the cassandra pages

The Year in Books

Well, here we are again, at the annual time for lists and compilations and review. I am just back from yet another trip to the U.S., about which more later, but before the year ends I wanted to share my list of books read in 2013. My reading took a nosedive in the fall, as we got so consumed with work and time became shorter and shorter, but before that I had been on quite a reading binge. The two themes for this year were the novels of Hermann Hesse (I'm about halfway through them, reading chronologically),  books about Mexico, and books about Ireland or by Irish authors. So here's the list, with a few comments along the way. Happy reading to all of you, in 2014!

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Links go to my reviews. * indicates books read as e-books, ** were audiobooks. My top picks indicated with !!!

Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes (in progress)  I loved "Sense of an Ending" but am having a hard time with this one.

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse  I'll write a blog post later, when I finish the novels, but for now just say that reading the writer's entire output chronologically, when most of the books are somewhat autobiographical, has been fascinating, illuminating, and poignant. I first read the famous titles when I was in college, but they're quite different when read as an adult. Hesse writes mostly about the struggle of creative people to live authentically, giving themselves to their work, and the difficulties this presents in their relationships. For him, creativity and spirituality go hand in hand, but as a child of overly-strict highly-religious parents he was appalled and repelled by the typical Protestant Christian rules and doctrine. His novels mirror Hesse's lifelong quest for authenticity, peace, and understanding of his own spirit and creativity.

!!! The Saints of Streets, Luisa Igloria  A wonderful book by a poet well-known to readers of Dave Bonta's Via Negativa -- highly recommended.

Lifelines, Philip Booth

Selected Early Poems, Charles Simic

!!! Falling Upward, a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Fr. Richard Rohr**  I found this book inspiring, original, and helpful. Rohr is so intelligent and so no-nonsense about spirituality, and this particular book discussed the development of a mature approach to religion in the second half of life, free of dogma and the images and ideas about "God" that were presented in our childhood and which drive so many of us away from organized religion. He divides life into two haves, the first being about acquisition, belonging, and building up a secure sense of personal identity, and the second about a gradual letting-go of that need to understand, control, and shore-up who we are. Most people, he sadly admit, never leave this first half of life. For those who do, the second half is a process of becoming what he calls "elders": people of genuine insight and wisdom who do not divide people, but have become wise and gentle guides who can hold everything in balance.

!!! Gorgon Times, Roderick Robinson* An absolutely delightful, true, and entertaining novel about Thatcher-era Britain by a frequent commenter to this blog. The characters are keenly observed and skillfully drawn, and the author makes us care about them. I'm especially impressed with how Roderick writes his female characters; his portraits are believable, and full of amusement and real appreciation that comes across in numerous details. In addition to his excellent descriptive writing, the dialogue is smart, witty, sharp, entertaining, and always rings true: it's a trap for most writers but Robinson handles it far better than many well-known authors.  Highly recommended, and available for download for a low price. Read it!

Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald  A good book about British manners, but light. I read Gorgon Times just after this, and preferred it immensely.

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald Justifiably famous.

Klingsor's Last Summer (with Klein and Wagner and A Child's Heart) Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind, Hermann Hesse

Rosshalde, Hermann Hesse*

Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih  A classic middle eastern novel; recommended.

Gertrude, Hermann Hesse*

Demian, Hermann Hesse

!!! Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse* The novel that began my project; this is one of his later ones, and one of the best. My favorite of the classic novels I read this year.

Ami Underground: Drawings from the NY Subway, Ami Plasse  Terrific drawings by one of the urban sketchers I follow. Bought as a present for  Manhattanite friend.

Drape, Drape, Hisako Sato  Fascinating book by a Japanese designer about how to make clothes using the draping process rather than cut patterns.

The Beaded Edge, Midori Nishida  Another book by a Japanese author, but it's actually about oya, the Turkish needlecraft method of making crocheted and beaded edgings for scarves and clothing. I bought it to make the edging for a scarf this past August, and am hoping to try some of the other designs.

Pitch Dark, Renata Adler  Entertaining, but the pace and style of this book felt self-indulgent and annoying to me, as if she were trying to show how brilliant she is. Not my cup of tea, but some people do find her writing brilliant. It's a pretty good story, but I could never get over how annoyed I was by the way the characters acted, as well as always being aware of the writing itself.

Confusion, Stefan Zweig  A strange small book that I liked quite a lot, about a young man who becomes obssessed with admiration for an older professor -- and the professor's young wife.

!!! John Singer Sargent Watercolors, Erica E. Hirshler & Teresa A. Carbone  The catalogue for the Sargeant show (Brooklyn, Boston) contains a number of excellent essays about the painter's techniques and life; extremely illuminating to me as a watercolorist.

The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories. Excellent anthology.

The Empty Family, Colm Toibin A book of stories, also about families and relationships, set in Ireland and a coastal village near Barcelona. Often dark and rather pessimistic, but brilliantly written. I liked it very much.

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin My first Toibin novel; the story of a young Irish woman who comes to New York and works in a department store in the early part of the 20th century; a novel about family relationships and expectations, and women's choices at the time.

