railsea.

Yesterday I finished reading Railsea by China Mieville, and it's left me with rustling, unquiet feelings. I love Mieville, and I've been rapidly working my way through his entire canon since I first read Kraken about three years ago. Reading him is a little like trying to keep level footing while standing on an accordion. He is adept at drawing richly detailed, slickly un-right worlds. The setting and the story expand and contract beneath your feet with a speed and grace that's both wonderful and nauseating. There are a number of themes and conceits that he relies on consistently, but his main meat is hybridization. Combined words, enmeshed bodies, physical worlds that are built on a sort of bio-steampunk ethos. I've written before that every Mieville novel starts in a place that seems familiar and easy to follow, but quickly rotates the camera and lets you see that you are in fact standing on the ceiling. Railsea is true to that pattern.

The basic premise is a world in which railroads are so prevalent that they're like a body of water. There's a permanent tangled network of ties and tracks, so thick that all their terminology and lore are language we use for oceans and sailing. Insects and small burrowing creatures have evolved to staggering, predatory size and are hunted by trainsfolk for commerce and, sometimes, for glory and revenge. There's a very heavy cord of Moby Dick running throughout. Mieville's books are themselves hybridizations: tangled, looping, referential cultural markers that make use of material from dozens of other literary sources. I've never come up with a word to adequately describe this. It's not delicate enough to be called literary allusion, not is it anything so sly as to be described as theft. He just straight up uses obvious pieces of what has gone before to make his own thing. Sort of like what would happen if you could build an entirely new house using pieces from existing houses, without actually removing anything from the existing houses. Look, the foundation: that's Melville. The doorframe is the Strugatsky brothers, that paint is a color called Penelope Lively. The result is a proper Painted Lady, but it's Mieville's house, and you couldn't mistake it for anyone else's.

This particular house is full of monsters, civilizations and un-civilizations, and people who are looking for something. It's a sailing story, all pitch and roll, and the hero is trying to find his feet. He doesn't know what's true, and so he doesn't know what he wants. So he keeps pushing and pushing at the edges of what is assumed about the world, looking for what's under the wallpaper. He starts in little ways, like saving a bird from a cockfight even though he knows it will enrage his crewmates, and keeps picking at those elusive things that spur him to action until eventually he finds himself with people and a story that fire his engine and make him move.

I enjoyed Railsea less than any of the other Mieville books I've read. There was no shortage of beautiful words or memorable passages, but I never fell all the way into it. In part, I was irritated by an of-the-moment tone in several places that didn't serve the story and kind of slapped me out of it when I came across them. It had the usual rhythmic, wordy beat that all his writing does, but it seemed more carelessly executed than usual; less durable, somehow. And for the first time, the world he described was one I just couldn't cognitively accept. Tell me about a world where houses contract technological viruses through flawed spoken language and become biologically ill, and I am right with you. A city that is actually two cities existing in the same physical space and within plain view of one another, but operating as separate entities with blinders on? Absolutely. But show me a world where railroads built hundreds of years in the past are so thick on the ground that they are like water, an infrastructure so old that it's spawned the vague religions of prehistory, that is governed but not maintained by any municipality and is assumed to be repaired by angels - here you have lost me. It's choppy. This world never felt real. That explains my general dissatisfaction with the book. My specific itchy feelings about it stem from the religious element in Railsea.

Every one of Mieville's novels deals with religion, or with cultural assumptions so ingrained that they resemble religion. (He also has kind of a thing about angels, and the myriad ways he's made them is strange and wonderful.) The religious elements in his books are viewed with a very wide lens, an anthropological pin in the map of the world he's writing. There's always a wide range of established beliefs, levels of faith, and degrees of action based on that faith (or lack of it). He's very effective at using the language of religion to establish the boundaries that are about to challenge his characters (and thereby challenging the language of faith and the nature of belief in every story he tells, whether that faith is in something supernatural or in the accepted order of things). Even when religion results in very concrete actions (basically all of Kraken), the belief itself is a fluid thing. It grows and shrinks, it flows into other forms of thought, it remakes itself in insidious ways, it drains down between the cracks in the concrete and swells back up through the kitchen sink: it is alive.

