letters and sodas: booknotes

Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250″: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from home—which Megan and I did back in 2007—was, as I recall it, a week of being frazzled, cranky, and hungry, a recollection borne out by my comments on this photo and other photos in that set. I caved in and started eating non-local bread partway through the week because I was so miserable. And that was even with an exemption to the 200-mile rule for tea at breakfast, so I can’t blame caffeine withdrawal. (Meredith, it should be noted, allowed herself exemptions during her year of eating locally too: she did still have coffee, she let herself eat non-local food twice a month if she was eating out with friends or at friends’ houses, and she cooked with olive oil and salt, though the salt was sea salt from Maine: outside of the 250-mile radius, but still pretty local!)

Reassuringly, part of Meredith’s point in this book is that eating locally doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: according to a quote from Eating Well Magazine that she includes in the book, “Buying 25% of your groceries from local farmers of a year lowers your carbon footprint by 225 pounds—even more than recycling glass, plastic, and cans” (1). And, as she also points out, eating locally can be a real pleasure: local food tastes good: fruits and veggies from a farmers market, CSA share, or a garden are often more flavorful than their grocery store counterparts, both because they’re fresher and because, unlike supermarket fare, they’re still being bred for taste, not just appearance and shelf life. Eating locally can also make you feel more aware of and connected to the place where you live: I like the way Meredith talks about getting to know local farmers and local geogrpahy, and thinking about the places where her food comes from as she prepares and eats it; I also like the idea of thinking about “what here tastes like,” a phrase Meredith originally wanted to use for this book’s title (6).

Well, I knew all that, but it was good to be reminded. I first heard about this book, I think, through a CSA newsletter—Meredith and I are members of the same CSA. (CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, which is to say: all of us buy shares in the farmer’s crop by giving him money up front, and in exchange, we get local seasonal veggies each week from June to November.) So the idea of eating locally isn’t new to me: I’ve been a CSA member for a few years now, and have been enjoying the farmers market since moving to Brooklyn. But I’ve been having a hard time getting through my CSA vegetables this summer (the fruit is no problem!) so I thought it might be good to have a little inspiration and advice in book form.

This book is quite NYC-centric, which I didn’t mind: I mean, I live here, so Meredith’s local food is my local food too, and when she mentions places like Added Value Farm in Red Hook or the Queens County Farm Museum it’s pleasing because I’ve been to those places, can picture the asphalt lot in Red Hook where there now are raised beds full of rows and rows of greens and peppers and other veggies, or the corn maze and fields and buildings and animals and open space at the Farm Museum in Queens, where I once went on a tractor-drawn hayride and ate a very good deviled egg. (Pictures from the Queens County Museum: here, here and here: it doesn’t look or feel much like NYC, but it is still within the city limits.) And it cracks me up when she writes about the “unofficial Park Slope recycling service” (Books or clothes or stuff you don’t want? Put it outside your building: someone will take it.). But if you’re not in New York, this book would probably be less interesting and less useful to you.

Still, there are some general points that I think Meredith articulates well. Like when she advocates “a reverse approach to recipes,” nothing that “after decades of having everything available all the time at the supermarket, people have gotten used to a recipe-first approach to cooking [...] you decide what you’re having for dinner, make a shopping list based on your chosen menu, and then hit the store to get the ingredients you need. Never mind that those ingredients may not look very good that day” (49). Eating locally requires a shift in meal-planning: you start with the foods at the market or in the CSA share; if you’re eating a semi-local diet, you then figure out what else you might want to buy that will go well with that fennel, or that chard, or whatever it is. This was a really good reminder for me right now. Some of the other sections, like the parts about gardening and preserving and foraging, are less relevant to me but still interesting, although in these sections, as in the book as a whole, Meredith’s writing is sometimes a bit repetitive. Even so, I’m glad to have read this book: it motivated me to organize my fridge and write down all my CSA veggies so I know what I have that needs using up, and it provided me with recipes for refrigerator pickles, lacto-fermented snap beans, and crustless dandelion green quiche. Yes!

Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how do work and leisure and recreation and play interrelate? To start with an answer: leisure, as Rybczynski defines it, is not “an antidote to work”—that would be recreation, which “carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose” (p 224). Leisure, following the ideas of GK Chesterton, is the freedom to do nothing, but above all the freedom to think and to reflect. So if leisure is the freedom to do nothing, where does leisure fit into the modern weekend, the regularly-scheduled two-day break many of us have, into which we often try to cram as many activities as possible? This is something Rybczynski touches on but doesn’t really answer—the answer being, I guess, that there’s room for leisure if you make room for leisure, though some don’t: “the weekend has imposed a rigid schedule on our free time, which can result in a sense of urgency (“soon it will be Monday”) that is at odds with relaxation” (222). Relatedly, as work becomes less skilled and more service-oriented or clerical, we we end up in a situation where “for many, weekend free time has become not a chance to escape work but a chance to create work that is more meaningful–to work at recreation–in order to realize the personal satisfactions that the workplace no longer offers” (225).

In writing about what leisure is and how free time came to be parceled out into Saturdays and Sundays, Rybczynski writes a lot about the history of the week and the history of the weekend, all of which is really interesting precisely because it’s the sort of thing that many tend to take for granted. As Rybczynski puts it: “Because my free time was personally enjoyed, I imagined that it was personally regulated, but this was not quite so. True, I did what I thought I wanted, but certainly not when I wanted; I dutifully arranged my recreations to fall in step with the regularly scheduled weekend intermissions that were accorded me. Not that I felt this was an imposition. It was done so automatically, it seemed so normal, that I never gave the presence of the weekend a second thought—it was simply the way life was” (10). But this isn’t the way life has always been. For one thing, the seven-day week isn’t the only way that we could divide our time: unlike the year or the month or the day, the week has no astronomical significance. And there were plenty of ancient calendars that had repeating periods of something other than seven days. The ancient Egyptian calendar had ten-day periods related to the fact that the stars the Egyptians used for night-time timekeeping changed at ten-day intervals. The Athenians had ten-day divisions in their calendar as well. The Romans had special days with irregular spacing— the first of the month, the fifth or seventh of the month, and the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month. The Chinese calendar involved a 60-day repeating period, and so on through a number of other times and places. By the time of the Julian calendar, Jews had long used a seven-day calendar, but its origin isn’t known. And the seven-day week wasn’t an original feature of the Julian calendar, but it was adopted not that long after. Because there isn’t any written record of a reason for its adoption (no edict from the Roman emperor, no debate among scholars), the guess is that the seven-day week was adopted as a matter of superstition, because the ancients saw seven moving “planets” in the sky and assigned each one to a day, which resulted in a seven-day cycle.

From the origins of the week, Rybczynski talks about different kinds of special days, days on which certain activities—including but not limited to work—are proscribed: a concept that has recurred in cultures and places from ancient Egypt to Judaism to the South Seas—and then talks about the idea of Sunday as taking something from this sort of “tabooed” day, but also being a celebratory holy day, more or less celebratory in different cultures at different times. So how did the special day of Sunday (for British Christians) turn into the weekend? Partly, it was due to prosperity. Of the 18th century, Rybczynski writes: “For the first time in their lives, many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the most economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter” (112). He goes on to note that “Whenever people had a choice in the matter, however, work was characterized by an irregular mixture of days on and days off” (113). Over time, though, there emerged a pattern of “keeping Saint Monday,” i.e. not working on Mondays (in part to recover from Sunday drinking), a pattern that was stronger in some trades than others. At the same time, railway travel was becoming more widespread, and short getaways by train were being marketed to the public. This, combined with opposition to the “Saint Monday” custom and the Sunday drinking that went with it, led to a push for Saturday to be made a half-holiday in Britain. The Saturday half-holiday familiar in Britain was adopted, later, by the US: a sentence like this was surprising to me because I’d had no idea that office-workers used to work on Saturdays: “By the 1930s, most offices in New York City closed their doors at noon on Saturday” (p 135). And from there, the conceptual jump to a full weekend isn’t long.

