I have various cultural Canadianization projects in the works (2011 resolution?  Learn to love hockey.), and I have my friend S to thank for introducing me to the wonder that is the rich Canadian animation tradition.  (Among the things I didn't know until she told me is the fact that films in Canada used to - in recent memory - be preceded with some consistency by a domestically-produced animated short in the theatres.  I thought this practice was a relic of a half-century ago, and had long been disgruntled by its passing.)

The first place S sent me was to "The Big Snit," in which a couple engage in a Cold War of eye-rattling and chair-sawing over a despair-inducing game of Scrabble.  (I'm reminded of the sublime breakfast-table wars from Heaven can Wait.)  And then it all ends, as it naturally would, the way Cold Wars threaten to end.

Here you have it:


You're welcome.

Mt. Courseprep looms large on my horizon today, especially since I've added another element to my Monday-Wednesday teaching-schedule-of-doom: now I not only have book group/salsa lessons on Tuesdays, wedged between the 2.5-hour marathon of my afternoon class and the two classes I teach midday on Wednesday, but I also have French class at the Alliance Française on Monday night.  (I approach this last with some trepidation - I studied French for over a decade, but my ability now can only be described as, um, atrophied.)

Just a handful of links, then, before I head off to the Farmers Market and back to my pile of course reading for the week ahead:


The good news?  My hometown is the most well-read city in America.  The bad news?  Everyone is reading less, across the board.  And Washington may only have gained the coveted first-place spot because the reading situation in Seattle is getting dire.  That really takes the wind out of my enthusiasm.


Steve at Philosopher's Playground asks what the funniest single utterance you've ever heard in your classroom is.  Here's his:

We were discussing the difference between ethical precepts and social mores. One of the students raised his hand and asked, "Steve, what are mores?" I looked straight at him and said, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a more."

Just the other day I was contemplating the history of the sitcom with my friend S.  I rarely watch sitcoms, I reflected, but when I encounter a really well constructed one (see Coupling or Arrested Development, although both defy the form in various ways) I buy it and rewatch it endlessly.  What would the canon of the sitcom include, we wondered - not just the shows that were groundbreaking (and thus of historical interest) but also those whose quality has held up?  Those that remain endlessly rewatchable today?

My gurus at the AV Club sensed our curiosity and responded (not really) with a fascinatingly deep Primer of the 80s sitcom.  It's worth reading in its entirely, both for the genre analysis of how pop culture means and is shaped by social forces and for the reminder of how many really great, nuanced shows you've already forgotten.


I've just begun subscribing to The Comics Journal's blog The Panelists.  What drew me in? Well, I am newly entranced by their One-Panel Criticism relay, in which various panelists (including one brilliant comics scholar I went to grad school with) exchange readings of a single panel.  I'm combing through the archives now to find the perfect, detail-oriented analysis to give my Intro to Lit students as an example of close reading images (and particularly images that are meant to exist as moments in a series).


Would that I had a talent this awesome.  There's nothing like a crocheted tribute to great television ensemble drama.  And then there is always the sublime craftiness that only Doctor Who fandom can evoke.


An experiment conceived and executed by a group of schoolchildren has been published in the journal Biology Letters.  This is a story of teacherly innovation that actually made me weep for joy.  No cynical postmodern irony there at all.

You know what I haven't done in forever?  Posted an enthusiasm of links.

(You might also have answered "Reviewed a book or film," and right you'd be.  Mt. Grademore behind me and Mt. Courseprep looming, let's see whether I can't remedy that one as well in the near future.)


Via the Smart Bitches, a monkishly silent Hallelujah chorus:

The Hulk is on Twitter, in many forms.  But did you know he is a feminist?

HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH.

Not to mention a Buddhist?

HULK GRATEFUL FOR IMPERMANENCE. OTHERWISE IT SAME SMASH EVERY DAY.

You might think that a commitment to smash would be the antithesis of Buddhism, but in fact it is the ultimate expression of detachment from the material world.  Think on't.

