Quick Lit April 2018

A month in which I apparently read so much that the cats must have starved and my children gone around in dirty clothes. And I think I had a husband, but I probably mislaid him somewhere.

I read very little translated literature. It's because I've studied languages and, while I'm fluent in none of them, I'm aware of all I'm losing when I can't read something in the original language. My only exception (with no rationale whatsoever) is ancient literature. So this month's reading surprised me rather...

Yana Toboso - Black Butler Vol I
I decided one way to engage our teen might be to ask her about a book recommendation. She said I should try reading manga. This wasn't the one she recommended (Death Note), but I've seen the anime version of that and Black Butler, and liked the latter better, so I gave it a go. It took a little while to get used to reading back to front and right to left, but I suppose that was a bonus brain exercise. Ciel is head of a noble household, CEO of an international business, and trusted aide to Queen Victoria - all at twelve years old. He accomplishes all this with the help of his butler, Sebastian, whose abilities are unbelievable - for a human, that is... It was entertaining, but I think I'd have to read more manga before I can decide whether I'm into it. At least I got to tick off my "book in a day" for the MMD reading challenge. And the tiny print finally prompted me to buy my first pair of reading glasses.

Sigrid Undset - The Axe
This is the first volume in the Master of Hestviken tetralogy by the Norwegian Nobel-prize-winning author - and, tantalizingly, I found the first three volumes in my library's 50 cent sale room. Kristin Lavransdottir is the Undset you find most people discussing, but this is in similar vein, reminiscent of Viking sagas, and with a slow, brooding sense of fate lingering over the story. Ovar and Ingunn were bethrothed as children, and Ovar was fostered by her family. In their teens, they consummate the betrothal (considered legal in Viking law), but Ingunn's father dies before they can be officially married, and his relatives want to dissolve the agreement. Ovar kills Ingunn's kinsman in a dispute, is outlawed, and so begins years of a cat and mouse waiting game. You have to like slow literature (which I do) to get into Undset's books, and while, on the whole, the writing is to be savoured, it did stall in places for me.

Jhumpa Lahiri - In Other Words
I picked this because my job is editing English language documents for a Slovenian university, and we're about to move there, but it turned out to fit nicely with my translated picks for the month. Pulitzer prize-winning writer Lahiri chose to follow her passion for Italian by taking her family to live in Rome. She begins with a resolution only to read in Italian, but ends up writing only in Italian as well. This is her series of reflections on living in the language rather than the country. It's dual language (so a short read if you're not fluent in Italian!), and Lahiri had someone else translate it into English so that it better reflects her Italian style. It captivated me, but then I am about to be immersed in another language, and am contemplating what life will be like for my toddler, growing up speaking one language in the home but surrounded by another totally unlike it.

Izaak Walton - The Compleat Angler. Read by Nelson Runger
No real link to the above books, except in the sense that, to take a quote from another book, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." This is the seventeenth century English classic that I expect most Americans have never heard of (and most British people don't read nowadays, either). A virtuous how-to manual on angling and cooking your catch, with a good portion of poetry thrown in - and don't forget the very dubious, but entertaining, biology. Probably for readers who are classiphiles (if that's not a word I'm trademarking it now) or enthusiastic about the history of angling.

Yep, David Tennant and Michael Sheen as the demon-angel duo!

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
I didn't read this because of the upcoming TV series but because a good friend pressed it into my hands. And then I didn't open it for several months because I rarely read comic novels. Just the idea of someone trying to be funny on every page wears me out. But actually, it turned out this is funny. Really funny (especially if you're British and my age and therefore get all the references). The Powers Below (or is it really the Powers Above?) have decided it's time to launch Armageddon, but Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon who've been in charge of earth since the Beginning, are rather attached to it and would like to hold off on the End. Their plan starts with the Antichrist - but it turns out that Sister Mary Loquacious of the Chattering Order messed up the baby-swapping plan. I never thought I'd giggle all through the Apocalypse. (It also has the distinction of being the first book I needed the above-mentioned reading glasses for because it's full of footnotes in tiny print.)

Jerome K. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)
A comic classic, beloved since its publication in 1889... but it just didn't appeal to me. Perhaps I was read out at the end of the month, or perhaps choosing it after Good Omens meant I didn't appreciate the 19th century humour as much. It's a short novel, recounting Jerome's expedition on the Thames with two friends and his dog, with many (many) asides, a classic British mode of telling a funny story. Usually I enjoy quirky novels with odd diversions, but when rain sent them scuttling back to London and abruptly ending the story, I was relieved. Maybe I'll give it another go in the future.