After focusing mainly on the UK and the US at first, Rybczynski shifts the discussion to the adoption of the two-day weekend elsewhere, including Solidarity-era Poland, Fascist Italy, and Japan. He talks, too, about pastimes and about weekend “retreats,” country campgrounds/trailer parks where working-class families go for the weekend in the summer, and the long heritage of the idea of an escape from the city—from Pliny’s countryside villas to Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon. These last chapters sometimes feel like they’re not so well-connected to the ones that came before, but that’s a small criticism for a book that, on the whole, is pretty pleasing.

(Hey, look, this is the fifth book I’ve finished from my list for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge!)

It’s been a while since I picked up any of the books I picked for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge—I’ve only read three books from my list so far, and it’s already August! But after reading Fire and Hemlock I was in the mood for another novel, specifically another novel with a quirky romance aspect and The Time Traveler’s Wife seemed to fit the bill.

I feel like this is one of those books everyone but me read several years ago, and even if you haven’t read it, you probably know the basics of the plot: Henry travels through time; Clare doesn’t. Clare waits. This is both very unusual and not so unusual, as Clare notes in the prologue:

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. (VII)

The narrative, like Henry, jumps back and forth in time, and the story is told sometimes by Henry and sometimes by Clare, which works nicely: you get the perspective of each, and you also get a sense of how odd their situation is: with Clare, as a child, you see Henry in his 30s; when Henry, at age 28, is talking to Clare, you know that she’s aware of a whole set of shared experiences that this Henry hasn’t had yet. The structure of the book (plus of course the plot!) makes you think about time itself, about the self moving through time, about your future self that doesn’t exist yet, or perhaps does. It makes you think about whether you can talk about a future self with any certainty, or whether you don’t, rather, have an array of possible future selves that might or might not end up ever existing. And it was interesting to compare Niffenegger’s rules-of-time-travel to, say, Connie Willis’s: in Niffenegger’s books, it’s not a problem for a time traveler to meet his earlier self, to be in the same place/time twice, and there isn’t too much worry about causing problems or paradoxes: things mostly just happen the way they will happen, and that is that. This is all interesting stuff, and once I got used to the dialogue (which at first seemed stilted, too disconnected from the more lyrical descriptive passages), the first half of the book was really compelling: delicious weekend reading that I seriously did not want to put down. (Though I suppose in part that’s a testament to how I feel about reading generally at the moment: it’s making me happy, it’s my quiet-time and my alone-time and my thing-that-I-write-about and it’s a hell of a lot more fun than cleaning out the fridge or putting away the clean laundry or cooking in 90-degree-heat. So, um, I am indulging myself, and reading a whole lot.)

Speaking of reading: I like how readerly this book is, how Henry is a librarian who counts “a mystery novel in bed” among his pleasures, how Claire, entering the Newberry Library for the first time, talks about her “Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books,” how Henry notes that his apartment “is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books,” how Clare, on the morning after their “first date,” looks at his bookshelves, lists out authors and titles (X, 3, 15).

But—and I guess, in part, this is the trouble of reading a book like this several years after everyone else has read it—all through that first half I kept feeling slightly squirmy, like: “this gets sad, right? when does it get sad? is it going to be OK when it gets sad or is it going to feel sappy and emotionally manipulative and annoying?” Which is a worry I would say I have moderately often when reading fiction, and am not sure how to articulate. What makes a sad ending moving in a way that feels “honest” or “true” (whatever those things mean; I’m not sure those are even the right terms), and what makes a sad ending feel like a manipulation or a betrayal? I don’t know, but I am pretty sure I have a strong preference for ambiguous or hopeful or happy endings, rather than sad ones.