The only thing that tempers my enthusiasm for Benjamin Andrews's Bookah is the knowledge that it only confirms D's worst suspicions about the nature of my book addiction.

If there is a tangible gain from the physicality of a book, then Bookah surely benefits the reader to an unprecedented extent. By concentrating the scent of 31 old books into a confined space, the much-praised aspect of the physical book is exaggerated to embody consumer technology's tendency to fetishize simple pleasures. The fact that you can't already buy the Bookah is really quite surprising. Here knowledge is contained within the sterile white walls of a modern product and powerfully ingested by the user, albeit in a hopelessly ineffective way. 

Got Medieval has been exploring how medieval bookmakers combated piracy.  With a good book curse.

 For a book curse is essentially the same as that little FBI warning that pops up whenever you try to watch a movie: a toothless text charm included by the media's maker meant to frighten the foolish. The charm only works if you believe that words are special, potent magic.

Here's how they went:

Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.

See what they did there? Steal a book, have your name removed from the book.


My friend Lara (whom I have known since we were four and shared a kindergarten class, as well as birthdays a mere two days apart) is a brilliant photographer, most often of luminous botanical subjects.  She has just opened an Etsy shop: go check it out.  My favorite of her pieces is "Lotus Petal Curve."

Many years ago, I read an article about professional funeral wailers in China. In China, and in many countries, when a loved one died, you hired people to sit in the back and cry—sob, weep, bellow, really, really grieve the way only a stranger or someone who is being paid can—or it just wasn’t considered a good funeral. And it didn’t mean you weren’t sad yourself, it was just for reinforcement. So for years I joked with my writer friends that one day, if I got desperate enough, I would hire people to read my book on the subway and laugh.

After reading the 138 novels on this year's Booker longlist, one of the judges has come to the conclusion that British writers are afraid to write about sex.

Philip Larkin pinpointed the emergence of sexual intercourse to 1963. Is his biographer, Motion, right in dating its demise, in literary terms, to the emergence of the Bad Sex Award in 1993?

I have noticed a fair amount of discussion among romance readers of how terribly non-genre writers treat sex scenes in their prose.  Admittedly, there is a fair amount of bad (or cliched or silly) sex in romance as well, but the best authors make poetry out of it, defamiliarizing all the old conventions of talking about both desire and the human body.  It strikes me that there is something about sexuality that serves as a foil to pretension, setting off language's literariness for both good and ill.  Thoughts?

• "Writing a play bruises people with that one weird condition that makes you bruise easily."
• "Writing a play is like discovering penmanship late in life."
• "Writing a play impresses your Dad and lets him down at the same time."
• "Writing a play is like texting with ghosts."
• "Writing a play is, it turns out, entirely unlike sports."

... hie ye to Persnickety Snark, which (besides having a brilliant blog name) is in the midst of running down the results of a massive poll of the top 100 Young Adult novels.

Some of my favorites have already made an appearance in the ranks of 50-100, like the sublime Fire by Kristin Cashore, Maria V. Snyder's gripping Poison Study, Patrick Ness's addictive The Knife of Never Letting Go, and Francesca Lia Block's bracingly bizarre Weetzie Bat.



I have also been moved by the list to add some books (of course I have) to Mt. TBR:

• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Glass Houses by Rachel Caine
• Whale Talk by Chris Cutcher

What favorites haven't we seen yet?  What would you add?  I am thinking Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books....

When I was a child (an only child, I hasten to add, and self-sustaining in my amusements), my two favorites activities were playing schoolteacher to my stuffed animals (I kept meticulous records of their grades, and let me tell you, Monkey and Almond did not benefit from grade inflation) and cataloging my books.  I thought of a hundred ways to classify my library, but I could never wrap my mind around the whole project.

Today, whenever I move with my considerably vaster library (probably around 2500 books, which is apparently 500 less than Samuel Pepys kept at any one time), my first action in a new house is to put books on the shelves.  A home doesn't feel like it is mine until there are books everywhere.  And then I begin anticipating the day when I can organize the shelves into some semblance of order.  I actually put off this task, you understand, so that I can enjoy the anticipation a bit longer.  Sometimes I save it for a really horrible day.

