ANOTHER month's worth of books

D**m, I am getting bad with this blogging thing...before more time goes by, I should at least list the books I read, I suppose, even if I don't get around to discussing them. The order is going to be all messed up, because while I think the piles around the apartment are in (reverse) chronological order (most recently read on top, oldest on the bottom), I'm not sure about the order of the piles...
N.B. - I just discovered after writing everything else in this post that some of the books were mentioned in the November 9 post, but never discussed. Specifically, The Red Garden, The Sisters Brothers, and Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. I must have held on to them to discuss them in greater detail, and then forgotten. So, basically, I have completely lost track of what I read, when. But at least I'm making a start now...and can bring a boatload of books back to the library this week!

The Magician's Book: A Sceptic's Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller  -  interesting at points, but not as good as I was hoping it would be.

The Red Garden  Alice Hoffman  -  amusing enough, I guess, but there was some shady "history" at the outset that kind of turned me off, and it was hard to ever really get invested in the stories (weaving in and out of successive generations in the same town in Western Massachusetts) after that.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead  Sara Gran  -  NOT what I thought the book was going to be; I thought for some reason (it had been on the list a long time), that it was about a woman who returned to New Orleans where her deceased aunt (grandmother? something like that) had performed rituals to soothe the restless undead. Instead is was about a woman private investigator who returns to New Orleans (that part was right), where she had formerly had an older, female mentor (that part was kind of right), to solve a case involving a missing, possibly dead, man (which is...I guess a little like soothing the restless dead?) I don't know now if the book I was picturing actually IS a book, and I just got them confused, or if I totally imagined a different, and non-existent, book. In any case, this one was...fine? I actually think maybe I didn't like it that much, but I'm not sure if that's just because I was disappointed it wasn't what I thought it was...

The Sisters Brothers  Patrick DeWitt  -  fun. A "Western," I guess, but also well-written with an interesting main character.


The Vaults  Toby Ball  -  I really rather liked this one. Which was a very pleasant surprise because I had had it on the list for a while, and for some reason I thought it was some sort of trashy mystery-thriller thing, and then I got it and it was a mystery set in an alternate, sort of dystopian, U.S. past, very well conceived and written.

A Secret Alchemy  Emma Darwin  -  dumb. I wanted to like it, but dumb. I didn't even really remember what it was, I had checked it out from the library forever ago, and it had just been sitting on my bookcase, and finally one night I had nothing new to read, and the title sounded fairly light-weight, and I was tired and just wanted to read a bit in bed, so I started it. It's one of those stories where it switches back and forth between ye olde England and modern England and it was the stupid Woodvilles and the Yorks and all that bother. Novelists clearly love the whole drama, and I can see why, there's obviously a lot to play with, it's just never really captured my attention.

All About Lulu  Jonathan Evison  -  great, great, great.

The Black Tower  P.D. James  -  this is one of the books I got off the bargain carts outside Harvard Bookstore over a year ago (yes? will need to check - a long time ago, anyhow), when I was super hung over and looking for some light reading, and I finally got around to reading it; that is, to finishing it. I actually started it a while ago, got a couple of chapters (if that) in, and then gave up because it was boring and I got more interesting books. But I was going to be taking the train to the 'burbs for some reason (Thanksgiving?) and it's a small paperback, unlike most of the big, heavy (library bound) books I had on hand at the time, so I plowed through it. It got better, I supposed, but I found the whole thing rather boring. I've enjoyed James' books featuring the detective Cordelia Gray (I think that's her name - An Unsuitable Job for a Woman? Mom had it years and years ago, and I read it a few times, and then I think I read another one - Cover Her Face? I might just be making up titles now...), but her Adam Dalgliesh character, who I think it the protagonist of her biggest series, has really never done it for me.

The Imperfectionists  Tom Rachman  -  quite good, not that that should be a surprise - I feel like this was widely, and well, reviewed...

Belle of Amherst

Just came across an interesting little piece in the New York Times, "My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst," by Holland Cotter.  It's just a reflection on what Emily Dickinson meant to the author, and a little about how she had been perceived / written about over the years and in different books.  It was nice timing because earlier today I checked out from Widener Emily Dickinson: A Biography, by Connie Ann Kirk (2004), as a start to a semi-planned Dickinson investigation.  I decided a while ago that I really know much too little about her, given what an important (canonically, at least) poet she is, and given the Amherst connection.  I don't do well with a lot of poetry, but she is an Amherstian, Carlin Barton likes her, and she is (I think) somewhat connected to "my" family (the Porter-Phelps-Huntington clan of my honors thesis), so I should be more familiar with her even if I never become a fan.  And even if I never get really into the poetry, the whole life & times bit seems potentially fascinating.  I actually avoided her for a while in part because it was a little overwhelming actually in Amherst (she's everywhere), but now that just benefits as far as the nostalgia factor.  The whole sexuality deal was also sort of a burn-out kind of roadblock for me, since it, too, was just SO constantly front and center in every aspect of scholastic life in the Valley, but I think I can handle it now :) 

So, I am going to start with the Kirk biography because it is recent (and so hopefully not totally bound up in crazy "no, really, she was the epitome of proper Victorian womanhood" thing in the older books, but also past the 1970s, '80s, and '90s "let make her a poster girl for X" enthusiasm), and super skinny & easily available.  I'll start digging in more after that.  If I get bored, a Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn was published recently, which looks and sounds (based on the cover and title, I mean, and a super brief reference in the Cotter essay) totally frothy and ridiculous, so that might be good to gear me back up if the lit crit stuff gets too much.  A new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon, is coming out next month, and according to Cotter it's something of a soap opera, so that should be fun.  Title is awesome, anyways!

Not sure how this all is going to play out, but I am looking forward to it...