Erica Silverman - The Day the Chickens Went on Strike
This was a little beyond my toddler's comprehension level, but he pulled it out of the cupboard and insisted I read it. But it fits this month's theme of the supernatural/ foreign literature nicely with its retelling of a Yiddish Rosh Hashana tale. In some Jewish cultures, people make Kapores, that is, get rid of their sins by whirling a chicken round their head while praying. Well, the chickens in this Russian-Jewish village have had enough of that. A funny tale about the power of customs and self-responsibility.

You rang, M'Lady?

Linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy - and the first month I don't even feel embarrassed at the length of my reading list.

All is rubbish

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. Except if he were knocking around the western world today, I think it would be, "Look at all that crap you're hoarding." Because that's one of the incidental, sobering lessons I've been learning from preparing to move overseas.

We've never been big consumers - that's partly how we saved enough to afford to start over in Europe. It's a standing joke that when I'm feeling despondent, I cheer myself up by throwing stuff out (it works every time). The lady we asked to run an estate sale for us nearly turned us down because we were "minimalists" and barely had enough to sell (referring to almost the entire contents of our house). We were so into zero waste - recycling, reducing, composting - that we only put our giant wheelie bin (garbage can) out once a month because we thought we ought to, even though there was only a bag or two rattling around in the bottom.

Now we're getting ready to move, and somehow the bin is full to overflowing every week (often with stuff left over for the next week) - and that doesn't include items we're not shipping, because everything that isn't broken past mending is going in the estate sale. Where is it coming from?

Well, for a start, recycling has gone out of the window with showing the house, because we don't have a kerbside service, and we can no longer store bags of rubbish in the side room until we get time to drag it off to the blue bins across town. Ditto composting for similar aesthetic reasons. Piles of paper and cardboard that wait around for cold days, when they warm us up via the woodburning stove. Years of garden rubbish dotted here and there over 1 1/2 acres, now slowly making its way to landfill. Scraps of this and that you keep just because you don't feel like throwing them out yet (half pieces of paper only scribbled on one side, stuff for 'crafts', the pens that don't work and the pencils that break every time you try to sharpen them). Anything that is beyond mending, but we've been hanging on to in some belief that we'll wake up one day knowing how to fix it. Using up everything in the store cupboard, including all those 'emergency' prepackaged foods (as long as they're reasonably in date). And all the stuff that brownies must be delivering during the night, because I can't see how else it can be this dire.

My only consolation is that we're at least consuming less new stuff while we wait to move. And it's reassuring to know that if a zombie apocalypse had come to Starkville, MS, we would have been in good shape for a while. But most of all, I've got a steel-hard resolution not to accumulate stuff in our new home (it'll be half the size, so that'll help) so that I never have to look at my life again and see all that rubbish.

Uphill, word by word

I used to be good at languages: French, Latin, ancient Greek. They seemed so easy back when my brain was young. I was an A student all the way. So, when we first planned a serious trip to Italy when I was in my late 30s, and I decided to pick up Italian, I was in for a shock. French plus Latin equals Italian. Easy! Er, actually, older brain plus little time equals constant struggle. I'd start a sentence in Italian, and end up in French. But I was game, and I managed to ask several things in Italian, and even understand a few of the answers.

When we lived in Slovenia for five months back in 2008, I tried to pick up the language, but we were living in our own little family unit, homeschooling and travelling, not immersed in day-to-day society. And Slovene is notoriously hard, a highly inflected Slavic language that hasn't bothered to modernise to a simpler version as most European inflected languages have. I ended up with a lot of nouns, a few adjectives and phrases, but few verbs and no sentences. I could, for example, go to the deli and say, "turkey, two hundred grams, please." Everyone spoke good English, since it's taught in school from the beginning - and Italian, since we were on the border, so I muddled along with a mix of three languages.

But now I'm going to be living there for around 20 years, and I know I have to learn, old dog or not. I started the way that makes sense to the academic me, step-by-step through the grammar. But, if not the proverbial two steps back, it was a continual retracing of my footsteps. Then I took a leap of faith (for a nerd) and decided that I'd just learn. Anything, anyhow, any way I could, because something is better than nothing. I also committed to five minutes a day. Just five. I can do more if I feel like it, but that's all I have to. I downloaded the 50 languages app and started skimming through the lessons, over and over. And gradually, it's sticking. I've deciphered a couple of news headlines on the university media pages: "UP teden 2018" - ah, university week. The Innorenew Center does something "prvo leto" - hey, that's for its first year.