The belief system of Railsea is finite and brittle. It has the language of the supernatural, it's acted upon as supernatural, but in the end it's purely mechanical. The taboos of this world are misunderstood words, the gods are machines set in motion so long ago that no one remembers what they are. The protagonist pushes further and further out against the vague chittering warnings of religious faith until it dissipates like so much fog.

I grew up in a very religious home, but have spent the better part of my adult life pushing against the lore and the language and the assumptions of that faith. This was not a go-to-church-on-Sunday-and-make-the-best-of-it thing; it was an all or nothing thing. As an adult, I see a lot of things in that life that were unwell, and I've fought to get away from them. But I can't ever shake my belief in God entirely, and I'm not sure I want to. What I do want is to know if what belief I have is real or just a habit that's so old it's in my cells. I'm forever taking that rusty habit out and examining it in the light to see how sound it is, but I never have an answer to that question. I'm never going to have an answer to that question. Living with that kind of complex uncertainty about what makes us ourselves is just part of being human. What made me uncomfortable about Railsea was imagining a world where it was possible to push on the last door of belief and see it evaporate. Where you could know for certain that your deities were mechanical creations with concrete financial goals, and your holy texts were simply misunderstood place names. Hoping for that kind of certainty, fearing that kind of certainty.

I don't think think it's necessarily a bad thing to feel my uncomfortable places so acutely, but I wish the book that did it had been better.

33.

I left a library book on the Max yesterday. Specifically, I left Shadows by Robin McKinley on the red line train at Beaverton Transit Center, as it ended its westbound run and switched over to the eastbound. It was about 8:40 in the morning, I was carrying coffee and a tote bag and an umbrella and my phone. I had been reading the book at the beginning of my commute, but then set it aside to do something else, thinking I'd get back to it before I arrived. It was wedged between my left leg and the wall. When the train got to Beaverton TC (which always comes before I'm expecting it, and I have to switch there for the blue line), I got up with my coffee and tote bag and umbrella and phone, and walked off without the library book.

I'm describing this in excruciating detail in order that I might feel every little grain of salt I'm rubbing into my own wound. I left a library book on a train. The ignominy of this is large. Big ignominy.

Oh, I've forgotten a detail that makes it even worse. It wasn't even my library book. It was a loaner from a friend who finished it early and knew I had it on my hold list.

Bignominy.

The worst part, of course, is that I was only about a third of the way through, and it was zipping right along and I was loving it, and now I can't read it until I can get another copy, or until I spend $9 and change on a Kindle edition. Which I'm not going to do, because, well, I'm not. Robin McKinley's great with the vocabulary and the vivid and unexpected characters who are chock full of normal human details and feelings in the midst of their epic magic thing. But not even to punish myself will I spend $9 on the Kindle edition. Having to wait for another copy to roll up the library hold list is punishment enough.

But I can't stop wondering what's happening to this book in the meantime. It was pointed towards the airport when I left it. Did someone find it and think it looked interesting and take it somewhere fun? Did somebody pick it up and return it in a library drop box (this is Portland, I'd bet money there's one of those at the airport)? Is it still sitting on the train? Was it there at the end of the day, and did the driver find it during a final sweep, and drop it in lost and found where it will lie unread forever and its soul will slowly die? Did a kid find it and stash it in her backpack, where it will sit for the next eight months, in a bath of gum wrappers and nail polish and nickels and pens until she finds it at the very end of summer vacation and reads it and falls in love and can't stop telling all her friends about it and they're all totally over it and wish she'd shut up about the main character who loves dogs just exactly as much as she loves dogs and how she doesn't really like her stepfather either and did you guys know that origami figures can ward off evil?

I hope that one's the one. I'll happily pay to replace the book that never returned if that's the one.

day 27.

The library of my childhood was across the field from my elementary school. I'd sometimes go there after school to wait for my mother to pick me up; when I picture it now, it's from the perspective of my height at about 7 years old. I spent long hours there all through my childhood and well into my teens, but that's the way I remember it: from low to the ground. 

