Month: November 2015

Sunday Post #37: Complete

Posted on by Dana

Sunday PostI didn’t post last Sunday because I was returning for my favorite conference, the National Council of Teachers of English annual convention. It was great. I picked up some excellent free and cheap books and enough book recommendations to keep me busy for a long time.

NaNoWriMo is going well, word-count wise. I think I’ll finish. I’m not excited about the book as I’m nearing the end. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a fanfic or if it’s because I’ve run out of steam. I was delighting myself writing it at the beginning, but I haven’t even wanted to read what I’ve written lately to my husband. Still, I’m making myself plug away and finish it. Even if I’m not enjoying it as much as I was, the story is still coming remarkably fast. One thing I think I’ve learned this month is that I have a lot of stamina and speed when I give myself permission to write a crappy first draft and turn off my internal editor.

I have completed my goal of reading 52 books for the year. In fact, I just finished the 53rd. In the last week, I’ve finished five books and reviewed four:

Today, I finished listening to an audio book of Amy Snow by Tracy Rees. I was torn over this one for a long time. It was okay, not great. It’s actually a bit over-the-top campy at times, and I think somewhere near the beginning, I realized that Rees was writing a send-up of those overwrought Victorian novels (or I hope she was; otherwise, oh dear). Mrs. Vennaway should remind just about every Brontë fan of Aunt Reed—horrible to a child for just about no reason. In fact, Amy Snow does owe a bit of a debt to those other books. The main character’s self-deprecation is grating, though, and she never becomes as strong or interesting as Jane Eyre. If you read it with an eye toward thinking of it as an homage, then it’s fine. I finished it, more to discover the ending to the novel’s puzzle than anything else, but I found the ending unsatisfying, even if fairly complete. Still, if it’s an homage, it’s a fairly clever one. For a light read, it was well-researched, at least. The setting managed to intrigue even when the characters didn’t.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I’m counting Amy Snow as my Surrey book, since that’s where the Hatville estate where Amy comes from is located.

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week on your blog, and showcase books and things we have received. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Image adapted from Patrick on Flickr.

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A Double Review: Camus and Kamel

Posted on by Dana

I somehow never got around to reading The Stranger until yesterday. I finished it today and immediately picked up Kamel Daoud’s companion novel The Meursault Investigation. If you, like me, waited to read The Stranger, the crux of the plot is that a disaffected French Algerian man buries his mother; he is unable to grieve, or indeed, to feel much of anything. He strikes up an affair with a woman he works with, becomes involved in an argument between his neighbor Raymond and Raymond’s mistress, whom Raymond believes is cheating on him. While Raymond and the narrator Meursault are out, they see the “brother” of Raymond’s mistress, and, believing the brother is spoiling for revenge over his sister’s treatment, they start a fight. Though the fight ends, Meursault heads back out to the beach and finds the mistress’s brother, known only as “the Arab” and kills him. The rest of the book details Meursault’s contemplations behind bars, including his trial, which turns into an absurdist farce when the prosecutor, jury, and judge are more upset by Meursault’s lack of grief over his mother’s death than the fact that he has killed an Arab.

It is upon this point that The Meursault Investigation turns. The narrator of The Meursault Investigation is Harun, the brother of the Arab Meursault killed—and he had a name: Musa. Harun is haunted by his brother’s death and by the murderer who wrote about it and neglected even to name his brother, stripping him of an identity, of personhood, of meaning. Both Harun and his mother piece together the details of Musa’s murder, but neither is able to find peace in the wake of his loss, and even revenge doesn’t bring Harun the solace he seeks.

I’m really glad I waited so long to read The Stranger so that I could read The Meursault Investigation right after. In the future, I imagine that these two books will be read together, companion pieces. The interesting thing that Daoud does with the story (which is something I think Camus misses) is make it about colonialism. Camus doesn’t name the Arab because it’s not important to his story. The murder is just what lands Meursault in prison. No one much cares about it. The problem with this attitude is that the Arab’s life did matter. Daoud gives the man a name and a family—identity, personhood, meaning. The Meursault Investigation explores the effects of colonialism on Algeria and makes Meursault, like so many of his countrymen, complicit in the “murder” of the country’s identity.