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 Obviously haven't read them all, but have enjoyed my forays into Paz's work. Reading a bilingual edition; I don't really know Spanish but enjoy reading the poems out loud, and have been surprised by how much I can understand.

The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje is one of my favorite authors. This is not at the top of my list of his work, but it's a very good book, a coming-of-age novel about a child's long sea voyage and the adults he observes.

Imperium, Ryszard Kapusinski. Excellent political/sociological travelogue by a master writer-journalist about his journeys through the former Soviet Union.

The next six titles are all books I read before, during, or after our trip to Mexico City. I won't describe them all here; some are novels, some travel books, some historical novels, and all combined to give me a much greater sense of this complex country than I ever had before. I plan to continue reading Mexican literature and non-fiction; I was embarrassed to realize how little I actually knew about this neighbor and its complex, rich history.

Mogador, Alberto Ruy Sanchez

A Rosario Castellanos Reader, Maureen Ahern and others, translators

!!! Bolero, Angeles Mastretta

!!! First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, David Lida. The best of the attempts to "explain" Mexico City that I have read. Honest, unflinching, personal.

The Orange Tree, Carlos Fuentes

The Traveler's Companion to Mexican Literature, C.M.Mayo, ed.

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The Life of Pi, Yann Martel ** I listened to Martel's Booker-Prize winning novel as an audio book, and enjoyed it immensely, as well as being touched by the story. Don't particularly want to see the movie; I'd rather keep my own mental images, I think.

The Beloved Returns, Thomas Mann. I love Thomas Mann and have read nearly everythign else; this is a lesser book which may be why it is not well-known. The story of the return of Lotte, once loved by Goethe, to see the great man when they are both old.

Mission to Paris, Alan Furst. See my review on Goodreads.

The Sea, John Banville. If I had needed convincing, this book showed me why I can't stand John Banville's writing...or perhaps it is Banville himself. Many others disagree.

Himalaya Poems, Ko Un. An amazing set of poems by a Korean poet who should be much more known in the west than he is. Recommended by T.C.

!!! White Egrets, Derek Walcott. My favorite-book-of-the-year award goes to Wolcott's elegeic collection, set mostly in the Caribbean; it is simply beautiful, emotional, poignant, using the English language with such skill, intelligence and simplicity that I found myself setting the book down repeatedly to stare into space, filled with admiration and gratitude.

Word into Silence, John Main, OSB A book on contemplation by the late Montreal monk.

!!!  Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon ** See my review on Goodreads; the most riveting book I've read this year, listened to as an audiobook. An international espionage novel that transcends the genre.

So -- 43 books in all; 6 books of poetry, 2 books on spirituality, 27 novels, the remainder non-fiction, including four books on art, sewing, and needlework. A pretty typical mix for me, I suppose! As for the dire predictions of recent years that the printed book is dead, I read that The Strand Bookstore actually had its best year ever in 2013, and e-book sales, while strong, have not decimated the print book market. My own reading seems to be bearing that out; while I love having books to read on my tablet and phone, and do read magazines and journals that way, I still like holding real books in my hands. I don't buy as many as I used to, but I still buy some (often as used books), and I frequent the library and am happy when friends lend me titles and often do the same.

Happy reading in 2014: and please send me your own list and favorites for 2013!

Book List 2012

First of all, a look at the statistics:

2012 showed a drop in the number of titles read. There are two reasons for that. First, this year my husband and I bought a large screen for our bedroom and have been watching movies and (mostly) BBC TV shows and documentaries, and that's definitely cut into my reading time. Having said for years how much I hate TV (and this isn't a TV, but still!) I've enjoyed what we've been watching tremendously. A lot of it is pretty damned literary, too, plus it's made me think a lot about screenplays, and the art of writing and adapting for the screen, as well as the incredible talent of certain actors and directors. (But I defensively digress!)

Reason two is that many of the books I read this year were mammoth ones. There are only so many pages that anyone can get through in a year!

Of these 30 titles, 14 were by women, 16 by men. Eight of them are by people I consider to be friends. Slightly less than half were in digital form: 9 were e-books and 2 audio books. I don't have a dedicated e-reader - I use my Android smartphone, and while the screen is small, I really like the portability -- as well as the ability to download free copies of many classics. I can't quite believe I read Ulysses on my phone, but I did!

Finally, I've been more active on Goodreads, and have posted some reviews over there that haven't appeared here. All the links shown in the list below go to my reviews.

David Copperfield and his friend Mr. Micawber

The year was definitely dominated by those "big books:" Ulysses, David Copperfield, Emily Carr's journals, the Icelandic sagas. I've written about them both here and at Goodreads, so follow the links for more details.

Particular standouts written by friends included Marly Youmans' evocative and poignant novel of an orphan boy-turned-hobo in the depression-era South, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage; Dorothee Lang and Smitha Murthy's Worlds Apart, a book of letters between two women, one in China, and one in Germany, who've never met but begin a correspondence about travel that deepens into true friendship; and Khadija Anderson's first full-length poem collection, History of Butoh, which taught me about this astonishing artform and gave me more of Khadija's strong, uncompromising, and beautiful writing that I had first come to appreciate on qarrtsiluni.