Whatever I'm doing, I keep going over words in my head, and sometimes there are breakthroughs. For weeks, I couldn't learn the words for "granddad" or "uncle". Then, the other day, I was playing with my toddler, and he mentioned "grandad". "Dedek!" I thought, then, "Can I remember 'uncle'...'stric'!" Woo-hoo!  I have useless phrases, like "Peti dan je petek" (the fifth day is Friday), "Jem sendvic" (I'm eating a sandwich - in case you didn't notice) or slightly more helpful ones: "To je moj sin" (this is my son - useful when you're a geriatric parent!).

Some days I'm excited and confident about eventually speaking a new language, some days I'm terrified and doubtful. I'm probably still a "D" student, which is disheartening, but also strangely freeing for someone who's used to being that A student. I just I tell myself that's "D" for "dedicated" and trudge on.

Starting over

You know all those books about people who throw up their lives and go off for a year in Provence, Denmark, or around the globe to eat, pray, love and embrace hygge, that sort of thing. Actually, I don't, because I've never had the slightest interest in reading about it. But here we are, committed to selling almost everything we own, and, in mid life, moving our family (the two children who still live with us) thousands of miles away to new jobs in a country where we barely speak any of the language.

"Slovenia," we tell people, adding, if we're reasonably sure the person isn't allergic to the mention of the "T" word, "It's where Melania Trump is from."

We didn't wake up one day, like Mole, to say "bother spring cleaning" and set off into the world. It crept up on us over a decade. In 2008 we spent about half the year in Koper, my husband on a Fulbright scholarship, me homeschooling and enjoying the time off "work", all of us travelling just about every week. I remember announcing that Slovenia was a country I could live in, unlike the US, where I was sinking, year after year, into a deeper melancholy. Kind and generous as Mississippians are, I just never became American. (Yes, I know it's ironic that I'm going to Europe where, as an Englishwoman, I'm about not to be officially European.)

With the late birth of a third child, we were starting over and needed a new direction. Positions in the UK were not forthcoming; the University of Primorska, on the other hand, was ready and willing to welcome us both. I stopped half asking, half praying, "How can we get to the UK?" and instead asked, "What is the next, best, move?" And one day, it dawned on me that the answer was there: Slovenia.

It's been the secret that consumed us for months - furtive planning, vague answers to the innocent question of what we were up to nowadays. We couldn't let the news get to my husband's department until he had his work permit in hand. And all those months of inner, secret reflection somehow made my fingers freeze every time I sat down at the keyboard. I wanted to write, but what? Tell about the past 5 months in retrospect? Make it funny, cultural, informative, the online draft of a memoir?

Finally, I told myself: just write. Something short. Break the deadlock. So here it is. And there we're going.

Quick Lit March 2018

Linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy for reviews of the past month's reading.

Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
Sometimes you can't remember whether or not you've read a book - that was the case with this one, and it was nagging at me. I knew the famous parts for sure - about needing a room of one's own to write fiction, and the fable of Shakespeare's sister - but had I read the whole thing or only extracts? So when it was a 99 cent Kindle deal, I had to buy it. It was interesting to read Woolf's call for upcoming female researchers to uncover the hidden fiction of women ninety years ago - when I have the fruits of those labours sitting on my shelf. Her ideas on fiction and predictions of the outcome when "womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation" offered lots of reflection and internal dialogue.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath - Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
OK, so maybe it wasn't a great idea to pick up this book after we decided to sell almost everything we own and relocate to Europe - but (phew) it clarified a lot of the decision-making process we'd gone through. This is written in a very clear and engaging manner, with a huge range of examples that cover both personal and professional decisions, a handy pneumonic, short summaries of each chapter, and further resources on the website. I found myself beginning to apply the ideas straight away.
It influenced my toddler too. "Where's your green book?" he asked after I swapped it for the drab back and brown To The Lighthouse.

