2012 Wrap-Up

I finished two books today and am unlikely to finish another one by tomorrow, so it’s time for my usual by-the-numbers wrap-up. I’ll probably come back and make a list of my favorite books in a day or two. It was a good year for reading; I read 84 books, which is my second highest number, down from the 100 I read last year, but up from my usual 60-70 of recent years. I may have read lengthier books this year than last year, which would account for the difference. This year there was no Little House on the Prairie read-through to bump up my numbers, which is fine. Whatever. My resolution for 2012 was not to care about numbers so much, and I was only moderately successful at that; I still set a goal over on Goodreads (of 75 books) and I paid attention to whether I would reach that number or not throughout the year. For 2013, however, I am not going to set any kind of goal whatsoever, on Goodreads or elsewhere. With a new baby, I’ll be happy if I get to read some books, and I’ll leave it at that. So here are my stats:

• Books read: 84
• Audiobooks: 6
• eBooks: 3
• From library: 23
• Fiction: 54 (64%)
• Nonfiction: 30 (36%, up a little bit from last year)
• Poetry: 0 (harumph)
• Essay collections: 8
• Biography/autobiography/letters/journals: 14
• Theory/criticism: 3
• Short story collections: 1
• Mysteries: 11
• Books in translation: 6

Gender breakdown:

• Men: 30 (36%, a little more equal than last year where men were only 28%, but still off the perfect gender balance I used to [accidentally] keep, which is fine)
• Women: 51 (61%)
• Both:3

Nationalities:

• Americans: 46 (55%)
• British: 24 (28%)
• Canadian: 2
• Japanese: 2
• One each by Bosnian, Czech, Egyptian, Finnish, Irish, and Swedish writers. Plus one book by an author of uncertain nationality (Olaudah Equiano — was he born in Africa or South Carolina?) and three books by multiple authors from various nationalities. There was not as much diversity here as usual, alas.

Year of publication:

• 18th century: 3
• 19th: 0 (wow — down from the already low number of 2 from last year! I need to read some 19th-century fiction soon)
• First half of 20th century: 8
• Second half of 20th century: 20
• 2000-2009: 18
• 2010-2012: 35

I’m reading a lot more contemporary fiction lately, which I don’t like in theory, although I’m enjoying it in practice.

As for cycling, my total mileage is way down this year, for obvious reasons. I rode 3,677 miles, down from 5,213 the previous year. But I rode over 3,000 of those miles in the first half of the year, mostly before I knew I was pregnant. If I’d kept up that pace, I would have been close to my old yearly mileage record of 6,597. That’s a number I won’t see again for a while. I did some races last year, maybe 6 or so, but that’s all over for a while. Next year, I’ll be grateful for every mile I get to ride, and I won’t even think about racing.

And now to think about which books from this year I liked best …

Updates: Recent reading and 35 weeks

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season. All is well here, although everything feels slightly strange, in a not-bad way. Hobgoblin and I usually spend Christmas with my parents, but this time we didn’t want to drive the six hours required to get there so (relatively) close to my due date, so Christmas was quiet, with just the two of us and Muttboy. But we had fun opening presents, eating Hobgoblin’s awesome cooking, and seeing The Hobbit (not my kind of movie, really, and not perfect, but enjoyable nonetheless).

And now I … wait. After submitting final grades last week, I now have no obligations at work until I return 6-8 weeks after the baby is born (at which point I won’t have many obligations — it will be nothing but putting in an appearance in the writing center a couple times a week during the remainder of the spring semester to keep the paychecks coming). So all I have to do is stay healthy, take care of a few things like buying a car seat and arranging the nursery, and sit on the couch and read in between muttering complaints about my sore back. I’m extremely lucky to have so much time to rest before the baby is born (extremely!), but at the same time, I’m wondering what the next few weeks will bring. I generally don’t deal well with having a lot of time on my hands. I get anxious and cranky and find myself doing nothing at all. But this time I’m going to keep telling myself to enjoy it while it lasts, because it won’t last long, and maybe I’ll convince myself. We’ll see.

