Nonsuch Book

a jane austen education by william deresiewicz

A memoir need not be completely truthful for me to enjoy it, but it does have to offer some insight into a life that I would not otherwise have been afforded. Lies themselves can often offer that insight. One point with which I agree in A Jane Austen Education is that sharing personal stories can be a gift to others, a sign of trust, a peek into an extended view of humanity. The share need not be large. Tell me about your crazy dream life or what you wanted to be as a child. Just don't manipulate your rather ordinary rites of passage through life to correspond with your reading schedule through Jane Austen. It will not sit well with me.

Former literature professor, William Deresiewicz, breaks his memoir into seven sections - one for each of Jane Austen's novels plus a conclusion. The premise is that he learned an important life lesson from each of Austen's novels at just the right time in his life. The portions that discuss just Austen's books were of some interest to me, but without much depth or anything I did not already know about Austen. Just a pleasant reminder of why Austen still sits atop the canon despite an occasionally underestimated simplicity to her work. But the rest of the book annoyed me. More than a little in parts.

Is a man reading Austen such a rarity that we celebrate it in entire books? Does an appreciation of modernism automatically exclude an appreciation of Austen? Are life lessons like "Pay attention to the everyday things" and "Be honest with your friends" only learned through Austen? The author would have come around to these things eventually with or without her. We can only hope. This book strikes me as an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Austen, and as obvious pandering to legions of her fans. Nicely packaged, well-written, but perhaps he should have utilized his obviously extensive knowledge of Jane to better end.

More opinions via TLC Book Tour here.

the easter winners

It seems improbable in this day and age, but I have been without internet access for the better part of this week. Not being committed enough to the effort here to laboriously tap out a post or two on my phone, I will just have to muddle through this weekend to make things bloggishly right. But first things first. Before all the heads have been bitten off the chocolate bunnies, we must have the winners of the Easter contest.

• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell - Lu
• The Gathering by Anne Enright - Amy Rea
• Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons - Sarah
• The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca - Richard (the only one to ask for it)
• How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley - Andi
• Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni  - Diane

Congratulations to the winners! Please email me your shipping address?

book lust: penguin threads deluxe classics

In October, Penguin will release three volumes in the new Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics line. And I hope there will be more. Not because we necessarily need yet another edition of these three classics or others that might present themselves to the line, but because they are beautiful. Click on any of the images for a closer look.

Designer Jillian Tamaki's work process is fascinating to me, and can be seen on her blog here. For anyone interested in the needle arts (as I am), this project is an inspiring marriage of the craft and the imagination. Don't forget to click over to her Monster Quilt first embroidery effort. It might give you ideas of your own. Sewing the book.

sunday salon: for your easter basket

Good morning everyone, and Happy Easter to those who celebrate it and Happy Spring to those who do not. I have had the perfect week off from school, and have even managed to thin the shelves a bit as one of my ongoing purge projects around the house. So I saved six for you.

The titles up for grabs include:

• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (hb)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (pb)
• Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons (hb)
• The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca (hb)
• How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley (hb)
• Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni (hb)

All are in excellent condition, and looking for a new home. I tried to pick broadly to appeal to as many tastes as possible.

 

If you would like a chance to claim one of these titles, please leave a comment here by close of day tomorrow (Monday). If you are the only one interested in that book, it is yours. If more than one person is interested in a title, my children will hold a raffle to determine the winner. They love doing this so please do not be polite, and defer to the first person that mentions the book you really want. You will be making children sad. Try living with that.

The Sherlockian and I will conclude our time together today, and then I will most likely pick a book that I can finish by tomorrow night as I return to work Tuesday. What are you reading in the Sunday Salon today?

pages, dimensions and weight: library thing's new upgrades

Anthony drew my attention today to some time-wasting but fun-filled facts that a LibraryThing subscriber can now access about their collection. My stack is the blue one above which puts me solidly between the Sphinx and the Statue of Liberty if my books were to be stacked one atop the other. So I should be happy, right? But I am not. Because I know how much I still have to catalog here. And the competitive side of my nature is franticly trying to remember where the hand scanner is, and where I left off last time I stopped cataloging. And the librarian in me is blushing that my own collection is treated with a devil-may-care approach that I would never bring to a professional effort.

