The Little Stranger: Post-Read Thoughts

On strangers, haunted houses, and delightfully creepy novels:

Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is set in the 1940s rural town of Warwichshire, and is narrated by the county physician, Dr. Faraday.  One summers day, Dr. Faraday is called to Hundreds Hall, an old and large estate, to attend to a young maid pretending to be sick.  The Hall is the residence of the Ayres family: one older woman, and her two grown children, Caroline and Rodrick.  On the first day of his visit, Faraday is shocked to discover that the hall is slowly crumbling, and is a mere shadow of the once beautiful estate he remembered from his childhood.

Defeated by the war and the new government, the Ayres are just barely keeping the house from falling down around their ears.  Life for the old, genteel families has changed, and Dr. Faraday who’s the son of a maid, eventually befriends the family and becomes intimately concerned with their changing lives.  It soon becomes apparent, however, that there’s more going on here than the decline of the genteel class.  There’s something dreadfully wrong with Hundreds Hall.  Something or someone is haunting it, and life at Hundreds Hall is about to become even more dangerously precarious that it was before.

I’m writing this post after having finished The Little Stranger less than ten minutes ago.  I am well and truly impressed.  I don’t think I’ve read a haunted house story as carefully crafted and ultimately satisfying as The Little Stranger.  I was a little disappointed at first with how slowly the plot was moving, and I had my doubts as to whether this was a “true” haunted house story and not a modern take on the haunted house tradition in which the house turns out to not, of course, to be haunted at all.  Then around page 50 things started to pick up, and I thought Wait a minute. I’m really liking this right now.

There were scenes in this book that were wonderfully and delightfully creepy.  I think the fact that Waters took such care in building the story made the strange happenings even more affecting than they might have been otherwise.  In fact, the slow care that Waters takes in building the story was one of the things that I really appreciated about The Little Stranger.  The story wasn’t just about Hundreds Hall.  It was about class and, as it turns out, a psychological study of our narrator Dr. Faraday.  As the story progresses to its shocking conclusion, you begin to question Faraday’s motives for befriending the family in the first place.  Could it be that his motives aren’t as altruistic as they seem?

That’s another thing that I liked about The Little Stranger: the mystery at the heart of it.  Is Hundreds Hall really haunted, or are all those strange happenings merely figments of a deranged family’s imagination?  If Hundreds Hall is haunted, who or what is haunting it and why?  Waters rather cleverly answers most of these questions by the end of the novel, but she leaves just enough open for there to be some question as to what exactly was going on and why.  Waters also redefines what it means to haunt a house.  Desire, it seems, can lead to a haunting just as much as fury or other “unfinished” business can.

Then there’s the fact that all of this could easily be seen as a metaphor for the changing class structure in England after World War II.  The genteel families suffered through a dying way of life after the war; they were forced to break up their large estates in order to survive and engage in activities they would have found horrifying even thirty years before – like living with only one maid and making their own tea.  The world, it seemed, had risen up against them, determined to eject them – much in the same way Hundreds Hall seems determined to eject the Ayres.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed The Little Stranger.  The influence of writers like M.R. James, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry James is more than evident, but this is definitely Waters’ story.  I liked this – dare I say it? – even more than Fingersmith.  Perhaps because I wasn’t expecting to be as impressed as I ultimately was.  It’s always nice when a book exceeds your expectations, and The Little Stranger did that by a long shot.  I found it immensely readable, and if I liked Sarah Waters after reading Fingersmith, I love her after reading The Little Stranger.

Honestly, if my reading continues to be as good as this, I might end of having a heart attack.  I guess that wouldn’t be so bad.  After all, at least I’d die happy.  Highly recommended.