As for what I’ve read recently, I’ve been ploughing through Francis Burney’s long (900+ page) novel Camilla and should finish it in a day or two. It’s been a fun read. Yes, it could be shorter — there are episodes that could easily be cut — but it’s obviously not the kind of book you pick up when you want a quick read; it’s the kind of book you pick up when you want to be absorbed in a long story, and it’s perfect for that. Camilla is that very typical 18th/19th novel character — the young woman venturing out into the world for the first time without the protection of a mother, finding that all is not what it seems and that people can be treacherous and deceitful. Even those who appear to be kindhearted and friendly can pose dangers — in fact, these are the most dangerous of all because they seem so trustworthy. But they are all too often frivolous, or friends with the wrong people, or profligate with their money, or vain, and they lead poor, susceptible Camilla down dangerous paths. The book is all about the dangers of having the wrong friends, and also, although Burney wouldn’t frame it this way, about how horrible it is that women of Camilla’s background can’t easily earn money. As the novel goes on, it gets more and more obsessed with money and the problem of not having any, and Camilla can do nothing about it except look for new people to borrow from and hope her relatives can come to her rescue. If only she could just work a small part-time job for a while, she would be fine, but, of course, she doesn’t live in that world. And I don’t live in Camilla’s world, a fact for which I’m very, very grateful. The restrictions she lives under are absurd, but no one in her world sees it that way.

I also finished Virginia Woolf’s diary, volume 2, which I’ve been reading off and on for several months now. I’ll admit I skimmed over some of the passages where she talks about her social life, except those where T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster appear, in favor of passages where she discusses her writing and reading and her mental state. Those passages are fascinating, particularly toward the end of this volume where she is working on Mrs. Dalloway. She struggles with it at times, but she also seems to know that this is going to be one of her masterpieces. She is writing in a way that pleases her and she doesn’t much care, at least in her best moments, about what people think. She’s found her style and her subject, and it’s fun to know from the perspective of the future that her confidence is justified.

A few quick notes on other books I’ve read in the last month or so: first, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which was as great as everyone seems to be saying it is. It’s an absorbing story, and at the same time it leads you to thoughts, questions, and conclusions about global economic structures without being at all didactic. She has a great way of keeping her focus on the story, but getting the reader to realize the implications of the story without spelling them out. Surely that’s not easy to do.

I also read Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder, which I liked very much — it has a satisfying structure and is the sort of book that makes you turn back to the first page after finishing it to see what you missed the first time around. It turns out to be worthwhile to take that extra look because then you understand the book as a whole so much better. It’s a book about art, specifically about being a writer, and it’s also about faith. This is where I balked a little bit, for the very personal and non-literary reason that I didn’t understand the religious conversion the main character undergoes. Hers is a kind of faith I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. I’m still undecided as to whether Sophie makes sense as a character. But in a way this is okay because the narrative purposely keeps a distance from her and she is meant to be mysterious (as the novel’s title indicates). I liked the way the novel circles around her, trying and never quite succeeding to understand what happened.

And, finally, I finished Christina Schutt’s novel Prosperous Friends, which was a dark and difficult read that I liked very much. The characters are complicated and frequently unlikeable and the prosperous friends are not always friends you actually want to have. It’s a book about relationships and marriages gone wrong and only occasionally going right. I think I’m in the mood for unlikeable characters these days, so all this was fine, but I particularly liked the writing, which was rich and poetic — not always a good thing as far as I’m concerned, but it worked well here. The writing makes you work a bit, as Schutt does not always fill in all the pieces of the narrative, but it captures the mood of the novel perfectly.

I’ll close with my latest picture, which shows me looking a little bit harried — which is only to be expected, I guess! I hope to be back soon with my year-end round-up.

