Unexpected Odes to Literature
Title: City of Lost Souls
Author: Cassandra Clare
Genre: Young Adult/ Fantasy
Length: 534 pages
For me, what makes the writings of Cassandra Clare so captivating isn’t the fairy tale romance, the paranormal elements, or the bad ass fight sequences… at the heart of it all, it’s the way Clare manages to make a young adult fantasy saga an sequence of unexpected odes to her favorite pieces of literature.
“No man chooses evil because it is evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” – Mary Wollstonecraft
“Love is familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.” – William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
“I love you as one loves certain dark things.” – Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XVII”
“All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” – William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916”
Whether the story was constructed around these quotes, or the quotes 
were slipped into the story, the two halves were beautifully married together. Just as Clare always manages to do.
If you recall my review of The Book of Secrets you should be well aware of how much I cherish this particular aspect of storytelling. I love peeping into the mind of the author and what they’ve read before – what work we may have both cherished. I love to see how others acknowledge how literature builds a soul. Even if that soul is an imagined character in another book.
A reviewer on Goodreads mentioned they thought it was silly that all these Shadowhunter kids were completely oblivious of what went on in the mundane world half the time – Jace completely misses references to Madonna or Dungeons & Dragons games – but are well versed in William Shakespeare and Dante.
As a classical book geek it makes perfect sense to me. I was raised on Charles Dickens and the Brontes, not the latest boy band or pop culture trends. Poetry is timeless. New Kids on the Block obviously not so much.
One doesn’t expect these odes and references in a paranormal teen romance. I suppose that’s what makes them so stunningly lovely.
Love Letter to Literature
Title:The Book of Secrets
Author:Elizabeth Joy Arnold
Publisher: Bantam Books
Genre: Fiction/ Literature/ Books About Books
Length: 450 pages
I checked this book out from the library, but this is not a library book. This is a book you need three copies of – a hardback first edition signed by the author, a copy for reading and scribbling notes in the margins, and a copy to loan to your friends. I’m devastated that I’ll be shoving it through a book drop later this afternoon, it will leave my hands and slide down a shoot to be re-cataloged and re-shelved. When all I really want to do is sleep with it under my pillow.
I was up all night reading. Not all night, but well passed my thirty year old motherhood appropriate bedtime.
Part One was titled Chronicles of Narnia, Part Two: Where the Wild Things Are, and so on – each section of the book titled and designed to reflect story that tied ever so gracefully into a famous book title. The whole book is not just a riveting story, it is a love letter to literature.
If you are a Kate Morton fan, the architecture of this book will be right up your alley. It’s beautifully done, marvelously written, and simultaneously raw and eloquent. It may even be better than anything Kate Morton wrote, and saying that feels like blasphemy because I adore her and own all her books.
There were so many gorgeous quotes I wanted to underline, and now I don’t know where they were in the book, because it was a library copy so I couldn’t. I should have jotted them down, but I was too eager to read what would come next. The whole reading experience was captivating and surreal.
“I thought it was a dream,” Thomas said. We were sitting in the library…
Have Child, Plant a Tree, Write a Book
“Then it came to me: Zola had said: ‘To have a child, to plant a tree, to write a book.’ That, he said, was a full life!” – Betty Smith
What I love about being a book reviewer is the constant discovery of new things. Picking up books I may have never had the opportunity to read, and learning from those books – not how to write better necessarily, but – what kind of writer I want to be.
Book reviewing has also required me to read things more closely, not just the way I would for school, but in a more personal way as well. It’s not just about finding the literary value, it’s not just about liking or not liking, it becomes more and more important to be able to people and my readers why I loved a book. What moved me to passion? What is so relevant about this story to my own life? In doing that, it makes me dig deeper into myself, deeper into my library, and deeper into the art of research.
I’ve slacked off the last few weeks about publishing a literary journal post, but I haven’t stopped reading the literary journals. I meant to write this yesterday, it’s been dancing around in my head the last few weeks as I’ve alternated between picking my way through McSweeney’s issue 18 and researching to see if anything was written about Betty Smith. I’ve been scouring the internet for evidence of things written about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or perhaps a long buried article or story she may have had published before infamy. I didn’t know a lot about her, so it’s been an educational endeavor.
I started with what was available in the back of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition that I read the book from. The little extras this edition provides are wonderful, including the first piece Smith ever published: a bit of prose called “Winter” when she was 8 years old and still in grade school, under the name Elizabeth Wehner.
I enjoyed reading the article from This Week that she wrote called “Fall in Love With Life.” It’s a beautiful glimpse into her mind and life and what led her to know that she had had a full and marvelous life. It was refreshing to read, after feeling like a failure on most days, knowing I’ve had a child, planted a tree, and written book, changed my outlook on my life at 30.
