Tag Archives: bookish

Dogs Don’t Read Hemingway But I Do

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In case you haven’t followed the entire drama, there is no puppy coming to live with me, at least not the one I had in mind lately. Seems the current caretaker decided I wasn’t a desirable candidate anymore and favoured someone she had just met who already had a dog, a house of her own and a yard. I’m all for the wellbeing of the dog, but who’s to say he wouldn’t be happier here with me with all the loving I have to give? SHE can apparently, because SHE knows dogs better than me (her words). She had a bee up her wazoo about me expressing doubts online and that got her worried that all her hard hard work at housebreaking the pup after finding him tramping in the streets would all be for naught if it came to live on skid row here with me. And we all know of course that housebreaking, just like rocket science, requires numerous degrees(!). I now call the woman in question The Dog Nazi, because she showed incredible prejudice and narrow mindedness and was most unpleasant about the whole thing. She dropped the news on me the night before when I called her at the last still acceptable evening hour as we were supposed to meet the next day. I suspect she had no intention of contacting to tell me about it first, and she was incredibly offended that I expressed my disappointment and wasn’t 100% supportive of her change of heart. She had loads of people wanting the super cute dog and ALL THIS POWER of being able to decide who deserved it most obviously got to her head. Well phooey to her and best luck to the dog is all I can say—in polite society when minors are reading, that is.

Speaking of, I’ve taken up reading books again, which though isn’t exactly earth shattering, still is news because for the past 6 months or so couldn’t seem to concentrate on a book long enough to read more than a page or two. This after accumulating a vast collection of “must reads” that are currently sitting in a couple of large boxes and awaiting a new shelving unit that my most talented friend K (my old friend K, not Nazi K obviously!) is designing and will put together for me. Of the two and a half books I’ve read so far (I’m halfway through The Old Man and the Sea which I started last night and finishing shortly), I owe Penguin a book review for Tracy Chevalier’s latest called Remarkable Creatures since I got it for free as part of the Early Reviewer program on Library Thing. I’m sure you can barely contain yourself with excitement at the thought of reading this review, so I promise I’ll post it soon-ish.

Off to join the old man and his giant fish on day two of his agonizing journey. I sometimes wish I could have been around when Hemingway’s work was new and fresh and revolutionary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a fan of his writing, but have a hard time discerning the extent to which he influenced modern writing since we, most of us contemporary writers, are influenced by him without even knowing it. I’m sure Hemingway isn’t too bothered.

Passings

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Catcher in the Rye author
J.D. Salinger dead at 91
BY STAFF REPORTER, THE PROVINCE JANUARY 28, 2010

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J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, has died at age 91. According to the Associated Press, the author’s son, in a statement from the author’s literary representative, died of natural causes in his home in New Hampshire. The reclusive author lived in a small house in Cornish, N.H. His last original published work was in 1965, and his last interview was in 1980. He is best known for his bookThe Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. He is also the author of Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam and Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. 

I hate to admit it, but I had no idea he had been alive all this time. Reminds me I should add The Catcher in the Rye to my reading list, it’s been a long time since I first read it and I do recall being completely immersed in the story back then. RIP Mr Salinger.

“And yet she dared not express…

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“And yet she dared not express the hate and fear; she locked it within herself, where it coiled and recoiled upon itself, coagulating into the thickness and darkness of guilt and depression.” ~ Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

Here’s the game: Grab the book nearest you. Right now • Turn to page 56 • Find the fifth sentence • Post that sentence with these instructions • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book.

[please don’t get put off just because I added a ‘meme’ tag]

What Would Have Hemingway Done?

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Cece the Hemingway Cat_0792
Meet my neighbour Cece the Hemingway cat, a new friend of mine.