I have begun thinking about philosophies of shelving again after reading Charles-Adam Foster-Simard's thoughtful piece on the subject in The Millions.  Foster-Simard has adopted an intuitive structure for his library - a library of thematic associations ("all of an author’s books are together (no matter the language), authors that go well together go together, other books are placed by association of genre or style") that sometimes verges on the romantic:

Putting Sylvia Plath with her husband Ted Hughes feels wrong, so we try to find a new lover for her. I think of Byron as a joke, my girlfriend proposes Mary Shelley as a fellow tortured female writer. The offer is accepted and Plath serves as transition into gothic fiction. Ironically, Byron ends up just after Shelley anyway (they shared more than shelf-space in their lives, after all), and before Polidori and Stoker. Books start to place themselves on their own.

My new house in Nova Scotia, which I moved into about a year ago, has more space than anywhere I have ever lived, so I have adopted a new shelving system.  First, I now have an office, which means I can banish all work-related, stress-inducing books to that space.  Thank God. For a long time I haven't been able to keep any work books in my bedroom, because they will give me insomnia. So, that is the first cut - work vs. pleasure.

The second is between read and unread books.  My smaller (blush) collection of unread books goes in the basement and ground floor.  The theory is this: they are on the ground floor so that when guests see the collection there, and ask about the books, I will actually have something to say about them.  The relegation of the rest of the read collection to the basement room (a lovely room in its own right, I hasten to say, lest you have visions of my poor books moldering away in forgotten dampness) is that there I can find them whenever I need them, but they don't look me in the eye every day.  It is the unread books that I need to confront constantly, if I am ever to stand a chance of opening them.


So the unread library consumes all the space on the second and third floors - two bedrooms, an office, and a full, dedicated library.

The third layer of classification is between fiction and non-fiction.  Non-fiction occupies the master suite on the third floor of the house, since having it before me every night and morning is the only way I will ever remember to read it.  It is further subdivided roughly by genre and theme (biographies and memoirs, science writing, sports, media, literature, etc.).  The fiction on the second floor, by contrast, is organized strictly by author.  Why?  This makes it easy to find a volume when I want it.  And I have to admit I adore the incongruous neighbors this system creates.

So - how do you arrange your shelves?  Do you ever find yourself thinking about shelving options in - dare I say - moral(izing) terms?



P.S. Did I mention that I'm unexpectedly in Hawai'i for five weeks?  Read (and see) more about it here.  Or you could take a look at one of my posts from the last week or so.  I reviewed Make Way for Tomorrow and Jim the Boy, and gave my account of the first episodes of the last season of Deadwood.  I may also have touched on subjects as diverse as the International Catalogue of Superheroes, anarcho-dandyism, and the glorious I Write Like and Lone Star Statements time sucks.

The Morning News has compiled what may be the new Garfield minus Garfield - a culling of sublimely surrealist cultural artifacts - in the form of its Lone Star Statements.  These are a selection of one star reviews of classics - specifically works that are so classic as to have achieved a place in the canon that is Time's list of the 100 best post-1923 novels.

Quick quiz- See how many of the following classics you can identify by their one-star reviews (courtesy of Lone Star Statements):

• “While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”
• “When one contrasts Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with this book, it’s like comparing an Olympic sprinter with an obese man running for the bus with a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other.”
• “1) I’m bored. 2) He uses too many allusions to other novels, so that if you’re not well read, this book makes no sense. 3) Most American readers are not fluent in French, so to have conversations or interjections in French with no translation is plain dumb. 4) Did I mention I was bored? 5) As with another reviewer, I agree, he uses a lot of huge words that just slow a person down. And it’s not for theatrics either, it’s just huge words mid-sentence when describing something simple. Nothing in the sense of imagery is gained. 6) Also, to sum it up, it’s a story about a pedophile.”
• “This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.” (The hilarity of this entry, written about a famously opaque author, is compounded by the fact that it was through my ex-boyfriend that I discovered Lone Star Statements.  Thanks, M!  Sorry if I strutted and fretted my hour upon the stage from time to time back in high school....)
• And of course, the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies award goes to this review: “The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”

