Ms. Reader: Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris”

Title: Ex Libris

Author: Anne Fadiman

Pages: 157

Copy: borrowed from Sonoma County Library

Read: September 4-5, 2012

Spoilers: Again with the essays!

Yesterday, wishing to avoid investing my entire paycheck in books as I occasionally do when the feeling hits, I wandered around my public library and collected a huge stack of books (huge not in quantity but in size).  I’ll admit the diversity of topics represented in this pile makes me giddy: two Joan Didions (two hardcovers, one 1122 and the other 223 pages), a book simply titled Dissent in America (hardcover, 792 pages including index, but it looks as large as a dictionary), Reading Lolita in Tehran (a medium-sized paperback, 343 pages), a book on anarchism between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s (a heavy hardcover of 482 pages), and, of course, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris (a charming shrimp of a paperback that barely covers 157 pages).  Perhaps the pile isn’t so large—I may have only been overwhelmed by the weight and the slipperiness of the dust jackets.

At any rate, I came home and consumed in two short sittings Ex Libris.  (Perhaps its slimness made it the most appealing.)  While Fadiman is no Didion (Fadiman’s essays are somehow softer, lacking the crisp phrasing of a truly accomplished essayist), she is a funny writer who obviously loves her books.  That makes her a saint to me.

Ex Libris contains short essays, each on some aspect of her reading life, whether it is her obsessive habit of proofreading everything or her guilty pleasure (catalogs).  As in any essay collection, some are better than others.

Fadiman opens with the fantastic essay “Marrying Libraries,” a meditation on what it means to combine libraries with the person you love and to whom you are married.  Along the way the essay explores the many ways people organize their books (perhaps by color, or maybe by author, or even by continent, as well as all the ways to organize within a category—once you divide your books by continent, how do you organize them?  Fadiman’s response may be overly complicated [British in chronological order, American by author], but a quite reasonable response if you’re obsessed with organizing your library).  (I reorganize my library at least four times a year, always in different ways.  As my best friend pointed out, books need new neighbors with which to converse.  I’ve always liked the idea of creating strange juxtapositions, just so I can ponder what sort of arguments books will get into as neighbors.  My two, double-packed shelves of mass-market paperbacks are giving me the most fun right now.  Somehow I doubt Carl Sagan’s Contact often ends up sandwiched between This Side of Paradise and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, but I image its quite happy there.  And I couldn’t guess what sort of circumstances would lead to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars ending up between Dialogues of Plato and Anna Karenin, but Plato needs to loosen up a little and read some science fiction.  How Red Mars is getting along with Tolstoy, though, is beyond my ken.  See how much fun this is?)

I also enjoyed her essay “My Odd Shelf,” a discussion of her literary obsession (failed polar expeditions—successful ones aren’t romantic enough).  Fadiman defines an odd shelf as “a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner” (21).  I hardly know which shelf is my Odd Shelf (I’m tempted to say my whole library is an Odd Shelf, but that seems doubtful).  Perhaps my environmental shelf is the obvious choice, though I’m tempted to say it’s my Penguin shelf, since I have a Penguin shelf right now, but I’m not sure devotion to a publishing house really counts.  (By the way, you know you’ve entered a whole new level of book-love when you can rank your favorite publishing houses.  Currently, my ranking runs thus: Penguin [within that category: their old mass market paperbacks, their beautifully designed hardcover Penguin Classics, their fantastic yearly Great Ideas collection, and finally their black paperback Penguin classics—they’re new stuff doesn’t count], Oxford Classics, Modern Library, and, finally, Vintage.)  At any rate, Fadiman will make you look at your library and try to work out which parts make the library and which parts make the Odd Shelf, a fun activity for a lazy day.