“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all.  Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners.  Let’s call it a – a germ.  And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb.  What would this little stranger grow into?  A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde.  A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration…” – page 353

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Riverheard Hardcover / April 2009
$26.95 / 490 pages

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BTT: Winter, The Season of Quiet

On booking through Thursday and winter reading:

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

There’s something about reading in the winter and, for that matter, autumn that I really love.  Honestly, I like reading almost anything in the winter, but there are some books I particularly enjoy reading in the season of cold.  For instance, I tend to enjoy reading Gothic or horror novels towards the end of the year.  The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden, which I plan to read as soon as I’ve finished Waters’ book, fit this bill perfectly.  I also enjoy reading books about winter like Bill Streever’s excellent nonfiction book Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, or set in extremely cold climates like Dan Simmons’ delicious horror novel The Terror, set in Anarctica.  Gil Adamson’s lyrical novel The Outlander was also a wonderful winter read, set as it is in the nineteenth century cold lands of northern Canada.

British mysteries are also a favorite of mine.  Nothing quite puts me in the mind of curling up by the fire with a good book than a nice British mystery.  I love reading Sherlock Holmes in the winter, as well as Wilkie Collins when I can.  I think a novel like Collins’ The Woman in White is a perfect winter read.  Quiet, contemplative novels like Jane Austen’s Persuasion are also books I enjoy reading in the grip of winter. (Although, I think it’s safe to say I enjoy reading Austen any time of the year.)  Generally speaking, I think of winter as the season of quiet, and my reading often reflects that sentiment.

Of course, none of these preferences are hard and fast rules.  At the moment, I’m also reading The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, which is about as far away from the season of cold as you can get.  *shrug* What can I say?  Good reading is good reading no matter the season.

And, you?  What do you prefer to read in the winter?

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Teaser Tuesdays: “The Ticking is the Bomb”

Today’s Teaser Tuesday is taken from Nick Flynn’s essay “The Ticking is the Bomb,” which is included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009:

This black-and-white photograph in my hand is an image of my unborn daughter. This is what I’m told. It is actually a series of photographs, folded one upon the other, like a tiny accordion. I was there when the doctor or the technician or whoever he was made it with his little wand of sound. I sat beside him, looked into the screen as he pointed into the shadows –Can you see her nose, can you see her hand? Can you see her foot, right here, next to her ear? I was there when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal — it’s as if I were holding a photograph of a dream, a dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love, this woman now walking through the world with two hearts beating inside her. — page 142

The full essay can also be found here.  ”The Ticking is the Bomb” is also the title of Nick Flynn’s newest book which I’ve added to my TBR list.  Naturally.

*Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading.

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Weekend Update on Monday: I’m Alive!

On work, woman, Waters, and Wells:

Oy, did last week do a number on me.  I travelled, I trained, I worked, and worked, and then worked some more.  Somewhere in there I managed to eat and sleep, but only just barely.  I think I’m juggling entirely too many balls, which I have just taken a step toward rectifying.  I’m hoping to begin posting more than once or twice a week.  We’ll see how that goes, but as usual I make no promises especially since I was just promoted to a new position that might keep me after hours several nights a week.

I’m still reading when I can, though.  Though I should have finished it weeks ago, I finally polished off Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography.  I hope to have my post up some time this week, but if it takes me a while to get to it, suffice it to say that I would not be surprised if Woman turns out to be the best thing I read in 2010.  It was that good.  I’m tempted to say that the second-to-last chapter that debunks the popular old trope that “men hunt and women nest,” courtesy of evolutionary psychologists, is the best one in the book.  That would be a lie, however.  Everything about this book is wonderful and enlightening and, frankly, empowering.  Last year, I read Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science which I also loved.  It was my favorite nonfiction book of 2009, and I found it hard to believe that it could get any better.  I was wrong.  I loved, loved, loved Woman.  As a matter of fact, if I didn’t have books due back at the library in a few days, I’d be reading it again.