All the world's abuzz with I Write Like, a site that takes a sample of your prose and swiftly provides you with your literary soulmate.  Or doppelschreiber, as the case may be.  My friend JP told me about it, adding that I (apparently) write like David Foster Wallace.  Not bad, I think, although I blush to admit that I've never read any DFW.  When I went back to try the site for myself, it claimed I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft.  Hmm.  Grimmer and grimmer.

And that's my blog.  I dread to think what my dissertation* writes like.

But, of course, I can take comfort in the knowledge that Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King.



*Notice that my dissertation apparently has consciousness and a writerly identity in its own right.  I am just waiting for the day when it turns itself into a scholarly monograph.

If it weren't for the fact that I am currently in Hawai'i, and desirous of not appearing a miserable ingrate, I would be unleashing the following cry right about now: "Why, oh why am I not in London for the Chap Olympiad?".

When D first told me about the Chap Olympiad, images of the Twit-of-the-Year Race instantly sprang to mind.  To be honest, the Twit Olympics, in all their non-brilliance, are never far from the forefront of my thinking:

From there my thoughts naturally drifted (as they always do) to Eddie Izzard's Stoned Olympics.


But no, these were all red herrings along the path to the Chap Olympiad, which is no less quintessentially British, but considerably more sartorially polished.  (OK, Eddie, not more polished than thou.)  Admittedly, Gervaise Brook-Hamster and Oliver St. John-Mollusc might be names you see among the participants.  And it seems to be something of a response to Izzard's call for "a British Olympics, where each and every event is a British event - like the British 100 metres - 'Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, I think *I* was here first.'"

There's the cucumber-sandwich discus, the human steeplechase, the mustache tug-of-war, Pimm's galore, and some excellent, excellent fashion.   I draw your particular attention to the umbrella jousting, which Strange Games describes thus:  

In keeping with the ideals of Chappism the front of the shield is pasted with the front page of the Financial Times. Players mount their cycles with the shield on one arm, the umbrella held forward in the other and gallantly cycle towards each other and certain injury. Umbrellas can be used in traditional jousting fashion or the hooked handle can be used to try to pull the opponent over.

It calls to mind Got Medieval's recent contemplation of whether jousting is in fact seeing a major resurgence in the twenty-teens.

"We like to call our particular philosophy anarcho-dandyism," says a representative chap," So we're taking the principles of dandyism ... and throwing a bit of an anarchic blend into it."




Next year, god willing and the creek don't rise, I'm there.

I have lived altogether too long without encountering the wonder that is the International Catalogue of Superheroes.

I'm just sayin': A Canadian superhero named Stallion Canuck?  A French one named (eurgh) Hiroshiman?

(And just FYI, the explosively named Kapten Zzzboom hails from the Philippines.  His comrade, Chunks of Rotting Flesh Man, has New Zealand to thank for his existence.  I am dying to find out about the latter's superpowers, but alas all I can learn is that his first appearance was, rather unnervingly, in "Season to Taste" #3.)

A Washingtonian drama (gotta love the hometown intrigue) about a young analyst for an unnamed and amorphous government agency who discovers identical clues in the crossword puzzles of every newspaper, all pointing towards ... four-leaf clovers.  He's a code breaker, so naturally he thinks that this signifies our system of government - but if the leaves symbolize the judiciary, the executive, and Congress, then what is the fourth branch?  (And here I thought clovers always cryptically signified the Holy Trinity.  Clearly I am Dan Browned out, and need to update my conspiracy theorizing.)  And then, of course, the mysterious deaths start. The pre-pilot for this August drama is available on Hulu, and I found it more promising than polished - it feels like it wants to be an HBO drama, but doesn't have the balls for HBO's subtlety of narrative.  But I will be tuning in to see where it goes.