The novel that I may have simply enjoyed the most, as a page-turner, was Tèa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife: highly recommended, extremely enjoyable.

I was disappointed with Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke, underwhelmed by Cees Nooteboom's Roads to Santiago, and with many of the essays in Derek Wolcott's What the Twilight Says, though I did like his essays about certain poets. That latter volume was completely eclipsed, for me, by the studies of writers, known and less-known, in Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader, First Series, which I found captivating and brilliantly written. Ghosh's second volume in his ambitious, long trilogy contains page after page of descriptive prose that simply failed to capture me.

When I turned to Charles Dickens I immediately saw why: Dickens loved his characters, and makes us love them too, not through techniques or exotic locations or extensive research, but by observing the small human details that make each of us unique. His books may be long, but in many ways they are simple, moving and memorable. Like A.S. Byatt, I feel that Ghosh tends to over-write, and that the books end up being more about the author than about the creation of a world that the reader inhabits, populated by literary friends that will remain for a lifetime. I don't know about either of the other authors I just mentioned, but I do know that Dickens himself was humble, and it comes through in the books.

If finishing Ulysses, on my third attempt, was my biggest reading accomplishment of 2012, my biggest surprise was rediscovering Charles Dickens, 45 years after being forced to read Great Expectations and hating every minute of it.

For art reading, I learned a lot from the essays in the excellent, exensive catalog for the Van Gogh Up Close exhibition in Ottawa.

I always read a few spiritual books, and this year was no exception. However, the books I read by Thich Naht Hahn and Adyashanti didn't affect or inspire me nearly as much as The Journals of Emily Carr, the Canadian artist, who might be appalled to hear her writing described as "spiritual," since that was certainly not her expressed intent even though she often wrote about her sense of the holy as she found it in nature. Her journals, which an astute friend gave to me early in the year, are mainly about the creative process, and moved me deeply. They were a companion as I myself wrote, throughout the year, about Iceland and Montreal, and my own re-emerging sense of myself as a visual artist through the drawings I was doing, and I think her largely solitary journey, so plainly and directly described, gave me a great deal of encouragement and support. What more can we possibly ask of a book than to have it become a friend and companion on our own journey?

So, without further ado, here's the list. Previous years' book lists can be found here (scroll down.) Happy New Year, and happy reading in 2013. I've already got my first few months lined up!

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2012 READING LIST  (links go to my reviews or commentaries)

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (in progress)

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (in progress)*

Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen (in progress, audiobook)

Richard II, William Shakespeare (reread)

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens*

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, Bernie Krause

Chorister at the Abbey, Lis Howell (audiobook)

River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh

Aim High, Achieve More: How to Transform Urban Schools through Fearless Leadership, Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott

Van Gogh Up Close, Cornelia Homburg, editor

Ulysses, James Joyce*

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce*

History of Butoh, Khadija Anderson (full-length poetry collection)

Worlds Apart, Dorothee Lang and Smith Murthy

I Stand Here Shredding Documents, Kristin Berkey Abbott (poetry chapbook)

Balance, Robbi Nestor (poetry chapbook)

Saga of the People of Laxardal (from Sagas of Icelanders)

What the Twilight Says (essays), Derek Walcott

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans *

Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Naht Hahn

Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti *

Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental journey Through Quebec, Taras Grescoe

Roads to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom

The Common Reader, First Series, Virginia Woolf *

The Most Beautiful Thing, Fiona Robyn *

The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht *

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal,  Rob Rieman

That Woman, Tom Montag (poetry chapbook)

Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary

Chilly

The next day after this picture was taken (it's looking south on Papineau) the scene was changed with the addition of a bunch of wet, gloppy snow which has now frozen into ice and a hard mass of plowed clods that encase unlucky cars parked on the streets. Each day the temperature seems to be dropping. In other words, winter has arrived.

I've barely noticed, I've been so busy, except that the ice on the sidewalks kept me from walking for a few days. Like the rest of my fellow Montrealers, I've retreated inside my furry hood and down-filled coat, unrecognizeable for the next few months. The good part is that  -- predictably -- the wet grey day of the storm was followed by high pressure and bright blue skies, which make being out in the chilly air almost a pleasure.

Nearly all of November, J. and I were working very hard on a design job for our main client in the U.S., at the same time as I was finishing Thaliad, launching the book, doing the initial marketing, and placing orders for hardcover copies. Today is the first day I've felt like I could sit back and say, whew! and look around myself a little. So if you were wondering about the dearth of thoughtful, longer posts, that's why.

On the other hand, it's been good to have a break. Oddly enough, while my own writing has been mostly confined to micropoetry, in the evenings I've been reading a very long and wordy book: David Copperfield, about which I'll write more soon. I haven't read any Dickens since the enforced assignment of Great Expectations, which I loathed, in high school. 45 years later, it seems I've changed!

I'm about to go off with J. to the dentist, where one of his remaining wisdom teeth will be removed, and as I sit and wait for him, I hope to finish that book, which I'm reading as an e-book on my phone. I'm already looking forward to the next one -- and to returning to my own writing and art, as well as some Christmas baking, in the coziness of a winter interior.

