No Frigate

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."  Clearly, I'm in one of those question-asking years.  Right now, I'm asking how I managed to get through so many years of education and leisure reading without encountering Their Eyes Were Watching God?  It has been a long time since I've read such a lively book that's so ingrained in a particular time and place, with such a unique vernacular.  It's amazing how Hurston managed to switch between extremely descriptive realism and high-flying magical realism that wouldn't be out of place in a Garcia Lorca novel. 

In addition, Hurston was so perceptive about the inner lives of her characters.  When discussing the protagonist's second marriage:

"Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage.  Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn't do her any good.  It just made Joe do more.  He wanted her submission and he'd keep on fighting until he felt he had it.

So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush.  The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.  It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again.  So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church.  The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in.  It was a pace here she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. 

She wasn't petal-open anymore with him.  She was twenty-four and seven years married when she knew . . ."

What amazing, gorgeous, evocative, playful language!  All right, just one more quotation . . .

"Love is lak the sea.  It's uh movin' thing, but stilla nd all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

I'm a sap, I know.  Hey, we're entering the holidays!  I have an excuse!

Several interesting books listed in here -- I'm now reading Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Not sure how I'd missed it until now?

Eating Animals was one of those reading experiences where I was really excited at the beginning of the book and grew less and less enthralled with it as the book wore on.  Perhaps it was information overload from the sheer volume of information presented, or maybe, as the converted, I didn't feel I needed to be preached to.  (Or maybe I just tired of the use of the word "shit.")  Anyway, if you've never had any kind of introduction to the world of factory farming (and its impact on our waistlines, morals, environment, etc.), Eating Animals is certainly a stylish, quirky, and compassionate look at the topic.  I'm probably just more in need of escapism right now.

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm glad I can now post content from Amazon again, but I can't seem to write in the same post that I post any Amazon content?  Anyway, as I suspected it would be, Purple Hibiscus was great -- a really sad, evocative coming-of-age novel.  To me, Half of a Yellow Sun is the better novel, because it's broader in scope and more political, but I think that's a matter of personal preference; I think many readers would be completely enraptured by the intimacy of Purple Hibiscus.

Not one woman?  Not one?

So much to read!  "The Tudors" has been one of my maternity leave standbys, so I was salivating at the prospect of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall even before I read the review in the Sunday paper.  I was also intrigued by the review of Tobias Hill's The Hidden.  Hill sounds like an interesting writer with a broad scope (love the idea of a novel set in the midst of an archeolgical dig), and I've never heard of him before, although he's published three other novels as well as a story collection and some poetry.

Then, to top off these riches, the closing essay in the review was by one of my favorites; Colson Whitehead.  So wry!  So clever!  So true!

I just finished Ian Rankin's Bleeding Hearts, another one of my random library picks.  This was the first Rankin book I'd read outside of the outstanding John Rebus series, and most of it was a slight letdown.  I liked the structure; Rankin alternates perspectives between a hired assassin (written in the first person) and the detective hired to track him down (written in the third person).  The plot was also great; the trouble was that neither the assassin nor the detective felt authentic to me.  Both of them got slightly more authentic as the novel continued, but never enough to really grab me.  I was surprised by this, because character development is one of Rankin's strengths in the Rebus books. 

Character problems aside, Bleeding Hearts was the rare mystery where I really had no idea what the answer was to the central "who done it," and I was legitimately surprised by the ending.

I usually only check things out from the library that I've put on hold, but I was returning something and the kid was behaving in his Bjorn, so I wandered the stacks and grabbed Andrea Lee's Lost Hearts in Italy.  I remember reading some of Lee's short stories in the New Yorker a few years ago, and that, at the very least, they were international and cosmopolitan -- good for someone who's stuck at home a lot at present!  The novel was certainly glamorous; lots of jet-setting in Rome and London, etc., but it was so show-offy that my eyes were rolling a lot.  Lee examines the three participants in a love triangle, writing about each of them in a close third-person -- but she intermittently writes short sections from the perspectives of players on the sidelines.  Waiters, children running along the beach, distant relatives, etc.  I'm sure that was helpful for her process, but for me, it was distracting.

After that, I was lucky enough to have my mother bring me a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire.  Amazing.  Even better than Larsson's first, perhaps.  Again, I'm heartbroken that he's dead.

Yes, my posts are infrequent, but I am reading and thinking about things to read!  I'm just doing it in smaller intervals.  Sadly, what I'm reading right now is pretty disappointing.  I really loved Nuala O'Faolain's memoir, Are You Somebody?, and at some point I picked up her novel, My Dream of You.  In the spirit of getting through the things I already have on my shelf rather than spending money on new things I want to read (see Home Boy), I finally started reading it.  It's (largely) written in the first person, which I usually hate, and the protagonist is such a self-pitying, self-destructive narcissist that the experience of reading the novel is making me think back less fondly on Are You Somebody -- because I suspect that the narrator in My Dream of You is pretty close to Ms. O'Faolain herself.  The only thing that is keeping me reading is the travel writing; the protagonist is a travel writer, and O'Faolain's descriptions of her travels are fun for someone who's basically a shut-in.

 On the kid-rearing side, I'm reading:

Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever

Mem Fox