Forster v. Dickens

As many know, I have been on a little crush of Charles Dickens since reading Bleak House. So any mention of Dickens (usually they are negative, I find) peaks my interest.
While reading a chapter from Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrop Frye, I came across this delightful jab at the anti-Dickensians while Frye was talking about the comic use of repetition.

"Mr. E.M. Forster speaks with disdain of Dickens's Mrs. Micawber, who never says anything except that she will never desert Mr. Micawber: a strong contrast is marked here between the refined writer to finicky for popular formulas, and the major one who exploits them ruthlessly."

That's it. Just a little note since the blog has been a bit slower as of late.

A Reading List of My Own-unless you care to join me

So. As AZF and ScarlettZ and a few others embark on the pleasures of reading The Last Temptation of Christ, I will be spending my holiday break reading for MA Comprehensive Exam. As far as reading lists go, it's not too many pages and it's not too much new material. But there is one book on the list that I will be embarrassed to have read, let alone to read it for my comp exam. See if you can pick it out.
The theme of the exam is romantic comedy--definitions and discourse on love, meanings and constructions of lover and beloved, the stakes of marriage, socially sanctioned form of affect and relationships. So. That's okay.

The List:
Much Ado About Nothing-Shakespeare
Songs and Sonnets; Elegy 19-John Donne
Pride & Prejudice-Jane Austen
Importance of Being Earnest-Oscar Wilde
Complete Love Poems-May Swenson
The Boyfriend School-Sarah Bird

Yeah.
There's also a handful of scholarship to read. Stanley Cavell, Nancy Vickers, Hawthorne, Henry James, Northrop Frye.

Seriously. You want to read my comp list with me. You know you do. When will you ever get another valid reason to read the Boyfriend School?

Clack-Clack

Now that my quarter is over, my final papers are written and the worlds of Milton/Lillo scholarship are one step closer to perfection I have decided to read Buechner's Alphabet of Grace one more time. The rest of my winter break will be the reading list for my comp. exam. But for right now, I am loving Buechner.

You wake up out of the huge crevasses of the night and your dreaming. You get out of bed, wash and dress, eat breakfast, say goodbye and go away never maybe to return for all you know, to work, talk, lust, pray, dawdle and do, and at the end of the day, if your luck holds, you come home again, home again. Then night again. Bed. The little death of sleep, sleep of death. Morning, afternoon, evening--the hours of the day, of any day, of your day and my day. The alphabet of Grace. If there is a god who speaks anywhere, surely he speaks here.

Don't mean to get all heavy-handed and dramatic. It's just so lovely a book.

Don't forget to Vote (for jesus)

Taking a break from books to remind those who are not too stupid to register before the deadline to vote. Those of us who are too stupid will remain nameless.

I know we've seen this picture before, but i still think its hilarious, and it's been cleaned up a bit since I last came across it.

The Last Temptation of Christ

If any of y'all want to join Amber's and my cozy little reading club (and when I say cozy, I mean very, very intimate-- probably just Amber and myself in the end), we are planning on reading The Last Temptation of Christ for the end of December. So, start reading and you, too, can be part of that discussion. Yeah!

Greatest. Title. Ever.

We are reading the "She Stoops to Conquer," written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1771. He was desperate for cash, frantically wrote this play (as I've come to understand it) and everyone thought it would be a disaster. Instead, it was an un-rivaled success, becoming the most popular non-Shakespeare written play in English history. It has been in production every season since it was written.
Can you fucking believe that.
And, the title kicks ass.

Quick Question:

I've been wanting to read something by Margret Atwood but I'm not sure where to being. I was wondering if any of you are fans or have at least read a book of hers that you could recommend to me?

I wanted to mention this play, The London Merchant, written by George Lillo in 1731, in light of the last discussion here. It's what my professor called a "New Tragedy," due to the fact that it is the tragedy of an apprentice and a harlot, not the high folk of tragedies past.
Robert Hume would say The London Merchant takes place in "Melodramaland," the play is filled with morals and christianity and mercy and grace, and characters like Thorowgood and Trueman. It takes itself clearly from the pages of Paradise Lost, Hamlet and Macbeth. It is a play that should be all those things FR laments in the previous conversation.
But it is absolutely brilliant. I had not read this play before yesterday, but I think this is the stuff that i stand on when i support the sentimental and the melodramatic.

Frazier, Charles

All this talk about books I haven't read reminds me another book I haven't read, and want to read. High upon my list it is, though little knowledge about it, have I. (god i'm bored).
The book is Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier, author of the wonderful Cold Mountain.
Does anyone know anything about this? Is it supposed to be any good? I thought, all this Cormac McCarthy talk, we shouldn't forget other people.
Like Charles Frazier, or Herman from Herman's Head. Remember that show? Whatever happened to Herman?

In the thread of...

It's been a big week for prizes in literature. Today the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Orhan Pamuk. He is the first person from Turkey to win the Nobel prize for literature. Which is pretty exciting. Particularly because of the state of the world right now, namely whats going on in the Middle East, but clearly I didn't need to spell that out for you. The Nobel prize committee describes his writing as one, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures". A list of his works (along with publishing dates) can be found here. And a comprehensive list of past winners for literature can be found here.

In case any of you want to talk about it...

Man Booker What?

In case you didn't remember the significance of today I am here to remind you. Today the the Man Booker 2006 winner gets announced. The official press release was at 10 am in London on BBC1. Which was many a hour since its nearly 12 in Chicago. Yet somehow I can't figure out who won. It's not on the Booker website, nor on BBC1. Let me know if you hear anything.