Speaking of library books, since polishing off Woman I’ve been devoting some time to Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger since it’s due back at the library in, oh… three days.  And I’m only on page 147 of 463, and I refuse to return it until I’ve finished it because it’s finally getting good darn it.  I confess I was a little at a loss with where Waters was going with this story.  I purposefully didn’t read detailed reviews of this book since I wanted to come to it as fresh as possible, though I knew enough to know it had something to do with a haunted house.  Yet, there I was – a hundred pages in and I didn’t know nothin’ about no haunted house.  Then about twenty-five pages ago things started to pick up, and ten pages ago things got delightfully creepy.  Now I’m very intrigued and refuse to put it down.

Still, I’d better do some speed reading in the next few days.  I really want to finish The Little Stranger, but there are other people waiting on this and I’d hate to hold up the queue.  Sigh.  Library deadlines get me every time.  I’m entirely too slow a reader for a two week deadline.  Unless I want to be inundated with fees and library patron guilt, I end up rushing to get to the end.  Me, I prefer to savor.  But, it is what it is.  Besides, it was free, wasn’t it?  There are few things quite as wonderful as reading a new hardback while keeping $25 bucks in my pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, I love buying books.  But I have finally been forced to admit that I just can’t afford it anymore.  And I’m proud to say that I haven’t bought a book since the beginning of the year.  I’m pretty sure that’s a record for me.  I’m even more sure that the fact that I was next door to a bookstore four times in two weeks and didn’t go in is even more of a record.  Not only did I not go in, but I wasn’t even tempted to.  Progress!  I know the book business needs all the money they can get these days, but the rate at which I was buying books, you’d think I was trying to save bookstores with my measly pocketbook.  It would be nice if I could, but I can’t and this gal needed to learn to prioritize.

Of course, it’s not all that hard to make the switch from buyer to borrower when I can patronize the NY Public Library, which has arguably the best collection in the country.  I’ve learned that it’s dangerous for me to browse, though.  In bookstores, I’m (usually) restrained by the amount of money I’m willing or able to spend.  Usually, I’m not walking out of there with any more than three books.  But the library.  Oh, the library.  I can check-out twenty-five books, you say?  For free?  For real?  *rubbing hands together* Nevermind that it would be impossible for me to read them all before the due date.  That is neither here nor there. So nowadays I go in with a plan.  As a matter of fact, I go in when my books are placed on hold.  I go in, get them, and try to look around as little as possible.  Looking around is the road to madness.

I also started Wells Tower’s collection of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  This book has been lauded up one side and down the other, and I must say that after reading the first story, “The Brown Coast,” I’m suitably impressed.  It is indeed, “electric” as one reviewer described it.  It’s energetic and bounces off the page like a caffeine addict.  I’m very interested to see if the middle stories live up to the promise of the first one.  I also hope that Wells Tower is his real name.  For some reason, I think it’s very cool.  When I first heard it, I just knew he was a famous author.  Lo and behold this is his debut book, though if his writing is as good the critics say I suppose fame is not too far off after all. Well, back to reading I go.  I have a novel to devour.  Oh, the things I do for pleasure…

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Teaser Tuesdays: Northwest Passages

On Northwestern passages, crazy laughter, and awe and terror:

This Teaser Tuesdays post is a little late (when is it not?), but I haven’t done it in a while and I’m always a little sad when I miss out on the fun of Teaser Tuesdays.  In keeping with the plan I made a while ago, this teaser isn’t from a book I’m reading right now, but rather something from my TBR shelf.  I figure, if I’m going to tease someone, why not tease both you and I?  This teaser is taken from Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden:

She looked at him for a moment, and then laughter rose up, unbidden, at the suggestion that a cup of tea would be sufficient to restore her.  She saw Peter smile, and then as the laughter continued to spill out of her she saw his face change into something wary, almost frightened, and she wondered for a moment what he could  be frightened of, before she realized that it was her; or rather her laughter, which had a cracked, brittle sound even to her own ears.  That look sobered her in an instant.  She forced herself to stop and draw a few ragged breaths while the echo of her laughter was caught by the wind and whirled away to dance across the prairie. — page 121, “The Wide, Wide Sea”

