Carol Shields, again.

We all know how much I love Carol Shields, so telling you I loved The Stone Diaries might sound a bit like beating a dead horse--but before you stop reading, hear me out. First off, I don't think The Stone Diaries is quite on par with Unless, I doubt I'll even think anything is on par with Unless. So if you haven't read Unless yet and you are wondering which of her books you should read I still recommend that over The Stone Diaries. That said there are lots of similarities about the novels. Both are the first person narratives of a woman trying to figure out her place in the world. Both understand much of who they are through their relationships with others. And both of them have won some pretty hefty awards. The Stone Diaries in particular has won the Pulitzer for fiction, The Governor General's Award, The Prix de Lire in France, The U.S. National Book Critics' Circle Award and Unless was shortlisted for the Booker.

The Stone Diaries begins in 1905 with a woman who shockingly discovers she is labor, shockingly because her naivety has kept her from realizing she was even pregnant. And thus begins the life of Daisy Stone, a child brought into the world as her mother leaves it. This is in part why she never really understands who she is or who she is supposed to be. As if she never got the chance to live the life she was supposed to have. We follow Daisy through childhood, college, marriage, life as a widow, married again, motherhood, widowed again and on into old age. Its begins at the beginning of the century and ends at the end of it. Its a beautiful story told that spans an array of situations and emotions and has the ability to sweep you off your feet and into a different life--and to help you get there book even includes a series of family photographs inserted into its pages. It does have some drawbacks though, it starts off slow and the climax is possibly somewhere around 3/4 of the way through--thus the ending seems somewhat unnecessary at times, or maybe just anti-climatic. But that's not much of a complaint if you think about some of the crap people are reading. Carol Shields does what she does best in this novel, that is portray the beautifully quotidian lives of women. In an interview with the NYT's after the book came out she said, "Someone wrote me a letter, saying, 'I wish Daisy had tried harder.' Well, I didn't think there were enough novels about women who didn't make the historical record."

More books about books...

As you all know I haven't much time for extra-curricular reading, and poor luminous has taken the brunt of the fall. I've thought about posting about my readings, but how many of you really want to know the antonym of insects or how to tell an american cockroach from an oriental one. Few of you, I'm positive. I am curious to know what books you are reading though, and I think our other visitors are too. A few sentences would do for a posting, a might just be the life blood that keeps luminous going.

That said, I did recently finish a book. Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. The writing was simple, the ideas mostly dull and yet I read it cover to cover--never mind the fact that it took me three months. If you are interested in learning key words that come up in the book business (and by that I do mean the used and rare books business) this book is a great primer. From foxing and sizing to rag paper and red rot, there are many great terms scattered through out the book that anyone interested in working with books for a living should probably know.

That said the couple who co-authored the book are both supposedly writers but didn't come to have a love for book collecting until their mid-thirties. Whaaa? And if they had really read all the books that claim to have read, I would think their writing would be more refined and poetic. But alas, it's not. It also takes them all of 200 pages to and thousands of dollars to come to the conclusion they started off with. $7,000.00 for a book isn't reasonable for the average person. Lord knows how they were able to afford this "hobby" on writer's salaries. But since they the dropped book collecting like a bad habit by the end of the book, I guess it's not worth spending too much time trying to figure out.