Updates: Recent reading, new books, and 32 weeks

It’s time for another update post, I think, since I’d like to record at least brief thoughts about the books I’ve finished over the last month or so. Here they are:

• First, there was Kenzaburo Oe’s novel A Personal Matter, which is a strange choice of book to read during pregnancy, since it’s about a man who discovers that his son was born mentally handicapped. He spends the rest of the novel reacting badly to this news. But I wasn’t bothered by the subject matter, and I liked the novel a lot. There’s an unsparing directness to it, a sense of strangeness and a willingness to dig deep into the main character’s disturbing, although in moments unexpectedly sympathetic, mind that I admired.
• Then I read Tim Parks’s illness memoir Teach Us to Sit Still, which I also liked very much. He tells the story of mysterious pelvic pain that he suffered from for many years before feeling desperate enough to seek solutions in unexpected places. He turns to various forms of meditation and finds that this helps him recover and transforms him in deeper ways as well. The book is a really interesting exploration of the limits of western medicine and the surprising (to him and to many other people I’m sure) connections between the mind and the body.
• I listened to The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker on audio, and I’m not sure why, but I didn’t respond to this with as much enthusiasm as I thought I would. Parts of the story were great, the depiction of how people responded to the totally mysterious slowing down of the earth’s rotation in particular. I liked how simply and naturally Walker describes what this was like. The integration of the sci-fi elements with a coming-of-age story was well-done as well. But the coming of age story itself seemed a little cliché. I didn’t really like the teenage romance element.
• Then there was Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which I thought was fabulous. I suppose this is a fairly cliché coming-of-age story as well, but the writing was very, very good, which made up for it. Mitchell has a marvelous way with a sentence. It’s a novel-in-stories, each chapter forming its own vignette in the life of the main character, a thirteen year-old boy who struggles with bullies and a stammer. Mitchell captures this character and the setting in which he lives very well.
• For my mystery book group, I read Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, a book I chose after having heard good things about Hughes. It turned out to be a good choice, as the group liked her, and the discussion was lively. It’s told in the first person from the perspective of the murderer, and the mood is unsettling and claustrophobic. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the extent to which the narrator is unreliable and what exactly the other characters figured out and when. I like that sort of puzzle.
• From the library, I got a copy of Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a book I thought was very well done, a good, entertaining piece of literary fiction that made me feel a little dissatisfied with the state of literary fiction generally. I can’t pinpoint anything wrong with the book, but I guess I’m in the mood for books that are more innovative or do something more exciting on the sentence level. It’s a book about a family in Chicago and their struggles with a wife/mother who is seriously ill because of her weight. The descriptions of the family dynamics are good and if you’re in the mood for a family drama, you might very well like it more than I did.
• Then Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, which I liked with some reservations. It’s partly literary criticism, history, and biography, and partly memoir. I enjoyed the combination of these things. Zambreno focuses on the “wives of modernism,” writers such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien Eliot, and others who were kept from writing or whose writing was dismissed and ignored because of their gender. Zambreno analyzes the language used to belittle these writers and the ideas about women and creativity that still influence us today. All this I liked. I just wished the book had a clearer organizational structure, as it felt repetitious and too long.
• Finally, I just finished Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about her mother’s death, The Long Goodbye. This is a book that grew on me as I read; at first it seemed to be a fairly unremarkable story about illness that I wished had more reflection rather than straightforward narrative. The reflective elements of the book became more important as it went on, however, and the second half or so has a lot of interesting insights into grief and mourning.

I thought I’d give you the list of books I bought during a spur-of-the-moment book buying spree in Manhattan last weekend; I decided that I wanted to get out and walk around the city a bit while I still easily can. I visited 192 Books for the first time, a very small but great bookstore, and also old favorites Three Lives and McNally-Jackson. Here’s what I got:

• Jean Strouse’s Alice James A Biography
• Andre Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
• Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth
• Barbara Comyn’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
• Maggie Nelson’s  Jane: A Murder
• William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
• Roland Barthes A Mourning Diary

