In a new year resolutionish daze I started making a list of all the books I’ve finished, but I don’t know where it’s gotten to. I was curious about how many I actually read in a year, considering that I go through an average of six or seven titles a month for review, and I try to always have a little something-something on the side for me. That’s a lot of books. I think there are people who read more, but I haven’t read this much since grad school (and I’m not sure I read that much then, either, at least not consistently).

I also had this idea that I would write here occasionally about the books I’ve read, whether for review or for fun, that made me want to sing. Books I’ve read that I loved in a shout from the hilltops sort of way. Here are a few of them:

1. The Metropolis Case, by Matthew Galloway

I’ve been following Matthew Galloway on the Tumblr for a while now, since before this book was published. I loved reading his posts about that process, and part of the reason I loved this book was because it was so clearly his voice.

Some of you know that my so-called field of expertise when I was an academic was 19th-century British fiction, specifically the Victorian period (as opposed to the Romantic, though it all bleeds together, really), and more specifically the sort of books that make a lot of people — well, non-English majors, anyway — cringe and have bad high school English class flashbacks. I’m talking the 500-900 word sagas that span multiple generations and/or have an ensemble cast of characters with intricately plotted mysterious connections to each other. Middlemarch. Bleak House. The Way We Live Now.

The Metropolis Case is similar in scope (did I just compare this book to Middlemarch? Yes. Yes, I did). It follows four different characters in different times and places — New York in 2001 and 1960, Paris in the 1860s, Pittsburgh in the 1970s — and while these characters are all connected to each other in ways that are revealed as their stories progress, there’s one thing that unites them from the beginning: Music. Specifically, opera. More specifically, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

I like opera, and I love some operas, but I don’t know a whole lot about it in general, and even less about this particular one (also I have a Woody Allen-esque aversion to most Wagner, but that’s neither here nor there). But it doesn’t matter, because Galloway describes the opera, the sensations of hearing it, of singing it, with such care and detail and beauty that it both elevates and grounds the music. (Also, there is an incredibly useful music guide on the website for the novel.)

Plus, opera isn’t the only music thrumming through the novel. There’s punk and new wave music everywhere as well. But the novel itself is structured in three acts and plays out like an epic tragic opera: there’s disaster and death and despair, and yet the whole of the writing is upbeat and very funny at times and so emotionally satisfying overall. The NYT gave it a positively glowing review, and the line with which I agree the most is: “There’s hardly a lazy sentence here.” God I loved this book.

2. Among the Missing, by Morag Joss

Reviewed here.

3. A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Reviewed here.

4. The Astral, by Kate Christensen

Reviewed here.

Can you tell that I started writing this post months ago and now, in finishing it up, I got sort of lazy and said, “Hey Self, you’ve already written about this book. Why not just link to that instead of making up new things to say.” 2011 will henceforth be known as the Year I Became OK With My General Level Of Laziness. But seriously, you should read these books.

Related posts:

1. Slow blog day

First, a big hearty cheers to anyone venturing over here from the Five O’Clock Cocktail blog, where I have a post today. *clink*

Second, hi! I’m here. Been letting the blog lie fallow for a little bit in the hopes that it will eventually yield . . . you know, I’m not a farmer. Do I want to say “bumper crop”? Because right now I’m thinking this whole metaphor is failing. “Bumper crop of blog posts”? Yeesh.

Instead of writing here I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading and writing book reviews — here’s the latest, for Eleanor Brown’s Weird Sisters. It’s a book that’s apparently been receiving a lot of positive buzz, and while I had some reservations about it, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Look for my review of Elly Griffith’s The Janus Stone tomorrow — also very, very good (or to use a review cliche, “gripping”). (I have totally used the word “gripping” in reviews, FYI. Not trying to be all “Oh I’m so great at this.” Just, you know, it’s kind of an overused word.)

And I have a slew of books to get through before my trip to Ireland next month. (OMG did I tell you I’m going to Ireland?!) And speaking of Ireland, I got it into my head a few weeks ago that I needed a new sweater for the trip, regardless of the likelihood that it won’t be done in time. But with 26 days to go, I do have a finished back:

A word about this color. Difficult color to photograph, red, and even more so when you’re kind of a crap photographer. The first photo I took of this yarn (Wild Apple Hill Farms, purchased at Rhinebeck, for all you knitters out there) made it look brown; the second made it look hot pink. I took my knitting to a friend’s over the weekend and everyone there exclaimed over how different the color looked in person. I think, based on what I’m seeing on my monitor, that this picture is pretty true to life, if a little dark, but honestly — I have no idea. It’s supposed to be a pomegranatey sort of red — like a violet red.

