Tiffin's Reading for 2009

I've jumped ship from the 75 Challenge. Tad's move gave me impetus to do what I've been contemplating for a couple of weeks now. I have recently retired and find myself wanting to kick off the traces, read as whimsy and interest take me, not be bound to a number or a challenge. To read qualitatively, not quantitatively. Mostly I want to rediscover my passion for reading, a passion which has taken a beating over the last two decades as I juggled work with family responsibilities.

READING GOALS 2009

1. Read and review more Canadian Lit.
2. Read five unread classics this year.
3. Reread some classics I read so long ago that I can't remember them.
4. Continue to explore literature in translation from other cultures.
5. Read some authors I've somehow managed to avoid, although not intentionally, like William Faulkner.
6. Stop reading a book if it hasn't pulled me into it by page 50.
7. Keep a reading journal.
8. Start reading poetry again.
9. Never have a day go by where I don't read something, even for a bit.
10. Push myself outside my comfort zone more but don't beat myself up when I just want a comfort read.

Yay for us! Yay for Tiffin!

I was spending a ton of time here anyway, Lois, reading the wonderful posts and comments. This feels MUCH better.

Bonjour Tiffin. Welcome aboard.

Just lost a big post...grrrrr
Merci beaucoup, Urania.

JANUARY in REVIEW

1. Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
2. Un Lun Dun by China Miéville
3. When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
4. The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell
5. The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell
6. The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

The old 75 thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/51785 (I can't do links yet)

I'm not going to recreate the 75 challenge comments, but:
Sarah Caudwell: regrettably, her untimely death means that there will be no more of these wonderful, quirky, erudite mysteries. An LT friend pointed my nose in her direction and I devoured 3 of the 4. I'm holding back from reading the 4th as it is the last. I will read it on a day which needs a lift.

The David Sedaris was pretty much what you'd expect from him, I think. An ok read.

Un Lun Dun was delightful, pure and simple. It was touted as a YA book but I think it would delight anyone unless you are someone who detests alternative worlds and anything which smacks of fantasy.

Colm Toibin's The Master was one of my top reads for last year so I want to read more of his work. The Blackwater Lightship didn't disappoint.

I have also read Nigella Lawson's latest cookbook fairly thoroughly.
Also have read about 286 pages of Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie by Victoria Glendinning, as an ARC. Duty impels me to finish the thing but I am not enjoying Charles Ritchie's personality at all. I love Bowen's style of writing when she writes about anything except her gasping love of Ritchie, which has me scratching my head. So I have set it aside for a while, to take a breather from it.

I read 3 or 4 online newspapers daily; am following Alexander McCall Smith's latest serial effort, "Corduroy Mansions" in the Telegraph; have a serious magazine habit but the magazines themselves aren't particularly serious. Love "Uncut" from Britain.

Hola Tiffin

Welcome! I see you owe the lamp. lol

The Master is on my TBR bookcase for sometimes in the future. Nice to see it highly endorsed.

Hi, tiffin. It's good to see another familiar face.

hey, good to find you here. Are you going to link to this from your 75 book challenge thread?

*very small voice* I don't know how to do links.

>8 wandering_star:,9: done!

Tiffin!!!!!!!! I am so glad to find you here too!
I am enjoying myself reading what everybody posts, even though I have not posted anything myself.
How do you like Corduroy Mansions? I enjoy it very much, as well as all the other things I have read by A.McCall Smith.
I am pleased you liked Sarah Caudwell, and I join you in the sorrow for her passing away.

#10: laughing because that's how I've always done links: some kind friend bails me out. Techno doofus here. ETA: thank you.
#11: I'm getting a kick out of Corduroy Mansions and am enjoying the serial format, which keeps you cliff-hanging. I read his earlier series in the Scotsman online, the 44 Scotland Street series featuring Bertie. I also have the books but it was so much fun to read it in the serial version. I wonder if people who read Dickens' serials felt the same way?

Lovely to see you here.

We can work on the CanLit goal together :-)

I am occasionally shocked at discovering a gem. Last year it was Double Hook. Yeah, sure, I sort of "knew" it was out there, and that some people thought highly of it, but then I read it and was bowled over. One of the truly great works of CanLit, IMHO. So perhaps there are more unexpected thrills in store for me.

Have you read the new Miriam Toews yet?

