"What Affected Her Was That He Had Once Been Young, And That He Had Grown Old, And Was Now Dead. That Was All. Youth And Vigour Had Come To That. Youth And Vigour Always Came To That. Everything Came To That."

For some strange reason, the version of The Old Wives' Tale that I ordered on Amazon came as a plain orange paperback with the title and author on the front and a very brief statement on the back about how Arnold Bennett was inspired to write the book based on a grotesque old woman that he encountered in a Parisian restaurant. Inside, other than the text of the novel, there is nothing else. No copyright information, no about the author, no introductions or dedications. The text literally starts on the very first piece of paper after the cover and ends on the last piece of paper before the back cover. Bootlegged copy perhaps? Who knows. But the one thing that bugged the ever-living shit out of me while reading this book, was that the page numbers were done in Roman numerals. Given that the book was dlxxxviii pages long (for those of you not well-versed in the ancient Roman counting system, that's 588), it was beyond irritating to have to do letter math when I just wanted to figure out what page I was on vs how many pages were left in the book. In spite of the long and rich story contained within the plain orange paperback cover, unfortunately, I'm most likely to remember this detail most about the book. 

The Old Wives' Tale is the story about 2 sisters in the mid to late 19th century living in the town of Bursley, a small provincial town in England. Constance, is the dutiful, obedient, plain-looking daughter and Sophia is the beautiful, obstinate, willful daughter. They live in the lodgings attached to their father's millenary store, and follow the goings-on of the small town in the square outside their windows. Sophia causes a scandal when she runs off with a travelling salesman who would occasionally come to the shop, while Sophia dutifully marries the man who works in the shop and takes over after her father's death. 

The rest of the story tells of the 2 women's lives: Constance has a son (also a stubborn and self-centered child) and lives quite contentedly in her small town with son and husband until her husband's early death and her son's abandonment of her for schooling in London. Sophia marries her salesman and travels to Paris where they live elaborately for a few years until her husband blows through all of his inheritance and leaves her. Sophia goes on to make a name for herself as a lodging/hotel proprietress. They both live their lives completely independent of each other for ~30 years until a friend of Constance's son identifies Sophia while staying at her hotel. Sophia eventually reconnects with her sister and moves back to small-town Bursley, and the 2 sisters live together into their old age. 

Overall, there wasn't really all that much special about the book. The stories of the 2 sisters was interesting, but the writing was very straightforward, explanatory prose. The story kept my attention, but I wasn't wowed by anything really that happened. 

I did schlep this giant book 22,116 miles across to globe to read on vacation in Cambodia and Thailand. I had lots of quality airplane time and lots of quality beach time in Koh Yao Noi to do nothing but read the tale of the lives of the 2 Baines sisters. And I'm actually quite glad that I did. Because I suspect this book would have taken me MONTHS to get through under normal circumstances. But because there was a lot of forced downtime, I motored my way through it. So while it literally was a pain to have this giant deadweight book with me all the time, it was a pretty good way to get through a hefty novel. 

I also schlepped the equally giant book The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah with me on vacation (yes, I devoted like 7 lbs of luggage weight to books, including my Thailand travel book. And in case you attempt my folly, most Asian airlines have weight limits for your carry-on luggage, so I wouldn't advise  bringing along 1300+ pages of books). So I'm progressing quite quickly through this book as well. Unintentionally, the book is also about 2 sisters, this time during WWII in France. I guess historical fiction is where I'll be hanging out for a while. 

Happy Saturday! 221 more books to go! 

"Oh My Little One, I Think You Must Be The Pure Child Of The Century That Just Now Is Waiting In The Wings, The New Age In Which No Woman Will Be Bound Down To The Ground"

This past August and the previous summer, I participated in a choir for a Detroit performance artist, Satori Circus, singing songs from his 30 year catalog of music as well as spoken word pieces that had accompanied his different performances. The choir was held in a historic church on the border of Detroit and Hamtramck. Our "hymnals" which housed our lyrics and notes on the songs were taped inside the pages of an old encyclopedia set. One of our inside jokes for the show was when each of the performers would go up to the pulpit to introduce a song, they would read a random section of text on the opposite page of their encyclopedia. When I went up to the pulpit, the sentence I read was about women in the Khoikhoi tribe who were known for their ample buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. We rehearsed for the choir a lot, so I said this sentence and this word a lot. So imagine my surprise, when on the very first page of Nights at the Circus to come across the sentence: "The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind - bums aloft, you might say; up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective...". I knew that this book and I were going to get along just fine.