The pattern is Thea Coleman’s Collins. Here’s the Ravelry link.

And I’ve also been going crazy with the cross stitch. For the past couple weeks I’ve started each morning playing around with my cross stitch software, coming up with various pop culturey designs. Most of them make use of antique patterns that can all be found on this site. The charts are compatible with my program so it’s easy to cut and paste and then play around with the color schemes.

So this is what I’m working on now — this photo might give away what the finished piece will look like, for those who have the same taste in TV shows as I do:

I love the border. LOVE it. I had to tweak it a little from its original layout so that it would fit my text, but I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. And I feel no shame in telling you that I chose these colors because they match my couch.

I’ve also got a Doctor Who sampler in the works that I am very excited about.

You heard me.

Related posts:

1. I don’t know why I do this to myself.
2. Books! I read them, you know
3. The first knits to be completed in 2012

I had half a mind to let today slink away without posting. I’d feel guilty about it; this resolution to post every week day would get added to the extremely long list of unfinished, petered-out resolutions, projects, and things of a general nature; which would then pad the case against my being a Person of Worth; I’d spiral into a rut of self-deprecation and lethargy and wear the same pair of pajama bottoms for a week straight and drink bourbon straight from the bottle.

In other words, it would have no effect on my daily routine whatsoever. Hello!

(Lishen. Shfine. Don’t be uptight.)

I spent the day reading and writing, same as most every day, and I was feeling as though my store of words had been depleted. But then a friend emailed me with an English Major question — were there any novelists aside from Jane Austen from the Regency Period whose works have stood the test of time? Seems she was in a heated discussion with someone else over the relative merits of Austen and The Victorians, in which the other person was dismissing Austen and her ilk as idealized and insubstantial as opposed to the later gritty realism of Dickens et al., but my friend was having difficulty thinking of other Regency novels, aside from Frankenstein, to fuel her side of the argument.

In my response I named Sir Walter Scott as another Regency novelist people still think is Important (and serious! He wrote serious historical shit!) and then went off on a completely unsolicited rant:

May I just say I dislike the idea of dismissing the entire work of a period because it’s not the work of another period? Personal preference is one thing, but quit trying to find industrial strength grit in romantic/Romantic literature and then criticizing it for not having any. AND ANOTHER THING: there were PLENTY of idealistic, silly books being written in the later part of the century. They have not stood the test of time, because they were badly written.

I sent it off with a little bit of fear that my friend would think I was yelling at her, but of course she knows me and she wrote back

DUDE this is the conversation I was having with you IN MY HEAD.

But here’s yet another thing, something she and I touched on briefly during this exchange but never outright said: you can’t take an entire period of fiction, like “The Victorians,” and compare it to one Regency period writer. It’s not like every person writing between 1837 and 1901 wrote the same way. And I love me some Dickens, but I think people tend to overlook how so completely sentimental and silly the romantic parts of his novels could be, because he also wrote about Important Social Condition Things and also, he was a dude.

In the course of this exchange I started to think about all the 19th-century books I love and keep meaning to reread, which because of the way my mind works made me think of that book list meme circulating on Facebook where you bold the books you’ve read on a list of 100 books some British institution has decided are Important. (I think The Da Vinci Code is on that list, so, you know, caveat.)

These are the bookshelves that Dan put up, which hold a fraction of the books I own, and I must admit that there are some books up here that not only have I never read, but never intend to read; I grabbed them from my grandparents’ house after my grandfather died and they’re only here as place fillers. Yes, Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, I am looking at you.

But that’s the point — I can look at these books now, whereas before most of them were at the back of my bookshelves in the bedroom. Now I glance up to give my eyes a break from the laptop or my current review book, and there’s George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda looking back at me. And on its shelf are other Eliot, Dickens, and Gaskell books that I loved dearly but have really only read once, twice at most (except for Middlemarch, of course). (Basically the whole two bottom left shelves are the editions I used in college and graduate school.)

And I would like to read Bleak House again. And Wives and Daughters. And Mill on the Floss, the book that made me an English major. Hell, I’ll even give Waverley another chance, because it’s been 12 years since I decided I didn’t like Sir Walter Scott and a lot has changed since then.