My only complaint with the collection is Fadiman’s occasional conceit and snobbery.  The essay that explores her obsession with proofreading demonstrates the drawbacks of being too honest—while admitting to her snobby garners some sympathy, she lost all my support on the last page of the essay, where she outlines all the places she could have saved various people or groups money with her affliction (as she calls it).  While the first step is always admitting to your quirky snobberies, the second step is letting everyone else live their lives without your judgment.  (Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” contains some salient advice: Excellent writing “has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear.”  Unnecessary apostrophes may be annoying, Ms. Fadiman, but they rarely make meaning unclear.)  The other essay of Fadiman’s that I disliked is “Eternal Ink,” a rather strange piece about her favorite pen and its replacement, her computer.  One thing that has always annoyed me about writers speaking about how they write is the strange emphasis they place on outdated writing techniques, as if writing with a quill automatically makes you a better author.  (Wendell Berry, who uses a pencil, is the only author I’ve come across that actually has a solid, unromantic reason for using older technology, which he explains in his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”)

To conclude, I’d recommend this collection of essays to any booklover of any age (the youngest readers will, at any rate, like to chew on the edges, which I think would make Fadiman quite pleased).  This book would make an excellent present if you have no idea what else to get a person who loves to read (especially if you don’t see eye-to-eye with them about their preferred reading material).  To those who are a bit daring, this might be a good book to present to people who don’t read.  I can’t think of a better introduction to book-love than this collection of essays, which, I hope, can convert even the staunchest anti-reader.

--Benvolia

PS I’m sorry, Ms. Fadiman, if you read this and locate egregious grammatical mistakes.  I belong to the Orwellian school of grammar.

Gawain Fan Club: "The Squire's Tale"

Book: The Squire’s Tale
Author: Gerald Morris
Pages: 209
Copy: Yolo County Library
Read: Early July
Spoilers: Nothing specific

When I first read this book in middle school, I was torn between enjoyment and a mild dislike. My second reading only deepened these feelings. The plot is okay, the characters perfectly depicted, the writing is pretty good, but it doesn’t all add up. I like the characters, especially Gawain. Everyone is memorable and vivid. The writing is snappy, with quick, clever dialogue and a good sense of humor. (There’s no swearing. Instead the author uses “By Gog” and “By Gad” which is a little too cute.) I think the biggest flaw of this novel is the plot.

The book runs along at a swift pace, bumping from one adventure to another without much rest or even reflection. Things just happen and the characters accept their adventures without wondering about what has just happened to them. The ending is particularly odd, almost as if the author had nearly forgotten to include this one last adventure and just threw it in at the end. It seems to me that the last adventure could have been the framing adventure for the whole book, with all the other little adventures occurring along the way. Instead, there are a series of adventures without much cohesion. The end is just too easy.

Perhaps Morris was trying to show how far his characters had evolved. Perhaps he was trying to show how much more powerful the various characters have become. Perhaps he just didn’t know how to end the book. I finished the book bemused, feeling as if half the book had been ripped out before I could finish reading.

For all that the weird plotting is an important issue for me, somehow it doesn’t destroy the whole book. I think that’s because the characters are so good and because the writing is interesting. If Morris had been slightly less clever, or taken Arthurian myths slightly more seriously, the book would be unreadable. As it is, this seems like a thinly disguised fan letter to Gawain, which isn’t at all bad. In fact, it’s wonderful.

Lancelot, I think, has taken over Arthurian myths. He lords it over all other knights and all other myths. He has become central to Arthur’s court and central to Arthur’s downfall. But not here. Here, Gawain is growing into the greatest of Arthur’s knights. Here, Lancelot hasn’t even arrived yet. Here, Gawain is the important one. And I think Gawain deserves the spotlight more than Lancelot. Gawain has flaws, but he still tries to be chivalrous. He knows what is expected of a knight, and what’s expected isn’t pretty clothes or shiny armor. It’s hard work, defeat, and sweat. I think Gawain is a better role model. Lancelot is just flimsy in comparison. (I’ll admit I’m getting ahead of myself here—Lancelot doesn’t show up in this series until the second book. But still. Even in this book you can tell that Gawain is a better knight than Lancelot.)