So yes: this book had me worried, and the end did indeed feel unsatisfying, but even so, there were things in the second half of the book that I liked, things like this:

The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving (284).

19-year-old Polly is supposed to be packing, getting ready for another year of college, but she’s been reading instead. As she reads, she pauses and realizes a funny thing: though the cover on the book, which is similar to a picture that hangs above her bed, is familiar, she’s sure the book used to be called something different, and she’s sure that it used to contain different stories. She flips through it and can’t find half the stories she remembers having read in it, which makes her panic a bit: she wonders if she’s dreamed those other stories, or if, somehow, she has two sets of memories, like one of the characters in the book does. But this makes no sense: “Why,” she wonders, “should she suddenly have memories that did not seem to correspond with the facts?” (p 4). So she leaves the suitcase empty and tries to remember, thinking back to the pictures that hangs above her bed and how she came to have it. It started when Polly was ten, with a strange and dream-like adventure: Halloween, and too little sleep, and running through back gardens with a friend. Then, somehow, a funeral, and a game of make-believe with a friendly stranger, a man named Thomas Lynn.

I love the scene right before Polly meets Mr. Lynn, how it captures the way children play, while also capturing something not quite everyday, something odd:

Nina and Polly scrambled through garden after garden. Some were neat and open, and they sprinted through those, and some were overgrown, with hiding-places where they could lurk. One garden was full of washing, and they had to crouch behind flapping sheets while somebody took down a row of pants. They were on the edge of giggles the whole time, terrified that someone would catch them and yet, in a dreamlike way, almost sure they were safe. (p 11)

Without saying much more about the plot, there is so very much to like in this book, which has roots in the stories of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. There’s a great story-in-a-letter, early in the book, and indeed a whole often-epistolary friendship, and lots about storytelling, imagination, and heroism and choice. I like how, when Mr. Lynn gives Polly a book of fairy tales, she’s unimpressed, though he promises that each story “has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look” (p 177). And there is lots of really pleasing writing, whether ordinarily/satisfyingly descriptive or thought-provoking/interesting thematically. Like: this made me grin, because you can so picture it: “Mr. Lynn lived in a very Londony house, with steps up to the door, regular windows, and a stack of bell-pushes beside the door” (p 70). Or mm, this bit, from when Polly’s in a school play: “she had a sudden sense, as she turned, that she was part of a transparent charmed pattern in which everything had to go in the one right way because that was the only way it could go. [...] The pattern had been there always, even though they were all making it just at that moment” (pp 208-209).

I feel like I cannot properly express how good this book is: the plot is exciting and the end is wonderfully satisfying (like: can’t stop reading for the last 60ish pages) and the whole thing is just so well put together and well-described; all of it feels like a story very well told and well integrated: the ordinary school and home bits, Polly and her awful parents and her excellent grandmother and her various friends, and then also strange magical bits and sinister bits and adventure-y bits. And without saying too much about the end, how much do I love books that remind you that there isn’t just either/or, that there are other ways and other places, if you’re only looking for them? I love them lots, yes.

Like Dogsbody, this is a book that was first recommended to me by Megan, though it was Jenny’s excellent Diana Wynne Jones Week that inspired me to finally get around to reading it. (Thank you both!)

Edited-to-add: PS: I was reading this book on the sidewalk in SoHo today (waiting for my boyfriend, who was browsing in a juggling store) when I overheard this guy on his cell phone saying, “I’m sipping some champagne,” which made me look up amusedly, because he was emphatically not sipping any champagne. He was standing on Broadway, and it was 90 degrees out, and he was drinking a VitaminWater. OK, maybe he was being metaphorical or it was a standing joke with whoever he was talking to, but I thought it was funny. I guess he saw me glance at him, and somehow thought that was an invitation to come talk. So he said, “Excuse me, what book is that?” and OK, that’s reasonably friendly and certainly non-threatening, so I found myself weirdly trying to explain this book to someone who probably does not know DWJ’s work and probably does not normally read kids’ books/YA. At one point I definitely said something about how (SPOILER ALERT, but not really if you know what Tam Lin is about) there are fairies in the book but they’re not, you know, little people, and he said something along the lines of, “so, uh, the fairies are, uh, like, fairies,” and I sort of looked puzzled and then my boyfriend came outside and I was very glad. The end.