I have my review books, of course, and new (or new-to-me) books on my To Be Read list, so it feels a little strange to put re-reads on that list as well, as though I should constantly be striving for new, New, NEW! and always moving forward (strangely, this does not seem to apply to TV shows and movies). But there’s so much pleasure to be had in revisiting a book, especially when there’s a vast period of time between readings. I think I have the makings of a New Year’s resolution.

Related posts:

1. Books! I read them, you know

Read this book: Our Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas. I’d read a review several months ago that made the book sound like exactly the sort of thing I like reading, so the next time I was at my local bookstore — you have no idea how much I love being able to say “my local bookstore,” as in, “the bookstore so close I can walk to it and would even if I still owned a car.” My local bookstore is Greenlight Bookstore, and it’s pretty much everything you could ever want in an independent bookseller. It’s an open, light-filled space, wonderfully organized, cheerfully staffed, and they hold tons of readings and special events — so the next time I was at Greenlight, I picked it up (along with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I read first and also loved).

This is an old picture

I have neither the time nor the mental energy to write a “real” review of Our Tragic Universe — for that, I highly recommend going here, since this was the review that initially piqued my interest. I loved it, though, and how could I not? The narrator, Meg, is a writer struggling to write her Big Serious Novel (she keeps writing and then deleting things. I loved these parts. At one point she figures that she’s written -18K words). In the meantime she reviews books (hello) and teaches herself to knit socks. I’m not kidding. This book is about writing and reading and why people keep wanting to bleed the line between science and science fiction (actually, I think it makes the argument that the line between science and science fiction is New Age), and there’s knitting. It’s no wonder I loved it. It’s like I ordered it custom made.

As much as I loved Our Tragic Universe for itself, I can’t help also loving the fact that I finished reading something I didn’t need to even start. That, my friends, is luxury.

I don’t know what to read for pleasure next, though. Besides Ulysses.

Oh, right. I may have mentioned this already, that I now own a copy of Ulysses, and that it had been given to me by Dan on the first night of Hanukkah (Happy Hanukkah!) and inside the book was a sheet of paper on which was printed the date and time of our departure to Ireland. We’re going to Ireland!

Dan is a genius. Our trip is really to celebrate my 40th (!) birthday, and I can’t think of a better or more special way to do that. I’ve already started researching places to go and things to do.

And I do want to read Ulysses, but it doesn’t strike me as the sort of book one reads at the end of the day, in bed, to relax one’s mind before falling asleep. So I need something else.

Reading in bed is one of my simple pleasures; I’ve done it ever since I can remember. I even find it satisfying and comforting when I fall asleep while reading and wake up in the middle of the night with the lights still on and the book pages creased from where my face was resting.

Of course, there are all the books on my To Be Read shelf that I resolved to read this year, and which I never cracked open, not a one. Since these are also the books I’d pledged to read the year before, I think it’s time to admit to myself that I am not going to read these books, and see about finding loving homes for all of them.

Related posts:

1. Books! I read them, you know
2. Been Caught Stealing

I’ve been inspired by that Facebook meme (oh, and all your sources of inspiration are highbrow gems?)

(OK, I honestly don’t know where that attitude is coming from, but I seem to have loads of it today and it has to come out somewhere, and neither the book reviews nor my NaNo writing is the right place for it. Sorry! You lose!)

(Gah, there it is again)

that asks you to list 15 influential authors — the note says “authors who have influenced you and that [sic] will always stick with you” — to think back on all the truly influential writers I’ve encountered in my lifetime.

It’s possible this meme is for many people the equivalent of putting books on your shelf that you have not read but that make you look smart. Not my friends! My friends are honest. But we all do that to some degree, anyway. I know I went three or four rounds of “Should the Complete Works of Plato and/or Complete Works of Aristotle go on the living room shelves for all to see?” I mean, I haven’t cracked either of these open since at least my third year of graduate school and possibly before that but they LOOK so good and impressive. I do not believe that we create our “15 _____” lists on Facebook without thinking about what our friends are going to say about them. (Plato and Aristotle are not on display, by the way. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of them just yet.)

And I am not questioning the veracity or validity of anyone’s claim that [Important Author] meant a lot to him or her, merely stating that this particular meme has prompted me to examine my own list in greater detail than simply jotting it down in a Facebook note. (Mostly I’m just trying to not be on Facebook so much, but that’s another issue.)

