fictional sequal and I thought it sounded much more interesting that the original.

Top Ten Books on My Fall TBR List

Top Ten Books On My Fall 2013 TBR List

Rather than having ten titles on my list I have authors on my TBR list as I've entangled myself in some group reading adventures. The total adds up to far more than 10 books.

1. Anthony Trollope - I've just started The Prime Minister with my on-line Trollope reading group. We just finished Phineas Redux and will soon move on to The Duke's Children. I am always reading a Trollope novel. In fact, I always have one with me whereever I go. I have an iPhone now and I can read Trollope - and lots of other authors - on that.
2. John Le Carre - my online otherlit group, a spin-off from the Trollope group, is about to undertake a reading of selected works of Le Carre beginning with his first novel, Call for the Dead, which is a sort of mystery novel with spy undertones. We are starting this project with The Human Factor, a Graham Greene spy novel, as one does . . .
3. J D Salinger has become a blip on my radar for the first time since about 1960. The 22nd Avenue Book Club has decided to read The Catcher in the Rye (sigh) so I have that and the rest of the Salinger oeuvre on my TBR list. Also a couple of biographies and a couple of memoirs. I'm not sure how long I can bear to read books by and about this man, but I'll give it the old college try.
4. Malcolm Lowry is known for one book only, Under the Volcano. theguardian, an online book page that I read, has undertaken that book as the current reading for their book club so I'm going to give it another try. I've found it unpenetrable in the past. I've been considering adding some literary criticism or a biography (I'd like to know whether his wife killed him or if that is just a nasty accusation.) But my library has neither so I'll just work on finishing the novel.
5. For reasons I can no longer remember I have undertaken to read all of Somerset Maugham's fiction in chronological order. I started with Liza of Lambeth (1897), which was a struggle as it uses dialect and the cockneys of the late 19th century are close to unintelligible to me. Now I've begun The Making of a Saint (1898.) Maugham wrote a lot more books than you think, something more than 45 volumes if you include the short stories. I'm also reading the Selina Hastings biography, which is terrific.
6. One of my favorite blogs, dovegreyreader, is beginning a months-long reading of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. I started it when I first got the book but quit about half-way through on page 700 (sic.) I'm going to give it another go.
7. And finally, I'm going to take advantage of Persephone Books' summer special and buy two of their wonderful novels (and get a third book free.) So I'll be reading at least two Persephone books and possibly three or more as I haven't read all of the ones I already have.
8. Over the more than seven years that I've been writing this blog I've accepted an offer from an author or publisher for a free galley or book to review only two or three times. But for some reason I've become rather popular lately (probably because of my reviews on Goodreads) and some really enticing books have been on offer lately. So I have a handful of books to read for review, including a mystery by J Sydney Jones, Ruin Value, that begins a new series and the next Father Christmas mystery by C C Benison, Ten Lords a-Leaping.

Who was the first king of England?

Ah, Aethelstan. The first English king. A great warrior - he conquered or threatened all of England into recognizing him as king. A scholar - he learned to read, not something everybody did back in 900, and supported the intellectuals of the time. A lawgiver - and his laws were pretty much obeyed, which is impressive as this was the depths of the "dark ages" when it could not be assumed that one was safe from mayhem just because the king said you should be. Devout, brave, honest, just.

The grandson of Alfred, the only English king called "the great," Aethelstan was the one chosen by the great man to acceed to the throne after his father, Edward the Elder. Even as late as the 12th century it was said that "no one more just or more learned every ruled the kingdom." This is from William of Malmsebury, upon whom we must rely for much of what we know about the late years of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Sarah Foot's biography, Aethelstan: The First King of England, is crammed with information, surprising (at least to me) since there wasn't a lot of history being written back then and the historian has to rely on documents from all over Europe created for other purposes. This is the first of the series of books in the Yale English Monarchs series. The next one chronologically is Frank Barlow's Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), great-grand-nephew of Aethelstan.

I won't send you to read this book unless you are deeply interested in the English monarchs before William the Conqueror. The book is by necessity dry and filled with dates. The author has compiled a time-line telling us where Aethelstan was at almost every moment during his reign, 927-939. She does bring to life the important battle of Brunanburgh in which Aethelstan defeated the combined forces of the Norse and the Scots. She describes the king's household, and she gives the reader an idea who lived there. But this is not a social history. You are on your own to figure out what the common folk do.

But do remember Aethelstan, in the shadow of his famous grandfather, forgotten in the later struggle between the House of Wessex and the House of Denmark, and of course, overwhelmed, as is much of Anglo-Saxon history, by the bastard from Normandy.