And now for a pregnancy update: I’m a little under eight weeks away from my due date. All is going well, although I’m eagerly awaiting the end of the semester, which will get here in about two weeks, so I can stop having to lumber around campus feeling ridiculously large. My teaching is going fine, but it’s getting increasingly uncomfortable to stand in front of a class. I’m both looking forward to some time in which to linger on the couch and do nothing, and worried that I will be too uncomfortable to enjoy it and/or bored out of my mind. We shall see. Here I am at 32 weeks:

Transformational Books

I’ve seen a couple lists of people’s favorite books and authors lately that inspired me to think about what my own list would look like. But what springs to mind is not a list of my favorite books so much as a list of the books that have transformed my thinking about books. Perhaps the two lists are actually the same. I’m not sure. But a list of transformational books seems different somehow. These are books that have changed my idea of what it’s possible to write about and how it’s possible to write. They are the books that excite me and make me want to share them. People who love (some of) these books are people whose taste I’m likely to trust.

I decided to omit a few categories, for the sake of simplicity and brevity. I’m not including children’s or young adult books, although those are perhaps the most transformational books out there. But that’s a subject for a different post. I’m also not including books that have influenced my life generally – obvious examples are religious, political, or philosophical books that have changed my thinking about the world – but am instead sticking to books that have changed my thinking about literature specifically. It also occurred to me that I could put some books on this list that are negative examples, books that have helped me define my literary aesthetic by helping me figure out what I don’t like. But I won’t get negative here.

This list is in no particular order.

• Virginia Woolf’s works, especially To the Lighthouse but also Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own
• Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey
• All of Jane Austen, especially Pride and Prejudice
• Middlemarch
• Montaigne’s essays
• Mary McCarthy’s essays and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and his two essay collections
• Phillip Lopate’s edited essay collection The Art of the Personal Essay
• George Orwell’s collected essays
• Nicholson Baker’s books, especially U&I, The Mezzanine, and The Anthologist
• Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica
• Mark Doty’s Dog Years
• Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book
• Janet Malcolm’s books, especially The Silent Woman
• The Quest for Corvo
• Joan Didion’s The White Album
• Richard Holmes’s Footsteps
• Lauren Slater’s Lying
• Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals
• W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn
• Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time
• David Shield’s Reality Hunger
• Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage
• Scarlett Thomas’s PopCo and Our Tragic Universe
• Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust
• George Saunders’s Civil War Land in Bad Decline
• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
• Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
• Henry James’s novels, especially The Wings of the Dove
• William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
• Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key
• Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
• Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris
• Mary Oliver’s American Primitive
• Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater
• Boswell’s Life of Johnson
• Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Looking over this list, it feels partial and unsatisfactory, but it’s not a bad start.

And because this pregnancy thing is getting serious, I’ll close with one of my latest pregnancy pictures, at 29 weeks:

Updates: Hurricanes, short reviews, and me at 27 weeks

It’s been quite the week around here, although I will be the first to say that though we were hit by hurricane Sandy, we had it relatively easy. We lost power on Monday night during some truly scary winds and spent four days waiting for the power to come back, but those four days were made much more enjoyable by a friend who offered to lend us a generator. Plus there’s the fact that even in a power outage we have not only running water, but hot running water. So thanks to the generator we had a working refrigerator, wireless, a microwave, and some lights. A quick trip to the hardware store to buy a space heater made everything just fine, and now after 24 hours with the power on, I feel back to normal. All in all, it was an easy experience, and I only wish the same were true for everyone who has gone through this storm. Sadly that’s not the case, and I keep reading stories of houses ruined and people who are struggling to get by without basic necessities and lives lost. Let’s hope the recovery moves along quickly.

