Moonrat's update

Hi, folks! I haven't posted an update in a long time, but I'm still working pretty hard on my list.

I realize I have read the following since I last posted:

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat
The Known World, Michael Chabon
Werewolves in Their Youth, Michael Chabon

I've also read significant portions of David Copperfield and Moby Dick, but these are both titles I am working through slowly when I'm in the right mood.

I've also started trying to read a lot of classic crime fiction. It's a second (and less well-structured) reading project. Anyway--if you're a crime fiction reader, let me know some of your favorites. I'm very curious.

whoops, further updates

Upon perusal of my list, I realize I have also finished the following and forgotten to blog about them:

TROPIC OF CANCER, Henry Miller (blech, basically)

BAD BEHAVIOR, Mary Gaitskill (liked it ok; got me reading more short stories; didn't totally fall in love)

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, Raymond Carver (again, enjoyed; more short stories please; revealed Gordon Lish editorial style to me, which has been very educational)

CHARMING BILLY, Alice McDermott (lovely writing, but I found it a bit inaccessible)

THE SUN ALSO RISES, Ernest Hemingway (yep, definitely a fan)

THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLES, Haruki Murakami (glad I've got a Murakami under my belt now, but I just don't think I'm a fan of his)

I also started Charles Dickens's DAVID COPPERFIELD, but kind of put it aside after 30% (on Kindle). I'm just starting Edward P Jones's THE KNOWN WORLD now.

Wahoo. Almost halfway through.

ENDER'S GAME, by Orson Scott Card

Yay! After a long hiatus (uh, someone fell into an epic fantasy binge-reading hole), I'm making Gaps progress again. Here's my review for Ender's Game. I'd love to discuss with anyone else who's read it.

East of Eden read-along: p 1-80

Hi everybody! How was your weekly reading? Please leave notes / comments / progress / questions / observations / thoughts / feelings.

I, for one, made it through the pages and finished the end of the chapter, which is awesome, because it means I'm ahead for next week. Woohoo!

Welcome to the EAST OF EDEN readalong!

(I'm posting a day late ... sorry about that. Yesterday was busy at work.)

This week we embark on the Gaps reading of EAST OF EDEN, a classic of our time, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, an Oprah pick (what could be more telling!), and a book I somehow have avoided all these years. Upon consideration of its physical presence, which I now hold in my non-typing hand, that might be because it's really heavy. However, together we shall storm against this prosaic deterrent and conquer! (Right?)

According to the ever-informative Wikipedia, EAST OF EDEN was first published in 1952, and the first edition contained one typo. (Gosh, I wish any book I've ever worked on somehow made it to press with only one typo. I think standards are a little different these days.) Steinbeck supposedly originally wrote the novel for his two sons, then 6 and 4. I have scrupulously avoided any descriptions of the plot, but I gather there are heavy themes about the relationship between Cain and Abel hearkening back to the Book of Genesis. Can't wait to see how that all unfolds.

Let's convene here again next Tuesday, February 8th, having read (if you're Abel, teehee) the first 80 pages. In the meantime, please leave your Steinbeck notes in the comments--what else have you read? What's your favorite? Why are you reading EoE? Any interesting stories about his life you might have heard?

Looking forward!

EAST OF EDEN read-along

Hi Everybody!

So recently many of us mentioned interest in an EAST OF EDEN read-along starting in February. Hope everyone who wants feels invited to join.

Here's a guideline schedule, which I've created operating under the previously agreed assumption that most people can manage to read about 80 pages a week (on a good week). Please feel free to read ahead or fall behind; these are just to help.

Tuesday, February 1: Kick-off! (Perhaps a meditation on Nobel Prize-winner John Steinbeck and our previous associations/experiences with him?)

Tuesday, February 8: pages 1-80

Tuesday, February 15: pages 81-160

Tuesday, February 22: pages 161-240

Tuesday, March 1: pages 241-320

Tuesday, March 8: pages 321-400

Tuesday, March 15: pages 401-480, and perhaps a pre-St Paddy's Day and/or pagan shindig (just thinking out loud here; don't you guys feel like we'll need a mid-book reward?)

Tuesday, March 22: pages 480-540

Tuesday, March 29: pages 540-end, fabulous catharsis of relief and accomplishment

I got my copy of the book last week, and am looking forward to a group read! I haven't done one since 2009, with a very helpful and fun (for me, at least) Gravity's Rainbow read-along. So thanks, everybody who has already spurred me along. I appreciate it! I hope you're excited too.

new year, new update!!

Hi, fellow Gaps friends!

So here entereth the 3rd year of the Gaps project for some of us. (Well, sort of--we started in April, but January 1 seems like a nice milestone to observe.)