Of course, the research continued and in my searching I found this: http://web.njit.edu/~cjohnson/tree/context/context.htm
I also found this and am pretty disappointed that I can’t find a copy of “On Discovering Thomas Hardy” anywhere: http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/s/Smith,Betty.html
If anyone knows of any publications or articles written on or by Betty Smith, please share. I’d like to discover them too.
My Rundy
(This is supposed to be a review of My Antonia, HPB Humble book club selection for September’s discussion. But it’s not.)
With every book I read, I miss my high school English teacher more and more. I’m nostalgic by nature, so this should not be misconstrued as any overly dramatic longing. I only regret the times I was too exhausted to stay awake in class. I want to hear him talk about something I’m currently reading that wasn’t part of the curriculum ten to fifteen years ago. I feel desperate to hear his literary thoughts.
I miss Mr. Rundell – casually referred to in the classroom as Rundy – I miss conversations we never had. Which is ridiculous. Who misses their high school English teacher so much?
Sadly, it’s because somewhere in my seventeen year old brain, I was convinced that when I was a grown up, Mr. Rundell might be my friend – join my book clubs – hang out. I always thought that if he hadn’t been the teacher and I hadn’t been the student we would have been friends. I think everyone thought that about him. He was so cool, but super nerdy. He made being a little bit geek look fun.
At seventeen I was also convinced that I would never marry or have children. I thought this because the love of my life had me pretty convinced we were never going to be anything other than platonic. Now, we’ve been married for seven years and have a daughter. The point? What I thought at seventeen turned out to be pretty irrelevant. And the love of my life finally did fall in line with all of my heart’s desires. So why can’t my old English teacher?
I want to hit him up on facebook like I do my old college professors. Discuss random things that pop in my head as they come up organically. Why shouldn’t I? I’m still paying for the degree that’s sitting in my closet with a dog chew tear in the corner of what was probably meant to look like very expensive paper.
Selfishly, and a bit stalker-like, every few years I start googling him to see if I can hunt him down. Last time I was dying to discuss East of Eden (we read Grapes of Wrath for school) with him over a whiskey. Now, it’s Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
I watched the new Gatsby movie with a friend the other night and all I could think was, “I would have loved to see this movie for the first time with Rundy.” Even if it meant I had to sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair bolted to a crappy desk to do so.
People shape our lives in ways we do not expect. I was always a reader, I always loved literature. He did not ignite something in me that wouldn’t have already been there. But the man knew how to balance that fine line between teacher and friend. Teenagers really need to feel like someone is on their side sometimes, and Rundy had being on our side down pat. There was a rapport that made us desire his classroom and approval alongside a pure, true teacher student ambiance.
I knew he was one of my favorite teachers then and there, but I never expected to actually wonder what he was up to or hear half his lectures in my head when I re-read old classics. I especially didn’t think that I would feel the absence of his lectures when reading a title I didn’t even know about at age seventeen.
So this is not so much a review as an ode to my favorite English teacher of all time. The tall, lanky, hunched-over-geek that sat on the bottom of his spine as he leaned awkwardly into the stool beside the podium. The guy who had us write essays on Pink Floyd and Army of Darkness. The man who arched his eyebrows at my best friend and me when I told him we were just friends and said, “Sure.” I think he was the first person to get me wondering if I had a shot with the boy who swept me off my feet and became my husband.
This is an ode to the guy that made us think.
As for Cather’s work, I nearly died at a quote on page 187 by Lena: “[…] I don’t want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them, they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”
I laughed and laughed at this. Oh, Lena, how I thought that too! But that post is for another day.
My Classical Re-Education Part 2
Kiddo and I started the year reading The Confessions over breakfast… we got caught up in The Magic Tree House Adventures and that got put on the back burner, but I intend on putting a good dent in this list this year, so we need to get back on it. Feel free to join me.
The Story of Me: Autobiography and Memoir
PART TWO of The Well-Educated Mind
Augustine – The Confessions
Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe
Michael de Montaigne – Essays
Teresa of Avila – The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
Rene Descartes – Meditations
John Bunyan – Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
Mary Rowlandson – The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Confessions
Benjamin Franklin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Frederick Douglas – Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
Friederick Nietzche – Ecce Homo
Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
Mohandas Gandhi – An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Gertrude Stein – The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Thomas Merton – The Seven Storey Mountain
C.S. Lewis – Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X
May Sarton – Journal of a Solitude
Aleksandr I. Solzhenistyn – The Gulag Archipelago
Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
Jill Ker Conway – The Road from Coorain
Elie Wiesel – All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs
Poetry Nights at Half Price Books
Make time in your life this Spring for student led Poetry Nights at Half Price Books in Humble.
Best Book Boyfriends of 2012
I avidly read The Lit Bitch and a recent post included a top 12 book boyfriends list: http://thelitbitch.com/2012/12/29/top-12-in-2012-book-boyfriends/.
Cute concept, fun blog idea, but as I scrolled through my 74 books of the year, I realized that I didn’t read a lot of books in which there were boyfriends to pick from.
