The Wordy Updates: The Book List

Although you’ll probably not believe me given the lack of book list updates around here, I’ve been reading. A lot. As you may have noticed, the writing thing isn’t going so well (I attribute that to a busy work schedule and pretty, pretty dresses that must be perused).

First thing’s first: I’ve gone through the entirety of the Jasper Fforde canon since the last book list. After The Eyre Affair, I was unable to resist buying first the rest of his Thursday Next novels, and subsequently failed to resist the call to his Nursery Crime series. I am extremely disappointed that Shades of Grey, advertised as coming in July 2008, is now slated to appear in summer 2009. Throughout my reading of the Thursday Next novels, I was absolutely delighted — it’s so much fun to read a writer who appreciates, admires and, well, loves the written word so much (because it’s not so obvious in some of the other things I’ve read in the recent past). From integrating footnotes into a vital part of the novels to making the clichéd exhortation of falling into a book possible, the Thursday Next novels were absolutely golden to me. Imagine my delight in realizing that there are three more on their way!

The Nursery Crime series, a spin-off from the Nextian novel The Well of Lost Plots (but not acknowledged as such in the Nursery Crime series since the Nursery Crime series is supposed to be a world unto its own), is also charming, but on a different level than the Thursday Next novels. If you think the Thursday Next novels require a huge suspension of disbelief, you’ve seen nothing until you tackle the Nursery Crime series. The detective series, headlined by Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, deals with crime within the nursery rhyme world — nursery rhyme characters live in the Reading, Berkshire area and Jack Spratt is in charge of the so-called Nursery Crimes Division. The books have dealt with the untimely and suspicious death of Humpty Dumpty and the disappearance of Goldilocks (with an insane Gingerbreadman thrown in for good measure). Like the Nextian series, the Nursery Crime series is snarky, self-deprecating and witty — you do you have to be on your toes, and the more you know about nursery rhymes, the better. Watch out for a public fascination with crime stories (more so than in real life; imagine a press conference everyday with a show-off detective outlining how he pieced together a crime), thermonuclear cucumbers, and aliens who speak in binary. I won’t say that it’s as engaging as the Thursday Next novels, but it holds its own. It’s best to let them stand on their own merits, anyway. However, don’t read the Nursery Crime novels until you’ve read the aforementioned Well of Lost Plots.

In between the readings of the two Fforde series, I also had the misfortune of picking up Sloane Crosley’s self-indulgent tripe, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (seriously, lady, just stick to blogs like I’m doing; I’d never inflict my vain, self-centered writing on the publishing world!). I picked up Crosley’s essays because it was noted that she had a similar tone to Sarah Vowell — whose new book, The Wordy Shipmates, I’m currently reading — and Sarah Vowell should be insulted. The driving idea behind Crosley’s essays is that no matter what she does, she doesn’t come out ahead and is prone to massive fuck-ups that she can only attribute to being a strange, strange person. It’s one big love and/or hatefest with herself, like every other person in the world has with themselves. Except that Sloane Crosely got to publish and make money off of her stories, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.

There are no great insights that Crosley experiences and reveals to the reader; no careful examination, no witty observations, no everyday occurrences that take on another layer of meaning thanks to her writing. As far as I can tell, she just tell stories that she thinks may be funny, that she thinks may have imparted a lesson on her (but not on the reader), thinks have some kind of introspective or at least quirky bent to them. The only time I identified with her was when she was discussing her name — in the chapter “Bastard out of Westchester”— but even then she cites her name as “a placeholder for the heritage and cultural grounding [she] never had.” And that’s where Crosley’s writing ultimately fails — whatever it is she’s trying to bring to the table, she does it seemingly without context, and consequently she flounders. Everyone has heritage and cultural grounding — it may not be what Crosley considers unique or exotic, but we all come with some cultural context. Just because American culture is a bit of a salad doesn’t make it bland.