My own list of authors who have stuck with me, who have profoundly influenced the way I read, write, think, etc., would probably include the obligatory literary canon writers — Dickens! Eliot (George, that is)! Woolf! — but would also include Madeleine L’Engle and Douglas Adams. But what does it mean to “influence”? For me it means more than valuing their works. “Influence” means these authors made me want to accomplish something, or caused a sea change in the way I view the world. To that degree, reading Dickens really only made me want to read more Dickens. Michael Chabon makes me want to write like Michael Chabon, so while he’s one of my favorite writers I wouldn’t put him on this list. Douglas Adams makes me want to write like Douglas Adams, but he was also my introduction to science fiction and that special British comedic style that I value tremendously in both literature and visual media — so he made me want something outside his writing. George Eliot is the reason I became an English major, and she remained a significant figure in my graduate studies, so she stays on the list.

Madeleine L’Engle — OK, forget what I said before about Douglas Adams. Madeleine L’Engle was my introduction to science fiction, and to this day I have not read a book that affected me more than A Wrinkle in Time.

A bold claim, I know, but I’m going to stick to it. That book changed the way I thought about what girls could do, it made me want to learn more about science and math (“you mean tesseracts are a real thing? She didn’t make that word up?”), it is the book I want to be buried with. My copy, the one that has that fantastic musty aged paper smell, the one with the cover pictured above (it was $1.25? Wow), the one where I inscribed my 3rd and 4th grade room numbers and teachers on the inside cover just in case I lost it because I took that book with me everywhere for two years.

And here’s another influential writer: Else Holmelund Minarik.

(Who?)

She wrote the Little Bear series. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with them, either as children or as parents, but these were the first books I fell in love with. I can still hear my mother’s voice reading them to me, which must have inspired me because they were the books I learned to read on — not surprisingly, since the publication of Little Bear in 1957 launched the whole “I Can Read” series.

I loved this one especially:

(I know you’ll recognize the illustrator’s name.)

Little Bear’s friend is named Emily, and she has a doll named Lucy that she takes everywhere. In one story, Lucy has an accident — she falls out of a tree, I think? And her arm breaks, and Mother Bear fixes it. (I think. I remember most of this story, and if that doesn’t speak of the book’s influence, that I can remember the salient details 36 years after reading it, I don’t know what does.)

The book held so much sway over me that I wanted a Lucy doll too. So my grandmother made me one. And it’s only now that I really get the implications of that particular cause and effect, now that I can make things too and willingly, sometimes unsolicited, create things for the people dear to me. And my Lucy doll had a bandaged arm, too. My grandmother was thorough. If I’m not mistaken, that doll still lives with my mom.

The books live with my nephew.

I wrote on Twitter earlier

and I was joking, sort of, but not really. That the vast majority of us understand any cultural reference originating from a Dr. Seuss book (there’s a restaurant near me, Olea, that serves Green Eggs and Lamb for brunch. The eggs are scrambled with cilantro. It’s delicious!) speaks volumes about his influence. Even if he hadn’t written The Lorax, Dr. Seuss would rank near the top of my Influential Authors list.

So I guess my broader point, not that I have to have one, but if I did it would be that the authors that influenced me as a child might matter more to me than the authors I admire and who influence me now. Not straight across the board — there are authors and books that have mattered to me as an adult that I would not have comprehended at 9 or 15 — but I do think it’s true that while we may look on the books we read as children with nostalgic longing, we tend not to put much weight behind their significance in our adult lives, or at least we forget about it, or maybe downplay it.

Which is poor tribute to the books that made you who you are today, really.

No related posts.

There will be no Mad Men recap today. I spent the entire day writing, by which I mean I spent most of the day trying to talk myself out of a fog of self-doubt, about an hour and a half on various websites, and about an hour or so total playing Drop7 in the hopes that it would help the words find me. (They didn’t, but I did clear the board for a 70,000-point bonus. Twice! Not in the same game.)

I started my day at 7:30 am. Had my usual 30-minute coffee/Internet warmup, did the crossword puzzle, and then checked the lengthy to-do list I wrote up last night, knowing that the first item of business would be to write two book reviews that were due today. I wanted them done by noon. It is now 5:30 pm.

