Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

I've had Wide Sargasso Sea on my shelves for years. I picked it up at some point before I knew anything about it, maybe because of its inclusion on the (deeply flawed) Modern Library list of 100 best novels? I don't really recall. I do remember pulling it out several years ago as something to possibly read, then seeing its connection to Jane Eyre in the blurb and thinking I should probably wait to read it until after I'd read Jane Eyre, so I would have the proper context. (If by chance you don't know, Wide Sargasso Sea creates a back story for the mad Creole woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.) In 2011, when I decided to catch up on all the 19th Century English literature I had somehow missed, I finally did read Jane Eyre. I didn't particularly like it, which made me not particularly inclined to read Wide Sargasso Sea (though I do recognize the flaw in that logic). Anyway, my world books reading project gave me a reason to finally read it (Dominica: check!) and I'm glad I did. The prose in Wide Sargasso Sea was lovely. The tropics sounded wild and beautiful and lush and a bit scary. It made me want to go back to Guadeloupe.

A book like this presents a sort of conundrum: it's hard to evaluate it on its own; should one even attempt to do so? When reading it, I found I sort of wished I didn't know the Jane Eyre connection. Of course, if I hadn't known it, the significance of certain descriptions and events in the book would have been lost on me. How would the end have felt different if I didn't know the result of the fire she starts?

A quick update on what I'm calling my world books project: I'm up to 44 countries read (out of my count of 212, so about 20%). So far this year, I've read books from 18 different countries, though not all of these were first books from those countries. I feel like this is "not bad" -- or maybe even "pretty good" -- on both fronts.

The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson

I felt I had been neglecting my World Books project, so yesterday morning, I pulled out every book I owned from a country I had not read and stacked them on my dining table. I then reorganized them in various ways, ending up sorting them by continent/region. Africa turned out to be the biggest stack, mainly because I have six South African novels vying for my selection. (The Africa stack also included a Senegalese, a Sudanese, and a Guinean book.) The Europe stack included two novels by Tove Jansson (Finland) - this one and Fair Play, which I picked up together at a thrift store near my office, a Portuguese novel, and a Bosnian novel. The Americas stack included two books by Jean Rhys and To Sir, With Love. The Asia stack consisted of just one book: a Nepalese collection of short stories, which I decided to save for my busy travel season this fall. I had originally intended to read the Bosnian book (The Fortress by Meša Selimović), but it was the longest of the books and I thought I should pick something shorter because I also have to read a book club book this month. It came down to a choice between Jansson and the Sudanese book (Season of Migration to the North), and I chose The True Deceiver after reading the first paragraph of all my options. (This is the normal final step in my book selection routine.) When I decided to read a small book, I didn't expect to finish it in a day, but between three commutes, reading on my lunch break, and some final reading at home yesterday evening, I got right through it, so here we are:

This book was small and intense and strange. It's a story about two women, one of whom (Katri) insinuates herself into the other's (Anna) life, and the bizarre, tense, frenmity that forms between them. As a woman who lives primarily alone, but frequently has her home invaded by guests, I could really relate to Anna. The presence of another person makes you self-conscious about your habits and routines; you perform normalcy for the strangers in your home. The way Anna's world falls apart, while nothing about her life actually changes, felt true and a little bit scary. Are the worlds we create for ourselves so fragile? I suspect they are.

The All Souls Trilogy, Deborah Harkness

I've been accused -- probably justifiably -- of being a snob. I've been known to be dismissive of genre fiction. I've tried to be better and less judgmental. The All Souls trilogy was a total departure from my normal reading material -- one that made me a bit uncomfortable. Their genre could be described as historical fantasy with a healthy dose of romance. The central characters are a witch and a vampire. Aside from Roald Dahl's The Witches, I don't think I'd ever read a witch book, and I'd definitely never read a vampire book before.

While I'm not the kind of person who ostentatiously reads ~literature~ on the subway (I mean, I do read literature on the subway, but not for the attention it gets me, if you see what I'm saying), I was self-conscious reading these books on the subway. I knew it was dumb to care, but when I read standing over people, I wondered what they thought of the back-cover blurbs about vampires and witches. When I read sitting next to people, I held the book close. God forbid someone should read one of the vampire-witch sex scenes over my shoulder.

But, um, let's see... I enjoyed these books. I devoured these books. I couldn't put them down. I think I liked the first book, A Discovery of Witches, the least. Of all of them, it was the most formulaic and romance-ish (but without the payoff, wtf?!). The second book, Shadow of Night, nearly all of which takes place in the 16th century (and in which the protagonists finally consummate their relationship), was fun! The final book in the trilogy, The Book of Life, was my favorite, and I read it over a period of less than 36 hours. I was so sad when I finished it. Plus the books were smart. Not, like, overly so, but smart enough. I could read more books like this. What are they?