Ulysses -- and the Trojan Horse Within

The Trojan Horse

Last night I finished my major summer reading: on my third attempt in as many decades, I finally finished Ulysses. How do I feel? Well, I keep asking myself that question. I guess I feel relieved to be done and proud of myself for actually finishing it, bu mostly I feel rather exhausted, somewhat annoyed, somewhat amused. In some ways I still don't know what to make of it. Perhaps that's what Joyce intended, and perhaps that's part of what makes it a great book: the fact that you are never really done with it, and it's never really done with you.

My longtime blog friend Loren (In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See) also finished the book last night, and he's written some initial thoughts here. Lorianne (Hoarded Ordinaries) is in the middle of it, and she made some good points in the comments over there. Earlier this summer several online friends and I decided to tackle the book; we figured that, as with exercise, we'd be more likely to stick to it if we had company, and that proved to be true.

Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops cave by hiding under a ram

Like Loren, I also read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; I should have started with it but actually read it as a kind of detour when I found myself in danger of completely losing both my way and my desire to finish Ulysses itself. That was a good idea; Portrait really helped to contextualize Ulysses, and to place Joyce (through his character Stephen Daedalus) in his own narrative. It was also interesting to enter the Catholic-steeped, "priest-ridden" (to use Joyce's own words) Irish culture not long after the death of Parnall, and compare it with what I have learned about Quebec, where I now live, another formerly-priest-ridden culture filled with nationalist sentiment and many problems that are circularly debated to this day, trapping the society in a provincial, insecure mindset that still keeps it from truly looking outward.

In the famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait, Joyce describes a family fight over Catholicism and Nationalism, about loyalty to the Church vs loyalty to the nationist cause, that degenerates into hopelessness about the future. Daedalus/Joyce observes this as a boy; it is the first Christmas where he has been allowed to eat dinner with the adults, only to see the eagerly-anticipated event devolve into a complete disaster, with the family members at each other's throats. Later on in the book, people speak of their hopes for Daedalus, a young man of bright intelligence; he flirts with religious devotion, and is even vetted for the priesthood. But no, he says to a friend eventually, I hope to fly by all those nets. He want to escape becoming ensnared in Catholicism, in politics, even in academia. At the end of Portrait, we still don't see how. Ulysses is Joyce's answer.

 

Odysseus kills the suitors who want his wife and kingdom.

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As an intellectual and literary monument Ulysses is fraught with “oughts”: I ought to read it, I ought to understand it, I ought to like it, I ought to say it is great. Frankly I think a lot of literary intellectuals lie about Ulysses: very few have actually read it all the way through. I did my own informal poll, and even people I was certain would have read it  -- Oxford-educated literary clergy among them -- admitted they had not. And there are good reasons for that. After adeceptive start, the prose becomes as dense as a rain forest and you, the already-soaked and miserable reader, have neither machete nor macintosh; what you do have is the path behind you, you can turn around and go home, and most of us do. I certainly did, twice before. The verbal pyrotechnics can be extremely annoying; I don't want to have to read a book with a concordance in order to "get" everything, and I don't want to sit and listen to sophomoric male sparring: I had enough of that in college to last me a lifetime.

 

As for the structure of the book, I'm quite familiar with the Odyssey, but my copy of Ulysses didn't include the later notes and chapter headings, written by scholars arguing for the book's acceptance and legal publication, explaining the parallel scenes in Joyce's book and Homer's epic. I struggled to try orient myself in the two narratives, only getting the big picture after finishing, when I read the Wikipedia notes. As I quipped to a friend, part way through, "I think I prefer the original."

 

But actually none of this intellectual density ended up mattering to me. Once I had read Portrait, I was able to cut Stephen Daedalus a break because now I knew where he was coming from and what he was reacting against. I read several essays about the reaction to the book, when it was written, which helped me to understand the larger cultural context into which Ulysses exploded, and why what Joyce was doing was so revolutionary and shocking at the time. I read a good deal about Virginia Woolf's struggles with the book, and her friend T.S. Eliot's unmitigated praise for it.

I made a decision that it was OK not to read every word; and when pages became, for instance, simply a long list of names, I treated it the same way I once treated Deuteronomy; I got the gist of it and skimmed until I could find a footing again. Reading Ulysses became a lot like being immersed in a swiftly-moving streams: smooth, slower stretches alternated with rapids, where sometimes there was a footing, and sometimes one needed to just let go and be carried along by the sheer volume of words, feeling underneath with one's bare feet for a rock, trusting that there would eventually be a secure place to rest, get one's breath, look around, and start up again.

 

That stream could also be a description of the inside of our heads, and certainly this is one of the book's main points. As a longtime meditator, I'm aware of watching the stream of thoughts, experiencing the calmer places where one can rest, as well as the disorienting babble of the uncontrolled, unleashed, drifting mind. One of Modernism's goals was to explore the emerging awareness of human psychology in literature, and so we got various versions of this stream-of-consciousness writing: Joyce's, Faulkner's, Woolf's, Beckett's.