I’m very excited to read this.  I can’t recall exactly how I heard about this book, but I think it was the fact that Roden has been compared to M.R. James, Poe, and Doyle may have had something to do with it.  Publisher’s Weekly wrote:

Readers with a taste for deftly executed tales of subtle horror will welcome Roden’s fine debut story collection. Out and Back tells of an abandoned amusement park whose attractions are sinister snares set to entrap unwary thrill seekers. In The Palace, a skeleton crew working the night shift at a luxury hotel finds the premises haunted by the ghosts of a serial killer’s victims. Both the title story and The Wide, Wide Sea are set in Canadian wildernesses, where the alienated mingle freely with the ghostly. Roden is a copublisher of the classic ghost story imprint Ash Tree Press, and her fiction resonates with echoes of Poe, Conan Doyle, Coleridge, Dickens and other masters of antiquarian horror. This yields powerful expressions of the supernatural in the book’s two tales of 19th-century Antarctic exploration, Endless Night and The Brink of Eternity, whose carefully crafted old-fashioned style lends atmosphere to depictions of a terra incognita rich with awe and terror.

Yup. Can’t wait.

**Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading.

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Grave Peril: Post-Read Thoughts

On ghosts, Die Hard, and my favorite wizard detective:

Jim Butcher’s Grave Peril starts off with a bang – very much in medias res – and doesn’t let up until the final page.  The opening pages of Grave Peril has Harry Dresden, our heroic wizard, speeding in his car with his knight friend Michael, on his way to stop a ghost who’s materialized in the maternity ward of the local hospital.  Something has disturbed the barrier between the real world and Nevernever, the world of ghosts, fairies and other beings, and dangerous ghosts have been crossing over causing havoc and harm.  Meanwhile, the vampires of Chicago are throwing a suspicious shindig to which Harry has been invited and something called The Nightmare is targeting Harry and his friends.

This is the third book in the Desden series and Butcher has not failed to surprise me.  After Fool Moon I was sure there was no way Dresden could find himself in a situation worse than trying to fend off super werewolves weak and alone.  I underestimate Butcher.  There were parts in Grave Peril that made me so afraid for Harry that I had to either 1) put it down and come back to it later or 2) continue reading until I was sure he was going to be alright.  Of course, I know he’s going to be alright – there are eight more books in the series so far, after all – but I never know how alright he’s going to be.  Reading Dresden’s books is like watching Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies: by the end of it, he’s all bloody and beat up, which is terrible to watch, yet somehow the small, brave guy always beats the big, bad villains. (This is excepting last Die Hard movie, “Live Free, Die Hard,” in which Willis’ character was more of a superhero than some poor dude who’s “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”)

Now… where was I?  Ah, Dresden.  For me, the fact that I never know how Harry is going to get himself out of his harrowing situations is one of the best things about the Dresden books.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a character who’s as skilled at getting himself into and out of trouble as Harry.  On top of that, of the three books I think this had the most difficult mystery to unravel.  The plot was incredibly convoluted, and had I not read the first book Storm Front I might have been hopelessly lost.  As it is, all of the pieces fit perfectly well together and the end was immensely satisfying.  Then, of course, there’s Harry’s irreverent humor which makes reading Dresden’s books both thrilling and fun.  I love that he carries his ghost-hunting gear in Scooby-Doo lunch box and that he has the audacity to attend a vampire party dressed in a cheap Dracula Halloween costume.  I chuckled more than a few times during Grave Peril, though sometimes I think Harry talks too much for his own good.

Grave Peril was an excellent addition to the Dresden Files series.  It was just as good as the first two, and if the following books are similarly good, I know I’m in for some excellent reading.  I highly recommend Grave Peril, though I suggest you go ahead and start from the beginning if this is your first Harry encounter.  If you like urban fantasy fiction and hard-boiled detective novels, then you’re going to love Harry.  I can almost guarantee it.