>11 aluvalibri: & 12: I've been downloading the Corduroy Mansions podcasts and will listen to it once I they are done (next week, I think?). I enjoyed his #1 Ladies Detective Agency stories but wasn't a fan of the Portuguese Irregular Verb stuff, so we'll see how this goes.

#13: thank you, Polutropos. No I haven't read the new Miriam Toews nor have I read Double Hook. Two to watch out for.
#14: I heard A.M.S. read an excerpt from Portuguese Irregular Verbs when he had just written the first book. It was delightful because he was cracking himself up at his own reading. Then my husband read it out loud to one of our lads after he had surgery. Somehow hearing it out loud made it really funny - do you have someone who could read it to you? hehe

Hi Tiffin :)

This must be the week for AMS! Like Tad, I've also been downloading the Corduroy Mansions audio to listen to later. At the moment I'm listening to "Portugese Irregular Verbs" read by Hugh Laurie. The various accents he is using are amusing in themselves. And von Igelfeld is a ridiculously pompous baffoon!

hi digi, isn't von Igelfeld a hoot? I worked with a member of faculty just like him, which made faculty board meetings excrutiating after reading the books. Must hunt down the Hugh Laurie reading.

Kate's Klassics by Kate Camp

New Zealander Kate Camp does a monthly look at a work of classic literature for her radio show, "Kate's Klassics". This book discusses ten big ones: Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, David Copperfield by Dickens, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Odyssey by Homer, The old Testament by "God et. al", Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, War and Peace by Tolstoy, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

This is not an academic look at these works but a refreshingly personal discussion of each of the books and their merit to the author herself. I thought of a radio audience listening to her say of Crime and Punishment: "For six hundred pages, Raskolnikov is just one bad joke away from disaster." Or hearing of Elizabeth's engagement to Mr. Darcy: "And as if we weren't already exploding with happiness, the good news renders Mrs. Bennet speechless."

I read it with great pleasure and a constant half grin on my face. I felt a strong kinship with someone who can quote a passage from The Song of Solomon and say "That bit always makes me go all gooey" or who would willingly marry Mr. Darcy while acknowledging how good Will Ladislaw looks in a long maroon coat but would "give them all up to be tearing Heathcliff's hair out on one dark and stormy night".

Glad you enjoyed it, Tiffin. I wonder how well Tim Jones and cmt know Kate - and whether she is, in fact, a celeb of sorts in NZ?

Thanks for recommending it, Kiwi. As you could guess, I didn't agree with her about Moby Dick, but admired her impassioned "critique" of the book. I don't know about celeb status, as very few on LT have the book but that might be because of the cost, at least in Canada. *ouch* for a paperback.

#19: I've never met her, but I will soon: she's the guest reader at the New Zealand Poetry Society monthly meeting on Feb 16th in Wellington, and I plan to be there!

I wouldn't describe her as a celeb (you pretty much have to be a newsreader, a weather presenter, an All Black* or a Silver Fern** for that), but she's certainly better known than most writers, and a lot of people have enjoyed the "Kate's Klassics" show, as have I when I've caught it.

*Member of the NZ men's rugby team
**Member of the NZ women's netball team

Well, tiffin, after reading what you, kiwidoc, and Tim have said about her, the book has gone on my Amazon wishlist.

Is her radio show streamed (or whatever it is called) online? I'm off to check. I would love to hear her as well as read her book!

*ahem* timjones, I do know what an All Black is. I can't do the Hakka but I know a prop from a winger and that biting someone's ear in the scrum is bad form.

Ha - Tui - you sound like a NZer. I spent my teen years sitting on the sidelines of rugby fields drooling over the boys, and I don't know as much as you!!

...and Tim - you can tell Kate that it is me that is responsible for her increased readership in North America. I deserve an advanced copy of her next book.

....oh,Tui. Moby Dick - I loved it, cannot stop raving about it since I read it last year. Is it the seafaring references that put you off, or the style of prose? Or both?

I was able to listen to a program on Hans Christian Andersen through this link. Wonderful.