When I quoted a passage from Proust about the “litanies of the small trades”, Carol mentioned this book of Irving Penn’s photographs of workers in Paris (and also New York and London) from 1950 and 1951. I’d mostly known about Penn’s fashion work or portraits of celebrities and society people (I’m thinking of pictures like this), but clearly he has a broad body of work: fashion photography and portraits, yes, but also pictures like this excellent one of an “on vacation” sign in the window of what I’m guessing is a tailor shop, or this one from the “Underfoot” series.

In the introduction to this book, Virginia A. Heckert and Anne Lacoste write about the background of these pictures, noting that the project was one that Penn had “long envisioned based on his admiration of Eugène Atget’s photographs of workers and the larger, centuries-old tradition of representing the petits-métiers, or “small trades”" (p 10). Penn had two helpers who worked to find potential subjects and bring them to Penn’s studio, dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade. I love this description of it: “Enticed by a token payment, sellers of cheese, cucumbers, newspapers, and balloons climbed the six flights of stairs to the rented studio, as did repairers of ceramics, knives, chair cane, shoes, and windows; mailmen, firemen, and coalmen; butchers, bread makers, and pastry chefs” (ibid.).

The 210 photographs reproduced in this book are a mixture of gelatin silver prints and platinum/palladium prints: as the introduction explains, Penn mastered the platinum/palladium process later in his career, and returned to the negatives from this series, sometimes reprinting the same images he’d already made gelatin silver prints of, and sometimes choosing new images entirely. Both are pleasing, but I think I like the gelatin silver ones more: the platinum/palladium prints are often darker, more atmospheric, but I felt like I could see more in the gelatin silver ones. Speaking of seeing: you can see some of the images online at the Getty Museum’s site (here, but seeing them on the screen isn’t as nice as seeing them on paper, and I’m sure seeing them in a book isn’t as good as seeing them in person.

But even in a book, there is lots to like here. I love the detail and specificity of these images, how they capture a vanished world, how tangible it all is, how seeing these workers makes you imagine the cities in which they worked, the Paris where a glazier carries a wooden frame on his back or the New York where a stevedore carries a great big branch bearing more than fifty bananas. The way the subjects are photographed, standing against a simple paper backdrop, means your eye is drawn to the details of the person or his or her clothes or tools: the quizzical expression of the knife grinder with a cigarette in his mouth, the flour-covered shoes of a pair of pastry chefs. Highlights for me: the grace of a white-haired “lady acrobat” standing there holding a trio of hoops; the street photographer with his camera and his cigar, and the humor of that picture—the mirroredness of it; the chestnut vendor with his sign announcing that chestnuts are “GOOD FOR THE BRAIN” (is that a book tucked under his arm?); the busboy at a Parisian restaurant, facing away from the camera, the V of his big white apron mirroring the V of his feet, the folds of a napkin tucked under his arm; a pair of smiling lorry washers, one holding his brush with the bristles up, the other holding his with the bristles down, both of them in thigh-high waders; a Parisian telegraph messenger—with his bicycle, of course. Sometimes it’s the juxtapositions that are wonderful: a woman news seller in London tilts her head and looks assuredly at the camera; at her waist is a rumpled and partly obscured sheet of paper announcing, in big black type, “FOOTBALL RESULTS” and “EVENING NEWS.” This woman has broad shoulders, a hat with a feather in it, and a wide stance; one hand clutches a newspaper and the other’s in her bag, and the overall effect is that she looks like someone used to moving through busy streets. Opposite is a nurse, a younger woman, standing very straight, ankles close, hands clasped, all narrow shoulders and narrow waist, lipstick and a starched collar: someone who looks like her working hours, at least, are much more decorous.

