Let the reading begin!

I can't help but make resolutions with each new year, but, happily, I've come to my senses and given up making any that have to do with exercise. (I'm burning enough calories chasing these babies around.)

Every year I resolve to read more, but I know it will happen this year, as I'm Bread Loaf bound once again. I don't have my courses yet, but am still spending plenty of time pouring over last year's course catalog and dreaming of what I will be reading in the next few months.

I'm also taking this time to ramp up my personal reading and get in the habit again, now that Whitman is 6 months old and my brain is sufficiently recovered from - or simply used to - the lack of sleep. I recently finished Beloved (don't know how that one had eluded me for so many years) and last night polished off Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of stories. One was pure pleasure, the other was mostly work (I'll let you guess which was which), but both were, at times, breathtakingly beautiful.

I'll leave you with a picture of our newest addition, Whitman, the reason I missed Lit Nerd Camp last summer - we can only pray he'll love books as much as his big sister does!

Live from Bread Loaf

Greetings from Bread Loaf, where I sit, wishing I'd had time to read all of the books they told me to read before I got up here - they weren't kidding! Now that the secondary sources have been assigned and papers are coming due, there is not a moment to spare. It's extremely rigorous, my peers are intelligent and intense, and I am loving it.

Yes, it's hard to completely throw myself into the program with a 10 month old at home, but she's probably also a good break from the hard thinking. As with most things in life, this is an exercise in time management.

And speaking of, I should get back to my essay on Emerson and Wordsworth . . .

Bah, Balzac

I decided to forgo Balzac for now and jump into The House of Mirth as my next novel - it's been immediately gratifying from page one. In Lily Bart, I've finally found a character I am interested in and sympathize with from page one (not page 200!) - I actually had to force myself to turn out the light last night (usually I'm forcing myself to keep it on). What a treat. In the meantime, I'm going to try to crank through the Emerson essays and The Scarlet Letter, as I've already read them in my younger days.

A dollop of Trollope

Actually, it's been much more than a dollop. When I first opened The Prime Minister, I looked at the last few pages and saw it was less than 400 pages long. Perfect, I thought! I'll breeze through this! Well, I got to page 300, looked at where I was, and realized something was amiss, because it didn't even look like I was halfway through the book! The book is in two volumes - BLAST!

I realize I sound like a big whiner complaining about the length of these books, but it really is just that much more daunting as I think to how much I have to still read before classes start, and suddenly 400 more pages are thrown at me. Eeek!

I am enjoying the book, though - he's living up to his own dictum of making fiction readable. Some of the political portions get dull, but the villain, Ferdinand Lopez, is a lot of fun, and I do really want to find out what will happen to his unfortunate wife, Emily. The interplay between The Duke and Duchess of Omnium is also very interesting, and seems a very honest portrayal of marriage.

Next up, Balzac, and again, The Writer's Almanac has gotten me in the mood just in time:

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century — La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.

He wrote about everyone and everything, about banks, offices, factories, the stock market, the media, and the first commercial advertisements.

Balzac had a huge influence on later 19th-century French novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Henry James thought he was the best novelist of all time, and Willa Cather once said, "If one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live." Today, Balzac is rarely studied in American schools. Even in France, Balzac's novels are outsold by writers like Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Collette.

Balzac said, "All happiness depends on courage and work."

Sound the trumpets! I finished Our Mutual Friend this morning! As predicted, the bad people die (or are exiled from England in shame, perhaps a fate worse than death!), the good people marry, and the best people end up happy and with lots of money. Hope that didn't spoil the ending for anyone out there reading along!

Next up, Trollope, and just in time, for he celebrated a birthday this week. So, those of you that were not thrilled with Dickens, how about The Prime Minister, by Trollope? Hopefully he will be true to his word and it will be READABLE. Here's another amusing biography care of The Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, (books by this author) born in London, England (1815). His father was a British gentleman who had failed at being a lawyer, a scholar, and a farmer, and the family sank deeper and deeper into debt. The children at school made fun of his worn, muddy clothes and his teachers were exceptionally cruel. He later said, "[I may have] been flogged oftener than any human being alive." The only reason his family didn't fall into complete poverty was that his mother started writing books for a living, and he looked up to her so much that he decided to become a writer himself.

He got a job in London as a postal clerk. He struggled to pay his bills, he had a series of unhappy love affairs, and nothing came of his writing. Then, in 1841, he was offered a transfer to Ireland, and he saw it as a chance to make a clean start.

In Ireland, Trollope developed a social life for the first time. He went hunting, and he went to pubs and he fell in love and got married, all within a few years. Once he had settled down to his new life, he began to write fiction. In his job for the postal service, he rode a horse over all the rural routes himself, to ensure that a letter could be delivered to the remotest possible areas. It was while he was riding across the countryside that a fictional English county called Barsetshire sprang up in his mind.

In just eleven years, between 1855 and 1866, Trollope published six novels about the extended families and parishioners and civil service workers living in that imaginary county of Barsetshire, novels such as The Warden (1955), Barchester Towers (1857), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866), all of which were best-sellers.


The novelist Henry James said, "Trollope did not write for posterity. He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket."

Anthony Trollope said, "Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/04/24/index.html

Still chugging through Dickens. I'm over half way now, and there are numerous characters that I truly don't care about one bit and am getting pretty annoyed by. Luckily, people are starting to die, rather than new folks getting introduced - hopefully this trend will continue and I'll have fewer characters to keep track of in the second half of the book!

In the meantime, I heard this on The Writer's Almanac this morning: the 2 tidbits in red were choice, I thought, and shed some light on James.

It's the birthday of the novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.

At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.

But he wrote almost 10 million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

He became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain in World War I. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ April 15, 2008

1/4 of the way through!

200 pages into Our Mutual Friend, only 600 to go! It took about 80 pages, which felt like an eternity, to get all of the characters introduced and connected to one another in one way or another, and now that I've slogged through, I can really enjoy the story.

Having not read Dickens since Great Expectations in high school, I had forgotten what a wonderful observer of character he is - I care about the good Mr. and Mrs. Boffin and I laugh (sometimes to keep from crying) at the ridiculous Veneerings. I can't help but sympathize with Dickens' strong distaste for the nouveau riche, and wonder what he would have to say about modern America and our often obscene obsession with material possessions and status. It's as if the Veneerings have only multiplied.

On a very practical note, I sincerely have no idea how one is expected to be a working professional and also get all of this reading done before the summer session. I think next summer I will be sure to avoid choosing 2 courses from the very wordy 1800s!