Shelved

Since last I posted, I have read the following:

Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)
The Wonder Spot (Melissa Bank)
Straight Up and Dirty (Stephanie Klein)
Julie and Julia (Julie Powell)
Little Children (Tom Perrotta)
The Last Days of Haute Cuisine (Patric Kuh)
Kate (William J. Mann)
Love is a Dog From Hell (Charles Bukowski)
The Next Los Angeles (Gottlieb et al.)
Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
Tender at the Bone (Ruth Reichl)
Comfort Me With Apples (Ruth Reichl)

Why does it seem like that's a shamefully small list of titles for five plus months of reading? I blame my satellite cable tee vee. Resolution for 2007: READ MORE!

Eating My Words

I read through Mimi Sheraton's memoir in just about a day. I didn't know much about her before this, but I've been on a food writing kick lately, having picked up Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires in the airport on my way home from SFO, and just having waded through Gael Greene's self-obsessed sex and eating universe in Insatiable. Sheraton has an easy way with words, and doesn't dwell too long on minutia, whether its about her personal life or a dining experience. That said, I felt at times she left things short, or held back, and I would have liked to have known more about her reviewing years, much like how Reichl centered her narrative in G & S. I have the two other Reichl tomes on my shelf, and am just getting started with her Tender at the Bone. I might switch back out to fiction, but this stuff is rather delicious fare, so who knows if I'll play the variety game, or keep feeding my interest.

Cybill Disobedience

i have a feeling i am about to lose face completely here. i aim to do it with style, and grace, mind you, and just an ounce of self-mocking. i have deviated completely from the plan, and have thoroughly spoiled the image of myself as some sort of highbrow literary mucky-muck. oh, who am i kidding. the fact of the matter is, i have to supplement my high-quality reading with some low-quality material. do you think i spent my childhood with my nose buried in sweet valley high and nancy drew and, later, v.c. andrews novels only to spurn my questionable taste after getting one and a half college degrees in the art of the english language?

i think not.

i have a thing for celebrity biographies. autobiographies are best, actually, because you get to see first hand what material they opt to publish about themselves. you can also take guesses as to how much a hand the co-writer had in the deal. i spent my saturday evening devouring cybill shepherd's hot pink autobio, cybill disobedience. and i loved every minute of it.

here's the thing. i've a long history of revering women in entertainment; often they're underdogs, slightly unpopular, unconventionally beautiful, controversial, or somewhat obnoxious. some may remember the summer of 2003: the summer of katharine hepburn. or perhaps my long time love for susan sarandon. bette midler. diane keaton. lucille ball. ethel merman. carol burnett. what can i say? i like strong women--they have all colored my life.

the odd thing about my recent spark of interest in ms. shepherd (aside from the blatantly obvious reason being the release of moonlighting seasons one and two on dvd and my subsequent reliving of many nights of childhood entertainment) is that of all the above mentioned people, she is actually the only one i've ever met. it isn't much of a story--she's kind of goofy, likes attention, can be loud, is extraordinarily beautiful up close, and was on the whole, extremely pleasant and nice to be around. and boy... now that i've read this book...do i know she's got some stories!

i certainly wouldn't endorse anyone's reading this book because of its literary genius. in fact, i don't think i ever endorse the reading of a biography because to me those connections are personal. if i want to take the time to read something about someone's life in depth, well, that's a committment on my part to, almost, invite them into my life. (the best thing about kate hepburn's terse autobio, me, is that it's on audio book, recorded, albeit abridged, by her; nothing beats cranking up her scratchy old voice on the cd player and hearing the succinct tale of her loss of virginity in 1928.) it's them telling me their stories. and if i care, i'm a captive audience.

i'm not sure i buy all of cybill's stories about how things went down on both the sets of her tv series, moonlighting and cybill. it pains me to read about tense work relationships because i've lived tense work (and other) relationships, and i know it's not pleasant, and there's a voice in my head asking "but why does it have to be that way?" it troubles and saddens me. i don't like conflict, and i don't celebrate it. i wish things had played out differently, which of course i know i have no say in. it just bothers me, that's all. why can't people get along? hell, i don't know. maybe she really is a meglomaniacal, controlling, insensitive bitch. she's also pretty liberal about her sex life (a "cybill sandwich" being an episode that comes to mind) which i enjoyed. i'm incurably nosy. i figure i'd tell it, so why wouldn't they? and she does. yay for smut!

it's funny, the other day when i mentioned her to someone they said "but she's all washed up now." i kind of took offense. hey, i bet it isn't easy being a 55 year old former beauty queen and allegedly difficult television star of the 80s and 90s! but, yeah, sure. she isn't doing much work. but that's cool. i was blown away by the power of her first film, the last picture show, and moonlighting's in heavy viewing rotation. little capsules of life. and i wouldn't mind meeting her again. don't know if i'll ever get the chance.