By her loom, Penelope and her son Telemachus await Odysseus's return

But there is also a meta aspect to Ulysses, I think. With words, Joyce is describing the minds of his characters as they go through their day in Dublin. But as the reader, you are also invited not only to examine your own thoughts, your own consciousness (both self- and sub-) in general, ("yes, I'm like Bloom, or Stephen, or Molly, I've thought like that too"), but to look back on the reading experience itself and say, wait a minute, this is what I've been doing as I read. I've had moments of clarity, periods of inattention and boredom, moments when I "got" the world depicted and moments when I was totally lost, periods when all I wanted to do was eat, or think about clothes, get up and go to the bathroom, make love.

 

Joyce knew what he was doing: he said that he'd given the professors enough material that they'd be occupied for the next hundred years trying to figure out what it all meant. On the surface that sounds like more of Stephen Daedalus's arrogance, but I wonder if Joyce -- entirely familiar with academia and literary critics -- wasn't simply pointing a wry finger at his own well-constructed smokescreen, knowing most of them wouldn't, and couldn't, see past it. The real brilliance of the book, I suspect, is not its erudition, verbal alacrity, or monumental pile of obscure references, but what it tells us about simple humanity; what it says about who we all are underneath our chosen veneers: human minds in physical bodies, and beautiful for it -- in spite of all our sins, excesses, failings, weaknesses and posturings.

After all, Ulysses - Odysseus in the Greek original - was a trickster. Known for his intelligence but most of all for his guile and cunning, he was relied upon by Agamemnon and all the Greeks. A major aspect of the Iliad is the way in which Achilles' physical prowess as a warrior, fired by anger, jealousy, and self-righteousness, is pitted against Odysseus' cooly rational intelligence and cunning. In the end, the Greek victory after nine years of fighting is not due to Achilles, for the Trojans had their extraordinary warriors too, but because of Odysseus, who devised the most famous battle strategem of all time, the Trojan Horse. The enemy, concealed and unsuspected, was lauded and wheeled right into the heart of the city.

Odysseus and Nausicaa; her father wanted him to remain and marry her, but Odysseus chose to return to his family.

Joyce's Ulysses is definitely a journey of homecoming, but I think the author has embedded his own brilliant ruse within it. You think it is this, he says to the academics and critics, and gives them, as Homer did, an adventure filled with monsters and seductresses, dangers and surprises, and enough complications, details and symbols to keep them busy forever. Wheeled into the heart of academic and literary tradition, the Trojan Horse opens, and shatters what had existed.

Meanwhile, like Odysseus, who alone of the Greeks came safely home, Joyce himself "flies by all those nets." He show us a possibility of finding our true home, beyond any concept of institution, nation, or family expectation. It's no mere coincidence that Homer titled the penultimate chapter of the Odyssey, "The Great Rooted Bed," and its final chapter, "Peace."

Wislawa Szymborska

Sometimes the world goes a little more silent, and so it was yesterday when I heard of the death of Wislawa Szymborska. In her 88 years she had only published 400 poems, saying that she wrote many more, but always re-read the previous day's work the next morning: "Many," she added dryly, "don't survive." So this was a poet who was not prolific, nor had she had fallen in love with the sound of her own voice. Instead, each poem said something that mattered, and therefore the silence today is multiplied.

My own attraction to Polish poetry began perhaps fifteen years ago, or even more, after I had gone on a two-year binge of reading Russian literature, ending up with Akhmatova and Mandelstam. From there, in my search for voices of survival, hope, and sustenance among intellectuals and artists during times of war, and what I perceived as both social decay and indifference to what was really happening, I moved to the post-WWII poets of Poland. I was mainly drawn to Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, and their younger colleague Adam Zagajewski: all poets who wrote beautiful poems about the darkness and the light.

In 1996, Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I bought her book View with a Grain of Sand, but didn't particularly like it at first. Somewhere around that time, I had a conversation about these Polish poets with my friend Kingsley, who had been a headmaster in a NYC Episcopal school and was a great reader as well as a man of strong and considered opinions ."She seems so...ironic, and almost flip," I said. "There's a sort of black humor in her work, and I guess I'm more attracted to the lyricism of the others...you know, the apricots hanging from the tree, the memories of past loves, the beauty in spite of everything that's happened." K. , who was about thirty years olderthan I was, laughed and said, "Yes, but that's exactly what I like about Szymborska. She's unflinching, she doesn't paper over anything, yet there's a humor and irony in her writing. Just wait -- I think you'll come to appreciate her more."

He was right, and it didn't take long. So much happened in the next ten years, and it changed me. After seeing death several times over, after loss and grief, after watching my country change irreparably, after leaving my home and reconsidering most of my beliefs, I found that the way I had looked at the world before no longer served: it had been well-considered theory, but not a lived reality. I had become more skeptical and less idealistic; stronger but also more cognizant of human frailty; more aware of the beauty in everyday life and the poignancy of each moment. I had found that humor was a great ally in dealing with the worst of things, and also with helping others to cope, and that the absurd is never far from the most serious human endeavor, especially in the way we seem to refuse to learn anything from our own history.