• Boardwalk Empire (HBO, September 2010)

I'm normally no slavish devotee of Martin Scorsese, but I defy anyone to be indifferent to this Prohibition-era mobster drama that the director is launching on HBO. It's Steve Buscemi, it's a key writer from The Sopranos, it's speakeasies and rum-running in Atlantic City, for crying out loud.  And best of all in this best of all possible, possible worlds, it's Michael Kenneth Williams, who was Omar on The Wire. Resistance is futile.

• The Borgias (Showtime, 2011)

I know that the foundation upon which this pilot was pitched was the success of The Tudors, but I have to admit that I never cared for that show.  My reasons are twofold.  First, it seemed to try unnecessarily hard to make the reign of Henry VIII trashy and melodramatic.  It is naturally both of those things, so why not be more historically nuanced and detailed in creating your world?  Don't strain at drama - build it.  Second, I can't stand Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Irish stunner though he is.  He is all regal petulance without any of the king's famous charm and intellectual heft, and I have always found him quite limited as an actor.  But I am very much looking forward to The Borgias, and here's why: 1) I'm not sure it is possible to melodramatize the history beyond its evident histrionics (so I hope the writers and directors won't strain themselves to try), and 2) in Jonathan Rhys Meyer's place I (blessedly) have Jeremy Irons. Not to mention Neil Jordan is helming the project....

• Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011)

I have just this to say to you:  Sean Bean.  Fantasy epic.  HBO production values.  And Sean Bean.  For me, the true title of The Fellowship of the Ring was The Heroic Struggle and Lamentable Downfall of Boromir, with Hobbitty Interludes and Wizards You Shall Not Pass.

• Lights Out (FX, late 2010)

 A boxing drama from the Executive Producer of In Treatment.  If that doesn't baffle you (or if it delights you) with its paradox, this might be a show for you.

• Pillars of the Earth (Starz, July 2010)

All right, so this looks a bit cheesier in its characterization and production values than what we might dub the "HBO standard" for epic television, but I am finding it hard to defy the siren song of the spectacular cast - Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Matthew MacFayden, and Donald Sutherland - all of whom do cheesy shouting to the heavens so very, very well.  And who am I to cast the first stone?  I watch Legend of the Seeker.  (Don't tell anyone.)

• Terriers (FX, summer/fall 2010)

The new show by the creator of The Shield takes as its subject a pair of unlicensed PIs.  And, in contrast to HBO's Bored to Death, these unlicensed PIs won't look exactly, uncomfortably like my partner D.  (Really.  It's unsettling.)

• The Walking Dead (AMC, October 2010)

Zombies.  On the network that brought us the addictively churning, brain-gnawing conformity of Mad Men.  Need I say more?

Would you call the tone of the  Declaration of Independence "chatty"?  Or is its seeming formality just an effect of shifts in diction over the last few centuries?

In this piece on the prose style that was inaugurated (along with the nation) with the Declaration of Independence, Morgan Weis claims that

It is an almost impossibly tricky line to establish, the one between revolution and prudence. In establishing it, Jefferson not only formulates a new approach to government, he inaugurates a new prose style, an American prose. Its central principle is the following: When addressing matters difficult and august, it is best to be chatty. There is a danger in this approach. It is the danger of shallowness. Many Americans since Jefferson have fallen victim to that danger. But in the hands of a master this style has the virtue of honesty and confidence in the face of the profound.

What say you? Is chattiness ingrained not just in our conversational and social makeup, but in the very way Americans use language itself?  Do we tend to more prosaic speech the more profound our subject matter?

Joan/Sarah F at Dear Author has a fascinating and nuanced post up about the ethics and politics of historical accuracy in m/m historical romance.  This sounds like an issue with a very narrow audience, and some of you might (and certainly are) saying, "Oh, I'm not a romance reader" or "m/m romance? Are these words coming out of your mouth even the English language?". 