There are reasons I hate to drive fast… Tonight was an exception to the rule.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
Roc / Sept. 2001
$7.99 / 384. ppgs.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Reading Outside of the Box: Why I Read What I Read

On difficult questions, complicated answers, being conscious of what you read, and the wonder of stories:

I had plans to write about something completely different today.  In fact, I was going to post about my very first Library Loot (!).  I picked up a great pile of books and I couldn’t wait to share them with you all.  However, as I was looking for the Library Loot button to paste with my post, I came across Eva’s “Reading in Colour” post from this weekend.  See! This is why I hate hitting the “Read All” button in my Google Reader for fear I’d miss something like this.  Before I go on, I should say that if you haven’t read Eva’s post (and really, judging by the number of comments, who hasn’t?), you should.  I think the post drew some pretty heated comments (I skipped most of them), but while discord in our friendly blogging community is never a fun thing, it’s often necessary to get us to think about the difficult questions many of us would rather avoid or ignore.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything Eva says.  Are there people of color out there writing amazing books?  You bet.  Are we, bloggers, reading as many novels by authors of color as we could or should?  Probably not.  But right now I don’t want to talk about what every one else is or should be reading.  I want to talk about my reading.  And I think what I have to say might bring an interesting perspective to this discussion.

So first let me say that most of the authors I read are white authors, although lately I’ve been branching out and reading novels by authors of different ethnicities.  At the moment I have several books by Indian authors, Mexican authors, South American authors, and Middle Eastern authors sitting on my TBR shelf.  And I have maybe two books by African-American authors.  I like to think of myself as an eclectic reader, but a glimpse at the books I read last year shows quite clearly that most of the authors I read are white.

However, here’s something I never talk about on BiblioAddict: I’m a person of color.  Both of my parents are African-American, though my father – and therefore I – have a little Native American blood running through our veins.  So, how and why is it – and I’ve been asked this often – that I read more books by white authors than I do by authors of my own ethnicity?  I can’t tell you what an agonizing question this has been for me over the years.  There’s a measure of guilt attached to the fact that I read mostly white authors which is hard to explain, but I’ll see if I can do my best.  There’s always this guilt or this question that maybe I have self-esteem issues (Am I reading so many novels by white authors because I secretly want to be white?) or that I’m not doing enough to support black authors.  As an African-American reader, I feel almost duty-bound to read books by people of color because well, if authors of color can’t rely on other people of color to read their books, who can they rely on?

And, I want to see authors of color succeed, because I think the stories they tell are important and a necessary addition to the world of literature.  I also think authors of color don’t get the publication or the readership they deserve, and those that do get published get the short end of the stick from publication all the way to the placement of their book in bookstores. (side rant: I hate the African-American section in bookstores and I don’t see the point of them.  It makes a distinction between African-American books and everything else that simply doesn’t exist.  Writers of other ethnicities are placed on the shelves with everything else. Only African-American books have their own little ghetto often in the back of the store – and I say ‘ghetto’ purposefully because the section hardly ever seems as well-kept as the rest of the store.  It also hurts readers because it reinforces the idea that books with black characters are for black people and books about every one else is for, well everyone else.  You wouldn’t put Stephen King and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the same section just because they’re white, would you? Would you?  Why do it to Zane and Zora Neal Hurston?)

So, why don’t I read more novels by authors of color, one might reasonably ask.  The answer is… complicated, and the first essay in Zadie Smith’s most recent book, Changing My Mind, discusses this subject more eloquently than I ever could (another must-read if you haven’t already).  One of those answers is that I’ve always felt it was expected of me, which I’ve always resented.  I went into a bookstore once and was stopped by an employee who asked me if she could help me with anything.  I told her I was looking for a good mystery, and she then took me to the African-American book section and dropped me off.  I resented that.  I resented the assumption that because I’m black, the only books I must have been interested in reading were books by other black people.  I don’t think she was being racist; I’m sure was sincerely trying to be helpful.  It was her assumption about what I would like based solely on the color of my skin that simply bothered me.  I don’t like people to assume they know me until they know me.