When I returned to Szymborska, it was immediately clear to me that K. had been right. I often had her poetry on my bedside table, and always found something truthful that made me nod my head with both admiration for her, and determination for the next day. But her poetry was never harsh or unfeeling; quite the contrary. She simply refused to be sentimental, and faced things as they really were. Now I think I saw in her a particular kind of strength that was female, and with which I increasingly indentified. The only words I can find to encapsulate Szymborska are "a soft toughness." You can see it in her face.

She hasn't talked a great deal about herself, but I liked this quote, from Szymborska's obituary in The Guardian:

"Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation," she said, going on to wonder why anyone would want to interview her. "For the last few years my favourite phrase has been 'I don't know'. I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world."

Yesterday, when I heard the news, it seemed ironic and coincidental that I had just taken down her book and quoted from it here two days before. But then again, perhaps it wasn't so odd, because, as I said, I re-read her poems often. It was Szymborska who I had planned to pick for Marly Youmans' "Lydian Stones" project - a choice that would probably seem too obvious now. But at the time, looking at the jacket photograph with her ever-present cigarette, I had wondered how she was doing, with no idea she was in the process of leaving the world.

Last night I read Szymborska again, trying to identify a favorite poem to copy here. There are too many, so it was impossible, but I'll settle on this one which is about a journey, and embodies the qualities I've tried to describe.

 

INTO THE ARK

An endless rain is just beginning.
Into the ark, for where else can you go:
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see things from all sides.

Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks.
Into the ark: all you chiaroscuros and halftones,
you details, ornaments, and whims,
silly exceptions,
forgotten signs,
countless shades of the color gray,
play for play's sake,
and tears of mirth.

As far as the eye can see, there's water
and a hazy horizon.
Into the ark: plans for the distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all of this
will still come in handy some day. 

For the sake of the children
that we still are,
fairy tales have happy endings.
That's the only finale that will do here, too.
The rain will stop,
the waves will subside,
the clouds will part
in the cleared-up sky,
and they'll be once more
what clouds overhead ought to be:
lofty and rather lighthearted
in their likeness to things
drying in the sun —
isles of bliss,
lambs,
cauliflowers,
diapers.

 

 

Onward and Upward with E-Books

It's a momentous day here at Phoenicia Publishing: we just released our first e-books!

I've been reading books on my laptop and Android phone for quite a while now.

And here's the verdict: I've decided I like it, even though I'm not a 100% convert.

I like the ability to take my reading -- lots of reading, in fact -- with me wherever I go, on one nearly weightless device that fits in my pocket. And I like being able to buy, for less, books that I don't particularly want to keep as physical objects in a physical library. I like being able to search them, make bookmarks, look up words: all those interactive features.

If I can get a book I want to read at the local library, that's often the option I choose - it's free. But I live in a French-speaking province and can't always get what I want, which has been a problem ever since we moved here. And, like most people now, I like the instant gratification of being able to download a book and start reading right away. It's clear to me that the future of publishing lies, at the very least, with a mix of e-books and print books, and more likely with forms of electronic publishing that we can't even imagine yet, but which include a lot of multimedia content impossible with the printed page.

Most people don't have to think about all this, well, beyond their own pockets, but the problem is...I'm also running a publishing company. A small company, yes, but it's a furry little entity dedicated to being a fast and adaptable hare rather than a ponderous tortoise. At Phoenicia we publish mostly poetry -- one of the most challenging formats for e-books, which are still pretty hobbled when it comes to complex typography. The other thing we will be publishing are art and photography books: also a type of book that needs careful, beautiful design.

I've spent the past couple of weeks thinking and exploring and learning, and today we released our first two e-books at Phoenicia: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools and Ken Pobo's Ice and Gaywings, winner of this year's qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. Both are available in the Kindle/.MOBI format, and as EPUBs for the iPad or other EPUB readers, like the Nook or Sony, for a cost of only $2.99. Full-length e-books will be priced similarly to most commercial ones: around $10.00.

It was fun learning the new technology and I'm proud of the finished products. And it feels like a pretty big deal - a big step into the future.

(Dave Bonta has another book, a collection of his wryly funny and sometimes poignant "Words on the Street" cartoons that's just come out in multiple formats, through Bauble Tree Books in London. Check it out!)

I've been pretty low-key about Phoenicia here on the blog, but will be talking a bit more about it in the coming months - we've got several exciting projects in the works that I think will be interesting to Cassandra's readers, and, as always, the authors and I really appreciate your support! Nobody's getting rich - or even making any money to speak of - but I'm trying to develop a model that at least gets excellent, deserving work into print -- and now, e-ink -- which is a whole lot better than having it languish forever in a virtual folder in a virtual desk drawer!

2011 Book List

Back by popular demand, here's my reading list for the past year.

First, the statistics:

48 books total

• 15 by women, 32 by men, 1 anthology
  

• Format: 2 audiobooks, 7 e-books, the rest in paper
  

• Genre: 9 non-fiction or essays; 9 poetry books; 30 fiction, plays, sagas, misc.
  

The asterisks in the list indicate e-books. The links go to my reviews on Goodreads, most of which also appeared here on the blog.