The novel is about Fevvers (note: it took me a while to realize that this name was given to her due to its similar sound to "feathers"), an aerialist performer at the end of the 19th century. She is grandiose, bawdy, sometimes vulgar, but with a good heart, and absolutely larger than life. And oh yeah, she has giant wings attached to her back that have been with her since she was a little chick at birth. At least that is the story that she tells the public. But not everyone believes her story and thinks she is a fraud. Enter Jack Walser, an American journalist who has traveled the globe, who spends a long, bizarre, and possibly even magical evening interviewing Fevvers in her dressing room of a London theatre. After this meeting, Walser is roped in, hook, line, and sinker, and pitches to his editor that he join the circus troupe that Fevvers will be touring with, not only to get to the bottom of Fevvers' truth, but to write as an undercover circus performer.

There were so many chapters of this novel that I feel could have stood alone as their own short story. Or the novel seems like it could have been done as a serial. In particular, the different vignettes during Walser's time with the circus in Russia just blew me away. They were so rich with details and were so strange and unique, I just loved them. Dancing tigers, a drunk buffoon leader of the clowns, a troupe of performing apes who certainly seemed much more intelligent than their human counterparts. And while the book was grounded in reality, the reader often had to suspend belief and just accept the fanciful and impossible. The bizarre and incomprehensible. Which I just loved.

And I just adored the character of Fevvers. She is certainly out to get all that she can, selling her unique persona and keeping people guessing whether her wings are real or not, but as the story of her history pans out and the actions of the current storyline unfold, she is much more than just a gold digger. One of the most multi-faceted and unique characters I've read in a long time.

The book lost a little steam for me in the third act, when the circus train derails in the Siberian tundra; the different situations that occur during this part of the novel seem incongruous with the rest of the action of the story. Almost as though they were ideas that the author had identified for inclusion in a novel somewhere and they were kind of forced to fit in this one. But don't get me wrong, they were all as unique, fascinating, and wonderful to read as the first two parts of the book, but just didn't feel like they fit.

So I would highly recommend this book; it was a delightful read. It made me smile and made me say out loud (more than a few times), "Damn, this is what clever, creative writing is all about."

So up next we have The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett. I don't know much about the book except that if follows its female characters throughout the entire span of their lives. And that it is massive (but the print is small!). In mid-January, I'm going on a trip to Cambodia and Thailand and will be spending roughly 3 days of that time on airplanes or in airports, so I think a large book will be just the thing to keep me occupied! Hopefully I can find out between now and then whether or not I like the book; if I'm not a fan, I may have to switch gears for something else and come back to The Old Wives' Tale when I get back. But we'll see!

Happy New Year! 222 to go! xoxox

"I Have No Physical Organ For Guilt. But I Have A Question. I Want To Know - I Do Feel Clearly That I Have a Soul. There Is Such Thing As A Soul. I Feel It. I Started To Send It Out Of My Body, But Got Scared And Pulled It Back. I May Have Thrown My Soul Out Of Kilter. How Do You Reconcile Unity And Identity?"

I finished reading Tripmaster Monkey about 2 weeks ago and I'm just stumped on exactly what to say about it. In some ways, the writing was just brilliant - a skill set that I would very much like to develop, including rapid fire prose that doesn't feel forced or hokey, but feels natural, smart, and completely defines the mental state of a character. But in other ways, I just wanted to gloss over some very long sections of the book because they were just so drawn out and tedious to get through. I am certain that these long sections were important and were metaphors for many things the main character was dealing with, but they were just very dense and long, and it was easy for me to lose interest along the way. 

The book is about Wittman Ah Sing, a hippie Chinese-American who is a recent graduate of Berkeley in the 1960s. Wittman is trying to sort out his future path, primarily wanting to be a poet and playwright but having to settle for working in a department store. Wittman pines for a girl he knows from school, does lots of drugs, and marries a white girl he meets at a party. Wittman struggles with conventional expectations, capitalism, war, and very predominantly, self-identity as both an American and being of Chinese descent. 

Wittman's immediate goal is to stage the most elaborate play every conceived - his descriptions of his plans for play as well as the recounting of the actual staging of the play is often where I would get bogged down. Certainly the vision and eventual enacting of the play was impossibly surreal and could never actually be done in real life, and it was sometimes nice to just give in to the fantasy of possibilities beyond what could ever be contained within a stage setting. However, these descriptions would go on for dozens of pages and meander and change characters and storyline along the way. It was just hard for me to focus and feel much of a connection to what was going on. 

