letters and sodas: booknotes

A few weeks ago I had lunch with someone at work who asked what I was reading, and what I was going to read next. When I said I wasn’t sure what would be next, he seemed surprised. I do have a mile-long list—actually, several lists. I keep one in a private wiki, divided up into adult fiction/adult nonfiction/cookbooks/kids’ books/YA books, plus a few themed or source-specific mini-lists, e.g. “from the Princeton Architectural Press Autumn 2005/Winter 2006 catalog” or “cited in Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik.” I also have a set of private Delicious bookmarks, and a written-down list in the back of my planner, in no order at all. So I have these lists of books I’ve heard of from various places—book blogs, reviews in The New Yorker, reviews in Publishers Weekly, books that friends have mentioned, books mentioned in other books I’ve been reading … and then I have a stack of books on my desk, plus shelves of books that I own but haven’t read yet, or that I own and think I’d like to re-read, books I’ve bought and books I’ve been given and books that have been loaned to me and books I’ve found on the sidewalk. But I don’t make any definite plans until I’ve finished one book and it’s time to actually physically pick up the next one. Often it’s a matter of chance, or maybe, better, serendipity: of the books I read in December, three I saw at the library without having heard of them before, one was on my to-read list and got read when it did because I saw it at the library and checked it out, and the other had been recommended to me by a friend back in, oh, January, and I finally got around to reading it (and of course, that was the one I loved best.) Sometimes I’ll know I’m in the mood for a kids’ book, or for poems, or a great big long novel, but often I’m just in the mood for something good, no genre in particular.

I don’t have very specific reading plans for the new year, other than to carry on reading Proust, slowly, mixed up with whatever poems and novels and non-fiction books catch my eye and spark my interest. I want to read some more of the books I own—and to give away some books after I’ve read them, especially if they’re books I’ve found on the sidewalk in the first place.

And for an end of year summary: this year I read 37 books, categorized as below:
Graphic novels: 1
Books of poems (including a YA poetry memoir, which I am also counting as YA): 10
Adult fiction (novels or short stories): 11
Adult nonfiction: 5
Kids’ books/YA books: 11
Books translated from languages other than English: 8

These short stories are wizarding-world fables, “translated from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger” (though sadly, without any kind of textual commentary in Hermione’s voice), with “commentary by Albus Dumbledore.” The commentary, with its amusing footnotes and asides, is the best part of the book, though the stories themselves aren’t bad either. I liked “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” but not as much as I liked the horribly saccharine excerpt from a bowdlerized version that appears in the “Dumbledore’s” commentary; similarly, the best part of “The Fountain of Fair Fortune” was the story in the commentary of a failed Christmas pantomime at Hogwarts.

This book had me grinning from the preface, which quotes HV Morton (”I have gone round England like a magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me.”) and calls this book a “linguistic travelogue” (pp xii, xiii). The first chapter continued along excitingly: I’d heard of the Welsh town with the longest place-name in the UK (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch), but didn’t know the whole story of it: it used to be just Llanfair, or Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll (to distinguish it from the other Llanfairs across Wales)—but then when the railway came through in the 1800s, they adopted the new name as a way to encourage trains (and tourists) to stop there (p 3). As the book carries on, it’s rambling and a little scattered, and it’s full of references to British TV shows I’d never heard of (like “The Prisoner”—thank goodness for YouTube, or “The New Statesman”—YouTube to the rescue again), but I still really enjoyed it. I liked the chapter about Welshpool and border accents, the idea that because people in border towns “are exposed to two ways of speaking, they make all kinds of different choices from the array of sounds that surround them” (pp 53-54), and the chapter on Birmingham accents and the general pressure to minimize local accents for success in business, and whether this means that accents are dying out. Crystal says that accents as a whole aren’t, but some are changing, and some dialects and accents are “being replaced by new ones. The many mixed accents and new urban accents are proof of that” (p 79). It was pleasing to read about the Hay Festival, and to learn (unrelatedly) that “most of the simplified spellings that distinguish American from British English were proposed by [Noah Webster]. Color for colour. Program for programme. Traveling for travelling” (p 122). The wordplay in the 11th chapter, isograms and heterograms and lipograms and other games, is excellent, as are the bits of trivia throughout the book, like the fact that Bovril was originally called “Johnston’s Fluid Beef” (p 200). And, of course, the whole thing is full of pleasing words.

I thought I was in the mood for a wintry book, for prose with edges like mountains and ice, but maybe I wasn’t, or maybe I was but this wasn’t it. Having read W.H. Auden’s introduction, I knew the ending already, so I missed out on the “almost unendurable suspense” the back cover copy promises. But knowing the ending isn’t the problem, and neither is the simplicity of the prose: some of it’s quite beautiful. Maybe it’s just reading this after Dylan Thomas, who’s so exuberant and who captures people so well, people as well as places, whereas this novella is more like a folk tale, more about the general than the specific, which can sometimes mean characters who aren’t nearly so rich. It’s the story of Conrad and Sanna, a brother and sister who have often walked the mountain pass between their village and the village where their grandparents live. But one Christmas Eve, as they walk home in a snowstorm, they lose their way and spend a night on a mountain glacier, high above their valley home. The descriptions of the mountain and the stars, the snow and the Milky Way and the ice fields, are more vivid than the people, especially the children — Sanna says hardly anything more than “Yes, Conrad” throughout the entire story.