What if the stars weren’t just distant balls of gas: what if each one had, or might have, a “denizen,” a being who inhabited its sphere? What if these denizens had their own lives, their own politics, courts, and jealousies? That’s part of the premise of this novel, which the flap-copy describes, sort of cheesily but also accurately, as a book that is “a tense, exciting, science-fiction fantasy, a thriller, and a touching dog story all in one.” Sirius, the dog star, has been found guilty of murder, though he’s sworn his innocence, and he fears he’s going to be sentenced to death. But instead, he’s given a very unusual sentence, one he hadn’t realized was possible: he’s banished to Earth, where he’s born as a puppy, and he’s tasked with finding the Zoi, the murder weapon he’s accused of having used, which seems to have landed there. On Earth, his dog-nature and his celestial-being nature coexist in a dog’s body, so he’s a regular dog with regular doggy personality traits and desires, but he’s also Sirius, dimly aware of his past as a flaming star, able to talk to the sun and the earth, and aware that he’s supposed to find something that’s lost. He ends up being found and taken home by an Irish girl named Kathleen who’s been packed off to live with English relatives because her dad’s in jail for being a terrorist (this is the 1970s). Kathleen’s life is none too happy, and Sirius isn’t exactly welcomed into the household either, but he’s clever and loyal and manages to navigate life on earth quite well.

I love how precise and funny and tender a writer Diana Wynne Jones is. At the start of the book, when Sirius is ranting in court about how he’s not guilty, he’s not just ranting, he’s fulminating (from fulmen, lightning). Polaris, because he is a Cepheid (yes, I had to look that up) has a stutter. And I love how she imagines her way into a puppy’s viewpoint and then a dog’s: just after he’s born, Sirius sleeps with the other puppies in his litter, “wedged warmly among the other creatures, against a great hairy cliff” (p 6). When he sees a trio of cats for the first time, we get this: “He woke up, stretching his back pair of legs and his front hard and straight, to find there were hostile, alien things nearby. These creatures did not speak. They had no language exactly. But they felt things so firmly and acutely that Sirius knew what they meant just as if they had spoken” (p 15). Also excellent: Sirius’s friendships with old folks, Sirius’s ultimate friendship with the cats, and Sirius’s discovery of ice cream. (Regarding the last: “A very small boy reached toward him with a fistful of cold, sweet, white stuff. Sirius ate it all. And that was that. Having discovered ice cream, Sirius could think of nothing else for a while” (p 124).”)

I was excited to read Jenny’s post announcing that she was going to host a Diana Wynne Jones week in August. I loved Charmed Life as a kid, and more recently I’ve enjoyed re-reading Charmed Life and reading The Lives of Christopher Chant and Howl’s Moving Castle for the first time. But my book list tells me I read those books in 2008 and 2005, meaning I hadn’t read a book by Diana Wynne Jones in way too long. Megan told me ages ago that I’d like Dogsbody, so now seemed like the time to read it, and I wasn’t disappointed. I like how all the different plot threads/areas fit together, science fiction and myth and ordinary life; I like how this book is fast-paced and exciting but also well-written, and written with care. (It was one of those books I stayed up late to finish; it was also one of those books where I sometimes had to remind myself to slow down, so as not to miss the pleasing details.) Next up: Fire and Hemlock!