It was closed on Mondays, but the back door lock wasn't very secure and if you wiggled it just right, it would open. I know this because I once got permission to go during lunch recess, only to find it closed; but I wanted so badly to be in the quiet library, with its smell of floor polish and glue and old, dry paper. So I jimmied the door open, and let myself in and wandered around in the midday dim. I sat on the floor cushions in the children's section, right across from the circulation desk, and read my favorite books, and then I went back across the field to school. I did this more than once, including creeping into the basement where the librarian kept tables full of discarded books, which you could take for free. I was bold that time, and turned the lights on so I could see what I was taking. I must have been considerably older by then, but I don't remember how old. 

I loved that library. I'd pay good money for someone to bottle the scent. I'm sure the back door lock is much better now, but if I'm ever there again I'll give it a try just in case.

national poetry month, day 17.

Traditional rhymes about book ownership, from I Saw Esau, illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

Book Protection

                       109

Steal not this book for fear of shame,

For in it is the owner's name;

And if this book you chance to borrow,

Return it promptly on the morrow.

Or when you die the Lord will say,

Where's that book you stole away?

And if you say you do not know,

The Lord will answer, Go below!

                       110

If this book should chance to roam--

Box its ears and send it home.

                        111

Do not steal this book, my lad,

     For lots of money it cost my dad;

And if he finds you, he will say,

     "Go to Boston jail today!"

                       112

This book is one thing,

My fist is another;

Steal not the one

For fear of the other.

                       113

Who folds a leaf down,

The devil toast brown;

Who makes mark or blot,

The devil toast hot;

Who steals this book

The devil shall cook.

soulmate job.

I got the best job I've ever had because I had a pack of cigarettes on the front seat of my car.

When I moved to Nantucket in the fall of 1998, I knew no one and had a part-time job working in the office of the Episcopal church. I worked with a wonderful woman named Joan who shared a house with a former teacher. They ran a heavy-duty book group that met once every couple of weeks, spending several weeks on a single book. This was long before I started making jewelry, and I was shy and had a hard time meeting people. I spent that first winter going to work, hiding in my room reading, and cursing the buffeting wind that howled off the harbor round the clock. A book group seemed like a really good idea - particularly in a cozy house in town, on a sheltered street, a mile inland. When I joined, they were just starting Robert Pinsky's translation of Inferno. I hadn't read Inferno since my first year of college, and really loved the new edition. Several weeks into the group, they invited the owner of the local bookstore to come to the group and read to us. Mimi was fluent in Italian, and she read several passages from the original in that beautiful language, sounding rich and liquid and as if flames were licking around the words.

After the group, I offered her a ride back to the store on Main Street. She plucked a pack of cigarettes off my passenger seat, sat down, and fished one of her own out of her massive linen pockets. She said, "Well, you read and you smoke. Would you like to come and work for me?"

Oh yes, I would. Very much. Mitchell's Book Corner was a legend in Nantucket. For its size, it's the best-curated bookstore I've ever seen, touching on every subject with an eye to both classics and new books. Mimi had a sterling reputation for selling exactly the right book to the right reader, whether she'd known them all her life or they'd just walked into the store five minutes earlier. A local business heavyweight nicknamed her the Maven of Main Street. She'd read everything, averaging more than a book a day for most of her life. She had excellent business sense, a steel trap memory, a fierce temper and her own way of doing things. Mitchell's didn't use a computerized inventory system (in fact, they didn't own a computer when I started there, and did all their buying by phone from publishers and with the aid of monthly microfiche updates from distributors). Mimi knew the stock of the store inside out from memory, and she expected her booksellers to do the same. 

I'd worked in several bookstores before, but this was a whole new level of fun and challenge. Knowing the full inventory of a bookstore by memory means you absorb the life of books into your body. Stocking and straightening shelves, climbing through the dusty basement shelves doing inventory, I pulled the knowledge of books into myself through my fingertips. There is nothing more satisfying than taking a list of books from a customer and, without looking anything up, pulling Don't Stop the Carnival, Nightbirds on Nantucket, Snow Crash, Motherless Brooklyn, How to Cook Everything, Vile Bodies, A Coney Island of the Mind, The Tipping Point and A People's History of the United States off the shelves. (That's an actual list someone gave me once.) I adored it, and I was good at it. For three and a half years, I lived in that bookstore like it was a second skin. One of the most contented moments of my life was leaning in the door on a late evening before locking up, watching the rain, smelling that paper-in-humidity smell and being aware that I was in my exact right place.