I use my name as a placeholder as a reminder of the cultural heritage and grounding that I know I possess and want to honor. Here I am, the daughter of Mexican Catholic immigrants who made good, sent three of their kids of Michigan and one to MIT, grew up in a vanilla-white town, fell in love with medieval/Renaissance/Early Modern literature, is marrying a Ph.D. scientist raised Jewish from New York, is somehow an event planner even though it’s writing and research that really rocks, has lived in Mexico and Canada and Michigan and now DC . . . I’m always disappointed in people who say they have no culture. Yes, you do. It doesn’t have a simple narrative structure, but it’s there. And to tell bland stories to get around thinking about who you are? Way to undermine yourself. It’s not charming. It’s just sad. I’m still trying to find a way to write about myself intelligently — Crosley still hasn’t achieved this, but she managed to get published.

One weekend later . . .

Speaking of the comparison that brought me to Crosley, I’ve now finished the newest Sarah Vowell book since I began writing this book list. What can I say? Only Sarah Vowell can persuade me to read about pilgrims. A focus on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell hones in on the persons who begin to create a rich history for the United States, and contrasts them with the ideas of Puritanism and pilgrims that we have today. Say evangelical and you automatically think of pilgrims, but this is not so. The Massachusetts Bay Colony pilgrims were far from the God-within, book-larnin’s’ for pansies, give-me-my-gun evangelicals that the word “pilgrim” may bring to mind. These people established Harvard, after all. Go to Harvard today and you’re an elite bastard (what if you go to school across the river? Are you then an elite nerd? Mathgeek?).

As I’ve said before, United States history as it’s taught in schools is terrible; Mexican history teachers are much more willing to get into the conflicts that arose between various factions, will gleefully recount bloody details and obscure events, are happy to slander any particular president if the historical facts call for it. Not so in the States — history is so damn sanitized that even Andrew Jackson comes off as looking good after he force-marches the Cherokee down the Trail of Tears. What I enjoyed about 1776 and now The Wordy Shipmates is that the personages that Vowell presents are much more than people leaving England for an uncertain fate, but bravely facing what may come in the name of liberty; once there she goes into depth of how they actually conducted themselves, from regularly banishing people who questioned the church fathers and magistrates to establishing new colonies that demanded the right to religious freedom to engineering one of the worst slaughters of American Indians. Here’s John Winthrop, a pious bastard who is sometimes likeable and sometimes downright despicable; Roger Williams, who founds Rhode Island and presents himself to a loudmouth who believes in equality and the right to practice one’s own religion; here’s Anne Hutchinson, who was always a martyr according to our history books, but who damned herself during her trial and was a precursor to the proudly uneducated evangelical that terrorizes our country today (yes, I used that word on purpose, dearies). And here are the sachems of the local American Indian tribes, first betraying one another in order to survive alongside the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and then attempting (futilely) to band together in order to push back against the colony as its dominance rose. As with 1776, you learn that it wasn’t just Plymouth Rock-First Thanksgiving-1776! The intricacies in between are what shaped the nation for better or for worse, and of course Vowell adds her own patented dry-wit observations that make you laugh out loud until you realize with horror that, funny as the observation may be, it’s still acurrate and demonstrates how a) smart or 2) cruel those wordy shipmates actually were.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

1) Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany by Steven E. Ozment
2) Women at the Beginning – Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary by Patrick J. Geary
3) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
4) A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts by Robert Bolt
5) Lisey’s Story by Stephen King
6) 1776 by David McCullough
7) The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño (Translation by Natasha Wimmer)
8) The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
9) Duma Key by Stephen King
10) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
11) Me by Katharine Hepburn
12) The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs
13) The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
14) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
15) Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
16) The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
17) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
18) I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
19) Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
20) The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
21) Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
22) Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
23) The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
24) The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
25) Blaze: A Posthumous Novel by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
26) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Re-read:

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Currently Reading:

1) Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes by Eamon Duffy
2) The Aeneid by Virgil (Translation by Robert Fagles)

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Boyfriend, or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
2) Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn by William J. Mann