Among the things I HAVEN’T done today:

1. Laundry

2. Change the cat litter (but that’s next because it really has to be)

3. Watch last night’s TV (yeah, this was on my list. I have blog posts to write! Which is another thing I haven’t done today, unless you count this, which I don’t, since it’s really just an explaint.) (I just mashed up the words “complaint” and “explain” there.)

4. Purge unneeded books from my shelves.

Please note the use of the word “need.” It’s not that I no longer WANT these books. But I honestly have no more practical use for most of the theory books that I have not cracked open since leaving graduate school eight years ago. At first I kept them on my shelf because I was still teaching, then I kept them because I could always go back to teaching, and then I kept them out of sentimental habit. I read these, once, and they mattered to me. And they still matter. But they’re also taking up valuable shelving space.

So. Who wants my copy of Deleuze and Guattari? (That almost rhymes, awesome.)

(I still don’t know whether I could bring myself to part with my copies of the complete works of Plato and/or Aristotle that I’ve had since college. Do I NEED them? No. But I have read them and besides, they look COOL.)

5. Go to the market for basil so I could

6. Make dinner

Though it is entirely likely that even had I gone out for basil I wouldn’t have gotten around to making dinner tonight.

I also have not showered, gone for a walk (though it’s nasty outside so I think I can cut myself some slack there), or taken a nap.

This was just one of those days that writing felt like WORK. And yes, this particular kind of writing IS work, in that I get paid for it, but I mean the kind of work that leaves you less fulfilled than demoralized at the end of the day. It was difficult, frustrating, plagued with self-loathing. I had the whole weekend to do this and I didn’t, save for a few notes I made on one of the books. I psyched myself out because both books are by relatively well-established writers and I didn’t feel as though I could write the sort of comprehensive “Yes, this is similar to the technique employed in [Author]‘s first two novels, pray excuse me while I puff on my pipe in quiet reflection” review that I felt they deserved. I started to pick apart my own reviewing practices in which I talk a lot about what works plot- and character-wise but not, say, what works in the actual writing, the language choices, structure. It’s not that I don’t think I could do it, but . . . well, this morning I didn’t think I could. And then I criticized myself for thinking that writing was something that would always come easy to me, because I sometimes have days when I can bang out 1,000 decent words in an hour or less, and then I forget that really, more often then not, writing is like this. A slog-fest. Cloudy. Painful. Not at all fun.

I’m really not complaining or beating myself up here, although I know that’s what it looks like. But, you know, there are days when the words flow out of you effortlessly, almost as if you were simply the conduit and some other force was channeling through you — I’m not the only one who has writing spurts like that, when you go back over something and you KNOW it’s good but you have no clear memory of writing it, even though it was like five minutes ago, right?

So if I get to have a handful of those days, I suppose it’s only fair to balance them out with days when I have to work for it, and I mean really work for it, and then even after all that mining to not have anything remotely satisfactory to show for it. And then trust that the days of clear-headedness and brilliance will return.

No related posts.

I wanted to have something new here just in case anyone reading over at Pens Fatales stopped by — not that I expect it, but I I hope a few people do, because new readers are always welcome (not that old readers aren’t, but you know what I mean) — but for the potential people who did follow the link in my bio over there, hi! Thank you for visiting! Welcome!

And for those of you just joining us, here’s the scoop: Pens Fatales is a fantastic group blog run by a number of fantastically talented women, who pick a theme each week and then each contribute a post. Fridays are for guests, and this Friday I was the guest! The topic for the week is erotica, which if you know what I’ve been up to for the last year or so you know is something about which I have a few opinions. (Clicking the link in the previous paragraph will take you to my post.)

One of those opinions concerns language choice. About four months into my reviewing gig I started keeping a list of words used in sex scenes in the books I was reading that . . . well, ruined the moment.

Now, I don’t mean to be insulting to the writers of erotic fiction. As I said in my Pens Fatales post, it must be incredibly difficult to keep writing sex scenes and have them be interesting and arousing, and part of that surely includes finding different words to describe sexy parts and sexy acts. However. You know how you’ll see a certain word pop up multiple times, and it starts looking funny to you? “Army” has always been one of those words for me. Read it or say it enough times and it just starts sounding weird. And it’s the same with sex words. They start to lose context after a while, and then they just get irritating. But you know? The words that bug me might not bug you at all. They might actually do it for you. So as I said, I don’t mean to offend or insult or tell you how to write your sexy books. You keep doing what you’re doing, and bless you.