I'm so impressed with myself that I've stuck with a project this long, and I know I owe a big chunk of my commitment to the fact that there's a community of people helping keep me motivated. So thanks, guys :)

Based on the 75-book, 5-year goal, my hope was to average 15 books a year. And we're on track! I've finished a total of 34 books, although I confess a larger percentage of heavy reading was done in the first year than was done in the second.

Does anyone else fantasize about making a second Gaps list?
Part of my distraction from Gaps in 2010 was my (re)new(ed) interest in the scifi/fantasy genre, and a vague commitment to reading a lot of groundbreakers/classics in that genre. If I get more Gaps reading done, I might even make an sff auxiliary Gaps list. But not until I decide if it's reasonable.

(Any opinions? Emily, I know you did something similar a while ago...)

Actually, I think one phenomenon of the Gaps list is to want to make a second list almost immediately after embarking on reading the first--a number of my friends have had this happen to them. I'm interested if anyone else has had this "problem."

2011 Goals
My first book of 2011 was Jane Austen's Persuasion, which I reviewed here. I've also taken the step of downloading all the remaining public domain (ie free) books on my list onto my Kindle, so maybe I can make a dent in a couple of them without lugging around any of the real fatsos--a girl wants to avoid carpal tunnel if possible (these include Moby Dick, David Copperfield, House of Mirth, Moll Flanders). Other books I am eager to prioritize, based on feedback from friends, include: The French Lieutenant's Woman, White Teeth, Bad Behavior, and Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Read-alongs, anyone?
I have some above-mentioned fatsos, which I always get through better with read-alongs. So if anyone is interested in a read-along on any of the following, let me know!

Moby Dick
Infinite Jest
Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
House of Mirth
David Copperfield
Atlas Shrugged
The Second Sex
The Adventures of Augie March
Finnigan's Wake or Ulysses (kinda dreading them both)
The Brothers Karamozov
War & Peace
East of Eden
The Golden Notebook

So--where does 2011 find you? Are you on track for your own goals? Of the other people who started in mid-2009, I wonder how many people are still with us?

I'd love to hear from anyone!

a sad(ish) Gaps story

Warning: this is going to be a negative review, but in fairness to the author, it has nothing to do with his work on the book (I am sure this is a very good book, since other people much smarter and better read in this field than I am have said so). It's just a reflection of my hopes and expectations for the book. And, I guess, a manifestation of what the Gaps list helps us get out of our systems.

I bought God's War back in 2005 off of a starred Publishers Weekly review. Back then, $35 was a huge amount of money for me to spend on a book (heck, it still is, but I was a bona fide starving assistant back then), but I love to read about the Crusades and have always sought stuff out. The PW review assured me that God's War would replacing the current standard Crusades text (by one Runciman, which yes, I had read in college already).

I was disappointed from the beginning with Tyerman's tone, which was the traditional dry academic, bent on including as many details as possible but without including anything hard, like numbers (let's face it, what we really want to know is always how many people died horribly). I mean, this was hardly Tyler's fault; he is an academic, and wrote an academic text. I guess I was just hoping that someone would finally write a treatment of the Crusades that made the data and the themes easy to digest. Because I know there's a way. And it bothers me that no one ever wants to cover this large topic in a plainspoken and accessible way. I believe a lot of us modern souls could learn a lot from history--this history in particular--if only historians were more willing to distill their jargon and say something.

I'll stop with that line of thought now. I don't mean to open up a basket of snakes about academic integrity, the moral imperative of keeping a neutral tone to data, the sanctity of the white tower, the fact that any written history is already an interpretation, blah blah blah. I was just hoping, when I bought this book, that it would be what I hadn't found elsewhere before--a book about the Crusades that I could recommend to casual readers. It wasn't.

It had already sat on my shelf for almost four years when we embarked upon the Gaps project (now more than a year and a half ago). I put it on the list, because I thought maybe this would finally get me through it. In order to get through it, I marked it into sections. I would try to read about 75 pages a week, and it would take me only three months of Sundays to finish it and have done. I lasted for two weeks on that plan. Well, one and a half weeks. I was thrown off by the fact that nothing felt new or fresh--I was just rereading difficult-to-pick-through historianism with the same content I already knew backward and forward. Six months later, I plowed through another 50 pages, then six months after that, while I was briefly unemployed, I forced myself through another 400. Today, I made myself finish it, and forgave myself much skimming. I hope no one will fault me for crossing it off the list, despite rather light engagement over the last three hundred pages.

Anyway, now I'm done. The Gap is filled. Any writers out there in need of projects? I still vote for a short, accessible, general, thematic, and fun to read history of the Crusades.

E. Annie Proulx/THE SHIPPING NEWS

In 1993, Quoyle--unemployed (again), borderline-obese, devoid of all self-esteem--finds himself a single father when his wife, who never loved him anyway, runs off with another man and then gets into a fatal car crash. With no direction in life and a modest chunk of life insurance money, Quoyle packs up his girls, reunites with his aunt, and heads north from New York to the Quoyle family's ancestral home, the merciless coast of Newfoundland.