The writing was so funny at times and again, whip-smart. A large focus of the book is about how Wittman assesses what it means to be a Chinese-American in the mid 1960s and his conflict in identity around this (being so much of an American yet feeling continually insulted and exploited by white Americans). And while much of his analysis around this is done in a humorous tone, I really couldn't help feeling that it slid over the line into pretty racist territory. Wittman often mocked his own ancestry (everything from the way of speaking to clichés of Chinese restaurants) to make a point about how he felt Chinese-Americans were viewed and treated, but because it was done SO much throughout the book, it started to feel less like satire and more like the author herself was insulting her own culture. I realize it was meant to be a commentary about racism against Chinese-Americans, but it just didn't feel like it after awhile. 

So yeah, I definitely struggled with this one and I'm glad to be done with it. Onward we go. 

Next up is Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. I don't often do 2 books in a row from the same book list (both are from my list of female works of fiction), but in comparison to the other lists, I'm a bit farther behind on that list so I'll try to work on that one to even the score. 223 to go. 

"Loss, Once It's Become A Certainty, Is Like A Rock You Hold In Your Hand. It Has Weight And Dimension And Texture. It's Solid And Can Be Assessed And Dealt With. You Can Use It To Beat Yourself With Or You Can Throw It Away."

I read Ordinary Grace in 5 days. I think I mentioned multiple times to my family members that it was the perfect summer read. Although that would imply that it would take a full summer to read. Which for me, it certainly did not. I guess it helps that I'm off work for over a week and am in northern Michigan with not much to do other than hang out and read a book (and drink. So there's that too).


The story is told by Frank, a 13-year-old in a small town in Minnesota during the summer of 1961. Frank has a younger brother Jake who has a severe stutter, an older sister Ariel who is a piano virtuoso, a father who is the town minister, and a mother who is not happy with being dealt the hand of the preacher's wife (which her husband wasn't going to be when she married him). The book starts by telling of the death of another small child who was killed on the railroad tracks by a train. The rest of the summer is plagued by death in multiple different circumstances. In spite of this sounding like kind of a dark story (and in some regards, it is), it's actually very nostalgic, back to times when kids went out and played in every nook of their neighborhood, stopped by their friends' houses to see if they could come out and play, listened to baseball games on the radio, and played out in the woods and down by the river. The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking about how much I would love to see this book made into a movie. And while it inevitably will draw comparisons to Stand by Me, this book was centered more around family dynamics versus Stand by Me which focuses more around a circle of friends.


I have to admit that I did guess the ending; there were a few specifically placed foreshadows that drew the reader's attention to specific characters and relationships that I actually caught. But I really loved the book. The only minor quibble with the story though, is that the main character always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to see or hear things that he wasn't supposed to, which put him in a unique position to understand more about the ongoing situations than anyone else. And after a while, it just seemed a little too coincidental that every single chapter he put himself in just the right position to eavesdrop or spy on people.

So if you're looking for a charming, nostalgic book with interesting characters and a very interesting storyline, you'll enjoy it for a summer read!

Next up, I switch back to a booklist book in Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston. I don't know a single thing about this book other than what the description is on the back, and based on that, it certainly sounds very interesting. Although it sounds like there could be a possibility of it being really out there enough to frustrate me. So we shall see!

Happy 4th of July weekend!

"It Was Perhaps Superficially More Striking That One Could Live If One Would; But It Was More Appealing, Insinuating, Irresistible In Short, That One Would Live If One Could"

So finishing Wings of the Dove has left me conflicted, primarily because I have mixed feelings about each of the characters. 

The main storyline is of Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who fall in love and who become secretly engaged. Kate has an Aunt, Maud Lowder, who is very wealthy and offers to make Kate her benefactress if she cuts off all communication with her sister and father and if she does not pursue the relationship with Densher, who is a poor newspaper man and who Aunt Maud does not see as suitable husband material, in spite of liking him very much as a person. Enter Milly Theale, a young wealthy American woman who becomes a sparkling new feature on the London social scene, and who completely charms Aunt Maud and Kate alike. It turns out that Densher had met Milly briefly while in New York for work, and Milly had taken a bit of a fancy to him. What becomes known later, is that Milly is dying, and she entrusts this information to her closest friend Kate, and her faithful companion, Susan Shepherd Stringham.