With that disclaimer out of the way . . . I mentioned “crevice” in my guest post, but here are a few other words that I’ve found in sex scenes that, um, rubbed me the wrong way:

* Moist. To be fair, the repulsion this word causes me predates my erotic fiction reading. But new problems arise when “moist” is used in conjunction with words like…

* Cleft. See “crevice.”

* Membrane. I.e.; a condom; e.g.; “He rolled the membrane onto his throbbing manhood.” (I just made that sentence up for illustrative purposes; it is not someone else’s, as far as I know.)

* Sexing. I have seen this used as a transitive and intransitive verb, but most often in something like “As he was sexing her.”

* Pebbled. Used to describe areolae. I get it, but this is one of those words that I saw often enough that it lost its contextual meaning and all I could think of were very small rocks, which then made me think of Monty Python, and my mind was out of the game.

* Impaled. This word is extremely common in erotic fiction, and I totally get it. It claims a place on my list because of its inherent violence, which I suppose is OK in a rough sex context but is jarring elsewhere. And with the preponderance of vampire erotic fiction out there, it risks being extremely confusing.

* Cream cheese. Used as a sex aid. I am not joking.

No related posts.

Summer is almost over. Can I get an AMEN? What a clunker. There were bright spots, to be sure, with more to come before Labor Day, but I am more than ready to put this season to bed. Bring on autumn, with its sweater weather and pretty colors and delicious smells and harvests.

Yeah, OK, the school kids will be back and wreaking havoc on my block every weekday afternoon. Fine. It’s a trade-off.

Though it has been six years since I last set foot in a classroom, I still think of September as a beginning, a fresh clean slate. New notebooks with all those blank pages waiting to be filled! Things to learn that I didn’t even know I didn’t know! NEW PENS! And, of course, a set of resolutions promising that this year will be better than the last. I am all about the quarterly resolutions. It’s helpful for taking stock — what did I promise myself three months ago? Did I follow through? If not, why not? Should I renew this promise, or create a different one?

Also I like making lists. You know this.

There are two general promises I make to myself each time — not always because I haven’t followed through on them but because they are important enough to explicitly renew:

1. Write something every day. You don’t always see this writing. Sometimes this writing is mindless brain dump, sometimes it’s ranting, sometimes it’s put toward various stories I’m toying with. Sometimes they’re blog posts. Sometimes they’re Tumblr posts, though I want to stop counting those as writing for the day. Tumblr is for the distractions, for the stuff I see on the Internet that I feel compelled to share but about which I don’t really have much to say, or occasionally for those brief random thoughts that I also feel compelled to share but are either too complex or too long for Twitter.

I have been trying to post something here every day. I will continue to do so. It’s good exercise. (To that end, the Doctor Who posts will start up again soon. Just in case you were wondering.)

2. Make something (non-written) every day. Maybe I’ll make something new for dinner — or maybe I’ll experiment with a trusted recipe. Maybe I’ll sort through all the photos I’ve taken of my neighborhood and create new banners for this blog (note to self: you should get on that, actually). Even if I can only manage to knit one or two rows of whatever project I’m working on, at least I will have created a small thing that wasn’t there before.

And I have one new idea I’ve been knocking around for about a week, and I think I’ve figured out a way to make it work:

3. I’m going to reactivate my Audible account. I signed up for one back when they were running a “free book for new users” promotion, and then I deactivated it before my credit card got charged. Since then I’ve gotten to a place where I am reading multiple books a day (thanks, graduate school, for training me well in this regard) and require for my well-being an additional “just for me” book — I see it as a reward for reading “work” books. But I do not want the additional tangible book, which leaves me with three options:

– The library, which is unfortunately not as convenient for me as it probably should be, since a) I don’t like waiting for books and b) I am absolutely HORRIBLE at returning them on time, and I’m not talking about keeping them for just a week or so over the due date. Yes, I can change this about myself, but I probably won’t.

– Some sort of portable reading device, which I’m not sure I would actually use right now (despite the fact that I wish I had one every night when I pick up The Historian to read before bed). I have the Kindle software for my laptop and my phone, and have purchased books to read thereon, but I don’t. Thought I would, but I haven’t. Things might be different if I had a lengthy commute, but right now I can’t justify the Kindle expense. This may change. But for now, this leaves me with

– Audiobooks, which I could listen to while knitting, eating, puttering around the apartment and — most importantly — while walking. I can’t walk and read at the same time (not without risk, anyway), but I can easily walk and listen to a book at the same time. Reactivating my Audible account will help me save money on new books, save space that would otherwise be taken up by new books, and provide an additional incentive to going for walks, as I am rededicating myself to getting the hell out of my apartment at least once every day.