I also resent that as far as many African-Americans are concerned, I should be reading books by black authors because I need to support my community.  I don’t have a problem with supporting my community, but I do have a problem with being told what I should do and how I should go about it.  Besides that, I’m a contrary person.  Telling me what I should do is a good way to get me to do something else.  I like defying expectations, and many white and black people alike expect that as a black person I must (and should, in some cases) read books by black authors.

Then there’s this: In her comments on Jane Austen and reading, Fran Lebowitz says that reading should be door not a mirror.  When I first became an avid reader I was all about doors.  I wanted books to take me to foreign places where foreign people lived foreign lives and did foreign things.  I was black, I lived in a black neighborhood, went to a predominately black school, had friends who were all mostly black, and as far as I was concerned, books about black people written by black people were mirrors.  I figured I knew their stories, because I assumed (wrongly) that their stories were my stories because they were black and I was black.  But what of books on the other side of the fence?  What of Earnest Hemingway and Sandra Brown and Charlotte Bronte and Stephen King?  What of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft?  Doors, all of them.  Doors that took me to places I might never have been capable of imagining had I not read their stories.

They were also doors that took me to places that didn’t make me feel angry and sick to my stomach.  We read many books by African-American authors when I was in school.  And many, if not most of them, had something to do with slavery or Jim Crow or racism.  I hated those books.  Not because of their content, but because of the way they made me feel.  They made me (and often still do) angry, angry, angry.  Every cutting remark about black people or a flick of the whip in a book about slavery was like a slap in the face – nay, a punch in the gut.  I don’t imagine my reaction is very different from many white readers of these books.  That’s what empathy is all about, after all.  But it’s slightly different I think when you imagine that that could have been your mother, your father, or your grandparents 150 years ago; it could have been you.  In fact, someone whose blood now runs in my veins was that person.  It stings, that knowledge.  And it’s not something I looked forward to reading about when I was looking for a pleasurable escape.  So, I came to view books by black authors as a chore and a duty, not something I would or could particularly enjoy.

I know now that books by authors of color come in all different shapes and sizes (like books by white authors!  can you believe that? *sarcasm*).  Authors of color write novels of romance, horror, thrillers, science fiction, graphic novels, etc. and not all of them have anything explicitly to do with the color of their characters’ skin.  I think readers often expect this to be the case with minority writers.  In fact, some readers both black and white are offended when this isn’t the case.  But we don’t expect that novels by white authors are always explicitly about what it means to be white and how being white affects their daily lives.  The characters simply move in the environment they have been provided and we are left to draw our own conclusions about how and if their race matters at all.  The same is often true for books by authors of color.  Authors of color are first and foremost people writing about people.  If there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that, from my perspective, novels by writers of other ethnicities might be foreign, but they’re not nearly as foreign as you would think.  If you don’t believe me, hop over to Eva’s post and check out one those books she recommends.

As for myself, I do need to read more authors of color.  I’d gotten into the habit of reading mostly white authors for the reasons stated above, and even after I realized those reasons weren’t worth much, well old habits die hard.  I’d like to read more authors of color not because I feel duty-bound to do so or because I want to support my community (though, again, this isn’t inherently bad), but because I like to diversify my reading in every way possible.  I enjoy diving into genres I’ve never read and reading books set in countries I’ll probably never visit, but more than anything, I enjoy stories.  Stories are just as exciting and diverse as the people who write them, and I’ve always enjoyed a good story.  And I’ve decided that if I should come across a story that sounds an awful lot like my story, well then there’s nothing wrong with that either.  Doors are great, but mirrors serve their purpose too.  Mirrors show us things we might never have noticed otherwise, and I question any person who says they have nothing more to learn about themselves.

So – and here’s where I wrap it back around to the original point of this post – I’ve been thinking I need to diversify my reading as it relates to ethnicity for a while now and I was happy to see that my Library Loot (woot! woot!) is another step towards achieving that goal.  This week and last week I picked up:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Home by Marilynn Robinson
Life, Sex, and Ideas by A.C. Grayling
Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahria Mandanipour

Okay, only two out of nine of those books are by authors of color, but I’m trying to diversify my reading in many ways, which accounts for almost every other book.  And, I think these two books plus The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I read earlier in the month is a good start.