Of the two, I definitely enjoyed The Meursault Investigation more. I understand I’m supposed to find Meursault profound, but mainly I just found him very frightening and extremely difficult to relate to. Someone who is so unable to feel anything is truly in a horrible place. Harun, by contrast, not only tries to understand and make meaning of his brother’s death, but he even tries to understand his brother’s murderer as well as those readers who have found meaning in The Stranger. And unlike Meursault, he has been able to understand love and longing and a life truly given up for the sake another. I want to thank Carol Jago, English teacher extraordinaire and reading muse, for recommending this one.

The Stranger Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Meursault Investigation Rating: ★★★★☆

P. S. These last two books make 52 books for the year for me, which was the reading goal I set. WHOOP!

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Review: Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel

Posted on by Dana

The day before yesterday, I posted my review of Alison Bechdel’s first memoir, Fun Home. That memoir focuses on Bechdel’s relationship with her father. Are You My Mother?, naturally, focuses on her relationship with her mother. I picked it up as soon as I finished Fun Home. Bechdel’s relationship with both parents is complicated. Bechdel’s mother in particular is a complicated individual. She’s talented and beautiful, but she lives in an age when it’s difficult for a woman to pursue much beyond being a wife and a mother, and it’s not clear that Bechdel’s mother wanted to be either a wife or a mother very much. Frequent allusions to the works of Virginia Woolf, in particular, A Room of One’s Own, underscore the ways in which Bechdel’s mother was held back by her times. Bechdel also weaves in her readings of the work of psychologist Donald Winnicott, and the memoir that emerges is part self-psychoanalysis. Bechdel frequently describes and interprets her dreams and weaves in memories of her therapy sessions.

Perhaps every woman’s relationship with her mother is somewhat fraught. I was particularly touched by a question Bechdel asks her mother near the end of the memoir: “What’s the main thing you learned from your mother?” I won’t give away her mother’s answer here, but it struck me that in some significant ways, women repeat the experiences they have had with their own mothers. We establish cycles. Our mothers socialize us to be women, and their ideas of what is acceptable for women are passed on to us. It took me a long time to grapple with some of these ideas. In some ways, it might be a kind of conditioning that we undergo. I’m not sure. I’m still thinking about it. I’m not sure if men experience the same things with their fathers or not.

I am definitely a fan of Bechdel’s work. I’ll read any future books she writes for sure. She’s a smart writer, and the way she connects ideas is fascinating. I envy her mind quite a lot. As an English teacher, I especially appreciate the way she looks for connections in literature. She strikes me as a person who truly sees literature as a way for us to understand ourselves. Reading her makes me want to ask her for a recommended reading list so I can immediately go out and read everything on it.

Rating: ★★★★★

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Review: Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Posted on by Dana

I just returned from the annual National Council of Teachers of English conference. Alison Bechdel was a keynote speaker Friday morning, and she spoke about her two graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, as well as her other work in comics. Her parents had both been English teachers, and she had much to share with us about encouraging writers and the ways in which her own parents shaped her as a reader and a writer.

Fun Home centers on Bechdel’s relationship with her father, who likely committed suicide in 1980, right after Bechdel came out to her parents. Her father was a somewhat distant and arguably abusive man who was plagued by his own struggles with his sexual identity. Bechdel chronicles the family’s difficulties with her father, whose passion was restoration. His preoccupation with appearances profoundly affected Bechdel. She grew up in a very cold home.

Panel from Fun Home

But Bechdel’s father influenced her as a reader and writer.

Panel from Fun HomeFun Home is packed with literary allusions, from her own identification of Bechdel’s father and herself as Daedalus and Icarus to her connection of her father to F. Scott Fitzgerald to finding herself in the writing of Collette and other LGBT writers. There is a good interview with Bechdel on NPR you might want to check out if you want to learn more about her and also about the Broadway musical adapted from this book.

I truly enjoyed this book. I read it while waiting in the airport to return home from the conference and finished it on the plane. It’s a quick read, but an absorbing and very deep read. It’s a well-written memoir on top of being poignant. There are moments of levity, even in panels in which Bechdel is dealing with her father’s death.

Panel from Fun Home

If you are not familiar with Bechdel’s work, you probably have at least heard of the “Bechdel Test,” which is a criterion for determining whether a movie has some consideration of women as fully realized characters to the following extent:

  1. It has to have at least two women characters
  2. Who talk to each other
  3. About something other than a man

I was fortunate to be able to meet Alison Bechdel at the conference, and she signed my copy of this book.