I’d recommend this book to kids mostly. It doesn’t quite hold up to the expectations of an adult—it just isn’t cohesive enough. That being said, it is enjoyable, so it isn’t impossible for an adult to read. (Just be patient.) This is a great introduction to Arthurian myths, especially if you want someone to like Gawain and not Lancelot. I can’t imagine that Lancelot fans like these books very much. The disdain is just too obvious. At any rate, read this book—it’s fun—but just don’t expect too much. This is candy, not dinner.

-Benvolia

Also read:
Deerskin, Robin McKinley, 29 June 2011
The Fourth Bear, Jasper Fford, 30 June 2011
The Squire, His Knight, & His Lady, 1 July 2011
The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf, 3 July 2011
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Advanced Reader; Publication Date: August 2011), 13 July 2011
Shatter Me, Tahereh Mafi (Advanced Reader; Publication Date: November 15, 2011),13 July 2011

Blood, Guts, Mayhem, Death...: “The Running Man”

Title: The Running Man (from The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King)
Author: Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
159 Pages (pages 533-692) (Hardcover)
Read: 27 June 2011
Spoilers: I go over the plot in scant detail but I don’t really give anything away


To begin with, this book is gory.  Really gory.  There’s blood, everywhere.  There are guts, flying.  There are gunshot wounds, which causes most of the blood and guts.  Having never read Stephen King, I can’t say if there is an unusual amount of blood and guts, but there seems to be quite a bit.  The story is fairly interesting, so getting over the gore seems worth it to me.  However, there is also racism, prostitution, anti-homosexual sentiments, and a screaming woman in distress.  So the worth of the novel is sort of a toss-up.


Stephen King writes in the introduction (a weirdly organized essay entitled “Why I Was Bachman” which is interesting but ultimately useless) to this collection that The Running Man “is nothing but story--it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.”  He seems rather proud of this assessment.  I think it’s perfectly true, but I’m not sure that it makes the story powerful or even particularly noteworthy.


The set-up is simple.  The masses are sedated by watching violent games on television; in many of these games (if not all, it’s hard to tell exactly) the contestants die.  Ben Richards, strapped for money (his cause is noble, of course), becomes a contestant on the most violent and bloody (and rigged) of the shows, The Running Man.  The story follows his attempt to overthrow the system.  Along the way, King makes room for a indictment of pollution and an exploration of class.


King discusses pollution in an interesting way, suggesting that the effects of pollution are felt by the poorest.  The wealthy are able to escape the negative effects of poisonous air and therefore don’t notice it anymore.  Furthermore, the government of The Running Man censors information about pollution and pollution levels, raising questions about the government’s involvement with environmental injustice.  I think he raises interesting points about pollution and environmental justice, but he discards the environmental question when it starts to take the novel over.  This weakens his argument some, as well as making pollution seem unimportant.  However, this depiction suggests, very powerfully, that environmental issues fade when a person is confronted with terrible personal trauma.  It is depressing, but seemingly accurate.  I think that if King had chosen to focus on the pollution issue he would have had a much more interesting and powerful novel.  As it is, he settled for an action story without any attempts at making it an “issue book.”


King’s discussion of class moves in and out of focus, but remains a theme throughout.  Obviously King has great sympathy and understanding for the suffering of the poor and unemployed and he does his best to uphold them as the better sort of person.  In some ways, this echoes Orwell’s use of proles in 1984, proles being considered the greatest hope for the future, a dream that is complicated by reality.  However, the ending of the novel doesn’t provide closure or even hope for the future.  King points out class issues without suggesting that the lower classes will ever be able to escape.


