I swear, I haven't given up on reading

It's just that I'm part-way through a whole bunch of books, so actually finishing one isn't happening very quickly.

I did finally finish one last night, though - Mary Malloy's Devil on the Deep Blue Sea: the Notorious Career of Captain Samuel Hill of Boston (2006). I read this one because a while ago I read and enjoyed a semi-historical mystery novel that she had written. And this one, a non-fiction book about a ship captain whose career spanned the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was really good. At least, it was interesting, and written in an extremely accessible and readable way. But, my GOD, Malloy was poorly served by her publishers. Or maybe it was her fault, but the book was terribly edited. One of the msot egregious problems was that clearly her original manuscript was written in an old version of Word or something, and lots of words at the end of lines were broken off. Then when the text was typeset, you had lines like "and then someone did a lazy job of ed-iting and didn't catch huge, glar-ing mistakes." Okay, in fairness, I think there was ever only one word break in a line, but still. How did nobody catch that and fix it? It happened all throughout the book. There were a lot of random grammar and spelling mistakes that just frustrated me so much, because the book deserved better.

And since I'm mostly writing this because I'm procrastinating working on the big homework assignment I have do, I am just going to copy the book description:

"Had he not been a madman, Captain Samuel Hill would likely be remembered as one of the great maritime adventurers of the early nineteenth century. He was the first American to live in Japan, and was in the Columbia River basin at the same time as Lewis & Clark. He rescued men held captive by Indians and pirates, met King Kamehameha of Hawaii and the missionaries who arrived soon after the King's death, was captured as a privateer during the War of 1812, witnessed firsthand the events of the Chilean Revolution, and wrote about all this persuasively. He was also a rapist and murderer. In all his contradictions and complexities, Samuel Hill represented the fledgling United States during its first wave of expansion. At home he appeared civilized and sensible, but as he sailed into the Pacific Ocean the mask slipped away to reveal the recklessness, ambition, and violence that propelled the United States from coast to coast and around the world."

I mean, SOUNDS interesting, right? It was good. I just think it could have been better.

No time

Busy at work, need to run soon to see the eye doctor during "lunch," then back to work...but the library wants my books back, so I need to get at least a little something down on (virtual) paper.


Last weekend (last two weeks? I'm not sure) I re-read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches and then read the recently published Shadow of Night. Now not only are there vampires and witches, they're time travelling. OBVIOUSLY. But Harkness knows her history, and while the random historical-name dropping is OUT OF CONTROL in Shadow of Night, it's still kind of fun to read, especially the glee and perturbation of a historian suddenly walking around in the past...I think my head would explode, in a good way, if it were me. Anyhow, that part of the book(s) I like, Harkness' eye for period details and stuff. The rest...meh. I also finished the book feeling a bit let down by the author: she makes a reference in one of the last chapters (the last chapter) to the death of a fairly significant character, but without ANY explanation of what happened, and also has an other random character pop up after the "events" of the previous May. I get that she's trying to keep her readers hooked, and will no doubt get into it all in the next (final?) book, but it was handled awkwardly - I actually started flipping back trying to figure out if I had missed a whole chapter somewhere, and when I went online to check it out (I was that confused) it turns out so had a lot of readers. Stringing your audience along is one thing, bewildering them is another.


Totally different, totally amazing - John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact. I can't say enough how much I love this book. I laughed out loud and also had super deep, philosophical conversations with myself on the nature of Art and Truth (generally while in the shower or at the bus stop, but whatever). Super fun, super smart. Twists you brain up in a good way. I kept wondering how "real" the process/conversation described in the book was (and the book itself, by extension), and then remembered that part of the point of the book was that it shouldn't matter, but then wondered how much that was, itself, a construct meant to carry the book along... good times.

A "Tourney of Books"?!

Well, I am calling it a tourney, anyways, but not like a "Tournament of Books" needs to get any cooler.
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/here-comes-the-rooster
How did I not know this was a thing? And, if I was going to come to it late, couldn't I have come at least a little earlier, so I could read everything on the shortlist before the thing kicks off on Wednesday (March 7)??

Of the sixteen books

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Teju Cole, Open City

Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time

Karen Russell, Swamplandia

Kate Zambreno, Green Girl*

I've only ready one (Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers) although most of them are on my to-read list (although that's not saying much; they're pretty representative of the books that were on everyone's to-read list in 2011, not to mention the Times' reviews), and some I've actually taken possession of.

This week is pretty busy for me, too, so I won't have a lot of time to read (although it's practically all I did just this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, whoops)...maybe I can adjust the game so part of it is anticipating the top 4, and seeing if I can get those read before they advance to the final slots in the bracket?

I just need to finish The Night Circus first, which I began last night, at long last, on my brother's recommendation. Huh. We were meant to swap that book for my copy of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, but I just realized I didn't give it to him. Oh, well. The valiant men & women of the U.S. postal service shall have that honor at some point. Maybe when I mail my friend's shirt back to him in New Jersey...that would be good to remember to do, too...