Once Kate discovers that Milly has such a fondness for Densher combined with the knowledge that she has a terminal illness, she enacts a plan to allow for her and Densher to be together, namely, having Densher and Milly get married so he can inherit her money once she passes away (which seems to be not that far down the road). This will improve Densher's social status and therefore make their marriage acceptable to her aunt and society in general. The whole troop of folks travel to Venice (primarily as a better suited climate for Milly's illness) for a period of time, after which, Kate and Aunt Maud depart, leaving Densher to spend devoted time with Milly to seal the deal, so to speak. 

So it may seem, in the way I've described it above, that this is really a loathsome plan, and Kate and Densher are really evil characters. But under Henry James' deft hand, I never really felt either of them to be so terrible. Both characters had arcs and moral conflicts that made them much more sympathetic characters and much less despicable than may seem. Kate really truly adored Milly and thought her to be such a "stupendous" human being (the word that both she and Densher land on to describe Milly; but more Milly in a moment). They really were devoted friends and it didn't seem from Kate that this friendship was only intended to manipulate her. And Densher was on the outside of this plot for most of the book until shortly before Kate and Aunt Maud left Venice, when Kate finally clued him into the groundwork that she had laid to ensure that absolutely no one suspected the 2 of them of having a relationship (or more correctly, she made everyone think that he was the one smitten with her and that she had zero interest in him). She explains to him what his next steps should be to ensure the success of the plan. So Densher isn't really all that bad of a guy either since he's not really the architect of this devious plan and doesn't really seem to want to go along with it. Except that he does, all the while being clear that he has no feelings for Milly (but convincing Milly otherwise) and really seems to at least initially view her in an unglamorous way, unlike everyone else who revere Milly as this angelic dove.

Which I kind of missed the boat on. I did not see Milly's character as this divine, angelic, almost flawless creature that everyone just adores. It feels like something that might be handled more successfully in a movie rather than a book, but she just felt kind of naïve and simple to me. And I guess maybe that's why she was so ideal to everyone else, because they were inherently flawed and devious. But struggling to view the character in the same way as the characters of the book made it really hard for me to get on board with the entire premise of the book because so much hinges on exactly how everyone feels about Milly as this wonderful human being.  

I won't give away the end, but I think it was handled beautifully, down to the very last sentence of the novel. As a result of their plotting, both characters Kate and Densher are dramatically changed, morally, with Densher in particular significantly changing his view and affections towards Milly. The characters and their choices, struggles, and motivations were so rich and really were the strength of the entire novel. The narrator is omniscient so you get the full knowledge of every nuance of each character when the given chapter is told from his/her perspective. And that's really the bulk of the book; all in all, there isn't a ton of action that occurs, but so much time and page space devoted to the thoughts and sentiments of the characters. So in that aspect, it makes the plot of the novel so much more convincing and believable when placed up against each of the characters' motivations. 

Overall, I did enjoy very much (once I finally got into it). James wasn't as difficult to read as I thought it would be, although he is a big fan of what I call the interrupted sentence. He likes to place asides or additional clauses right in the middle of a thought or sentence. While I like to generally do this with parentheses (scroll back through post to get, oh, maybe 10? examples of my fondness for this), he generally adds them with hyphens, and the interruptions are varied in their type and function. So these sure did slow me down when reading, because I always had to reread the sentence without the interruption and then with to actually get what it even said. But overall to me, this technique demonstrated so much skill and thought and its function in the overall telling of the story gave it a very unique style. 

So up next, I'll be taking a short break from the book lists to read Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger. My sister is in a book club and she consistently raves about most of the books that her group reads. And not gonna lie, it makes me a little jelly, where I wish I could only focus on reading current literature. And I know that reading books from these book lists is my own self-imposed task (punishment?), but sometimes it gets a little cumbersome and not enjoyable when I stumble on a book that is dense and challenging. So I've made a side list of her fav book club books (more LISTS!) and will plan to slot them in when I need a break from the books on the other 4 lists (got that?). But I also still want to maintain my own discovery of current literature to read, whether by hearing about it through podcasts, articles, recommendations from others, or bookstore browsing. Needless to say my stack of "to read" books is getting notably larger! 

On that note, off I go. Happy Thursday! 224 books to go!  

"Distracted From Distraction By Distraction"

Back in March, I dropped my long beloved cell phone and shattered the screen, requiring a new upgraded phone. During this visit, I made a choice that I believe in the long run, is one that I will regret - in addition to the phone, I bought an iPad (it was on sale yo!). And while my initial thought was, "This will be great for watching movies while traveling," what have I actually been using it for? Playing dumb, mindless games. 