Interestingly, two of the lowest class characters are readers, suggesting that class can be escaped through education and imagination.  This vision does not work particularly well in the context of the novel.  Ben Richards is depicted as an action hero, but somehow it is necessary to see him also as a sensitive reader of novels.  The other major reader is a gang member, who belongs to a gang of...readers.  They sneak into the library to read about pollution and how the upper classes cope with poison air.  It’s a bizarre moment in the book, one that made me raise my eyebrows (not that I don’t think people should read).  I think reading is great, and I think everyone should sneak into their libraries to read about pollution.  The scenes just aren’t in keeping with the rest of the novel.  I think perhaps King wanted people to know how important reading is and didn’t work too hard on how to deliver that message.


I think this is a fair dystopian novel.  The novel is more about society than about politics, along the lines of Farhenheit 451 rather than 1984.  That being said, this isn’t the greatest dystopian novel ever written.  I think King was trying to take on racism, but he didn’t make his point strong enough.  He just comes across as possibly racist.  Further, he seems to be trying to fight against anti-gay sentiment, but he fails there too.  This isn’t to say that the book ought to have been longer.  The story would have lost its pop and suffered terribly if it were longer.  I just think King should have worked harder on making his argument stronger.


That being said, I’d recommend this to the same audience as Logan’s Run.  The stories are roughly similar (superhuman runs away from bad guys; there’s even a similar scene of claustrophobia), but Richards seems a little more interesting (perhaps because he’s 28 and not just 21) even as his situation seems a little less plausible.  This isn’t a book for the faint of heart or the easily upset.  This feels like a book that a non-reading teenager (I mean this as nicely as possible) would really like--there’s blood, the main character kicks ass, and a couple important issues are mentioned.  It isn’t boring, it isn’t slow, and it doesn’t stop in the middle for a complicated political discussion (ahem, 1984).


-Benvolia


Also read this week:
Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits, by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson (23 June 2011)
The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley (27 June 2011)

Dystopian Books: "Logan's Run"

Title: Logan's Run
Authors: William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
133 pages (Hardcover)
Copy: UC Davis library
Read: early June
Spoilers: several itty-bitty ones

Because I saw the film before I read Logan's Run, I had exceedingly low expectations.  The movie, while intriguing in some respects, has such bad acting that the film is nearly unwatchable--the female lead is particularly annoying--and the special effects are limited by technology.  I picked the book up with trepidation but a feeling of duty (I'm reading dystopian literature this summer in preparation for my Senior Honors Thesis).  I was surprised by the book and its intriguing view of the future.

This is a dystopia that explores the cult of youth so beloved by our modern society.  In this world, people are killed at 21 because society has decided that life after 21 is too horrible to contemplate.  Thus, the "ages of man" are skewed--a 16 year old, for instance, is considered a consenting adult.  Drugs and sex figure predominately in the early part of the book (rather similarly to Brave New World) and while people seem to have jobs, it is hard to know exactly what these jobs are.  The only clearly defined occupation is Logan's job as a Sandman, a sort of special policeman who pursues "runners," people who run away on their death day rather than submitting quietly.  The life stage of a member of this society is determined by a "flower" (some sort of jewel implanted in the hand) that changes color as part of its 21 year decomposition.

The book is slim and seems to be cut short.  The entire piece has the feel of a fairly detailed outline.  The action moves at an extraordinary pace and the time seems impossible (think compression along the lines of The Da Vinci Code).  Plus, injuries are fleeting which makes the novel seem more like an action TV series.  I have the feeling, though, that if the novel had been expanded any it would have become absolutely unbearable.  And, really, why bother to demand realism in a book of this nature?  Obviously the authors are caricaturing one aspect of culture and it seems that the fast, unrealistic pace could be part of the book's main philosophic thrust--face paced lives and a fast paced book.  It works fairly well.