*the titles were cut & pasted from the Tournament announcement (see link above), and link to, I think, Powell's Books. I don't know how to get rid of the links easily, and since I have no problem with Powell's (quite the opposite) see no reason to waste time trying to, but if it should matter down the road...not mine.

Another quick update!

Blogging is getting really boring...

In any case, I finished Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff, last night. Basically, it was fun. I don't think I learned anything, but it was a quick, easy, and amusing read. Schiff's tone was very Cosmopolitan-esque (not shocking - I think that, shortly after the book came out, Cosmo did a mini "feature" on Cleopatra, as an original Cosmo girl, and her approaches to life, love, and power...an accessories, too, no doubt). The contemporary feminist take on Cleopatra worked, though; I imagine it would be hard, however, to not be able to make a compelling case for C. getting a totally unfair reputation at the hands of the Romans.

This would be a good "history for non-history major" books, although there could be an issue with Schiff's casual references to the ancient historians / sources. *I* get why Josephus was such a d*ck about Cleopatra, but there are probably lots of people who don't know who he even is - ditto for Dio, Lucan, etc. I would also be wary of recommending it as "history" the more I think about it. It's not that I think her facts are wrong - although they could be, my Ptolemaic history is sketchy at best - but she just makes stuff up: what characters were thinking/feeling, how a particular scene looked, sounded or smelled...but those details do work to draw the reader along, so who knows.

One thing that confused/bothered me: as I read, there were little footnotes, marked with asterisks, throughout the text, but no footnotes. And, I will admit, I took the book less seriously, I suspect, than I would have otherwise, if there had been numbered footnotes or end notes...except that there were? After the close of the book, there are end notes for each chapter, nice and scholarly, listing the sources, with commentary. But then I went back into the text itself, and didn't see any numbered notes...so, what? The publisher left the notes, but took out the little superscript numbers, because they cluttered up the page? How on earth does that make sense? And how on earth am I supposed to track down Schiff's references if I need more information? NOT lovin' on Little, Brown, & Co. for this one, if that is what happened. I don't see what else it could be, unless Widener somehow got a bad copy (and considering I had to wait in line for months to get it, that's too bad).

more quick updates

Finished Roger Williams: the Church and the State by Edmund S. Morgan (2006/2007 edition) over the weekend (including a 4:30 a.m. drunk reading in bed session - I woke up around 7am with the lights on and the book still in my hand, whoops!) and then read Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist last night (super quick read).

late might not be better than ever

But in any case,  a while ago I read Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo; enjoyed the story & characters quite a bit (imaginative and unique, but believably familiar at the same time, if that makes sense.  The dialogue irritated me, though - literally, almost, in so far as it didn't make me angry as much as it sort of chafed at my brain and mental ear...  Mootoo, who I think is from Trinidad (already returned the book, and am too lazy to look it up) & sets the story in a imaginary West Indian place, attempts to replicate a...general West Indian patois?  I have no idea if it's even authentic or not, but it comes and goes willy-nilly, and when it comes, it feels forces.  Perhaps if it had been more consistent it wouldn't have bugged me so much, but it just didn't seem like it fit.  The post-colonial and gender/sexual identity issues, on the other hand, were handled lightly and gracefully, and were an absolute delight.  I see now that she has some other books, and I think I would definitely read one or more of them...
I would also maybe read more by Claire Harman, author of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World - a bit on the light side, to be sure, but interesting.  Harman traces Austen's early writing and publishing attempts, and how her cult was slowly (well, in fits and starts, some very, very fast) grown over the years.  Very chatty tone; I think I would have preferred something a bit more scholarly, but it worked well for pre-bed reading.  Another small complaint would be that she references a lot of images not all of which are reproduced in the book, so some of them are kind of hard to picture, but I suppose there may have been prohibitive costs associated with some of the images.  My fingers are too cold to type more about it, but it was fun, in any case - and gratifying to know how many super smart people think she's nifty...
Additionally, I finally learned more about the most deliciously "cheeky experiment" (thank you, Guardian, that wouldn't get said in an American paper), in which someone tried to get only barely-disguised versions of Austen's books published, and was rather soundly rejected: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/jul/19/books.booksnews.  I HAVE to think that a lot of the rejections were because the books were so obviously Austen's classics, even if the letters didn't say so - one imagines the manuscript was picked up, a page or two was read, and it was immediately dumped in the "no way in Hell pile" where it was later picked up by another person entirely, who wrote a bland rejection letter without reading the mss.  At least, I hope that's what happened!

Also fun (for me, anyhow), but MUCH more scholarly was Susan Hardman Moore's Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home, which I've been wanting to read for a while, and then had to read for work, so that worked out.  Really interesting book about the Puritans (and others) who went to Massachusetts / New England in the 1630s and 40s and then ended up going back to England.  The strength of the book definitely lies in her case studies, where she follows the lives of individuals who came over and then returned.  She's weaker on the math: there aren't all that many numbers, and the ones she has start to fall apart a little when you get into how she arrived at them.  Still, excellent work for what it is, if not what it aims to be.