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Reading A Room of One's Own inspired me to re-read this one, which I prefer to Mrs Dalloway (though Orlando is my favourite). It was an old paperback I used in college about 30 years ago, and has tiny notes written in pencil between the lines. I can't read a word of them now. I'm sure it's because the pencil must have faded. Ahem. I'd forgotten how beautiful it was, or maybe I didn't appreciate it when I was barely an adult. Now, like Mrs Ramsey, I'm nearing 50 with a small child, married to a professor who deals in abstracts (though mine studies pure maths, not philosophy), and am prone to reflect on life. In a skillfully interwoven stream of consciousness style, the novel covers two days - before and after the First World War - where the lighthouse symbolizes the metaphorical light that shines on the inner lives of the Ramseys and those the enigmatic Mrs Ramsey draws into their sphere.

Herman Melville - Moby Dick narrated by Frank Muller
I'm glad I listened to Moby Dick, and I'm glad I listened to Moby Dick. Another one that's been on my TBR list for decades. I knew I ought to read it, but I'm also an anti-whaling vegetarian. I once bought a cheap paperback copy that struck guilt in me for years until I gave it away. For a while, I even comforted myself that I got the gist of it by reading my son's Cozy Classics version: Moby Dick in twelve words and felt puppet pictures. What finally tipped the balance was my elder daughter telling me how she sat next to someone on a plane who was going to a Moby Dick readathon. It was a double aha moment - why not try out my library's digital audio service and slay this literary leviathan at the same time? No, this isn't a review - but you know what Moby Dick is about and whether you have a white-whale-sized bout of guilt over not having yet read it. I definitely recommend trying the audiobook route.

Oops, spoiler

Jenny Colgan - The Little Beach Street Bakery
I needed to cleanse my reading palette after all those masterpieces, so I broke my usual mould and tried something in a contemporary setting. If cosy chick lit is a genre, this is it. Flora Mackenzie is a paralegal in London, far from the remote Scottish island home she left in disgrace. But when a billionaire client needs an islander to go back and make his case against a wind farm, Flora can't refuse the boss with whom she's secretly in love. I loved the aspects of island life and baking, but I can't say I felt invested in the love life of a twenty-something. Despite that, Colgan's plot twists made it a real page turner (or is that screen swiper nowadays?).

Robert McClosky - Blueberries for Sal
A classic, and maybe one that isn't for children with separation anxiety, but my little guy liked it. For those who haven't read it, Little Sal and her mother go berry picking on one side of Blueberry hill. Meanwhile, Little Bear and his mother are working their way up the other side. Sal and Little Bear stop to rest, and when they get up to join their mothers, they just follow the nearest one they see... I guess you could read it as a sweet story of how motherhood transcends all barriers or a horrid tale of separation and neglectful parents. But we thought it was fun. A plus is the blue and white illustrations throughout.

I guess animals and islands were my theme for the month. Hope the lion of early March is giving you plenty of excuses to curl up with a pile of books.

Quick Lit February 2018

Linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy for short reviews of the past month's reading.

I'm a looong way from bookstagram, but I'm trying!

Laura Vanderkam - 168 Hours: You have more time than you think
I didn't pick this book up for the obvious reasons - overhauling my life - but because we're moving and I can't fathom how we'll have enough hours in the day to get and keep the house ready for selling. The book is well-written, and once you fight down the temptation to keep arguing back about why this wouldn't work for you (Vanderkam's life is scarily focused), there's a lot of useful ideas. I don't know if it will help me stage the house, but it's given me inspiration for balancing my new job and family life when we make the move.

James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson
Trying to convey everything I feel about this book in a few lines is impossible (so I wrote a full review too). It's a giant of eighteenth century biography - about an man who is a giant in his own right. Boswell, Johnson's close friend, follows his mentor's advice to tell all: the serious, the trivial, the flattering, the negative, the beneficent, the petty. I can only sum up with a quote from the end of the book: "The character of Samuel Johnson has, I trust, been so developed in the course of this work, that they who have honoured it with a perusal may be considered as well acquainted with him." Tears in my eyes, I had to say, "yes".

Elaine N. Aron - The Highly Sensitive Person: How to thrive when the world overwhelms you
I felt a strange disconnect while reading this book: according to all the quizzes and criteria, I'm way over the threshold for an HSP, but I don't feel that way any more. I think that now, in mid-life, I've learned to live in a way that harmonizes with my personality. I also have to confess that the author's style did not appeal to me, but I kept reading, as I also have children with HSP traits and I didn't want to miss any insights. I'm certain this book will be incredibly useful for HSPs and those who know them, but unfortunately it didn't click with me.