As for bookish news, I’ll have to do a quick round-up of books I’ve read in the last few weeks. So here’s the list:

• The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger. I listened to this one on audio, and found myself getting impatient with it. There were moments I got caught up in the story – it’s about a young Bangladeshi woman who marries an American and moves to the U.S. (to Rochester, New York, of all places, the city I grew up near) – but I wanted more. More in the way of ideas, more interesting writing, something beyond the story that’s there.
• More Baths, Less Talking, by Nick Hornby. This one was fun. It’s the second collection of Hornby’s Believer columns I’ve read, and I’m ready to read more. These columns are monthly round-ups of his reading and the books that he’s bought, and they are written in what I can only think of as blog-post style (which is not to say that all blogs are written this way!) – chatty, informal, and personal. Hornby is always amusing and he reads a wide range of books, many of which I’m not about to read myself, but sometimes our tastes overlap and occasionally he’ll get me to add books to my TBR list.
• Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf. I’d been reading this book for ages, but I don’t mean to imply it’s not a compelling read, it certainly is. It’s just very lengthy and is written in shortish chapters that provide good stopping points. I loved this book. Lee’s approach is to move roughly chronologically through Woolf’s life but to focus on themes or topics along the way, so the biography is more idea-driven than it is driven by strict chronology. This works for me as I have a sorry mind for facts and prefer to focus on ideas.
• Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek. I really liked two Taylor novels I read a few years ago, but this one disappointed me, and I’m not sure if it’s a matter of my tastes changing or the book not being as good. I’m inclined to think it’s the former. I just didn’t care much about the subject matter – unhappy marriages, affairs, children, disappointment in society. The characters were unlikeable, which I don’t mind generally in novels – I don’t need to like the people I read about – but these didn’t seem unlikeable for interesting reasons. The writing was lively, though, and there moments of insight into human nature I appreciated.
• A.M. Homes’s Music for Torching. This book covers much the same subject matter as the Taylor novel, if in a different country and time period, but I liked it much more. It’s a story about suburban family unhappiness, which doesn’t sound promising, but it’s a step or two beyond strict realism in its approach, and I found the exaggerated, strange behavior of the characters and the almost surreal atmosphere of the novel exhilarating. The book starts with the couple deciding on the spur of the moment to burn their house down, which, we quickly find out, fails completely. From there, the plot maintains a brisk pace. At first, to be honest, I kind of hated all the plot strangeness and the book felt cold, but as I kept reading, I began to get in the right spirit for it. The characters behave like no one I know, and frankly I’m grateful for that, but I admire their desperate bravery.
• Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. This is a collection of essays, in some cases in dialogue or list form, in other cases in more traditional essay format. They describe Kundera’s understanding of the history of the novel and its relationship to history more broadly, and they also offer a summary of Kundera’s own fictional aesthetic. Kundera’s understanding of novel history was fascinating if narrow – by which I mean he drew from a small selection of favorite novelists and I couldn’t help but feel that the history of the novel might be completely different with a another group of authors. But still, there were lots of ideas to ponder here.
• Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I loved this book. This is an example to prove my claim that I don’t need to like the people I read about, as the main character is pretty awful – self-absorbed, untrustworthy, immature, and not only that but an unlikeable guy who’s led a very privileged life. But he is aware of his failings and thinks about them a lot, which saves it for me, as does the fact that the book is meditative and idea-driven and has a lot to say about emotional experience vs. detachment and about poetry and its purpose, if there is one. The main character is an American in Spain on a prestigious fellowship, but he spends his year abroad mostly not working on the project he set for himself, and instead he processes his experiences, observes the people around him, and generally tries to get by without too much unhappiness. It’s a thoughtful, philosophical novel, and it made me want to read more poetry.
• Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries. I feel like every book I like in this list sounds awful when I describe it – in this case, it’s a diary written by an old curmudgeonly type who spends a lot of time thinking about death. But I loved this book too. It’s sort of a diary, but the entries are more like mini-essays where Gray recounts memories from the past or contemplates the fate of his friends (sometimes famous ones like Harold Pinter). He describes the world around him and alternates between satirical amusement and panic at the nearness of death and what he’s made of his life. The style is very informal and conversational, and Gray can tell a story well. It’s the first in a trilogy, and I will have to find the other two.