Mmm Dylan Thomas. I’ve read Under Milk Wood a few times and like it a whole lot, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this. It is one of those perfect books of short stories where each story is exquisite, where each makes you want to pause after reading it. I love the strangeness of “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” the unexpected sweetness of “The Fight,” in which two junior-high-aged boys beat each other up then become fast friends, walking home complimenting each other on their battle scars, the sometimes-strained camaraderie of so many of them—the friends writing a novel together in “Where Tawe Flows,” the two companions on an outing in “Who Do You Wish Was With Us.” And sentences like this, from “Old Garbo”: “I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up for the football; the country shoppers; the window-gazers; the silent, shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black, brooched dresses carrying frails; smart girls in shining mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little dandy lascars, bewildered by the weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never write. I’ll put you all in a story by and by.” (pp 88-89).

Smart, allusive: the first poem is called “To Olga Knipper,” and includes a reference to May 25, 1901—the day of her wedding to Chekhov. The poem is like a letter from Chekhov’s point of view: it’s quiet and beautiful (images of flowers, birds, rain) and makes me want to read Chekhov’s actual letters to Knipper. Later, there are quotations from Agnes Martin, Richard Serra. These poems are full of art, and full of nature: Pankey writes about the beauty of things, beauty in things, which makes this book especially pleasing to me. In “Reasons of Ice,” Pankey writes: “I would like to hold this still world,/ if the world were a thing to be held” (p 10). This and many of Pankey’s poems are wonderfully wintry: ice and bare branches. “All I am left with now/is detail,” Pankey writes, later in “Reasons of Ice,” and it’s that detail that I like best about these poems, the detail of “For the New Year,” with its lines about food, light, love (”This light after the body’s/pleasure. Always this light.” (p 14)), or “Snow on Ash Wednesday,” with its “chirr[ing]” pigeons and “slow heavy snowflakes” (pp 34-35). The poems from Apocrypha, with their Christian references, had me looking things up (the phrase “when the wood is green,” a diptych by Rogier van der Weyden): in the process of that looking-up, I read a review that compares some of Pankey’s phrasing to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I can see it in these lines from “Diptych”: “what shade blocked and what light whelmed/Glared, then grated, declined durably, darkly,/Until the frame of a diptych remained” (p 56). Later, there are other lines I like, and whole poems that are wonderful: lines like “Luck, like hope, is always hollow-boned” (p 62), and poems like “Fool’s Gold,” the quiet grace of it, and “Santo Spirito,” the same. I love this, from “How to Sustain the Visionary Mode”: “Let the rain rain all day on the slate, a province of rain, gray as the stone no longer quarried in these hills, gray as the pigeons tucked in the eaves” (p 125). I love, late in the book, the pieces of overheard conversations worked into the poems: the eavesdropping-in-museums lines in “The Narration of Rain” and “A Bit of Gold Leaf.”

These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (”What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but also the idea of the dodge, and full of love and Eros, the erotic and how landscape can be or reveal it. (p 11: “It’s that this far inland the appearance of a fox is more reference than metaphor. Or the appearance is a demonstration. Sudden appearance, big like an impulse; or the watcher gains a gradual awareness—in the field, taking shape and, finally, familiar.”)

“Location’s what you come to; it’s the low point, it usually repeats,” says the first poem (p 3), and later, “Looking back I wanted—I want—to equal the whole prairie” (p 76). I like how Giscombe plays with language, like “the flat center having become my favorite haunt”(p 13) and then, the next page, the speaker having become “a favorite ha’nt (or a favored one).” I like phrases like this (p 22): “I’ve always had a penchant for the place around speech, voice being suddenly absent in the heart of the song, for the flattest part of heat.”

These are poems about landscape, landscape literally and as metaphor: “An outline’s sameness is, finally, a reference. Towns, at a distance, are that—how they appear at first, a dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when you’re only three miles away.” (p 26) or this, “After dark you can always see lights in the distance, no matter how far between towns you get—lights “punctuate” Illinois” (p 67).

This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of my recollection/is this other world veiled/in its illusion of being known,” he writes, in “The First Days” (p 76), and, a few pages later, in “My Hand”: “see how the past is not finished/here in the present” (p 74). I like the grace of these poems, the pace of them, the uncertainty of some of the phrasing (short lines that can be read in multiple ways depending on whether you stress the break or not), the well-craftedness of the images, like the last few lines of “Barrade,” describing a train passing at night: “the strip of yellow windows passed/like days on a calendar/the long rays of their reflections/reaching across the naked earth/a moment and then never gone” (p 101).

I am such a sucker for city-romances like this, and also for David Levithan’s particular post-gay brand of optimism and charm, and also for the occasional slightly-breathless young adult novel. “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?” is how Nick and Norah’s whirlwind night starts, and it continues with kisses and drama and hand-holding and a deliciously sexy scene in the Marriott Marquis and more kisses (in the rain!) and so many sweet moments as neurotic-and-kinda-uptight Norah starts to learn to trust herself/the moment/life.

When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (which begins, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering/if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch”) and “Personal Poem” and the one that starts with “Krushchev is coming on the right day!”. I love “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” too, and I like some of the poems about art: “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “Joseph Cornell” and “Digression on Number 1, 1948.” I like the sweetness and sexiness of “To the Harbormaster,” and the beautiful city-images—the whole first stanza of “Beer for Breakfast” (chestnut trees and blue skies), or this bit in “Having a Coke with You”: “in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other.” I like the concrete better than the surreal, and there’s more of the latter in these poems than I expected.