Standouts? I very much liked this years Booker Prize winner, Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, and particularly enjoyed listening to it as an audiobook. The seemingly simple story, told in first-person, eventually reveals an unreliable narrator whose version of events made me call into question my own memory, and think back hard about events in my own life. Barnes isn't someone I would read for his literary style, per se, but this is a masterful novel.

It's no secret that I love Teju Cole's Open City. Even though he's my close friend and the book is partially dedicated to me -- an honor that continues to stun and humble me -- I definitely think this was the best book I read this year, for its originality, the lyricism of its prose, and the risks it takes. Many illustrious reviewers have agreed with me, so my objectivity can't be entirely suspect!

As usual with me, there's a bit of a geographical focus, this time on Iceland. Somehow I had never read either the novels of Halldor Laxness or the Sagas of Icelanders, and I'm very glad that gap was closed this year before we went to Iceland; the trip was immeasurably enriched by their writing.

There were also a lot of British novels set in the early 20th century. It was odd to read A.S. Byatt at the same approximate time as Virginia Woolf, and two young-people's books by Frances Hodgson Burnett as well. I loved The Secret Garden, which turned 100 this year, just as much as when I was a girl. Byatt irritates me; I find the books overwritten, overly long, and self-indulgent, and that was especially apparent reading them next to Woolf's beautiful, spare, carefully-constructed prose. Byatt's stories kept pulling me along nevertheless; they won't endure as literature but she's a good storyteller. Woolf is in a class by herself, often painful to read, but in many ways a kindred soul. I'm glad I'm a happier and far less public person.

This year's shock quality award goes to César Aira's How I Became a Nun, with second place to Rawi Hage for De Niro's Game.

In keeping with the year's Nordic theme, I also really liked the uncategorizable Broken, by Karin Fossum.

Quirkiness and condensation are trademarks of Lydia Davis. I'd recommend her Collected Stories as inspiration for any writer.

For sheer lyricism, I loved experiencing The English Patient as an audio book - but I'm crazy about Ondaatje's writing anyway. I could hardly wait to get back to it during the time I was listening to this book, and was bereft when it ended. For similar reasons, I loved John Berger's To the Wedding.

The worst book on this list, hands down, was Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey. It had its moments, but...my God. I've never seen a book take such a disastrous turn and then fall apart the way that one does!

Particular poetry favorites were Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, The Throne of Psyche by Marly Youmans, The Book of Ystwyth -- works by six poets (including Dave Bonta and Marly Youmans) in response to the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and Dale Favier's chapbook, Opening the World.

I liked all the non-fiction titles listed (if I don't enjoy a non-fiction book I generally don't finish it.) The last and the first look like they may be my favorites; John Hales' book about the Athenian navy was absolutely fascinating, and Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by Tamim Ansary, seems, after 90 pages, to be an emminently readable and timely look at, well, just what its title says.

I'll be looking forward to hearing what you have to say!

 

CASSANDRA'S 2011 BOOK LIST (click for lists from previous years) *=ebooks

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary (current)

Middlemarch, George Eliot (current)*

Letters from Iceland, W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice

Fight the Wild Island, Ted Edwards

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (audio book read by Richard Morant)

The Wide, Wide World, Susan Bogert Warner

Vatnsdœla saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders

Egil's Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders

Opening the World, Dale Favier (poetry chapbook)

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (audio book)

Open City, Teju Cole (rereading)

The Book of Ystwyth, six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Ice and Gaywings, Ken Pobo (poetry chapbook)

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Triplicity, Kristin McHenry (poetry chapbook)

Paper Covers Rock, Chella Courington (poetry chapbook)

Phaedrus, Plato

The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde*

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf*

I Stand Here Shredding Documents, Kristin Berkey Abbott (poetry chapbook)

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Years, Virginia Woolf*

The Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett*

The Throne of Psyche, Marly Youmans

Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy. Adaptation for the stage by Mark Healy.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (reread on its centennial)*

The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt

Errata, George Steiner 

Dark and Like a Web, Nic Sebastian* (poetry chapbook)

De Niro's Game, Rawi Hage

How I Became a Nun, César Aira

The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner

Phédre, Jean Baptiste Racine

Broken, Karin Fossum

The Redbreast, Jo Nesbo

The Sign of Jonas, Thomas Merton (rereading)

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis

To the Wedding, John Berger

The Jewel Box Garden, Thomas Hobb

Under the Glacier, Halldor Laxness

The Stone Raft, José Saramago

Home is Where We Meet, John Berger (rereading)

Human Chain, Seamus Heaney

Val/Orson, Marly Youmans

Independent People, Halldor Laxness

Open City, Teju Cole

Lords of the Sea: Athenian Naval Power in the 5th century, John Hales

I was just in the mood for a little Pushkin...

Oddly enough, this morning after posting this photograph I read a very good short story on the New Yorker website, Haruki Murakami's "The Town of Cats," and want to recommnd it. I love Murakami's uniquely deadpan style, which reminds me a bit of J.D. Salinger, and his odd plots which -- like many of those Russian short stories -- are actually full of insights into human behavior.