My first book: Hunger Games. Had to see what all the fuss was about. I just walked around my neighborhood while listening to the first chapter and the end of that chapter gave me chills. I may have to listen to it on our flight to Minnesota tomorrow.

(Yes, a bit of housekeeping: I’m off to the Midwest tomorrow, where I shall consume deep-fried foods on sticks in abundance and teach my nephew some scandalous new words. Nah, I’m kidding. He knows most of those words already. But what this means is that next week’s TV recaps will be late. Just in case you were wondering.)

Gratuitous squirrel!

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As some of you know, I’ve been reviewing books for RT Book Reviews for a little over a year, and specifically mysteries and thrillers for the past seven or so months. Because I live close to the RT office, I’ve been known to stroll over to pick over the selections and take back a bundle of books for any given month. And so it was that I came across this title:

Murder at Mansfield Park, by Lynn Shepherd

Knowing how I feel about the plethora of sequels and adaptations and misguided mashups of Austen’s work, you might think I would’ve thrown this book across the room without so much as a peek inside the cover. But I was intrigued. Out of all the novels Austen wrote, I would have thought Mansfield Park the least likely to pique a writer’s creative makeover urges. It’s not as glamorous as Emma or Pride and Prejudice, not as sweet as Sense and Sensibility, not as maturely romantic as Persuasion. Neither the heroine or hero of Mansfield Park are very bold or lively. From what I can gather, most people who generally like Jane Austen rank Mansfield Park as their least favorite. I will admit, it’s not one of my favorites either, but I think it deserves more credit than it tends to get.

And I do not think the vitriol with which literary critics have lambasted Fanny Price, heroine of Mansfield Park, is warranted. The most widely quoted is Kingsley Amis, who called Fanny Price “a monster of complacency and pride [hiding] under a cloak of cringing self-abasement.” While it is true that Fanny Price is no Elizabeth Bennet — she’s timid and cautious where Lizzie is vivacious and headstrong — I’ve always seen her as an Ugly Duckling/Cinderella figure more than anything else. She’s taken from her own impoverished family to live with wealthy relations, and while her older cousins are not overtly cruel to her, the understanding is that Fanny is not their equal and they all should be conscious of that fact. As patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram tells the family, “I should wish to see them very good friends, and would, on no account, authorize in my girls the smallest degree of arrogance towards their relation; but still they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different.” It’s worth noting that in a number of film and television adaptations of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas gives this speech directly to his daughters. And even without the evil stepsister figures, Fanny has a wicked stepmother figure in Mrs. Norris, who treats Fanny as her personal servant and goes out of her way to exclude Fanny from family outings.

Given all this, it always made perfect sense to me that Fanny is as quiet and shy as she is. She’s consistently, purposely kept down by an entire family with the weight and validation of the early 19th-century British class system behind them. That she blossoms into a moderately attractive young woman with keen observation skills and a small amount of wit that she’s only comfortable expressing when with close friends, and then winds up marrying the man of her dreams — marrying up, let’s not forget — is entirely in keeping with a conventional fairy tale.

All this is to say that I was decidedly curious about Shepherd’s Murder at Mansfield Park. The book jacket promised “an irreverent twist” on the original novel, and I thought that since this twist involved neither a sequel or a prequel, that it didn’t make Mary and Henry Crawford vampires or Tom Bertram a werewolf or the late Mr. Norris a zombie, the more likely I was to enjoy it.

And I loved it. I mean, LOVED. Right away it’s clear that Shepherd had an impeccable sense of Austen’s language and tone. She borrows liberally from the original (The first two sentences are identical, and other lines are lifted outright) but it’s obviously done as a framing device — she’s not adding anything to Mansfield Park, this IS Mansfield Park, re-imagined. The same events happen — the plan to perform Lovers’ Vows, the excursion to Compton — straight through to the middle of the book, when the murder occurs. It’s an alternate universe Mansfield Park.

So what’s different? First and foremost, in Shepherd’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is no longer poor, but a wealthy heiress, richer than the Bertrams. She comes to live at Mansfield Park after her parents are killed in an accident. And Fanny is no longer modest and meek — she’s proud, spoiled, and horribly condescending.