I read the book to see how it depicts the environment.  I have to say, the characters in the novel have an interesting relationship to the natural world.  Nature is the way to freedom, but it is also out to kill them.  The novel depicts traveling through a cave-system with creepy success, elaborating on the claustrophobia of the characters and the disgusting creatures that live in the caves.  A sense of death pervades the scene, in a more or less realistic way.  The vague realism of the cave scene, however, is overwhelmed by later, more unrealistic scenes.  Later in the novel, Logan has a prolonged fight with a tiger.  The scene strikes me as incredibly odd.  The tiger hunts Logan and carries a grudge, finally attacking him in a decidedly abnormal fashion.  The scene is more anthropomorphic than real.  Ultimately, the final scene presents a firm denial of Earth, in a scene that is unexpected and out-of-place.  On the whole, the book seems to find nature dangerous and most likely lethal, and seems to think we'd all be better off without it.

Of course, the depiction isn't all that surprising.  Science fiction, in many ways, denies the value of Earth and upholds the value of technology.  There are science fiction novels that deal exclusively with nature, but they are a more recent development.  Still, if Logan's Run is placed alongside Fahrenheit 451, for instance, this extremely negative natural depiction becomes more striking.  I wonder if this negatively viewed environment is part of youth (perhaps the environment can't be seen or understood until one is older than 21) or merely a symptom of a societal separation from nature.  At any rate, it's a curious depiction.

I'd recommend this novel to anyone interested in the intense glorification of youth because Logan's Run has much to say about age and maturity.  I'll warn that there is sex, but not too detailed, and there is drug use.  There are also violent scenes (and sexually violent scenes) and questionable depictions of women.  Nevertheless, Logan's Run is an interesting dystopia, fast paced and intriguing.  It's definitely a product of its era, but it's still fairly relevant.  And it's way better than the movie, so don't be turned off from the novel if all you know about it is the film.  The book is more interesting and the film leaves a lot of the most thought-provoking parts out.

-Benvolia

Books for Summer: "Practical Magic"

Title: Practical Magic
Author: Alice Hoffman
244 pages (Hardcover)
Copy: Keene Public Library (Although, I have a copy somewhere in my parents' house.)
Read on: 15 June 2011 (I think I first read it in May or June of 2008, sitting out on the lawn, eating countless pastrami sandwiches. My aunt provided both the book and the pastrami and owned the lawn. It was the right kind of New England summer for it, too, just as it is through most of the book.)
Spoilers: 4ish

Every June, somewhere around solstice, I get the urge to read Practical Magic. Alice Hoffman has a very distinctive voice, one that feels very similar to mine. (No, this is not wholly hubris, people have remarked on the similarity, especially in regards to her work Ice Queen) It is a voice that combines the simplicity of a fairy tale with something much more complex, adult, and ultimately realistic. Practical Magic showcases this voice in the story of the Owens sisters, who encounter almost every kind of love.


I'm usually a little bitter about books about sisters. Sisterhood is much more complicated than books make it seem, especially the books that feature "friends so close they are like sisters". (I have a lot of very dear friends, but I would never wish on them the extremely mixed blessing of being my sister.) Equally as aggravating and inaccurate are the books that take the other direction and feature books about sisters that destroy each others' lives (see, for example, the first three parts of In Her Shoes, by Jennifer Weiner, now a major motion picture! as of five years ago). 

But Hoffman maintains a lovely balance and each set of sisters in the novel is believable as sisters. Three generations of Owens sisters, all of then with varying degrees of magical powers, all learn from themselves and from their family how to love. They learn to love each other as sisters, as nieces, as daughters, and mothers, and aunts. With the exception of the elder aunts, who are content in remembering their lost loves, they learn to love the men who wander precipitously into their lives. Almost missing from the novel is fatherly love. Sally and Gillian--the main set of Owens sisters--are orphans. Sally's husband dies early in the novel and in their relationship, leaving the novel without a true father figure. 

Despite this minor flaw, this remains one of my favorite summer reads. I'd recommend it for anyone with sisters. Or anyone in a long term relationship. Or anyone between long term relationships. It is a novel that inspires love, second chances. The last phrase of the novel says it all: "Fall in love as often as possible". Fall in love with the book, if not anything else. 


-Mercutia