Alison Bechdel and DanaIt was wonderful to meet her and hear her speak about her reading and writing life.

Rating: ★★★★★

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Sunday Post #36: Halfway

Posted on by Dana

Sunday PostI have written 25,188 words of my NaNoWriMo novel. I am having a lot of fun with it, mainly because there’s no pressure. I know I don’t really have to write for an audience. It’s been freeing. For example, I wrote a paragraph today that made me think, “I wonder if that’s too much detail and interrupts the forward motion of the plot.” And then I thought, “Who cares? I can’t publish it, so if I want to include a whole paragraph about my character’s weekly class schedule, then I can. What I need to do is translate that idea to my other first drafts. I know the most important thing about writing a first draft is to get it out. The real work happens in revision. All that said, I really can’t believe how quickly it’s coming. I have never written over 25,000 words in eight days. That’s kind of nuts. I did read some of it to my husband. He didn’t tell me he said this, but I saw it later:

I finished James Shapiro’s Year of Lear this week. I tried really hard to finish it on November 5, since that date looms so large in the book, but I had about 20-30 more pages to go, and my eyes were drooping. I hated to have to set it aside and finish it on November 6 instead. I didn’t do a Sunday Post last weekend because it was the first day of NaNoWriMo, and I was writing all day (I actually wrote something like 10,000 words on that day alone), so I didn’t mention last week that I had also finished Fiercombe Manor. I am four books away from meeting my goal of reading 52 books this year, which I think is more books than I’ve ever read in a year. It’s a strange feeling, but the older I get, the more desperate I am to read because I know I can’t read all the books I want to read or that are worth reading. I know I shouldn’t stress myself out over it, and mostly I don’t, but sometimes I have these moments when I think about it and freak out.

And having said that, I think I’ll turn in with my book now. Good night.

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week on your blog, and showcase books and things we have received. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Image adapted from Patrick on Flickr.

 

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Review: The Year of Lear, James Shapiro

Posted on by Dana

James Shapiro’s new book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 explores the period in which William Shakespeare wrote three of his greatest and most well-known plays: King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Beginning with the Gunpowder Plot’s discovery on November 5, 1605, Shapiro explores the ways in which the political events of 1606 shaped the plays that Shakespeare wrote. Shapiro has turned the microscope on a year in the life of Shakespeare in the past. His book A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 explores the year in which Shakespeare finished Henry V, and wrote Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It. The Essex Rebellion and aging Queen Elizabeth figure large in that previous book as King James, the Gunpowder Plot, recusant Catholics, and the quest to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland figure in this new book.

As I am currently finishing up a unit on King Lear, I was most fascinated by the connections Shapiro made between the intrigues of 1606 and that particular play, but I also gained a great deal of insight into Macbeth, a play I have taught more times than any other save perhaps Romeo and Juliet. Shapiro’s research is meticulous. When he doesn’t know or where the records are patchy, he speculates, but his educated guesses make a lot of sense in the context of the times and the plays. I haven’t actually read Antony and Cleopatra in many years, and if this book has a weakness, it is perhaps that it doesn’t explore that play in the same detail as it does the other two; however, this book is not meant to be literary criticism as much as an exploration of history’s influence on literature.

James inherited both the kingdoms of England and Scotland. Having been king of Scotland since infancy, he was eager to see his two kingdoms united and spent much of the year attempting to convince Parliament to approve the union. The division between Protestants and Catholics was at a peak, as Catholics were urged to take the Oath of Allegiance and to take communion at church. Shakespeare’s own home in Warwickshire was a hotbed of conspiracy and recusancy, and his own family was not immune. Shakespeare seemed to be at the heart of all the most important political events of the year—even a fresh outbreak of the plague touched him and influenced his plays in ways that modern audiences have difficulty appreciating.

I will read anything Shapiro writes about Shakespeare. He’s one of the most interesting Shakespearean scholars writing today. He manages to stimulate and challenge even those who think they know Shakespeare and have a thorough understanding of a given play, but he also manages to write accessibly and engagingly enough for the lay reader.

Rating: ★★★★★

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