"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!

"When Destiny Knocks The First Nail In The Coffin Of A Tyrant, It Is Seldom Long Before She Knocks The Last"

There were other quotes from A High Wind In Jamaica that I could have chosen for the title of this post that better captured the story of the novel, but I just loved that line so much when I read it, I had to mark the page, save it, write it down. To be shared and admired.

It's kind of strange to think that there aren't that many books (at least that I can think of...I'm sure a more avid, expert level reader could list off many) that are written by adults, about children, that aren't a children's book per se, but that accurately capture the minds and inner lives of children. And I wasn't expecting A High Wind in Jamaica to do that as marvelously as it did. I think Lord of the Flies is the more obvious example that I could think of that felt similar to this book, but this one felt a little more fanciful and imaginative, as though someone much younger could have read it and enjoyed it for the adventuresome tale of the children's voyage and totally missed the much darker themes that pervaded the story. Like, much darker.

The story tells of the 5 Bas-Thornton children (and 2 Fernandez children), ranging in age from 4 to about 15 growing up in the wilds of Jamaica during, what I assume, is the mid to late 1800s (I don't believe an actual year was specified). The children live, what I can only describe as feral lives on the island. They play in the exotic surroundings, mess with bugs and animals, and definitely don't live in a conventional way as would be expected of a white British family (the girls all have their hair cut short and don't wear clothes...the one time the older daughter wore a dress while playing, she almost drowned from the fabric wrapping around her face). A terrible hurricane sweeps through the island destroying everything the Bas-Thorntons own and just barely leaving them all with their lives. Following the storm, the parents freak and realize it's time to send their children back to a safer upbringing. They are sent on a ship bound for England, but shortly after leaving Montego Bay, the ship is ambushed by pirates who take nearly everything from the ship, including the 7 children. And so the rest of the book tells of the children's time spent with the pirates, their life on the ship, and the very complicated relationships that develop during this time.

What fascinated me about this book was how the immediacy of the children's experiences affect the overall story. The children very much lived only in the present moment (as kids do!); as soon as something was out of site and they had a new environment and people to explore, it was as though the previous existence never was. As soon as the kids have the fascinating expanse of the pirate ship to explore, they give no thought to their parents. At one point at a stop in St Lucia, one of the children becomes seriously injured and is left behind on the island, and none of the children seem to mind or give it another thought. In fact, the boy is not mentioned again in the novel until nearly the very end. And once the children are eventually set on a steamer bound for England, as soon as they set foot on the much more elaborate ship, they give no thought to leaving the pirates and become completely absorbed in their new surroundings.

And this impermanent memory is also an important facet of the story. Back in England, the children tell revisionist histories of what they experienced that often were not true, but romanticized (and violent) stories of what one would have expected to have happened with the pirates. In reality, the children became very attached to all of the sailors on the ship, captain Jonsen and first mate Otto in particular, and didn't see them as dangerous at all. The children developed strong affections for them and they even assumed a parental role in the eyes of the children. And in fact, the children didn't even know they were pirates for a very long time after then had been on the ship and were reluctant to admit they were. And I appreciated that the "pirates" were not depicted as "typical" pirates...no peg-leg, no eye patches, no "Arrrggg."

There was also a very discomforting sexual dynamic with the children and the pirates. In particular, a good portion of the story is focused on 10-year-old Emily. At one point, Captain Jonsen strokes her hair in a kindly way (he expresses his feelings for the children as fatherly and not ill-intentioned at all) that slightly borders into an inappropriate way, and while Emily doesn't really understand what this means, she reacts by biting his hand incredibly hard and runs away. The captain feels ashamed for his actions but is also angry with her. All of the other children don't understand at all and just angry with Emily for hurting him and exclude her from playing with them. Later in the story, when Emily injures her leg and the captain carries her down to the bunk and she kisses him. Like I said...discomforting sexual dynamic. It's as though the girl is just slightly too young to understand what is happening and also doesn't have an adult female to explain anything so any understanding of appropriate interactions are all over the place. Her coming of age in this way, and really for all the children, gives them an odd contrast of living amongst violent men and still being naïve and vulnerable. And while there are glimpses of this innocence ebbing away, they still live with the mindset of children. This is even more evident with the ending of the book. I won't go into details to give it away, but it certainly seems that some of the darker, sadistic sides of the pirates rubbed off on the children, Emily in particular.

The book was one that I felt was remarkable. There were so many different levels and nuances to what was going on not just directly in the action of the characters, but indirectly in the author's descriptions. Upon finishing the book, I had a very satisfying feeling of, "This is what good writing is about." I would highly recommend if you're looking for an action-driven book that has a lot more to say.

Onwards and upwards. Next up is The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble. It's on my list of female novels. It seems to be written in the 1980s, so it will be an interesting change to read something from that time.

226 to go. Happy Sunday!