Admittedly, this isn't a genre of romance I've ventured into, but it is a booming one, and one in which a lot of issues of theoretical, readerly, and academic interest are being raised.  The largest of these is this: why is this genre, which takes gay men as its subject, mostly being produced and consumed by straight women? (My favorite line of this article? “You don’t have to commit murder to write a good mystery.”)  What are the ethics of this, and what are we to make of its aesthetics (or erotics)?  In other words, what does this say about the nature of desire and literary identification?

But Joan/Sarah F. raises a whole array of other scholarly issues.  First, and most important for scholars of the novel or the romance:

Only the 18th century could have made the idea of marrying for love the dominant narrative. For reasons both social (rise of middle class, literacy, leisure time, disposable income) and technological (paper, printing, book binding), only the 18th century could have invented and popularized the novel. And, most importantly, only the 18th Century could have focused that novel on the feminine and the domestic, on the ways in which two people negotiate their love, form a relationship, and become the ideal social unit. We think about love and relationships the way we do today because of the 18th century and, in unavoidably connected ways, we read the romance novels we read today because of the 18th century roots of the novel.

She then goes on to address the problem of identity as historically contingent: in other words, it was only in the last century that the idea of homosexuality as identity (as opposed to a set of discrete actions) comes into clear being.  It hardly seems coincidental that this shift occurs in tandem with the inward turn of humanism and the Enlightenment.

Because of this, she goes on to say, post-Renaissance historical romance can examine the role of romantic love in claiming the liberties of individual rights, establishing the nature of modern privacy, and outlining the physical body as one boundary between personal freedom and social power:

writing about a man in the eighteenth century, who is what we would now consider gay, fall[ing] in love with another man entails detailing how he comes to realize that he CAN fall in love with his sexual partner. [...] More importantly, to have historical m/m romance claim the same narrative as m/f romance, a narrative that is inextricably intertwined in the political, social, and civil rights of the individual to choose their own destiny, makes writing m/m romance a political act, and writing accurate m/m historical romance vitally important.

 She concludes by extending this move from the ethical realm to the political one:

The historical accuracy of the way people thought about themselves, about love, about sex, about IF they could fall in love and WHO they could fall in love with, the etymology of the terminology they used to imagine their relationships, is vital to the progress of their relationship because the very WORDS we use define how we think and how we see and interact with our world. So why write m/m HISTORICAL romance if you’re not going to play around with that?

Even if you aren't a reader of romance, take a look at her post: it raises important issues about the ways romantic love and an Enlightenment conception of personal liberty are entwined with the very nature of the novel itself.

Inspired by Nicole's idea at bibliographing, I have been moved to examine my own list of most read authors.  Off I went to LibraryThing, where I clicked on the "already read tag," organized the list by author, and examined the results with some satisfaction and a creeping sense of chagrin:

William Shakespeare - 39
Tom Stoppard - 28
Elizabeth Peters - 19
Lewis Trondheim/Joann Sfar - 17
George Bernard Shaw - 10
Neil Gaiman - 9
Charlaine Harris - 9
Sam Shepard - 8
Judy Cuevas / Judith Ivory -8
Bill Willingham  - 8
J.K. Rowling - 8
Brian K. Vaughan  - 8
Ursula K. Le Guin - 7
Martin McDonagh - 6
Jane Austen - 6
Oscar Wilde - 6
Boris Akunin - 5
Agatha Christie - 5
Susan Cooper - 5
Charles Dickens - 5
Alan Moore - 5
Tamora Pierce - 5

Some greater philosophical questions immediately leaped to mind.

First, naturally, What does this list say about me?

Well, I am a reader of, let us say, disparate and polyglot tastes.  You can see the residue of a decade spent pursuing degrees in Literature in the presence of various classics (Dickens, Austen), and the marks of a lifetime spent in the study of drama in the inclusion of playwrights like Stoppard, Shaw, and Shepard.  Combine this with an obviously completist approach to Shakespeare, and you can see that the "S" section of my "Already read" library* is a vasty prospect.