at least i could tell her i read her book. and liked it.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

i've just finished eggers' A.W.O.S.G. and, i must say, it's nice to not have to lift that weighty volume anymore. really, in just the purely physical sense, and even in its mere paperback form, the thing is heavy. weighty. long.

i'm a tad bit mixed on my feelings, which is odd, because i'd expected to be vehement in one direction or the other about it at this point. it seems to me that it is the kind of book that you capital-h-hate or you italicized-lovelovelove. i liked it. for the most part, i enjoyed it.

the best aspect for me was that i knew nothing of the story, the plot, the narrative, the facts, et al. before i read it. in fact (buries face in hands) i thought it was a novel. but, no--apparently it's a memoir. but not a full memoir; it is a segment of a fairly young life, a patchwork piece of a larger quilt that alludes to the other segments that make the whole. i think it is its holey-ness that keeps me from loving the book.

i also knew just a shade about dave eggers before i began. in fact, i think i could probably nod and say, "mmm, yes, mcsweeney's" if his name came up. this is probably because my mother told me that. my mother is extremely savvy, and secretly hip, and also is one of the few people i know who can properly "surf" the web. she knows things. she finds things. she gets me things--books--off my amazon wish list and puts them with my stocking on christmas morning. this is how i came to own A.W.O.S.G. of course i filed it on my shelves and didn't pick it up until a couple of days ago. i think it struck me to read it then because someone had mentioned it somewhere out there in the blogosphere (don't we hate that term? can we find a new one, please?) on one of those book memes (again, meme? i understand memo was taken, but, meme?) that's going around like the flu. someone, i believe, had listed it as one of many books they felt was overrated. the lightbulb went off. i found it on my shelf. and i began to read.

just when eggers' self-conscious, self-congratulatory, hyperstylized intro pointed out its own shortcomings (namely the above mentioned attributes) he moved on. i trudged ahead, eager for the "real" story to start. now, 400+ pages later, and i'm still a little hungry for the real story. there are gaps. gaps that i can see exist to protect, to cushion, to arouse, to point out the fact that in life there are gaps and lapses and things we don't know, but the gaps bother me. i want info. i want details.

i found that i could read fast, skimming, and not miss a thing. but in some places i had to go back and read over a part, because i hadn't understood. what timeframe was this? is this theory or memory? did this happen? is this hyperbole?

i don't know. i'm not sure.

so, yeah. i liked it. i'm not passionately for nor against it.

the obligatory testing and kick-off post

i wanted a place to keep track of all the books i read. so, why not do it here?

i've been intrigued by those folks i know who embark on projects like "52 in 52" (which, to my understanding, is an aim to read 52 books during 52 weeks, or, as those of us who can't count that high like to say, one year). i always think to myself, hey! i bet i read an average of 52 books a year, at least. i am, after all, getting a master's in english! (okay, so technically the MA is in creative writing, but i do take several lit courses.) anyhow, the point of all this is that i wanted a place to keep a log of the books i've read and am reading.

and here we are.

i have made some sidebar categories, with the titles of (and links to) what i've read thus far, which is what i can recall reading since the start of 2005 (i'm at 22!) which means i'm about two titles off to balance my title-to-week ration. this isn't much to be worried about, because i'm guessing that i've left something(s) off my list, and i'm also about 75 pages close to finishing my latest read, which is Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I know for certain that I did not include a couple of the anthologies I've had to read bits and pieces of in some classes this year, and a couple of poetry books, as well as the few tour guides i've worn ragged in my travels to vancouver, portland/seattle, new york, and san francisco, and i'm also not including the piles, and stacks, and massive amounts of critical articles i've ploughed through for some course related work.

i think i'm doing pretty well, actually!

i've organized the sidebar into four categories:
NOSE BURIED IN (FOR FUN) is what i'm reading purely for pleasure.
NOSE BURIED IN (FOR SCHOOL) is what i'm reading because it's been assigned. which doesn't mean there's no pleasure in it, but chances are i wouldn't be reading it otherwise.
STUDYING FOR THE GRE is an ongoing process. i'm due to take the GRE (both the regular and the literature subject test) in the fall, because most, if not all, of the PhD programs to which i am applying require them. i've been working from the priceton review book for a couple of months now, and am trying to round out my BA and MA work/reading thus far (which has been somewhat unbalanced in favor of contemporary or medieval work) with classics, or, at the very least, bits and pieces from those norton anthologies we english students know and love.
CLOSED THE BOOK ON should be self-explanatory.

it's probably not too hard to scan the last list and figure out what classes i took at the start of the year (narratives of the vietnam war and a close study of the medieval poem piers plowman) and doing all that reading meant that, on the one hand, i was working at a one-two title per week rate, but that i also was reading jack all for myself. it's those times when i bury my face in dvd reruns as relief--who can read on top of all that reading? but now things have mellowed, and i'm aiming to keep up the reading. it makes me a better writer, for one, and that is something that i can see as a tangible result.

so here's to books, and the tremendous comfort, joy, learning, and delight they can bring!