Reading updates

I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag lately, since the plane trip back to the states and then finishing my class. But I have not been on a writing jag about that reading. In order not to forget everything, some quick clips:

* First two books that disappointed: mad at myself for giving it the time: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. What exactly did Walker Percy love in it? I wonder if I read it at a different point in my life, I might see something redeeming in the book (an appreciation for the comedy of interconnectedness?), but the words that come to mind to describe it are bombastic, crude, bitter. A rant against the vulgarity of the vulgar that celebrates vulgarity. The main character, Ignatius, is repellent. And I never once laughed outloud like the New Republic reviewer on the back cover told me I would. I just felt disgusted. But I did finish it -maybe because I have a soft spot for New Orleans, or because Toole at least had enough talent that I kept expecting something would happen or would appear, that would make the effort of reading about fools worthwhile, but nothing did. Promise undelivered should have been Toole’s epitaph.

* Another lauded book I couldn’t find love for was The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. It was totally not what I was expecting, which I think was a story along the lines of An Officer and A Gentleman.  Instead, it's a first person flashback by an unsuspecting cuckold who seemed whiney. I didn’t admire the narrator in the least, nor could I really despise his wife.  Is that a flaw in my moral make-up? He didn’t know her. She was who she was. He was ignorant to have married her, and more ignorant to have failed to see how he was disappointing. Of course, she shouldn’t have been such a floozy, nor should The Good Soldier have been such a flirt, nor Leonora been so frigid. I suppose the good in the book was that the characters were all so fallen, that they couldn’t blame others for their failings. And the characters were convincing. The themes of the unreliability of memory and the inability to really know a person, and the difficulty of changing direction once a step in the wrong direction has been made, are interesting themes. Unfortunately, the book ends with despair all around, instead of leaving any faint hope for change.

* I did enjoy Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. Short essays on places were accompanied by “Guides”: artists or writers who explored those places in their work.  I’ve liked de Botton’s essays when I’ve strayed across them, and this book didn’t disappoint. The first essay examined how our anticipation and experience rarely correspond: “It seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.”  He notes how a small disagreement with his companion ruined a stay in the tropics: 

"Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect. Thus we will not enjoy – we are not able to enjoy – sumptuous tropical gardens and attractive wooden beach huts when a relationship to which we are committed abruptly reveals itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment.”

Later, de Boton writes about our appreciation of small details in foreign countries: “However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. . . To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be. . . . What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.”

The chapter “On Possessing Beauty” is guided by Ruskin. I’m inspired to read more Ruskin after quotes like this: “There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.” A paradoxical quote for a book on travel. But what Ruskin does is encourage both sketching and “word-painting” to contemplate the beauty of small details of places. It is sad that so many adults give up drawing, especially if they were the sort of child who filled up pages with sketches.

The last section is on “The Return;” the guide is Xavier de Maistre, whose masterpiece is “Journey Around My Bedroom.” The book sounds dull. But de Maistre’s thought, echoed by quotes de Boton gathered from Pascal and Nietzsche, is that the pleasure we derive from travelling is more from our mindset than from the actual destination. When we go someplace, we expect to see new, amazing, beautiful things. We take the time to study the importance of building ands gardens and battlefields.  We are delighted by shops and restaurants. De Boton describes this attitude as “receptivity,” and he spends a day strolling around his neighborhood attempting to see things as a tourist.  Expecting to see something interesting, he does in fact notice new details. And so the quote from Nietzsche: 

“When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant, everyday experiences – so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others – and how many there are! – are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.” 

(Do bloggers naturally make much of little?) Ironically, I never really had a sense of wonderlust as a teenager.  Perhaps because I was such a reader, I didn’t have a passion to travel, although I did want to see places I had read about – England, Greece, Italy, New England… But here we are travelling about, never staying one place long. So in some ways we live like perpetual tourists, charmed by local customs, on the prowl for historical markers and interesting hikes each time we move someplace. The danger is not being about to settle, to sit quietly at home, as Pascal warns.

And yet on my visits home, I’m always warmed by the return to the familiar. In one chapter, de Boton contemplates the meaning the “sublime,” and he quotes Thomas Gray, the poet, on how the Alps are “pregnant with religion and poetry.” Certainly, mountains are the epitome of sublimity, but I’ve always been struck with the beauty of my own childhood home in the Midwest: vast, brilliantly blue skies across spreading expanses of fields of winter wheat, the unexpected, quiet beauty of wildflowers in deciduous forests, the repeated pleasure of witnessing the consistent return of spring bulbs. According to the Romantics, the sublime has to have an element of danger. Little threat of avalanches, wild beasts, or even of getting lost – there’s always a friendly neighbor about. Tornadoes threaten, I guess.  Perhaps the biggest danger in the beauty of the Midwest is that it will all be lost to encroaching development.

* Criticism of rampant consumerism was one of the topics I agreed with in Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays, Small Wonder.  But sometimes her  crusading tone strikes me as too self-assured.  Kingsolver’s book left me unsettled about life choices: our car is too big, our food travels too far, my kids watch too much TV and spend too little time in nature, I spend too much time on the computer, and I’m contributing to American imperialism by being a part of the military. But after a couple of weeks away from the book, that guilt over those incidentals has faded. I’m not a crusader, although I do think in terms of making responsible choices. However, those choices are influenced by our circumstances and relative value. I’m not going to use more gas to drive to the other side of the island to buy organic food shipped from New England, instead of buying what the commissary has from California, which leaves money in the budget for donations to charity and college accounts.

Her letter to her daughter at 13 pricked my conscience. She encourages her to learn to make good choices and be responsible for the choices she makes. Meanwhile, I was left wondering if I am too protective. I didn’t want the 15 yr old reading “Slaughterhouse Five” although I was reading all kinds of junk at 15. Would he recognize the nihilism in it? Am I getting too prurient in my middle age?

* While Kingsolver writes with enough passion and inspired imagery to make you think twice, I was disappointed with the volume of The Best Spiritual Writing of 2010 the most recent volume at our little library. Most of the essays weren’t challenging. The most memorable were the one about someone meeting the Dalai Lama and the one about traveling across Afghanistan, neither of each were particularly spiritual. Nothing on par with the bits I read of C. S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm or Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation or parts of L’Engle’s Walking on Water, all of which I started at my mom and dad’s and never finished, but would like to go back to.

* I did finish The Love of my Youth by Mary Gordon in one evening, when I babysat for a friend who had to go to the emergency room. (She ended up being fine – just a bad case of what people call Guam crud, which can be pretty much anything.)  And the book was fine, too – a story of two former lovers who happen to meet again in Rome 40 years later. They eat lunches and tour Rome and reminisce together, while the reader puts together the pieces of why their relationship, which seemed practically perfect, fell apart.  My favorite parts were descriptions of Rome. The book just didn’t really come alive for me, although it was entertaining with a satisfying conclusion.

So this almost catches me up to what I’m reading currently: a Mother-Daughter Book Club book with my 9  year old. Report soon.