I think Moby is like that: you love it or you don't. Yes, I was bored to tears by the whaling technology, sickened by how the whales died, thought the whole thing was far too long, was mildly amused by the homoeroticism but not at all amused by the knowledge that Melville beat his long-suffering wife (out of his own frustrated homosexuality? who knows). I know, don't trust the artist, trust the art, but it tainted it for me regardless. And I didn't find anything about Ahab attractive, not as hero nor as villain, not even as tormented fellow human. Ok, as a metaphor, the whale was a whopper of a phallus, I'll grant Melville that. hehe But Ahab's maniacal fixation, his speaking of himself in the third person, his speech peppered with apostrophes, with his eyes glinting kind of thing made me want to kick him down the whale's maw, "splintered helmet of a brow" and all. I can read overwrought prose with the best of them but Ahab just wasn't my cuppa. I was soundly on the side of the whale.

Ha - Tui - you certainly put it down!!! I think you should join Kate and maybe write a companion book. Ever thought about that?

Marise - I couldn't get through on your link, but I will certainly keep trying. Thanks.

Ah, Tui,

the above description is so wonderful.

I was SUPPOSED to have read Moby in a third year course, seems like 20,000 years ago. I did not, giving up after fewer than 100 pages, I am sure. I never summed up my objections as eloquently as you did above but you did it for me.

I occasionally feel a slight tinge of guilt, and think I should return to it, for the sake of my well-roundedness, but on second thought, perhaps not.

:-)

Kiwi, seriously, I know it is a good book and fully worthy of its position as a classic of literature. I think the fundamental problem with it for me was that Ahab's personality really grated against my own, with a certain Scots-Canadian Calvinism on my part constantly wanting to tell him to just get over himself. I find that kind of profound egocentricity incredibly annoying. However, I did like the character of Queequeg a lot and felt sad when he died.

Oh thanks, Polu! I should add that I read it as an undergrad (yonks ago) and haven't given it a chance since...but there is so much I haven't read, so I think Sir Moby will have to sleep in the deep with his Ahab, never to be reread.

Most seriously, Tui, you are very perceptive in all your observations. I agree with you in all those fundamentals - and you give us a wonderful description of your reactions. I think you have a tremendous gift with words - and would love to see THAT recognized more.

But I just liked it, despite all of the above. I liked the emotional reactions I had to the characters, even if they were not all positive ones. I way preferred it to, say, Don Quixote, so that must say something about my personality.

It's all allowed, Karen. How dull it would be indeed if we were all the same. Thank you for your kind words too.

Um, I read Moby Dick in fourth grade. I suspect that maybe I didn't get as much out of it as Melville put into it, but now, half a century later, I am unlikely to try it again.

#24: Sorry, tiffin - if I had known your name was Tui when I posted that comment, I would have realised you were likely to know what an All Black is. But it seemed sexist not to explain the All Blacks if I was going to explain the Silver Ferns!

#36, Tim: I haven't a drop of New Zealander in me - that's the nickname my Dad gave me when I was wee. I only learned in adulthood that it is actually a New Zealand bird! But my two lads were rugby players, as was my husband, so we're fans of the game. And great admirers of the All Blacks (even though I always cheer for Scotland or Ireland).

BACK ON TOPIC:

The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
*SPOILERS OF A SORT* although nothing here which isn't implied on the cover blurbs - it's the writing and shrewd psychology which are the stars of this book

Imogen Gresham is 37, her powerful lawyer husband, Evelyn Gresham is 52. He is everything she desires and admires, with his handsome chiseled features, at the height of his masculine powers in her eyes, successful, accomplished and virile. The reader, however, gets another view of him, seeing a domineering alpha male who is entirely self-serving and self-absorbed, although he can be charming if he chooses. Imogen, on the other hand, is emotional, sentimental, loving old things for the wear on them, history which shows in cracks on mugs or missing silver finishes on platters. She is afraid to stand up to him for fear of upsetting the tranquility of his home life, a life which has unfortunately come to include their eleven year old son treating her just like his father does. At the point where we intersect with her, she has become effete and useless, unable to drive or to engage in the usual rural pastimes of hunting and fishing, purposeless and inept. She is not, however, unintelligent. Rather the opposite. It is just not a kind of intelligence which her husband appreciates or understands.

Imogen has her admirers, some fervent, and loyal close friends, partly because she is beautiful, gentle and considerate but also because those people aren't particularly powerhouse types themselves. But we see early on in the book that she does not have her husband's deep love or admiration because she lacks certain qualities which their frumpier middle-aged neighbour, Blanche Silcox, has in spades. Enter the femme fatale in a most unlikely guise of tweeds, portly middle and bad hats.