Maggi Andersen - Hostage to Love
My online critique group are graciously letting me hang around virtually while I'm 'on leave' from writing fiction, so I'm trying to repay them by keeping up with their new publications. I'm not a romance reader in general, but Maggi's stories are always a treat, and definitely worth more than the Kindle price: heroines you immediately like, strong and feminine, and plots that are usually enlivened with a mystery or suspense element. This takes place in London and France during the French revolution. Actress Verity Garnier is sent to England to seduce widowed Viscount Anthony Beaumont and entice him to France and the clutches of the revolution in return for the safety of her imprisoned father. But Verity falls in love with Anthony, and when he unexpectedly leaves for France of his own accord, to rescue his brother-in-law, Verity and his daughter Henrietta follow in a bid to save him. Put your feet up and indulge yourself - and if you want a quick(ish) romance binge I recommend her novella collection, The Baxendale Sisters Series. See her website for details.

A Tale of Two Bibles
I believe that well-rounded people in the West should know the basic religious and mythological stories of our culture regardless of their beliefs/non-beliefs, and to that end, child-oriented Bible story books (and Greek mythology books) are a staple of our household. I needed a new toddler Bible and did a little research. The Paraclete Bible for Toddlers (Paraclete Press) was recommended on several sites, including Catholic ones, so I thought I was safe to order it, but I (actually, every family member who read to my toddler) were disappointed. The illustrations are cute and colourful, but the text is full of death and judgement. This may be my wishy-washy ingrained Anglicanism, but I think children should start off with the fun stories and the idea that God is love.

I tucked it in a cupboard to sell in the move, and went shopping in person to my local bookstore, which I should have done in the first place. The bookseller recommended The Beginner's Bible from Zondervan. The illustrations and text are aimed at a wider age-range (toddlers and young children), and the view point is what I expect from a children's Bible. We're happily reading this one instead.

I hope you are still cosying up with some good books, and wish a holy Lent to those of you who observe the season.

Book Review: The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

This is a standard book for those of us with English literature degrees, so I can't believe - or even remember - why I avoided it for so long. Maybe it began as a slight aversion to the eighteenth century, which was never my favourite period of history or English literature. That's certainly changed over the years as I've come to have a deeper appreciation of how innovative - and modern-sounding - many of the prose writers are.

One maxim Dr. Johnson pronounced concerning the writing of lives was to tell all, and his devoted younger friend, James Boswell, (almost) dutifully complies in this monumental biography: the serious, the trivial, the flattering, the negative, the beneficent, the petty - all is here in a just-about-chronological miscellany of history, exposition, letters, quotations, and analysis that reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth Century England.

It's tempting to call Boswell the first fan boy, but his love and admiration for Johnson, though blinkered, isn't entirely blind. Johnson protests continually against seeing men as cardboard cutouts of saints or sinners, and the man that bursts from these pages is fully three-dimensional. We see the Johnson who rails against granting any sort of liberties for American colonists but who (to Boswell's rare disapprobation) supports the complete abolition of slavery; the Johnson who will capriciously argue with his literary club on whichever side he thinks will be most contentious, but who gives an honest answer to a little girl who dares to ask about his famous tics; the Johnson who will insult the rich and famous merely to be witty but who buys his own cat food lest his servant feel demeaned by the task.

Dr. Johnson and Hodge, "A very fine cat indeed."

The edition I got from my local library - the 1946 "Collector's Library" edition from Doubleday - turned out to be abridged. At 631 pages! I felt a little like I was cheating, but I have to say that the professed reason for the abridgment, to include numerous pen and ink sketches and portraits by Gordon Ross, made the read more pleasurable. I'd consider the Life accessible to any serious reader. The shortish chapters, divided by chunks of letters and exposition, make the biography easy to digest in smaller portions. I started slowly, but I was engrossed by the end, and had tears in my eyes at Johnson's death. (The only other biographer who has managed to do that to me was Peter Ackroyd in his life of Sir Thomas More.)

And the little pleasures and surprises were innumerable. I smiled almost every time I read of Johnson repairing to his friends' country villa in Streatham (anyone who knows the modern town will understand). And, though I'd get skinned if I gave exact details, I have to confess I was blown away with just how much a physical and mental colossus of the eighteenth century could resemble - and offer insights on - a twenty-first century teenage girl. I'd finish by saying don't wait thirty years to read it, like I did, but I've a feeling that three decades more of experiencing life's vicissitudes enhanced the pleasure. So, read it now, but be sure to read it again later in life. I intend to.