This remote, drooping community, where everyone's father, son, or brother seems to have drowned on a tragically unprofitable shipping expedition, where everyone is barely scraping by, family sexual abuse is a shared community history, and the industries that have kept the region alive are gradually dying--here, somehow, for the first time, Quoyle finds himself beginning to live his life. He gets a job writing the Shipping News column for the local paper, and over the course of a year comes to terms with his family's history, his own sorry story, and what he actually wants in life.

The Shipping News made my Gaps list because it won the 1993 Pulitzer. I knew absolutely nothing about it before dipping in (well, except for that the author was also the author of Brokeback Mountain).

At first, I found the book very inaccessible--for the first fifty pages or so, I couldn't get beyond what I thought was a fairly pretentious narrative tone, and I was afraid I was never going to become engaged by the story. But I definitely did--in spite of the stodgy beginning, the book is really beautiful to read, a careful meditation on a life that seems remote to most readers but which was a very real life path, a hypnotic piece of the North American cultural experience. The book makes much use of maritime devices (including a symbolic series of knots to open chapters), which added a certain charm for me--I grew up in New England where this harsh lifestyle was very much romanticized. Furthermore, the book is full of inventive imagery, so if you are a sucker for fresh language you'll have much to enjoy.

Richard Adams/WATERSHIP DOWN

A "fantasy classic," first published in 1972, about a group of rabbits who set out against all odds to start a new warren. The main character, Hazel, finds himself leader of the group against all odds, and is guided in his decisions by his brother, Fiver, who has a supernatural ability to dream the future.

Watership Down made my Gaps list for a couple reasons--first, it had made a lot of "best of the 20th century" kinds of lists, second, because my mother, who has a very low tolerance for literary nonsense, expressed great surprise and sadness when she found out I hadn't read it. "It's very good," she promised. My baby sister, when she saw I was reading the book, shouted "Hazel-rah!" at which point I learned she had read it in fifth grade (while I had somehow missed it).

I sat down to lunch with a literary agent whom I was meeting for the first time, and when she saw the book in my hands, she said, "Silflay hraka!" I hadn't gotten to that part yet, so she explained, "That means 'eat s**t' in rabbit! When we read it in elementary school, we thought it was so cool we could swear in rabbit, since the teachers couldn't punish us." At this point I realized I had missed out on an entire piece of our English language cultural fabric by not having read it, and became very glad I was getting around to it now.

I spent a week reading this one--it inspired savoring--and was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Like, blind enjoyment--it wasn't any work to read at all, despite the many bettering and literary themes. It required suspending disbelief--when I first encountered "lapine," the rabbit language, my thought was, "Seriously? Rabbits don't talk!"--but it is satisfyingly easy to get over these humps. And while this book is, I guess, "fantasy" literature, Adams is also gruelingly observant of rabbit biology, natural phenomena, and the world of the downs in which they live. It's really ... real, and very easy to get lost in.

Like I said, I enjoyed reading it, in a pretty unqualified way. It's a great story. I do think there are a couple barriers to pure enjoyment, and I feel obliged to mention them here, if only in passing: the first is gender roles stereotyping, although one might write this off to faithful animal behavior observation. The other is racial/ethnic stereotyping, which comes in a little bit in the "dialect" rendering of non-rabbit speech throughout the book. I personally think the book would have been a little improved without the dialect inclusions, but in 1972 perhaps this was not as much of a concern.

So, another Gaps goal accomplished! Pip pip.

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

This is one of those classics I'd been meaning to read since high school and had never got around to--classic Gaps material. I finally picked it up last week because my sister had finished reading it and left a copy with me. It was a used-and-purged library-bound copy printed in the 1940s, with satisfyingly large round type, thick pages, and scattered line drawings, and the pages had that pleasant dry-mildewy smell of old library books. It all contributed to a very nostalgic reading experience.

I really enjoyed reading My Antonia, despite or perhaps because of its non-adherence to many conventions of novel structure. The story is a sketch of turn-of-the-century American prairie life, with a migrating focus and rolling cast of characters, and no particular plot arc, per se. The main character, Jim Burden, chronicles different chapters of his life from age ten on, especially chapters that intersect with Antonia, the "Bohemian" girl whose family settles in the Nebraska farmstead next to Jim's grandparents'. Together they practice English, grow up, gossip, throw themselves into the extreme physical activity of farming. They survive the hardships of prairie winters, note the habits and scandals of the motley (but largely Scandinavian) settlements around Black Hawk, and mix with other young people. Along the way, they collect the stories of the passing farm hands, the foreign farmers who left their so-distant homelands, and the tough and colorful residents of Black Hawk. For me, these side stories make the narrative really special.