This is the tale of the dissolution of a marriage and the start of an affair, held up to the light and put under the microscope by Elizabeth Jenkins somewhat in the manner of Barbara Pym (although without the same depth of wry wit). Quietly and inevitably, we watch everything unravel, knowing what the ending will be but unable to stop watching the impending train crash. Only it never really is a crash because everyone is too civilised and genteel for that. I was interested to read in the Afterword that the book was somewhat autobiographical, as Jenkins sought to write out a similar betrayal in her own life.

There are quirky neighbours in the form of the Leepers, with a siren sister Zenobia who becomes the representation for the most extreme manifestation of female sensuality. Jenkins is looking at what makes relationships tick, playing with characters like Zenobia to help Imogen understand what has happened to her marriage, to herself. Woven throughout the story is Gavin Gresham's friend Tim Leeper. Tim is, as best as I can understand him, the thing with feathers which perches in the soul but is also a mirror image of Imogen herself, her shadow which bends around walls.

This is excellent writing, which drew me in and kept my interest to the end. I don't know if it would appeal to an alpha male like Evelyn Gresham, however.

Afterthought: Jenkins plays with genders a lot in this book, the alpha male having a soft, feminine name, Imogen's parallel character being a young male. Must think about this more.

That sounds like an excellent book tiffin! I really enjoyed your review as well, especially the descriptions of characters which I find is what really draws me to books. I also loved your phrase, "Enter the femme fatale in a most unlikely guise of tweeds, portly middle and bad hats." I can just picture her!

Tiffin -- love your comments on Moby Dick (a book I may try one day). I especially loved this comment: Ok, as a metaphor, the whale was a whopper of a phallus. Thanks for the laugh.

Thanks, nickelini (I have the worst time with your nom, as I keep wanting to spell it the Canadian way: nicklelini). Did you like how Moby Dick took over a huge chunk of this thread when it wasn't even one of the books I read? harrumph!

ETA: I meant to say thanks, too, Laura. Yes, I love good characterisations too.

#41 - (I have the worst time with your nom, as I keep wanting to spell it the Canadian way: nicklelini).
-------------

Sorry to confuse you! My name is a combination of my surname (Nickel), which is Low German, and my husband's Italian surname (Biagini). It's our family nickname. I've heard that "nickle" is the Canadian spelling, but I don't think I've ever seen it actually spelled that way. When I was growing up I always thought pickle was spelled "pickel." I think I was about 18 when I figured it out.

I confuse easily. ;) Like your pickel story.

Oh, man, I confuse easily too. Join the club!

Whenever I heard the surname Nickel, I think of my daughter's favourite book when she was about 8 - The Secret Wish of Nannerl Mozart by Barbara Nickel- she loved music and this book was a treat for her. Are you related to Barbara?

I've read that book! I thought I might be related because Barbara Nickel comes from a very small town where my dad spent a whole chunk of his childhood. But she must be related to those other Nickels that I'm not related to in that town. Nickel is also the surname of the main character in Miriam Toews A Complicated Kindness. I have to love that book just based on that alone.

Oh Joyce,

how I wish I had time to reread A Complicated Kindness. I love that book, though my name is NOT Nickel.

:-)

The Tortoise and the Hare looks great. I always add more books to my TBR list when I visit your thread!

Going back to #s 18-26, I went to the New Zealand Poetry Society meeting featuring Kate Camp as guest reader, but forgot to report back.

Unfortunately, Kate wasn't physically at her best; in fact, she had to go into hospital the day after the reading (which made it all the more commendable that she came along in the first place), which meant that she was unable to stay for the usual Q&A after she read.

This probably isn't the best place to reveal that, after enjoying many of the poems in her first collection, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, I haven't kept up with her more recent poetry. She read almost exclusively new work, and these were longer and more complex poems than I recall being her style: poems I would have to read on the page to get their full effect.

So I enjoyed the reading, but it didn't have the immediate effect of making me want to go out and buy the poet's latest book, as occurred, for instance, when I heard Johanna Aitchison read a year or so ago.

Thanks, Tim. I had been wondering. It doesn't sound like a good combination: feeling unwell and trying to read poetry to others perhaps best left for them to read themselves.

I agree, but in fairness I have to say that my friend and fellow poet Harvey Molloy thought Kate Camp's new poems were brilliant.