I grabbed this book from the shelf on a whim on a day when I was headed to the beach: I wanted something that wasn’t heavy (literally or metaphorically!) and that wasn’t a book I cared about keeping spotless. Something that would be an interesting story, something that would be unlikely to make me want to write anything down or look anything up, and something I wouldn’t mind getting sandy or sunscreeny or wet with salt water, rain, or condensation from the liter of seltzer in my bag. So, this book it was, and I swam and sunned and swam some more and then happily read about 50 pages of it before pausing, looking up at the sky, and noticing that it was a whole lot darker than it had been when I started reading. So much for spending the whole afternoon at the beach. Luckily, I had a short walk to the train, and didn’t get caught in any downpours. Back at home, I happily started reading again, after a break for coffee and conversation and word games on Facebook and a glass of red wine, because this book is sweet and charming and made me want to keep reading, but didn’t seem, at first, to be one of those drop-everything books where the rest of the things I want to do cease entirely to exist.

So, the story. Ella is the daughter of nobility, and lives in a world with gnomes, elves, centaurs, ogres, and fairy godmothers. Right after she’s born, a fairy (not her fairy godmother, who’s much too smart for such idiocy) curses her while trying to give her a gift. “Ella will always be obedient,” the fairy says, and Ella is—she has to be, even when doing as she’s told is against her own self-interest. She tries to resist orders sometimes, but she can’t, she physically isn’t able: so she gets good at finding loopholes, figuring out ways to follow a command but not really doing what the other person wants. This serves her well enough at home, and all is pretty much right in Ella’s world until her mother dies and her father sends her off to finishing school with two awful twits whose mother clearly has designs on Ella’s father. This being a retelling of the Cinderella story (early in the story, Ella meets the kind Prince Charmont, aka Char), you can see where this is going.

I like the funny and sweet details of this book, like Ella talking about sliding down the banisters of the manor with her mother (when no one else was around, of course), or Ella describing the soup that the house’s cook has just made, how the cook “had gotten the carrots at their sweetest, carrotiest best,” and how “weaving in and out of the carrots were other flavors: lemon, turtle broth, and a spice I couldn’t name” (p 23). Or this, when Ella’s father has decided on finishing school because maybe they’ll teach her how to walk more quietly, like the small girl she is rather than like the small elephant she sounds like: “I left. On my way out, I said, “Perhaps small elephants cannot be admitted to finishing school. Perhaps small elephants cannot be finished. Perhaps they . . .” I stopped. He was laughing again.” (p 32). Or this, just after Ella leaves home on the way to school:

“I would never embrace a cook.” Hattie shuddered.
“No,” I agreed. “What cook would let you?” (p 50)

And I like that Ella and Char have personalities, are both funny and clever and playful, are people rather than just fairy-tale characters. Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end this book had turned into a drop-everything-and-read book, and I like it enough that I’m actually keeping my copy of it, at least for now: I’d picked it up thinking I’d read it and then put it in my building’s lobby for someone else to find, but now I don’t want to!

I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by it.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” it starts, and then goes on to talk about the many kinds of blue, meanings of blue, shades of blue (lapis, ultramarine, turquoise), blue things and blue people and blue places, blue in the sense of “obscene” and in the sense of “having the blues” and also blue just in the sense of the color, how it looks, how it feels. This book is sometimes yearning, sometimes sad, sometimes sexy, always smart: it reminds me of Anne Carson (in a good way), the way it blends the personal and the scholarly or philosophical or historical, bits about the science of color and Newton’s experiments in vision, bits about about Joseph Cornell and Yves Klein, mixed with bits about fucking, about pleasure, about loss, about sorrow.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for months and months, and am glad I finally got around to it. I first read about it in a blog post by Mark Doty, one of my favorite poets; the passages he excerpted made me want to keep an eye out for it. Then Megan got a copy and read it and said I would indeed like it, so I borrowed it from her. And then it languished on my shelf for months, until I saw a sign at McNally Jackson saying that the author would be reading there, which made me decide that I should a) read the book and b) go to the reading. (Speaking of which, MP3s of Nelson reading some of her work, including some of the propositions from Bluets are online here.) So: the reading was pleasing, I bought my own copy of the book, and now I kind of want to read it again, though the rest of my TBR pile is calling to me too.