And now to close with my latest pregnancy picture, at 27 weeks. My hair is wet not because I couldn’t blow dry it without power, but because I never blow dry it, being kind of lazy that way:

Updates: Smith, Chabon, Baker, Wallace, and me, 23 weeks pregnant

The bookish highlight of the last few weeks is undoubtedly getting to hear Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon read at the 92^nd St. Y in Manhattan this past Thursday. The only disappointment is that Hobgoblin and I couldn’t stay late enough to say hi to the authors and get books signed, but the reading itself was great. Chabon went first and read Part 3 of Telegraph Avenue in its entirety, which consisted of one sentence and took about 40 minutes to read. I don’t know much about the novel and don’t know how the section fit into the book as a whole, but it was an entertaining piece, and Chabon is a very good reader. He was funny and managed to capture the one-sentence feel of the excerpt without sounding manic or breathless. Zadie Smith read two sections from NW, both of which were good set pieces. She also was a great reader; I especially admired the way she caught the different accents of her characters. She, too, was funny. They did a brief question and answer session afterward, but the questions were mostly stupid ones, the first one about which actors they would cast to play their characters and another one about the presidential debate the night before. They did a good job answering the questions in spite of the questions’ lameness, although it seemed pretty clear that Chabon felt way more comfortable up there than Smith did. I’ve heard her describe herself as shy, and that seemed to be true, although she was still charming.

So, I finished NW a couple weeks ago, I guess it is, and I liked it a lot. I’ve read a number of mixed reviews of the novel, and the reviewers’ criticisms might have had some validity to them, but they picked things out for criticism that I didn’t think mattered all that much. The book had an energy that I liked, it had characters I was drawn to, it did interesting things with language, and it explored its themes in a satisfactory way. It may have a structure that’s kind of a mess, but that didn’t detract from the good things. It’s told in four parts, the first three following a different character, and a short fourth section wrapping things up. The first and third sections follow two women who grew up as friends and stayed friends into adulthood, although their friendship goes through some difficult times and their feelings toward each other are complex. These sections were my favorites, both for the interesting writing in them, and for the themes they explore: class differences, career and marriage tensions, having or not having children, growing up and changing but staying roughly in the same neighborhood. The second section was also good, but more conventionally told. I think this is a novel that takes a while to absorb and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the critical consensus change over time.

I also read The Long Goodbye for my mystery book group, which I enjoyed, although I felt that it was a little too long and the quality of the writing began to slacken as I neared the end. But Raymond Chandler is still great – he has such a way with images. The book is ultimately about friendship, I think, which is an interesting topic for a mystery novel. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s protagonist, is entertainingly stubborn, illogical, and a smart-ass. I also read Nicholson Baker’s novel  A Box of Matches, which I liked, although it’s in the same vein as The Mezzanine, but not as good and suffers from the comparison. The premise is that the protagonist has decided to get up at 4:00 each morning, light a fire, and write out his thoughts, and these writings are the novel itself. They are about mundane things, as Baker’s novels often are, but described with lavish and loving detail. The best chapters gesture toward deeper ideas and feelings, and I liked the way more profound thoughts are hinted at through the juxtaposition of stories – stories about death, say, or about animals and what we can know about their minds. Not all chapters are that successful, but when they work, they have lightness and depth both.

And just now I finished the new biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, by D.T. Max. I’m still gathering my thoughts about it, but I think it was a very good biography. It’s only 300 pages and therefore not bogged down with detail, but it captures his life well, and every time Max discussed one of Wallace’s books, I immediately wanted to read or reread it. I think Max’s book is very good; what I’m still gathering my thoughts about is what I think about Wallace himself. He is one of my favorite writers, and I’ll return to his books again and again, but he’s a complicated person, unlikeable in a number of ways, but at the same time a charismatic and compelling figure, and also a sad one, a person who battled crushing depression his whole life.