I started out with How to Buy a Love of Reading, and I think Hunter set me into a mood that I just couldn’t get past. There are other boyfriends I read through the year, but I barely remember them.
I don’t recall the characters in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Regardless of what I thought of the book when I read it, no one in it made a lasting impact on me. I actually had to refer to my own review to remember Seldon’s name.
The Great Gatsby is a fantastic novel, one of my favorites, but Jay Gatsby is not someone I’d put on my list of literary love interests.
I did read The Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices series and there are plenty of boyfriends to be had in those books, and they are lovely, and romantic, and intense; but none of them lived up to Hunter.
I did read Inhale, the first of a series called Just Breathe, which is an urban fantasy erotica piece, but the characters there are what the genre calls for: super sexy, the end. Don’t get me wrong, sexy is nice, I think my husband is one of the sexiest, but I need more out of a character I’d want to put on a boyfriend of the year list.
Rory Williams, for instance, the man who waited, the Roman centurion, one-half of a couple known as The Ponds on Doctor Who… he could go on a boyfriend of the year list. He’s just heavenly, and wonderful. But this is about books, not TV shows.
I read a lot of Agatha Christie this year, and she’s all mystery and not a whole lot of romance. Although a love story emerges here and there, it’s rarely more than a motive or plot device, therefore how can anyone in her books make the list?
On the other hand, I read cozy mysteries too. I like Cleo Coyle and her coffeehouse series. Cozy mysteries almost always have a boyfriend, but with there always being a boyfriend, I don’t often get the chance to delight in any of them. They are there to make the protagonist feel good or bad, have a romantic scene of some sort, and then on to the next guy. In real life, I’m morally opposed to most of the relationships that pop up in cozy mysteries. But, I figure it comes with the territory when reading about murderers and investigators.
Scrolling down my list of books read this year, I come to Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly. Sorry girls, I can’t recommend Montgeoffrey to anyone. He is the basis of all Babara’s pain… a ladies man, a cheater, and ultimately also gay. How many strikes can you add to a relationship before I’m just really tired of the guy? It makes the heroine incredibly interesting, but I can’t let Montgeoffrey anywhere near my book-boyfriend list.
So it comes down to the fellows in A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the cutie-patootie Sam in Michael Grant’s Gone, and Hunter of HTBALOR.
Byatt’s romances in Possession are powerful and intriguing, Sam Temple in Gone is a cute kid with the potential to be an incredible man when he’s all grown up, but I have to hand it to Hunter – he captured my heart.
Hunter is intelligent, sweet, broody, keeps a journal, and sadly is also an addict. Reading the conclusions of my own blog post, I find myself in disbelief… what does this say about my taste in men that I want to pick the suicidal one as book-boyfriend of the year? And that Marius of Les Miserables didn’t even make the short list of final contestants?
Who is on your list?
HPB Humble Spring Book Club Picks!
The Ultimate Possession – a book by Byatt
Title: Possession
Author: A.S. Byatt
Publisher: Random House
Length: 555 pages
Nothing can make you feel so inadequate as a writer as when you read a piece of such perfection that your own work cannot but pale in stark comparison. It’s possibly something like being the mediocre gymnast addicted to watching the Olympics, knowing that the athletic achievements they witness will not and cannot be their own reality.
Someone can write and write, practice with diligence, read, and surround themselves with excellence of the craft – but there is an element of giftedness that can only be handed down by the command of God.
A.S. Byatt is such a person graced with immense giftedness.
Possession is overwhelmingly and alarmingly riddled with her talent and sheer genius for the craft.
Prose, poetry, storytelling, she has it all and shares it with such ease. Nothing is forced, everything unfolds with the exquisite engineering of a flower in bloom, or a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Intricately beautiful.
How can a person contain so much talent?
I imagine hundreds of years from now archeologists and scholars will discover a copy and upon inspection will accuse the author of not being a lone writer – but a pen name used for a collective. They will say the book is a collaborative effort between several poets, a journalist, a researcher, and possibly a novelist. Someone would be supposed to offer their services as the voice of Christabel LaMotte, another as R. Henry Ash. They may even miss the point altogether and believe it to be an actual account on a literary discovery, or a novelization of a literary discovery.
I think of myself as a writer. I have unfinished stories, a three-quarters written novel or two. I even used to attempt to write poetry – that was eons ago. None of it is really any good. I love words, but do not have the grasp and understanding of them to put them to proper use. I do not have the finesse of a linguistic artist. The words just linger muddled and puddled in my brain and sometimes my journals, fragments of fragments end up on this blog. I always tell myself that I’ll be better when I’m older, but I never am.
The only thing I can claim with absolute truth, is that I am a reader. As one reader to another, I must tell you, anyone who makes that claim cannot go through life without having read Possesssion.
Anakalian Whims 