Nantucket, as it turned out, was not my exact right place and I went back to Chicago in the autumn of 2002. Mimi had retired half a year earlier, and although I still loved Mitchell's, it didn't feel the same without her. I've had good jobs and bad jobs and jobs that were just a job, but there was never another one like that. I was talking to my brother last weekend about my current job hunt, and said that I'd like to go back to bookselling. He said, "Really? You still want to do that?"

Oh yes, I would. Very much.

fifteen thousand useful phrases.

A good book is a wonderful present. I stopped by Shana's a couple of days ago, and as I took my coat off she casually said, as if it were no big deal, gesturing toward the couch: there's a present for you there. And there was this magical book, sitting on the sofa cushion like any other little thing. Only it isn't any other little thing. It's the most enchanting book ever. Fifteen thousand useful phrases. You may have noticed that I have a thing for words. I also have a thing for odd reference books. And people who can turn a phrase. So this book? SHAZAM. I spent the next several hours reading word pairings and phrases aloud. I changed my regular Twitter bio to include the phrase "a well-bred mixture of boldness and courtesy." Then I spent some time this morning setting up a Twitter account so I can tweet the whole entire book, because the world needs to know all about the fifteen thousand useful phrases, subtitled "A practical handbook of pertinent expressions, striking similes, literary, commercial, conversational and oratorical terms, for the embellishment of speech and literature, and the improvement of the vocabulary of those persons who read, write and speak English." By Grenville Kleiser, Funk & Wagnalls, 1917. It's hilarious and touching and altogether brilliant. SHAZAM.

"The choice word, the correct phrase, are instruments that may reach the heart, and awake the soul if they fall upon the ear in melodious cadence...Language is a temple in which the human soul is enshrined, and...it grows out of life..."

If you're interested in owning your own copy, it's available on Project Gutenberg in several digital formats and abebooks.com has lots of hardcopies in various conditions.

a splendid manifestation of life.

I do nothing but sit and read at present. I think I have three books and a collection of poetry going simultaneously. This morning I was reading The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas, who writes sparkling short essays of tremendous humanity, inspired by his work in biology. This excerpt is from "The Youngest and Brightest Thing Around."

"...I believe fervently in our species and have no patience with the current fashion of running down the human being as a useful part of nature. On the contrary, we are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language and can build metaphors as skillfully and precisely as ribosomes make proteins. We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" for all of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music. Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development - almost instantly after emerging on the earth by any evolutionary standard - the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad. We ought to be able to feel more secure for our future, with Julian of Norwich at our elbow: "But all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." For our times of guilt we have Montaigne to turn to: "If it did not seem crazy to talk to oneself, there is not a day when I would not be heard growling at myself, 'Confounded fool.'"

...We are by all odds the most persistently and obsessively social of all species, more dependent on each other than the famous social insects, and really, when you look at us, infinitely more imaginative and deft at social living. We are good at this; it is the way we have built all our cultures and the literature of our civilizations. We have high expectations and set high standards for our social behavior, and when we fail at it and endanger the species - as we have done several times in this century - the strongest words we can find to condemn ourselves and our behavior are the telling words "inhuman" and "inhumane."

There is nothing at all absurd about the human condition. We matter...We are the newest, the youngest, and the brightest thing around."

bereft.

The big bookshelf is nearly packed. Just half a shelf left to catalogue and pack, and a largish pile to either sell or give away. My books are the soul and shape of my home. Despite how crowded this small space is, it feels utterly empty without them.

margin notes.

I find marks of authorship very compelling. Signatures, underlining, editing notations, doodles. Physical objects that say something in thought happened here. Tattoos. I wasn't interested in tattoos for a long time. I didn't object to them, I just wasn't really interested one way or the other. This may have had something to do with only seeing very boring ones - eagles and MOM. I started to get interested when my best friend was thinking about getting one - I think she had it narrowed down to an owl or a green man. She never did it, but by then I was curious and started noticing them more - especially since I was starting to meet really interesting people and they had much better ideas for inking themselves than eagles and MOM.