Finally, I’d like to encourage everyone to take Eva’s advice and read outside of their box, particularly their ethnic box.  Where would I be if I didn’t read Waters or Austen or Gaiman or Hornby because they were white and I wasn’t and it seemed like an awful lot of work to figure out who they were and what they were writing?  I suppose I’d be reading other things that might be just as good, but my reading life wouldn’t be as rich for sure.  I know the publishing world doesn’t make books by authors of color easy to find, but I’m sure the pay-off is worth the research work. There’s a whole world of literature by non-white writers out there just waiting to be explored.  I bet it’s gorgeous and I bet that you’ll love it.  Let’s go together.  We’ll have loads and loads of fun.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Cold: Post-Read Thoughts

One the magnificent world of cold:

The end of Cold: Adventures in the World’s Coldest Places by Bill Streever is probably the best, most affecting part of this wonderful book.  In his final chapter, “June” (each chapter is a month in the progression of a year), Streever briefly discusses global warming and its complicity in the gradual disappearance of his favorite element: cold.  He writes of melting glaciers, of under-snow habitats washed away by warming temperatures, of birds that migrate too soon or too late, and of cold-dependent animals that will go the way of the dire wolf and the sabertooth when the cold disappears.

It’s a sad litany not because Steever  adamantly advocates against global warming (he doesn’t, really), but because he spends most of the book celebrating cold.  Cold, he writes, is a powerful and sometimes frightening force, but while we’re hunkered in our homes around a warm fire, beautiful things are happening in the world of cold.  Animals are freezing and unfreezing themselves, trees are changing to suit heavy snowfall and blowing wind, and people are building warm huts made of ice and snow.  In addition, the scientific and sometimes mercenary exploration of how and why cold is has given us many things for which we aren’t often appreciative, namely refrigeration and air-conditioning, the great escape from excessive heat.

With his meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness prose, Streever dives into the history of Arctic explorers and the Children’s Blizzard of 1888, as well as the development of the weather prediction system and the physics of absolute zero.  It’s an enlightening journey and Steever’s writing makes it a pleasure to read every step of the way.  Streever’s prose is quite simply beautiful, and in some places, poetic.  It’s is also intimate and reads like a private journal or a letter to a friend.  Like any great narrator, Streever is personable, humorous, and thoughtful.  By the end of the book, I was as sad to see Streever go as I was the cold that might one day disappear.

Some reviewers have expressed a little frustration that Streever doesn’t tackle global warming more directly.  In fact, the prelude and the final chapter are almost the only places where he does mention it.  Yet, though I would have liked to hear more of Streever’s thoughts on global warming, I wasn’t bothered that he didn’t include those thoughts in Cold.  I appreciated the fact that he resolutely kept the book about cold rather than about global warming, which are really two different subjects despite the fact that lately they’re often interrelated.  Cold is a celebration of all things cold and a quiet rumination on how cold has shaped the way we view and interact with our world.  It’s an encyclopedia of knowledge on all things cold, and it’s a book that you won’t soon forget, especially when the days get shorter and the temperature drops.  Highly recommended.

The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways is still thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways. Cold is a part of day-to-day life, but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.

We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Cold freezes the nostrils and assaults the lungs. Its presence shapes landscapes. It sculpts forests and herds animals along migration routes or forces them to dig in for the winter or evolve fur and heat-conserving networks of veins. It changes soils. It preserves food. It carries with it a history of polar exploration, but also a history of farming and fishing and the invention of the bicycle and the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It preserves the faithful in vats of liquid nitrogen from which they hope one day to be resurrected.

….