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell

"Ugh, I'm so ambivalent about David Mitchell," is not a feeling I was aware I had until I got a few pages into The Bone Clocks. But I had that feeling to a greater or lesser extent (which I guess is to be expected when the feeling in question is ambivalence) until I finished it last night. "Too clever by far!" was a thought that kept going through my head. "One trick pony!" was another. It irked me the way Mitchell name-dropped characters and stories from his other novels*. But... but... I really liked the book. Mitchell may have one trick**, but he does it very, very well. He creates characters you really care about, even when they're despicable. The Bone Clocks' ending, I thought, was perfect! (And this is saying a lot because endings, in particular, are something that I've always found unsatisfactory in Mitchell's other novels.)

On a side note, I'm still stalling on writing about the All Souls trilogy, but this book occasionally reminded me of it: the discussions of the challenges that come with immortality, the second sight, the telepathic communication, references to Oc, and other unexpected commonalities kept coming up.

* I suspect a younger me would have actually liked this device and felt cool to be in on the secret. Has something changed about me? These insertions just felt heavy-handed and coy. (Especially the Black Swan Green one that called out the book's title!)
** If you've read Cloud Atlas, that is the trick I mean. To be fair, I've read 5 of his novels, of which I would say 3 use this trick, one sort of uses this trick, and one does not use this trick.

Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa

Conversation in the Cathedral was a challenging read. Partly because I felt underinformed about Peruvian political history, but largely because it has a very confusing narrative style. For the first hundred (or couple hundred, if I'm honest) pages, I kept wishing it was one of those books that had a cast of characters that explains who's who and how they're all connected. New characters would pop up with no introduction. And aside from the little bits of the book that make up the present-day titular conversation (an actual conversation, between two people, at a bar called la Catedral), it was often hard to know when anything was taking place. (The bulk of the book's narrative spans a decade or so around the 1950s.) The same paragraph might include - in alternating sentences - multiple narratives, among different characters, around events taking place years apart. It takes effort to unpack, but the effort is worth it. The way the stories are woven together in the narrative reflects the complex interwoven relationships among the characters, and feels very true to life.

Conversation in the Cathedral is divided into four large sections and I found the reading easier after I got through the first section. I did something I rarely do while reading this book: I took breaks and read other books in between. Between the first and second sections, I read Richard Price's The Whites. Between the second and third sections, I read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, and between the third and fourth sections, I read the remaining two books in Deborah Harkness' All Souls trilogy. Part of me wishes I had read Conversation in the Cathedral straight through. I think I probably missed or lost some things by spacing it out the way I did. However, if I had read it straight through, I think I would have felt it was quite a slog. (I felt that way a bit anyway, and maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that it took me so long to finish... because I kept breaking to read other books?? idk.) Anyway, stopping in the midst of books is not something I do often. I did it earlier this year when I was reading The Obscene Bird of Night and I felt like it was the right decision at the time. The only other time I recall having done this successfully was many, many years ago when I read The Long Day Wanes. In that case, I stopped (at a well chosen, between "books" stopping point) without entirely intending to go back, and found I was really glad I did so. Maybe I should go back and read those last 150 pages of Moby Dick (which I abandoned in 2008)?

The Whites, Richard Price

I guess I've been avoiding writing about The Whites. It was well-written and the plot was super engaging and it all felt very real, but it also left kind of a bad taste in my mouth and I've been struggling to articulate why. This book was good, but it wasn't for me.

Maybe it hit too close to home: crime fiction that reads very true set where I live featuring extremely fallible NYPD cops is just a little too real for me. (Though I will say New York in the book felt a little more like the New York of my teenage years than current New York.) Maybe it was just a touch too dark and gritty for my taste. But my biggest complaint about The Whites was something very particular. The titular Whites are people whom the police know to be guilty of a horrific crime but who -- for one reason or another -- were not successfully prosecuted for that crime. Each of the officers at the center of the book has a personal white: the one who got away with it on their watch. What irked me was that there was no doubt. I kept waiting for the plot twist where the person whom the cop has long assumed killed a teen basketball player actually didn't, or regretted it, or wasn't just plain evil. And, well, that twist never came. Most of the characters in this book were really complex, conflicted people, but the whites were just straight-up bad guys with no real back story. It's true that (title aside) the book isn't really about the whites, but this just kept bugging me.

Funiculars I have funiculated

I haven't even been on that many funiculars.

I was well into my 30s before I totally registered what a funicular even was.

Then I had a crazy year (2012) where there seemed to be funiculars everywhere I went.