When I came across a book about literary tattoos, I lost my heart to the whole idea. There's a vast world of amazing and beautiful words-on-skin. There are thousands of quotes that I love, but none of them seemed like the right thing for me. Last fall, it finally came to me - the right idea for beauty, symbolism, permanence, impermanence and a life marked by love of words. After I move, I'll get a tattoo of proofreader's marks, in red, down my right side. The simple, elegant, universally recognized symbols of a work in progress. I can't think of anything more appropriate to who I am.

Images by me and from pinterest, fuckyeahliterarytattooes, tattoolit, and literary tattoos: a novel of flesh.

short, belated thoughts on Farewell, My Lovely.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mixed. This is a much earlier book than my favorite Chandler, The Long Goodbye. I know that one inside and out, but this was my first read for Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe is a less developed character here: not so comfortable with his own skin and motives. In later books, Chandler invests Marlowe with an uncanny ability to reassess a situation on a dime: he always understands who has the power in any given moment, who is responsible and who must be protected, even when those variables shift quickly. That weary certainty of the right thing is missing here, and the younger, jumpier Marlowe is interesting.

Two things stand out. The racist language, particularly in the early third of the book, is so prevalent that I have to call it triggering. I think he employs every ugly euphemism I've ever heard, and some I haven't. Second - and really interesting to me - is the overarching theme of pain, both physical and emotional, sought and uninvited. Marlowe gets the shit knocked out of him for pretty much every second of the plot. Chandler's descriptions of physical pain are profoundly authentic, and made my bones hurt. The book opens with Marlowe involving himself in a situation where he knows he'll be hurt (which is kind of his thing, but his approach here is more wryly self-abusive than it is in later books), and the theme holds for each character in their own way.

"And once again the ports of the good ship Montecito grew out of the black Pacific and the slow steady sweep of the searchlight turned around it like the beam of a lighthouse.

'I'm scared,' I said suddenly. 'I'm scared stiff.'

Red throttled down the boat and let it slide up and down the swell as though the water moved underneath and the boat stayed in the same place. He turned his face and stared at me.

'I'm afraid of death and despair,' I said. 'Of dark water and drowned men's faces and skulls with empty eyesockets. I'm afraid of dying, of being nothing...'" (p. 251)

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found poetry

Excerpt from The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion; a short entry that reads like a poem to me.

On Lundy Island

Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely interested, and calls out occasionally, --

"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?'

'All right, Capt.,'" says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on...There are three dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different owners and neither one to A--.

books and more books.

I returned to Goodreads recently, after an absence of, oh, three years? Something like that. I was shocked to find that I remembered my login information. They've made some nifty changes since the last time I was there, and now you can post your reviews to your blog with a click. So I'm gonna. I read this last Sunday (on my no-internet-one-day-a-week program).

The Archivist by Martha Cooley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was recommended to me by the greatest reader I've ever known, with the description "It's like The Hours for boys." The themes of isolation, mental illness, historical literary figures and love of reading are common to both books, but I'll revise the "for boys" part of that characterization. The main character is a man, but it's still the women who hold center stage, and it's still the women who suffer from crippling mental illness. The archivist is the recorder of their larger-than-his lives. So, well done, title.

Pleasantly written and enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The primary conflict of the novel is engrossing and well paced, but the resolution was a fizzle. My favorite thing about it was that it reintroduced me to the poetry of LeRoi Jones, which I haven't read for many years. Also, quite lovely descriptions of the mercurial task of trying to grasp the whole idea when reading TS Eliot.

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report from hermitpalooza 2011.

My three days of no internet & no phone were an unqualified success. It felt very peaceful and purposeful, and seems to have given my neck knot time to heal. Apparently that's from the way I sit at the computer, not from the way I sit when I work. The more you know...

As it turned out, I did end up spending most of the time hermitted in my apartment. On Friday I slept sinfully late and spent most of the rest of the day rereading Ender's Game. It's still brilliant and painful. I cleaned the already mostly clean kitchen and watched something vague on TV while I tidied up my workspace. My parents called, and I answered. Because I am not a monster.