My books graphed according to number of pages. I should not be so ridiculously interested in this. And there is more. Here are the facts.

Cubic feet
Total cubic feet: 26
Total cubic meters: 0.74
U-Haul book boxes: 28.6
Bathtubs: 1.7

Weight
Total (pounds): 721.3
Total (kg): 327.9
Total (stones): 51.52
Elephants: 0.078
Blue whales: 0.00303
Pounds per cubic foot: 27.73
Kg per cubic meter: 443.05
Value of weight in gold: $11,764,262

Shelf space/stack height
Total shelf width/stack height (feet): 85.8
Total shelf width/stack height (meters): 26.1
IKEA Billy bookcases: 5.63

Pages
If all the pages in all the books were laid end-to-end...
Distance (feet): 89,503
Distance (meters): 27,280
Distance (miles): 16.95
Distance (km): 27.28
Hours to drive: 0.28
Smoots: 16,030
Spaldings: 15,454
Circumference of earth: 0.0681%
To moon: 0.0071%

Two little voices competing inside me. One telling me to make better use of my LibraryThing lifetime membership. The other telling me to get a life. But I know the value in all this. After all, if my books were gold, they would be worth nearly $12 million.

a red herring without mustard by alan bradley

This is the book that nearly brought me down during the recent TBR Dare. It arrived through the mail slot a week before its publication in February and I spent the rest of that month and all of March avoiding its bright yellow allure. It was inhaled as quickly as the two before it in the series, and now I will have to wait a while for another. So in the meantime, I have persuaded my teenage daughter to give the books a try. Which somehow makes it all a little better.

The eleven year old rule-breaking and poison loving chemist, Flavia de Luce, has returned for another installment of mid-century murder and secrets in the small rural community of Bishop's Lacey. The story begins with Flavia having her fortune told by a gypsy at a local fair, a gypsy that will soon be discovered in her caravan, on de Luce property, with her skull bashed in. Thanks to quick thinking on Flavia's part, her life is saved, but in seeking the perpetrator of this violence, Flavia discovers a corpse hanging from a fountain by her home, Buckshaw, and a trail to a painter that leads her closer to a more authentic knowledge of her deceased mother.

The mysteries here are well detailed and satisfactorily concluded, but the draw of these books is the rich character development. The real mystery of the series is our young protagonist herself as she struggles with reconciling a hazy past with the person she will become. Like so many very bright young people, she is not yet emotionally equipped to cope with what she understands intellectually. Flavia is able to unearth any matter of material facts, and is exceptionally perceptive when it comes to the maneuverings of others, but she has yet to allow herself to deal with the pain of a lost mother, a financially struggling and distant father, and familial relationships that do not feel storybook supportive. She retreats rather than engages and in this telling line reveals her comfort level: “whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”

Those around her have become subtly aware of what this devilish and articulate young woman requires of them, and this book delightfully makes the reader aware of this transition at Buckshaw at the same pace Flavia herself begins to suspect that her family and friends are needed more than she was willing to admit. Charming and engaging as always.

book lust: the prague cemetery by umberto eco

Was reminded again this morning by an exchange on Twitter between Stu and Jonathan Cape, how much I am looking forward to The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. But it is not due out until November here. Sigh. There is much controversy surrounding the novel but I want to read not for the buzz or the crazy sales but just because it is Eco. HMH synopsis goes like this:

Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document?