After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan back in May, I ended up checking out three John Green books from the library, wanting to read more of him, thinking I liked his literary voice. Looking for Alaska was OK: hugely readable but also a bit over-dramatic/too much of an “issues” book for me. I liked the offbeat humor of An Abundance of Katherines more. Paper Towns, though, is far and away my favorite of John Green’s solo works. The plot has some similarities to Looking for Alaska: smart/nerdy guy falls for crazy/unpredictable/smart/hot girl, but Paper Towns is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that Looking for Alaska only occasionally is, manages to be suspenseful and exciting without being melodramatic, and is also very much a self-consciously smart book: there’s a whole lot of Walt Whitman in these pages.

Because the story’s a mystery, complete with clues that the characters have to follow, it’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much, but: Quentin Jacobsen, aka Q, is a well-adjusted high-school senior. (His parents are both therapists, so he thinks about well-adjustedness more than you might expect.) He’s smart, he’s well-behaved, he’s content with his daily routines: he has a perfect attendance record at school. But he’s also totally in love with his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman: they’ve known each other since age two, and were friends as kids, but now she’s popular and he’s not and so they don’t have occasion to hang out much, until she shows up at his bedroom window at midnight and talks him into accompanying her on a late-night revenge adventure (her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with her best friend). Margo is simultaneously pushy/awful/selfish and really great; hilarity ensues, and then Margo disappears. She’s left home before, so no one’s too concerned at first, but days pass and she doesn’t come home and Q begins to worry.

I like how Q learns about himself and about friendship as the book progresses: how he realizes he’s not as much of a scaredy-cat as he and others might have thought, and how he realizes that other people are, well, people, with as much of an inner life as he has. I like how he reads Leaves of Grass—first just looking for clues, but then really reading it, thinking about the world and multiplicities of voices and multiplicities of metaphors and how the way we choose to see the world shapes us. I like the unabashed lyricism this book sometimes has, like when Q, talking about someone who died, says this:

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? (p 301)

I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact that I’m just now reading the Summer Fiction issue (June 14 & 21). I like short stories, or at least, I think of myself as liking short stories, but somehow I don’t actually read that many of them in book form: at any given moment I’m much more likely to be reading a novel, or a book of poems, or maybe a book of essays. But that’s where The New Yorker comes in, except that I often find the short stories in its pages to be, well, semi-memorable at best. This may partly be a function of the fact that I don’t tend to write about those stories here, or to discuss them with anyone else—and what I read but don’t write or talk about, I tend to forget. But I’m starting to think it might also be about the subject matter. I’m generally just not that interested in short fiction about middle-aged people who are privileged, heterosexual, and/or having marital difficulties or career trouble. And I feel like The New Yorker‘s fiction section has a lot of that. Not that there aren’t other kinds of stories represented as well, and not that I don’t sometimes appreciate a style or phrase in those stories, or even the way the plot unfolds. But unless something formally quirky or interesting or fun is happening, it’s probably not going to resonate with me. Also, I think I like short shorts, or even just short-ish shorts, best of all short stories.

Which is why a two page story by Jonathan Safran Foer called “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” made me pause when I started reading it and made me smile when I kept going. Here’s how it start: “I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers.” And it continues like that, except with some paragraphs being all “You” statements, and some being a mix of “I” and “You” and some being “We.” (There are some “They” sentences at the end, and some that don’t even start with a pronoun—but not very many of those, comparatively speaking.) I love it, the pace of it, the length of it, the way it tells a story through all the accumulation of these insignificant-seeming bits and pieces, how it traces the line of the speaker’s life through love/marriage/parenthood/boredom but does so in an unexpected way.

You can only read the whole story on The New Yorker‘s website if you have a subscription to the magazine, but someone else liked this story enough to type the whole thing out: here it is in its entirety.