Now, I think there is value in having some kind of activity that allows you to zone out and not have to think so intensely about all of the other ongoing stressors that fill up our minds. But this has turned into me wasting time away from reading. Sometimes when I'm reading something a little more challenging (usually because the style of writing is a little more antiquated, requiring me to read much more slowly), I just have this mental block against picking up the damn book and reading it. So it definitely doesn't help to have a very mindless and quite addictive game to detract me even more from reading. 

Needless to say, progress on Wings of the Dove has been going very slowly. But in the last couple weeks, I have finally gotten engaged in the storyline and more attached to the complexities of the characters and am making more progress. I'm about 2/3 of the way done and my goal is to finish before the 4th of July holiday week so I can move on to a more easy read for my planned time up north. I like timelines and clear goals, so I think I can achieve this (the data nerd in me might even calculate the number of pages left by the number of days to determine my daily target. **Feel free to roll eyes here.**).

So progress will be made dammit! And I will (hopefully) learn to put the damn iPad away! Until then, heed my advice: do not download Candy Crush. 

Cheers!

"We Are All But A Part Of A Whole Which Has Its Own, Its Distinct, Its Other Meaning: We Are Not Ourselves, We Are Crossroads, Meeting Places, Points On A Curve, We Cannot Exist Independently For We Are Nothing But Signs, Conjunctions, Aggregations"

I would like to call The Radiant Way the novel of the backstory. Because everyone has a tremendously detailed backstory. The 3 main female characters, the husbands of the 2 who are married, the ex-husbands, the sister, the sister's husband, all of the women's children, the mother, the army buddy of one of the husbands. I'm talkin' everyone got their own, very detailed story about who they were and where they came from. I was waiting for the backstory of the father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate a la Spaceballs, but I must have missed that part (although there was a backstory of a former quasi-roommate that all the girls knew in college, so I'll chalk that up to a win). But given that half to two-thirds of the book was character backstory, I was still very impressed with the intertwining the storylines of the characters set in their current time, against the political and social climate of the early 1980s in England.  

The novel begins on New Year's Eve of 1980 and focuses on 3 very different, but all very intelligent, scholarly women: Liz, a successful psychiatrist who finds out during her high class NYE party that her husband is divorcing her and leaving her for another woman; Alix, a literature instructor at a women's prison who develops a friendship with one of the inmates that causes her trouble later; and Esther, a pre-eminent Italian art scholar who seems to march to her own beat and define her own space and way in the world. The women all met at Cambridge when they were there interviewing for their schools (of course you learn this part of their backstory!) in the early 1950s and manage to maintain their friendships for 25+ years. I loved how unique and interesting the women were; they felt as though they were very real women that you could actually meet, and ones that I would probably be happy to be friends with. They weren't written as caricatures or clichés of divorced women or career-driven feminists even though these were facets of (some of) their personalities. It was nice to read about contemporary women's lives where the focus was simply letting the characters and their stories shine without any gimmicks. In a way, it reminded me a bit of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, but I suspect the similarity of 3 female main characters makes them feel familiar. 

I admittedly don't know a lot about the political climate of England in the early 1980s as I was just a wee babe then, but even without knowing much (other than Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister), the descriptions of the events in the book and their impacts on the different characters made it clear enough: Conservative vs Labour parties, steelworker and mining strikes, government cuts that affected the prison that Alix taught in and where her husband was teaching, changes in television broadcasting, etc. How these events interplayed with the characters and storyline really made the novel much more of a social commentary than I was anticipating it to be. 

One of the other interesting backdrops of the novel includes a serial killer known as the Harrow Road killer who murdered and dismembered women in areas close to where the women lived. The murders come up multiple different times and in multiple different ways in the book, from more oblique descriptions and comparisons of the murders to direct impact on the female characters; circling back to these type of macabre, deadly incidents gives a much more serious, darker tone to the events going on in the women's lives.

I was pleased to have enjoyed this book as much as I did. While I may sound a little snarky about the backstory, I actually really enjoyed reading all about the characters. It made everyone feel like so much more a part of a distinct circle of individuals with shared stories, where you could see their connections and disparities more clearly (and sometimes, not so clearly). It really gave the novel its strength. I would have been pleased if I had another Margaret Drabble book on my list because I would be curious to see how another book from her would be. But alas, not to be. 

Onward we go. Next up is The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. I have 6 books by Henry James on my lists, so it only seems reasonable to get started on at least some of them. After that, I'll probably take a break to read one of the non-list books I have set aside. But so far, so good on progress in 2018. 

225 more books to go. Happy Tuesday!