It’s late. I want to be in bed. Not under the covers mind you, because it’s too bloody hot in here, but laying on top with the fan sending moving air in my general direction. It’ll feel good to just shut my eyes for a few hours. This means I won’t be posting those pictures I’ve been mentioning, at least not tonight. That requires more work and time than I can put in right now. Another thing which is almost guaranteed is that I won’t be reading myself to sleep either, the way I usually like to do. I’ve been more or less on a ‘reading strike’ for the past couple of weeks. Not so much because I don’t want to read, quite the contrary. But for one thing, there are all kinds of other things I want to be doing, like working on my puzzle and starting up my Art Nouveau colouring project, to name just those two. Mainly though, it’s because I’ve decided I must read a book that was sent to me via the Early Reviewers program I participate in, and that I must read it now. Publishers choose to send books to those reviewers who actually post reviews about the books they’ve sent them. If you skip even one review, then you’re more or less put on the black list. Which is fair enough. This last book I got, called Annie’s Ghosts, talks about mental illness and a sibling who was carted off to the mental ward and declared dead or made to disappear and never having existed (not sure which). Written by the much younger sibling who was considered mentally well adjusted who of course eventually mangaged to put it all together. Sounds interesting, which is why I ordered it to begin with, but with all the stories about and around mental illness that I hear every day, plus my own daily struggles to find balance and some sense of order, I can’t begin to imagine why I thought I would want to read this book. I’ve tried to reach a compromise by telling myself I’d read just 50 to 100 pages and then choose to write my review based on that—or finish it, but I can’t motivate myself to even crack it open. It’s so frustrating because meanwhile, I’ve got hundreds of book (ok, maybe just many dozens…), excellent books that I’m highly motivated to read, just lying around collecting dust in the meantime.

To put everything into perspective: if that’s my biggest problem right now, then it must mean things are going pretty well for me. And after reflection, I can quietly say yes, I guess they are… but I’m afraid to actually believe it, because then, who knows when the other shoe will drop? :-O

Cece the Hemingway Cat_0798
Lovely mittens Cece! ;-)

p.s. Damn. Now it’s 1:55 a.m. and I just realized I wanted to talk about something different altogether, namely my fascinating new friend Friedrich whom I sometimes run into at a favourite café on Tuesday afternoons… another time.

I Once Had a Girl, Or Should I Say She Once Had Me…

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Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
After having read a half dozen or so Murakami books, a fellow avid Murakami reader pointed out I had gone about reading his work in the wrong order and suggested that I should drop whatever else I was reading and start all over again with Norwegian Wood. I’m glad I did go back to the first book which made Murakami such a big literary sensation in Japan. And after reading this novel, I can see how Murakami’s work has evolved considerably over time. In comparison say to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age story simply (and brilliantly) told. Toru is a young college student in Tokyo who’s days are mostly occupied with going to class and observing life in his campus dorm. He is also in love with Naoko who was once the girlfriend of Toru’s best friend, who’s suicide has brought the two of them closer together. But when Naoko, having trouble dealing with daily life, retires to the isolation of a mental health clinic, Toru starts feeling lonely in her absence and comes to meet Midori, an uninhibited and independent-minded young woman who seems to embody the spirit of the freewheeling late 60’s, and he quickly finds himself irresistibly attracted to her.

There are no tricks here, no mysterious magical forces at play, no spies dressed as cats lurking in the corners. What we do find is a vivid account of the years 1969-1970, it’s music (the book is named after the Beatles song which is mentioned several times in the story), it’s energy and the upheavals the times brought about, Tokyo-style. It’s a sad story with many insights on relationships, connections and loneliness told in Murakami’s magic style, in his unique voice which bring a tinge of excitement to everything he touches upon. If you’ve heard about Murakami and are curious to discover this phenomenal writer, this should be your first stop.

I enjoyed it thoroughly but do have a special fondness for Murakami’s multilayered and intersecting worlds found in some of his later books which is why I gave it ★★★★½

Why Kafka Should be Read in German

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The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
I generally dislike reading translations, but I decided after some deliberation that learning German just to read Kafka was more work than I was willing to put in. This short story seemed like a good entry into this famous writer’s world. From the first sentence, I was surprised, not by the fact that Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug—something I already knew about—but rather by Michael Hofmann’s (the translator of this Penguin edition) choice of words: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.” As I understand it from the research I’ve done, Kafka used a German word that was much more vague and certainly did not specify what kind of bug Gregor had become. As it happens, cockroaches happen to be the most despicable type of bug while beetles are much more benign to me, this description therefore coloured my entire reading of the story.