Edmund Bertram, Austen’s hero, is now Edmund Norris, Mrs. Norris’ stepson. Mrs. Norris is as hateful as ever, and is actively arranging for Fanny and Edmund to marry so that she may benefit from the Price fortune.

Mary Crawford, the character most people think should have been the heroine of Austen’s novel, as she embodies all of the charm and wit and verve of an Elizabeth Bennet type, except that she’s also shallow and a little wild and self-gratifying, is the true heroine of Murder at Mansfield Park. Delightfully, Shepherd retains most of Mary Crawford’s speeches, and in the mouth of someone with a stronger sense of ethics, they’re perfectly charming. It’s Mary who steps up after the murder to help investigate the crime — and she has a few secrets from her past that grant her a certain amount of insight. If it’s diverting to read Shepherd’s inventive changes to Mansfield Park, it’s impossible to put the book down once the mystery is afoot.

I think that it would be possible to enjoy Murder at Mansfield Park if you aren’t familiar with Austen’s novel . . . but imagine how much richer the experience would be if you were.

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1. Books! I read them, you know

I went to a marvelous place on Thursday night called the Mysterious Bookshop. Mysterious indeed. Not only is it a speciality bookstore dealing only in mysteries, thrillers, crime and espionage novels (as well as rare and out-of-print editions), but I had no idea it existed, despite its being around for almost 30 years. It used to be located in midtown but is now downtown, Tribeca-ish.

I keep saying that mysteries are a relatively new genre for me, but on reflection I don’t think that’s true. Though it is true that it’s only been within recent years that I’ve found pure detective novels interesting, I have always enjoyed elements of the mysterious in other literary fiction, canonical or otherwise. My interest started with Dickens, I suppose, and those shadowy figures introduced in Chapter 5 that one suspects will turn out to be someone’s rich uncle by Chapter 43.

If I had to point to one book that awakened my interest in the mystery as a genre, however, it would have to be Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do remember getting the same sort of thrill from trying to figure things out in that book as I do when I watch movies with some sort of twist that I try and suss out before the ending. It’s a combination of wanting to know what happens next and trying to figure it out before it happens, and the delight that comes from reading something that’s a few steps ahead of you at all times.

(Unlike, say, a Jane Austen novel, where you know exactly how the main characters will end up, but you nonetheless enjoy the ride.)

Anyway — I am enjoying learning more about this genre, now that I am reviewing mysteries, thrillers and crime fiction for RT Book Reviews. And that’s what brought me to the Mysterious Bookshop on Thursday, to attend a reading by one of the authors whose new book I’ve reviewed, Brian Wiprud’s Buy Back (what the review doesn’t mention — it is HILARIOUS. You should read it). And the reading was wonderful, and the bookshop is wonderful. It’s stocked floor to ceiling with books, and the ceilings are high, so there are a few of those charming rolling ladders that I associate with library rooms in grand estates. There’s an entire wall of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. (An ENTIRE WALL.)

There’s a lush mahogany-colored leather sofa in the center of the space, the kind you’d expect to see in a gentlemen’s club of previous centuries, and on the sofa was this needlepointed pillow:

And that’s really what I wanted to show you. I think it’s neat. It reminds me of the sorts of needlepoint my grandmother did, none of which I have now to show you. But this sort of needlepoint was my gateway to crafting. I liked the feel of the two- or three-ply wool yarn commonly used for needlepoint, the texture of the stitches, the way canvases started out stiff and unyielding but as one stitched a fabric on them they became pliable and soft. I think the first needlework project I ever did was a small decorative pillow with a northern lights pattern in purples, pinks and blues. (My grandmother would’ve done the backing and the sewing and the stuffing for me.)

I look at this pillow and think, “I should get back to that sort of thing.” I know I could easily get any number of pre-printed canvases and kits, but I’m thinking a bit bigger than that.

In my head I am creating grand tapestries that would fill entire walls of my apartment, broad scenes as in medieval times but with a modern, urban slant. Skylines rendered in vivid, saturated colors. Abandoned subway cars covered in graffiti. Comic book panels converted to pixels and printed out on canvas. Maybe even scenes from TV shows or movies. Needlepoint is essentially color-by-number, but with yarn. Anything is possible.

I think I’m more or less serious about following through with this. Any ideas for where to start?

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