I think there are more, but these are the funiculars I have taken pictures of between Clare's Year of the Funicular and the present:

• Funiculee Funicular, Park City, Utah
• Bom Jesus do Monte Funicular, Braga, Portugal
• Funicular dos Guindais, Porto, Portugal
• Old Quebec Funicular, Quebec City, Canada
• Cremallera de Montserrat, Montserrat, Spain
• Funicular de Sant Joan, Montserrat, Spain
• Budapest Castle Hill Funicular, Budapest, Hungary

I love funiculars.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

I read The Big Sleep a few years ago during a foray into genre fiction I was making at the time. I liked it fine, but I can't say it left much of an impression on me. Sometime later, someone I follow on Twitter recommended (generally, not to me personally, in the context of like, essential noir novels or somesuch) The Long Goodbye, so I added it to my PaperbackSwap wishlist and a couple weeks ago it showed up in my mailbox. The timing was perfect: June was a busy travel month for me and engrossing, plot-driven books are about the only books I can manage to read when I travel. (This was also the reason behind my selection of The Death of Roger Ackroyd immediately before The Long Goodbye. I finished both books on planes.)

For a long stretch as I was reading The Long Goodbye, things felt slightly familiar, but I wasn't certain that I had seen the movie. Then, when I was finally sure I had, I found that the book diverged quite a bit from what I remembered happening in the movie. I looked into this after the fact, and it turns out it's not so much that my memory is faulty but that the movie is quite different from the book. Several characters are missing from the movie and most notably, the ending - which I remembered and was expecting - is totally different. The mood of the movie is also different. As the Wikipedia page explains, the movie was updated to be set in the present day (1970s), when a character like Philip Marlowe was anachronistic. Anyway, the differences meant the book felt almost totally new to me.

So, about the book: I loved it. The writing was incredible. This is the language that is both imitated and spoofed in detective stories everywhere. Reading The Long Goodbye, I felt like I was experiencing the real thing for the first time. It was beautiful, and funny, and evocative, and stunning. I couldn't get over it. Everything else about the book felt sort of incidental. The story was good, but not nearly so good as the telling. Good or bad, I found I could read right past and forgive the flaws and bits that made me uncomfortable. It was just such a pleasure to read.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

As I've discussed before, detective TV shows are like comfort food to me. However, as I've also discussed before (like one sentence later in the same post), I haven't read a lot of detective fiction. This was the third Agatha Christie novel I'd read and my first featuring Hercule Poirot.* It should come as no surprise that I have watched the full 70-episode run of the BBC Poirot series. Luckily for me, they all sort of muddle together so I can read the books without remembering whodunit. When I started The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I immediately remembered which episode it was (the one where Poirot decides to retire to the country!), but I didn't remember the crime at all.

To read Poirot after watching hours upon hours of the TV show was a little surreal. I could see and hear David Suchet perform every affectation written on the page. I was almost surprised to find that I didn't feel this detracted from the book at all. What did surprise me was that the book was written in the first person by one of the other characters. It had never occurred to me that the Poirot books might be first person narratives. (While reading Roger Ackroyd, I inferred that many of the books are probably narrated by Captain Hastings.) Seeing this in action, it's clever and makes perfect sense. The narrator is in the same position as the reader: neither of you ever know quite what Poirot is up to until the big reveal. Anyway, it was fun to read this. Yay!

As an aside, I HIGHLY recommend this LA Review of Books article from a few years ago on the occasion of the end of the Poirot TV series, but about Poirot more broadly.


* I read And Then There Were None in middle school, adored it, and sought out another Agatha Christie novel at random. I don't remember which I ended up with, but it was a Poirot book and 13-year-old me just couldn't get into it. I don't think I quite got what Poirot was supposed to be. I never picked up a Christie book again until last year when I found a Miss Marple book at a thrift store, but I have watched every BBC adaptation of her books I can get my hands on.

Stoner, John Williams

When I was a kid, I thought the word melancholy sounded all wrong for what it meant. To me, melancholy sounded like a happy word and I thought it should represent a happy feeling. Many years later, by which time I had mostly reconciled myself to the definition of melancholy, I learned about literary traditions of melancholy, wherein it was seen as a mark of genius or a prerequisite to artistic production. This somehow jibed with my old childhood idea of melancholy, and so I've continued to think of melancholy as a sadness that is tinged with joy. The feeling of melancholy for me is similar to nostalgia, or the particular feeling of remembering past happiness in the face of loss, or simply the enjoyment that comes from wallowing in sad songs.

The overwhelming feeling I got while reading Stoner was melancholy. At times while reading it, I would think, "my god, how depressing," but I would read on and as I went I would find it not so depressing after all. What it really felt was normal and true. Stoner reads as the biography of a man who led a life that was more defined by frustration than fulfillment. He is constantly thwarted, but at the same time, you never feel he is all that disappointed in his lot. Which is not to say he's happy with it; it just is. In the end, I didn't even think the sadness quite outweighed the joy in this book, or maybe what joy there was seemed all the more joyful because of the pervasive sadness of the book. And that's what I liked best about the book; you could feel sorry for Stoner (and I definitely did - a lot!), but you could also read it and feel that this is what life is and that it's not so bad.