In eager anticipation,
azf

UPDATE: Kiran Desai is announced winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006.

The Dive From Clausen's Pier

As you all already know, I am reading The Master and Margarita right now. But before I picked that up I was reading, rather vigorously I would say, The Dive From Clausen's Pier by Anne Packer. This is her first novel, but before it she wrote for The New Yorker and had a collection of short stories, Mendocino and Other Stories, which I believe she won some awards for--but don't quote me on that. The novel follows one young woman's post college search to find where in the world she belongs, which sounds kinda cheesy, but that's my own fault, not Packer's. The book centers around one highly debatable ethical question: how much of ourselves are we required to give to others? And when do we have to put ourselves first? A review from The New Yorker describes it this way:

At the start of this quietly engrossing début novel, twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell is tiring of her stalled life in Madison, Wisconsin, and her bland, relentlessly loving boyfriend of eight years' standing. When a dive into the local reservoir leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, she flees to Manhattan, where she takes shelter with a group of wannabe artists in a decaying Chelsea brownstone and falls for an elusive older man. The journey is a familiar one, but Packer fleshes it out with a naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented, and capable of mistakes that the author may never have intended. The result is genuine suspense, as Carrie feels her way toward the truth about herself, and what it means to be a moral being.

I'm can't out-right recommend this book to everyone, obvioulsy, because what book can be recommened with such overarching confidence (besdies this one) but I will say that I really really enjoyed it and if, when recalling the past, you find that you often like the same books as I do, then it would be well worth your while to pick it.

RIP: AZF's Computer

Things have slowed down a bit on the blog, I am sure you noticed. It is due to the untimely demise of AZ's computer. Tragically, it has expired. But reading has not expired, nor has CZF's ability (and he excels at this) to sit on a computer at work and not do much.
So. AZ has started The Master and Margarita, which I know some of you have read, and there is and endless amount of discussability there. Jesus and Pontius, the upright cat with the monocle, the devil and the master and all that great stuff. I find that this novel, though I have forgotten much of it, has left very strong images in my mind, which I'll probably never forget.
Or, if that doesn't interest you, Book IV and V of Paradise Lost, which I am reading.
Or, Latin. Convenire meus amicis cupio et amor deusque dissere.

(how's that for elementary latin.)

Blindness

"For the latter, blindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo." - Jose Saramago

Okay, so that quote might be a little out of context for those of you who haven't read Blindness yet, but I couldn't resist it. To any of you who are looking for a book that will pull you in after the first page, I highly recommend this book. It has a creepy post-apocalyptic feel to it, to which I can't say too much about with out giving away the ending. But I will say, pick it up! It's a quick read, and well worth it. If you want a short synopsis, here is a link to one of my favorite websites to help you out. And if you have read it, I would love to talk about one chapter in particular and the ending. Jeez. What a freaky book.

Milton, revisited.

So I'm taking a Milton class this fall. Which is great. But in yesterday's class, a discussion occurred, of which I was the instigator. Basically, it revolved around the modern reader's inability to recognize medieval and early modern texts for what they are. Something that annoys me, and I think says a lot about myself as a possible future academic, is that many (of course not all) students are unwilling to read in earnest what is simply the writings of belief. Yesterday there was very little sincerity conveyed on Milton's characters, or on Milton. Instead he was given the crushing title, Naive. It's Cute, Laughable, Naive, but come on, take it seriously, that such a brilliant man could hold so strongly to such naive precepts as Protestant Christianity, come on.
My professor called this problem the inability of modern readers to break from the Hermeneutic of Suspicion, to be unwilling to be deeply moved by the sincerity of Milton's belief, while simultaneously being moved by his skill as a poet. Instead we distance ourselves from anything that requires earnestness on our part, and analyze to death what was originally meant to inspire.
If we can't do that, or are unwilling to do it, then I think these texts are dead. In all of this, big props to DR, who taught his students that these texts are first moving, to the point of tears; they are tragic and beautiful (if a bit remote from current thinking) and only second, are they academic fodder.
This is a rant.
thanks for listening.
Yours truly.

The First book of the Americas

Since this is a blog about books, I thought I would link to this story which is about the finding of the oldest known text in the Americas.

From what I can tell, I think it was the grasshopper that stole the bandaids, which caused the ice-cream cones to melt, and all the mail to go undelivered. I've never trusted grasshoppers.

Now For The Shortlist.

You may remember that really intruiging post I made a while ago about The Booker Long List being announced. Well, the time has come. The Short List is finally here. But David Mitchell is not. Sad. Here are the books:

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai


The Secret River by Kate Grenville



Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland



In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar



Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn




The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

What? Already.

What you have heard is true, although being the smarties that you are I'm sure you never doubted it, especially if you read pandas. Cormac McCarthy has a novel coming out at the end of the month, The Road, September 26th to be exact, so now is the time to pre-order it, that is, if any of you happen to be on the edge of your seat about it....

So my reason for commenting is that it seems odd to me that he has two books coming on in just over a year. Hadn't it been years since he had last published a book? What changed? Two in a year, jeez. Who is this man, its not like he's putting out albums?

On that note, I'm off to read the last chapter of Blindness (which I will report on in the coming days) and then finally all this time later, at the probing of whb, I will start All the Pretty Horses. The question is, will I team up with him and drive you all nuts? Or, maybe just be at a complete loss...we shall see.


Anyone else read it?

Books?

I'm curious, since everyone is spread all over the place, and I don't know the minor details of most of your lives, what books have you been reading lately? Anything good? Stuff to stay away from?