But you can also see that I am a voracious devourer of comics (Alan Moore, Brian K. Vaughan of Y: The Last Man, Bill Willingham of the Fables series, and Trondheim and Sfar, frequent collaborators on the brilliant Dungeon series whose work I have lumped together here), mysteries (Elizabeth Peters, Agatha Christie, Boris Akunin), romances (the stunningly literary Judith Ivory, and Charlaine Harris, whose presence on this list is the real source of my blushes**), YA of the fantasy variety (Susan Cooper, J.K. Rowling, Tamora Pierce), as well as fantasy more broadly (Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin).

Immediately after blushing for the amount of genre literature on this list, I began to question my own academicky prejudices: is this really a cause for embarrassment?  Certainly not. I am pleased by the breadth of my tastes, in literature as in film and music.  It shows a flexibility that is one of my own favorite features.  Even when I dislike something, that repulsion is usually accompanied by a nagging feeling that I want someone who loved it to communicate the details and causes of that love to me.  The pleasure to be gleaned from hating something is, for me, less rich than the pleasure of loving it.

The only cause for embarrassment comes in seeing that you have devoted a great deal of time to reading books that you haven't particularly enjoyed or admired.  And there are a few of those on here.  Harris's books are the prime example of books that are addictive without being (any more, at least) really enjoyable.  Peters's mysteries are others that I enjoyed tremendously without admiring to the point that I would recommend them as literature (and many in number are the genre books that I would recommend as literature, I hasten to say:  Judith Ivory's Black Silk, for example, or Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.  Or, for that matter, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, which doesn't appear on this list.).  The Willingham and Vaughan comics fall into the same category as the Peters mysteries.  And apart from Gaiman's very good Sandman comics, I have always found him more compelling as a personality and blogger than as a novelist.

So, What does this list say about this list?

First of all, it says that the authors you read most are not necessarily the authors you like best.  Often, they are simply either the authors it is easiest and fastest to read, or the authors who have written the most books and longest series.  Both of these factors contribute substantially to the glommability of an author's canon.  Jane Austen, for instance, would have ranked much higher had she lived longer and thus written more.  I have never read an Austen novel that was less than an impeccably-crafted page-turner, but I have (alas) read all of the long works now.  I glom Austen.  I glom her most heartily.

Because of some of the reasons mentioned above, it also says that genre authors are going to be disproportionately represented on lists like these.  I am reluctant to generalize beyond my own reading habits, but I will tentatively say that many, like me, read genre fiction faster than the ickily-designated "literary fiction."  With the exception of works like Joe Sacco's excellent Palestine, I read graphic novels considerably faster than their prose brethren.  (This is a flaw in my reading: in fact, I should be reading them much more slowly, since I process images more lumberingly than I do words.)  Fantasy, mystery, young adult fiction, and romance are also quite a bit more likely, as genres, to appear in series, which demand that you move on to another by the author as soon as you have finished one.

There are also a few flaws in my methodology here:

First, there are gaps in the records. The books included encompass only those I have read since beginning a book diary at age ten. They also fail to take into account the many years since in which my record-keeping (and record-translating-to-LibraryThing) has been spotty, lazy, or entirely void (I'm looking at you, senior year of high school.  I know more than five books were read that year, regardless of how much time I spent on the phone with my boyfriend.).

Secondly, some genres are hard to account for via LibraryThing.  LibraryThing records the volumes of literature that you read, but with drama, for instance, I often read full-length works in anthologies, without completing the full volume (and thus without marking it as read on LT).  I feel certain that more playwrights should appear on this list, but can't quite put my finger on who they would be.


Still, intriguing.  I am most interested to note the dearth of contemporary, non-genre fiction writers on this list. Ishiguro, for instance, is a favorite who barely failed to make the list. (I have A Pale View of Hills on the nightstand, ready to remedy this injustice.)  But what of other favorite likes Auster, Barker, or Munro? My tendency, I suppose, is to read broadly in contemporary literature, rather than deeply.  Hmm.

What, I ask you, would your list look like? And what, more importantly, would your feelings about it be?