As for what I’m currently reading, that includes the Hermione Lee biography of Woolf (still! I may finish in the next week or two) and also her diaries, although I’ve slowed down with those in an attempt to finish other things. I began listening to The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger on audio the other day, and I also picked up More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby. I need to find a new novel (one to read and not listen to), but I can’t decide which one to pick up next, so I’ve focused on finishing my nonfiction books instead.

Finally, here’s my latest pregnancy picture, at 23 weeks:

I’m still feeling remarkably well and can only hope I feel this way as long as possible. I’m even still riding, although only now and then, and only on my hybrid bike with an adjustable stem that raises up the handlebars (you can see it in the background) and wearing one of Hobgoblin’s much roomier jerseys. But it’s great to be able to ride, and when I’m not riding, I’m often out walking in the woods, which is lovely.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Updates: New (used) books, Green Girls, and NW

So, school has begun.  I’m on top of things so far, but starting school every year requires quite the transition — from having loads of time to all the sudden having to fight for time to read. I love my job and won’t complain, but the transitions are my least favorite aspect of it. This semester feels different to me, though, since I know I won’t be returning to teach in the spring. I normally have an image in my mind of the teaching year running from September to May, but now it’s only September to December, and then … everything changes, as people keep telling me.

Last weekend Hobgoblin and I had the pleasure of seeing our book-buying friends (here and here) and visiting the fabulous Book Barn in Niantic. The store is awesome, partly because it’s HUGE — it has three different locations around town, and each one is sizeable. We visited all three, of course, with a break for dinner. Here’s what I found:

• Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets:  Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers. The kind of nontraditional biography I like.
• Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, a book discussed by a number of bloggers, but most especially Rohan.
• Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, to add to my memoir collection.
• Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves, for when I’m in the mood for something lighter, possibly post-childbirth.
• Willa Cather’s O Pioneers, for when I’m in the mood for another classic-type book.
• Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, ditto, or I should say, for when I’m in the mood for a classic in translation.
• Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, for when I want something more philosophical.

As for reading, last week I finished Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl, and liked it a lot. I heard about it through the Tournament of Books where it got eliminated immediately (by The Marriage Plot, which got so, so, so much more attention, but which wasn’t as intriguing as Green Girl was). Apparently a lot of readers found the main character, Ruth, unlikeable. She IS unlikeable, in some ways at least, although I found myself getting fond of her and certainly sympathizing with her, but that unlikeableness is part of the point. She’s a young American living in London, trying to scrape by on low-paying jobs. She’s isolated and bored and unhappy. She doesn’t have what I can only think of as internal resources to get her through — she’s not interested in much beyond pop culture and fashion, movies and boys and parties. She doesn’t know much about the world and doesn’t know how to reach for anything more meaningful, or even that anything more meaningful exists. She’s a depressed and depressing creation of modern media, consuming as much as she can but never finding any satisfaction in it. She’s full of surface-level images of what girls should be and she does her best to live up to these images while finding the entire enterprise horribly empty.

It’s the critique of fashion, celebrity, party-girl culture that I liked. There is a sense, if only a vague one, that Ruth will eventually move on and grow up, but for right now, she’s trapped. There is also an interesting narrator who in the beginning of the book self-consciously conjures Ruth up and then continues to comment directly on her throughout — a commentary that is both critical and sympathetic and is a pretty good guide for figuring out what to make of the character.

I’ve been reading Zambreno’s blog for a while now and am looking forward to reading her new nonfiction book Heroines. She is a writer I plan to follow.

Then I started Zadie Smith’s new novel NW, which I was lucky to be able to get quickly from the library. I haven’t finished it yet — I’m about 70 pages from the end and hope to finish it today — so I won’t write much about it now. But so far I’m enjoying it. Having a lean, tight structure is not exactly Smith’s thing — the book feels a bit all over the place — but it’s never been my thing either, and I like the book’s different sections with different writing styles. I’m liking the characters and the way Smith conjures up a particular part of London. More on that one soon (hopefully).

Finally, here is another pregnancy picture. I’m going to give you the 19-week one instead of the 20-week, which I wasn’t happy with. I’m past halfway now!