Before reading the story I thought that the storyline was that Samsa discovers himself transformed into a bug and is completely horrified but then his family, coworkers and strangers aren’t the least bit perturbed by his monstrous appearance and he carries on his life “as usual” except he’s a giant bug. I suppose this too would have made a good story—if it hasn’t already—but one quite different from Kafka’s original tale. My erroneous expectations took nothing away from the experience for me and in fact, I found this story could be read on many different levels. For instance, one could easily conclude that this book was a commentary on antisemitism, which was rife in 1915, the year this book was first published, and/or that Kafka was perhaps working out issues of self-hatred or that it was an omen of things to come with the rise of Nazism in the 1930’s when the depiction of Jews as monstrous vermin became ubiquitous in Nazi propaganda. Then again, maybe Kafka didn’t mean to convey anything else than the story itself at face value, which still leaves us with plenty to ponder.

I gave this book ★★★★ an entertaining story with profound impact.

Sons and Lovers

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Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
This is my first D.H. Lawrence book, if you don’t count Lady Chatterley’s Lover which I read in my early teens. I plunged in without doing any research, and was therefore unaware that the story was autobiographical, though I doubt this would have ultimately altered my impression of it. Among the things I found appealing in this book are the descriptions of working class conditions and of Mrs. Morel’s struggles to make the best out of difficult circumstances (such as a husband she no longer loves because among other things he gets drunk at the local pub every night). I also enjoyed the way Lawrence delves into the minds of each of the characters, which seems to give the story multiple layers. However I had a hard time understanding the Nottinghamshire Dialect spoken mostly by Morel Sr., or why Clara—who is at first presented to us as a man-hating suffragette—would so easily accept to become Paul’s mistress. Some passages describing the scenery and the flora were a little bit tedious to my liking but ultimately this novel has so much substance that I was willing to pause and read about the local vegetation once in a while.

Books, Books, Books and More Books

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I’m not sure how I’m going to do this exactly but it looks like I’ll have to seriously pick up the pace if I want to make a dent in all the piles of books I’ve been amassing in the past few months, if only to clear off a little bit of floor space. It’s that or just accept the extra load of stuff and go to Ikea or pay someone to put up bookshelves for me (Me? put up my own shelves? You must be kidding). Here in random order are a few of the titles I’ve purchased either used or new or gotten from around the world via BookMooch in the past couple of weeks (links provided for book descriptions):

Paris Made By Hand, Pia Jane Bijkerk
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
The Music of Chance, Paul Auster
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Out Stealing Horses, Per Peterson
Light in August, William Faulkner
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain De Botton
Secret River, Kate Grenville
Slammerkin, Emma Donoghue
Hiroshima mon amour, Marguerite Duras

The following more or less constitutes my reading list for the next couple of months. I’ll be making many of them available on BookMooch (mom: both lists are essentially for your benefit so if you’re interested in anything, please let me know asap):

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
Annie’s Ghosts, Steve Luxenberg (for early reviewers)
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Slammerkin, Emma Donoghue
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Blindness, José Saramago
La vie devant soi, Romain Gary
The Red Queen, Margaret Drabble
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Manticore, Robertson Davies
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, Agatha Christie
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

The Origin of the Saying

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Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
All I knew about this novel going into it was that it popularized the term “Catch-22” and that it was a satire set during WWII. Since I’m not very fond of books about army life and wars, I went into this one with the expectation that I would probably dislike it, only to find that it was much more entertaining than I could have imagined. At the center we have the bombardier John Yossarian, who desperately wants to stay alive and is trying by all means to avoid flying more dangerous missions, though he is forever thwarted by Colonel Cathcart who increases the number of missions required of the men every time they reach his ever-increasing targets—ensuring none of them can return home—in hopes of earning greater esteem from his superiors. Heller’s wry humour and hilarious observations about human behaviour turns even some of the most violent and harrowing situations into opportunities for a laugh, although for some, altogether different responses—anger, sadness, frustration—might be considered more appropriate. The crudeness and zaniness of the characters and situations, the unflinching descriptions of injuries, death and aggression are sometimes difficult to read through, but they also contribute a feeling of immediacy which make this novel still relevant today, almost 50 years after the original publication.

I gave this book ★★★★ I had no expectations and was pleasantly won over.

Catch of the Day

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Dropped by one of my favourite used book stores today. It seems that at this time of year lots of people are selling their books to lighten their load before moving time so there was plenty of selection. I had to take into account the 45 minute walk to get back to my place, so tried to keep the selection as light as possible—all things being relative of course:

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
Nothing that Meets the Eye, Patricia Highsmith
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
Du côté de chez swann, Proust
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

Finally, when I got back home, there was a book—Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote—waiting for me in the mail. Overall a pretty good catch I’d say.