Genius loci

Gustave Courbet, 1849

"Genius loci, the spirit of place, which, like an unbidden bolt of recognition, transforms a landscape, a street corner into 'inscape,' into a reorientation of awareness. Snow was blowing and drifting in a white fog. The rural road simply vanished. My wife, whose sagacity of heart, radiant good sense and unspoken perceptions are incomparable, drove parallel with what we could make out of fence posts. At moments even these blanked out in a white tumult. Suddenly the February blizzard cleared. A cold brilliance washed the air. We edged the car across the fields back to a paved road and into woods. A gently tortuous descent led from the plateau. On either side, like scarred walls, towered the cliffs painted time and time again by Courbet in this corner of the Franche-Comté. A breach opened in the larch, pale birch and black pine. Zara and I stopped breathless. Below us, in the perfectly rounded cusp of the hills, traversed by a stream whose crystal voices reached us even far above, lay a hamlet. Its rust-coloured and snow-blown roofs, squat church-tower and two small chateaux -- the one ramshackled and Second Empire, the other a pure marvel of a seventeenth-eighteenth century logis and circular donjon -- composed a compact, earth-bound yet also mirage-like ensemble. We were struck mute with wonder. The church tower rang its hour as we crossed the low stone bridge, its querulous chime somehow answered by the toss of silver-white and green-ochre (Courbet's palette) of water across lustrous stones. I knew at once that there would be for me no greater perfection anywhere, that I had stumbled on home."

George Steiner, Errata (1997)

Apparently, Errata is not a typical book by Steiner; it's the closest he comes to memoir and autobiography. Within this book, even this chapter doesn't seem typical because here he stops being a critic or professor, and edges toward pure writing, some of which is very beautiful. I recently finished "The Death of Tragedy" -- which came out of his doctoral thesis -- and am now halfway through this one, written quite late in his long and still-continuing life. Steiner can be maddening, as all brilliant people sometimes are, and he is also flamboyant -- a criticism that was penned on one of his first papers at university. But he shares a concern for philosophy, the art and creativity, and the classics -- for humanism in general -- and writes about those things very well indeed.

I've been amused that since writing the title of this post, this morning, I've had Anton Bruckner's "Locus iste" ("This place") stuck in my head. Steiner would probably approve, though that one's a bit of a stretch, even for him!

 

E-books and Impatience

The Canadian postal strike has finally ended; yesterday we rode past a postal truck filled with packages, and today received a phone call at the studio about a package delivery at our apartment. I'd gotten used to not checking the box, actually. Except for the occasional package, most of what we get is either financial, or advertising. With the prevalence and convenience of door-to-door service of other delivery companies, the post has become increasingly irrelevant.

I was thinking of that yesterday, too, as I downloaded the Nook reader for PC, and ordered my first e-book. Yes, I'm still behind the times; I don't have a Kindle or any other kind of hand-held e-book reader but I do read everything else on my laptop, so why not a book? But the real reason was that it's not always easy to get English language books here, either in stores, by mail order, or at my preferred outlet: the library. The Bibliotheque nationale is a fabulous resource, though the majority of their holdings (including the vast majority of their fiction) are in French - it is, after all, the Quebec national library. I can use interlibrary loan to order just about anything, but it takes time and a special trip to the library. I buy some books from a used book stores, and I order some, but shipping is very expensive here, and slow, especially from the U.S.

There are a lot of good reasons why I've been stubborn about printed books, one being that by evening I am tired of looking at a screen of any kind. Another, of course, is that I'm a designer, and excellent typography and page layout matter to me. We said all the same things in the early days of website design, and I'm sure that e-books will eventually have many of the design features we've become used to on the web, and the differences will become increasingly irrelevant. As a publisher, I'm also going to have to bite the e-book bullet. The main reason, though, is that I just love printed books; I like reading that way, I like holding them and turning the physical pages, and I like having them around me. A room without bookshelves seems as bare to me as a mind devoid of literature: but what a telling remark that is! I recognize that these visible symbols are a kind of claim to intellectual status as well as a comfort, and that part of my attachment to printed books has to do with identity and pride.

I don't buy the claims that e-books are a financial advantage: that's only true if you're comparing prices for recently-published books. I found a lot of discrepancies. Yesterday, for instance, I looked at the prices for "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill from B&N. The e-book was 11.99. paperback, 12.32. Hardcover? 2.99. And both paperback and hardcover were available in the marketplace for 1.99. Is it really worth it to me to pay $9 more for instant gratification? Uh, not exactly. On the other hand, the book I did download, "Nemesis," by Jo Nesbo, was 4.99 for the e-book and 9.03 for the paperback. I have no desire to keep that particular book on my shelf, and it's a good one to read while traveling, so the e-version makes sense. Still, I know when marketing is capitalizing on human impatience and our desire for the latest technology. I don't like being manipulated; the library and used bookstore retain their appeal.

I'm curious about your own experience: do you have an e-book reader or a way to download and read books on your computer? How many books do you download in a month? Have your book purchases gone up as a result? What do you have to say about the advantages or disadvantages of reading this way?