I found myself coming out of the book wanting to think about a lot of its aspects, like the way your high school English teacher wanted you to think about aspects in Great Expectations or whatever other book s/he was pushing at the time. I found myself deriving satisfaction from isolating themes and trying to spot things Cather specifically wasn't saying. And, you know, very much enjoying this thinking. Which says, to me, that this book deserves to be the classic it is.

If anyone else has read and wants to discuss, leave me a comment :)

Housekeeping

I plowed through Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping basically in one sitting. My review is here; the many adoring comments make me really excited to still have her Pulitzer-winner, Gilead, on my list. I actually went and got a copy out from the library to bump it up.

And onto Gaps housekeeping, I'm currently working my way through (three chapters a week) the devilish history of the Crusades called God's War. I put this on my list because many years ago I bought it for $35, so I need to read it so I don't feel stupid about having bought it. But it is 800 pages of very dense history. My big plan, when I finish, is to write here on this blog a summary of the WHOLE of the Crusades so that no one else will have to read the whole book. (Great plan, right...?)

HERZOG, by Saul Bellow

Woohoo! Knocked out one more title. My review for Herzog is here.

I'd love to hear thoughts, especially from other people who've read any Bellow in the past. I find myself getting very irritated with his books, then loving them in retrospect, and then going on to read more. He just makes you think so hard and feel so much that by the end, it's worth the effort.

This brings me up to 24 books since last April, a number I'd be very proud of if I didn't secretly know I've knocked out most of the short ones and left all the Tomes.

Carry On, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

A nice, quick, satisfying one to knock off the list--all light fluffy slapstick humor, and also a coup for me since it's my first taste of Wodehouse and thereby a real Gaps filler! My report is here.

I very much enjoyed the read, and am glad I have been exposed to Jeeves and Wodehouse. I'm not sure I need to read any others, but who knows. I know there are some real Wodehouse adherents who find him addictive--any in these parts?

THE WOMAN WARRIOR, Maxine Hong Kingston

Yay! Squeezed one more in before 2009 ends. My review is here. Anyone else read this one?

eeeek!!

I can't believe it!! After 11 weeks of reading I've finally finished Gravity's Rainbow!!

In case anyone was wondering why I hadn't logged in in so long... that's why. And now it's OVER!

I only understood about... 13%. On good days. But I made it to the END.

If anyone has this yet to do on their list, I would strongly recommend reading it with a group. This was one of those situations where NO one understood the whole thing, but since everyone understood different pieces, a conversation was not only interesting but helpful.

I've now finished 19 out of 100 titles. Considering 2009 is almost over, I think I'll be very, very pleased with myself if I finish a 20th by December 31st. That will be a fifth of the list finished in the first of five calendar years! Something about that really appeals to the Type A in me.

Now off to celebrate with some (decidedly non-gaps) epic fantasy rereads.

Gravity's Rainbow

I realized I totally forgot to post this here--I and some others are trying to get through Gravity's Rainbow. Details here, if anyone wants to join up...

I think a bunch of people have this on their list, right? Anyone ever tackled it before (or finished it?)?

finished A FAREWELL TO ARMS

I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say in terms of a review--but anyone else read it? I'd love to "chat" about thoughts and feelings.

Mine being

[SPOILERS, DON'T READ FURTHER!!]

that dang, I didn't see that ending coming. Also, it's not exactly a cheerful book, is it?


I liked the prose, which was often vivid and, especially in the war scenes, very direct at conveying the reality of the action. It struck me--unexpectedly--as cinematic.

I did often feel distanced from Henry in terms of feeling, though, and I didn't really buy a lot of the interaction with Katherine.

I did like it a lot, but maybe I was expecting something... other than what it was.

Also, I wonder at the use of the N-word in the text, which even taken in the context of the usage seems, well, just racist of Hemingway (and his character). Do we forgive Hemingway racism because of when he wrote? I personally feel like the answer should be no. But... we do, don't we?

Sapphire/PUSH

Has anyone else read PUSH? I started it last night and finished it today--reading the whole thing only took about 4 hours (and I'm a slow reader, promise).

That said, there's a lot in it to think about in it, and I kinda don't want to read anything else for awhile so I can mull.

I had it on my list because I remember hearing Sapphire on NPR when I was like 13 or 14, I think--maybe on Terry Gross--talking very vividly about one particular scene. It stuck with me and I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but I doubt I would have been ready for it when I was any younger.

Has anyone else read it?

working on Anna Karenina

Thought I'd post in case anyone else is, or has, or will.

It's SO long, but I've been surprised that basically it's smooth(ish) reading.

I know a couple other people have already finished this one, right? Any comments/hopes/desperations?

I did read a modern retelling, What Happened to Anna K., a few months ago. It was a good (short!!) read, and has made reading the original really, really interesting (although maybe I would do it in the reverse order if I could revisit).