Wow. Sounds like a Dan Brown novel. And the cover design is not appealing. But again, it is Eco so on the list it goes.

monsieur pain by roberto bolano

Just like The Skating Rink is a detective story that is not fully a detective story, Monsieur Pain, another early and slim Bolano novel, is a mystery that is not fully a mystery. In a literal labyrinth of Parisian streets and a figurative maze of imaginative constructions, Monsieur Pain is a middle aged mesmerist and dabbler in the occult who ekes out a meager existence from the government pension awarded him after his lungs were burnt at Verdun during the first world war. His unrequited love of the young widow Madame Reynaud prompts him to do her a favor by visiting the husband of a friend in the hospital, and thus begins his perceived difficulties. I say perceived because the extent to which Pain's sense of menace and danger may be perhaps his only facility for flights of the imagination as shown in this favorite passage highlighting the occasional obtuseness of the protagonist:

"I have very little to lose, really," I said, excusing myself. "You can't even imagine how little."

"Don't worry," said the dark one, smiling. "We have a lot of money, it's not an issue."

"And besides, don't underestimate the imagination."

"The imagination can imagine anything."

"Anything," said the thin one.

"Leave Vallejo to us, we'll take care of him; he's a friend, a soul mate."

A soul mate ? The imagination can imagine anything ? I had a sharpening sense that I didn't understand what they meant.

The dying man in the hospital turns out to be real life Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo who appears to be dying of nothing more than chronic hiccups that may originate from the will of the victim rather than the will of an undetectable disease. Pain leads Madame Reynaud and the wife of the suffering poet to believe that he can help after he spends some time with the patient, but is never able to reconnect with Vallejo, but takes to the streets in a surreal, peripatetic attempt to evade the mysterious Spaniards who have bribed him not to help Vallejo.

Pain may appear perpetually lost as he stumbles from one mysterious set of circumstances to another, and the narrative may offer one foggily noir cinematic moment after another, but this book is actually fairly straightforward. It was a joy to read for the playfulness with form and language that I always bring up in connection to Bolano's work (like a broken record). Poets and assassination and dreamlike existence play out in various forms like the cinematic touches, noir influences, surrealism, political dismissal of the forces shaping the upcoming second world war. In other hands this could have been a strained and incomplete mess, but Bolano makes it all appear effortless, all of these disparate elements somehow compatible. In one of his first forays into the novel, he picks up all his favorite construction tools, and wields them expertly to craft a slight but elegant hint of what will follow in his prose.

april hath put a spirit of youth in everything

Today is the first day of spring break, and I am celebrating by not doing anything of practical worth including rising in the dark at the usual ungodly hour. My happy existence today included a quick dash into a local Borders store before it closes in three days. It is a little sad in there but at 80-90% off, also a little irresistible. Even for the chain resistant shopper like myself. What did I find? (Click on the photo for higher resolution image.)

• C by Tom McCarthy
• Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
• Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
• Heliopolis by James Scudmore
• Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
• Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
• Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
• The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
• Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton

Ten books for $32 and some change. Kind of unbelievable. Read any of these?

the very fine clock by muriel spark

Some months back I read a tweet (I think it was from Maud Newton) that introduced me to Muriel Spark's one children's book - The Very Fine Clock - with some charming drawings by Edward Gorey. The book made its way to my wish list, and I did not give it a whole lot of thought after that. Published in 1968 and now out of print, it struck me as one of those things that would wait for the right moment. But this week, the book found its way to me most unexpectedly.

There was a project that needed to be done at school. Not one I wanted to do but one I thought I should do. And I did not enjoy it a single bit. But in the bottom of an old box filled with a large and various array of school detritus from the last three decades or so, sat this book. And the clock on the cover was looking squarely at me. A moment of bookish serendipity. And I thrilled at the thought that I was meant to have this. And that good karma had been somehow acquired through my willingness to take on this crap job.

The picture book begins:

"Once there was a very fine clock whose name was Ticky. His friend, Professor Horace John Morris, had brought Ticky home with him from Switzerland one day, in the winter time, many years ago. Since then, Ticky and the professor had become very attached to each other, and they understood each others' ways."

Ticky speaks to the professor and his professor friends in a way that impresses them so much that they invite him to join their ranks at the university. But Ticky must decline. He must remain in the house with his other clock friends for ultimately "heart speaks to heart," and Ticky is a bridge between two worlds that must remain in place.

Very happy to own this.