It is time to enjoy an occasional shiver as we worry about a newly emerging climate likely to melt our ice caps, devour our glaciers, and force us into air-conditioned rooms. It is time to embrace and understand the natural and human history of cold. Even in a warming world, a world choked by carbon dioxide and methane, cold persists, biting my lungs and at the same time leaving me invigorated, alive and well on an Arctic spring afternoon with the sun hovering low over an ice-covered horizon and the thermometer at forty below.

* A NPR interview with Steever about his book can be found here along with an excerpt.

** Streever is currently working on his next book, which is tentatively called… Heat: A Natural and Unnatural History.  He has another interesting interview over at Paper Cuts here.

Other reviews:

Things Mean A Lot
Pages247

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places by Bill Streever
Little Brown & Company / July 2009
$24.99 / 292 pgs.
(Purchased with my own moolah.)

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The Divine Jane Austen: The Movie

On why Jane Austen is special to so many people:

I’ll let these people do all the talking.  They’ll do a much better job than I ever could.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

…….

Happy Friday, folks.

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BTT: Flapper? Who, me?

On booking through Thursday and the flapper in you:

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Suggested by Prairie Progressive:

Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?

I often read the inside flap of books I’ve never heard of before, but not so much if it’s a book with which I’m already familiar.  If I’m in the bookstore just browsing, however, the inside flap or the description on the back of the paperback can make or break a book.  If I find the description’s writing too cheesy or simply poorly written and the plot unbelievable or not to my taste, I’m very likely to put the book back down.  If the description on the inside of the flap does pass muster, I’ll read a few first lines and whatever blurbs there might be.  If I find all of that satisfactory, I’m likely to leave the bookstore with it or, at the very least, add it to my TBR list.

Flap descriptions are tricky business, though, aren’t they?  They’re often written by editors and, when editors are too busy (which is frequently), by editorial assistants.  They are not written by the authors themselves.  This can cause all kinds of problems.  A terrible description can reflect poorly on a well-written novel.  Or, if the editor or editorial assistant has never read the book or skimmed it at the most (which happens more than you’d think), a book description could easily be not very descriptive at all.  Then there are the descriptions that are purposefully misleading by using language that a general reading audience might potentially find more appealing.

So, it seems that it would make more sense to avoid book descriptions all-together, and since most of the books I buy and read have already been vetted through reading reviews and comments about said book online, most of the time I do.  Bloggers and book reviews give me a much better idea of what a book is about than any book description could.  Yet, the thrill of discovery and adventure one feels when they stumble across a book of which they’ve never heard is undeniable.  Such discoveries almost demand that attention be paid to book descriptions.  That’s what they’re there for, after all.  They’re there to grab me, seduce me, thrill me, and entice me.  They’re there to make me feel as if I would be a fool not to walk out of the bookstore with that book in my bag.  Book descriptions don’t always live up to their promise, but then neither do books.  A great plot can be poorly executed and poor plot can be beautifully rendered.  It’s always a gamble, because knowing what a book is about is never the same as reading it.  But, for that one moment when I’m excited and shot-through with anticipation for a world which I have yet to plunder, I am happy.  That moment of I can’t wait to read this! makes the gamble worth it.  Every once in a while a book lives up to the promise of its description and it is glorious.

Here’s the flap description to The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, a book I’ve been dying to read for a long, long time.  To be honest, I’d planned to read this book long before I ever read the flap description (which was just now), but this description would’ve convinced me if I hadn’t:

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world.  A quest for truth that leads to death, madness, or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925, Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization—which he dubbed “Z”—existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”—became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth, and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z,” form the heart of this enthralling narrative.

I can’t wait to read it.  I also can’t wait to read Grann’s collection of essays due out in March, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.  The book description:

Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries.

Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent; and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann’s hypnotic accounts display the power—and often the willful perversity—of the human spirit.

Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

I’m particularly interested in reading the essays on the Sherlock Holmes expert and the arson sleuth trying to save the life of a man whose now controversial execution was written up in The New Yorker [...by none other than David Grann. I read the article months ago and I just now made the connection. Incredible.]

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