*Which occupies the basement and ground floor of my house and a whole wall of my office.  The "To be read" library (also known as Mt. TBR) occupies a much vaster territory - the middle and top floors of the house, and the two other bookshelved walls of the office.  Sometimes it intimidates me.  But most of the time it fills me with a sense of cosmic rightness.


** More on this soon, I expect.

You can't go back to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the ideal...

He saw now that you can't go home again--not ever. There was no road back.

 But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State.  Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter***, twelve miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness [...]

     Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest had given the university a sweetness and beauty it was later to forfeit.  It had the fine authority of provincialism - the provincialism of an older South.  Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom - there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.

     [...]

     In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years.  There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness.  Instead they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs****, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs.  And they talked - always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked - in limp sprawls - incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large, easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, atheletics, fraternities and the girls - My God! how they talked!

The state highway led directly into the rising sun; when the sun pulled itself loose from the road, it suddenly seemed very far away.  The sky, in a moment Jim didn't notice until the moment had passed, turned blue, as if it had never tried the color before and wasn't sure anyone would like it.  Jim giggled out loud for no reason he could think of.

"My dear, dear girl" he said gently as she tried to speak, "we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back."

*Or whatever the term is for those who are a part of your family through long partnership, but not by marriage.  Seriously - we need a word.

** But not by D, who, when asked just now what he thought of Look Homeward, Angel, said, "I'd hate to see what the unedited version looked like."

*** Durham, that is, site of absolutely nothing of athletic interest.  Well, maybe the Durham Bulls.

****Proving some things haven't changed between Wolfe's time and Will Schuester's.

First, let me give you this, an entertaining article from The Times (of London) on what we actually (surprisingly) know about Shakespeare's private life.  My favorite tidbit:

Did his marriage to Anne Hathaway involve her father’s shotgun?
Quite possibly. He was 18 and Anne Hathaway was 26. The parish records for Stratford-upon-Avon show that over the 50-year period of Shakespeare’s life he is one of just three men in the locality to marry before the age of 20 and the only one whose bride was pregnant. He was so young, in fact, that he needed a special Bishop’s License, on which his name is spelled Shagspere.

I hadn't (after all these years reading and seeing and teaching Shakespeare - sorry, Shagspere) realized quite how unusual a case his marriage was.  Anne Hathaway, you minx, you get more and more intriguing the more I find out about this relationship.

And who can resist a bit of staging-shapes-dramatic-form gossip?

Did he go in for lighting and sound effects?
Yes, the Blackfriars indoor theatre (which was used from 1608) in London was candlelit. His last plays have a clear five-act structure, and the reason for this was that candles lasted only so long; you needed four points in the action in which the play could stop, music play and the (brief) candles be changed. 

Not someone who teaches theatre history, that's who.

Some of the rest is a bit speculative for my tastes. (How can we really be sure that the use of dog-related epithets as slurs in the plays mean that Shagspere didn't go in for puppies as pets?  Perhaps it was familiarity that bred contempt.  Perhaps that was just the usage of a culture of ubiquitous dog-ownership.)  But highly entertaining.

And now this: an English professor (because really, what don't we study?) who works on textual concordances* has discovered that Agatha Christie may have been suffering from Alzheimer's when she wrote her final novel, (wait for it) Elephants Can Remember.** 

His process in determining this, combined with work that is being done elsewhere in using writing as an early indicator of Alzheimer's, is riveting, and not a little unnerving to those us who have a family history of the disease.  (Is it utterly irrational that I gained some relief from the hypothesis that convoluted syntax may be a sign that its creator is less predisposed to dementia?  Perhaps the frequency with which I get grammatically lost, mid-sentence, in lectures should make me a bit less giddy.)



*An old-fashioned but indispensable field of research - how else would we know that Milton never used the word "because"?  This sort of work is always fascinating to me.

** The novel itself - which I haven't yet read, although I think that it sits on a shelf somewhere - apparently deals with a protagonist who struggles with memory and memory loss.