Saturday, I made a quick run to the grocery store and then made sourdough bread and a triple batch of pickled red onions. Oh, vinegar and sugary, peppery spice! Four days later, the house still smells faintly of brine when I come in from outside. I made a list of all the things I want to get done this summer. I separated it into things that required the internet, and things that could be started right away. I got several of the non-internet things done, pulled books for an ambitious summer reading/rereading list, and then started reading Geek Love. Dysfunctional carnival family rabbit hole, meet Kateri.

Sunday morning, I lingered over coffee and Geek Love, took lots and lots and lots of new product photographs, and then did the rest of the short-term non-internet projects. I gathered information I might need later for the internet projects and redid my list, along with a rough calendar for the next six weeks. I went back to Geek Love, and finished it Sunday evening over a beautiful sushi dinner. (It's an incredible book. The writing is wonderful, and the scope of the misery is operatic. I didn't like any of the characters, with the exception of one peripheral character. Some of them were sympathetic, and many of them were occasionally lovable, but they were all fundamentally unlikable. I think that's a major achievement: a perfectly paced novel of unmitigated misery and dysfunction that's thoroughly enjoyable and compelling.)

My three days were delightful, and a reminder of how much I can accomplish without feeling rushed, and still have hours and hours to devote to reading. It's not possible or desirable to live that way all the time, but it's a good short-term habit for me. I ended up resolving to take one day a week off from phone and internet for the rest of the summer. Sundays, probably. It's much harder to do that during the school year, when I need the whole weekend to run the business that I neglect during the week. I'll just try to soak up my focus and silence while I can get it this summer.

the beekeeper's apprentice, by laurie r king

It's January 31, the last day of my What I'm Reading posts. I missed a handful of days around the middle of the month, but I'm kind of shocked I managed to do this almost as planned.

I just finished The Beekeeper's Apprentice today. Laurie King's novel is a bit difficult to classify: I'm not sure if I should call it a mystery, a historical fantasy, young adult fiction, or something else. Her protagonist is Mary Russell, a teenager in Sussex, England during the first World War. Ms. Russell meets the retired Sherlock Holmes, and finding herself presented with a mind as sharp as her own, becomes a sort of apprentice to the master criminologist.

Under normal circumstances, I really dislike the use of an existing literary character by another author, particularly when it's one I know and love so well. I came across a glowing recommendation of the Mary Russell series on a blog recently (I think it was either feministing.com or Salon.com's Broadsheet, but I can't find the link now), and since I was embarking on a whole stack of pleasurable holiday reading, I added the first book of the series to the pile. Given my prejudices, I was mostly expecting to be irate from the get-go, but I was surprised. Mary Russell is that somewhat implausible character of fiction - orphaned, wealthy, brilliant , well-spoken and determined; but she is also well-written and likable. Sherlock Holmes as written by Laurie King is surprisingly intact (mostly). He's lost something of his famed misogyny, obviously, since he's taken on a teenage girl as an apprentice, but King navigates that neatly by setting Mary up as the first intellectual equal Holmes has ever encountered (apart from his brother, Mycroft, and his notorious nemesis Professor Moriarty). He's intrigued and challenged, and pursues the friendship in spite of himself.

The mystery plot is ordinary, but it held my interest. There were a couple of spots where a contemporary turn of phrase or coy literary device were jarring, but I have to say I didn't really care. As a feminist hero, Mary Russell is something of a treat, and I had a really good time reading this. Two thumbs up.

the best american nonrequired reading 2007, ed. by dave eggers

The Best American Nonrequired Reading series is a favorite of mine for train reading. The series includes lists, short stories, comics/graphic novels, tv scripts, essays, memoir and other nonfiction pieces that were published throughout the collection year. I've chosen 2007 because it's the one I read most recently, but they're all great. The series is edited by Dave Eggers, and the pieces are chosen by high school students from the San Francisco Bay area who participate in Eggers' writing center.

My favorite pieces from this collection are a profoundly upsetting story about Hurricane Katrina, called "American Cheese," by Joshua Clark, and a short story by artist/filmmaker Miranda July called "How to Tell Stories to Children." There's also a hilarious list called "Best American Names for Horses Expected to Have Undistinguished Careers." Great stuff.

the wellspring: poems, by sharon olds

My introduction to Sharon Olds' poetry was in May of 1995, when her poem "January, Daughter" appeared in the New Yorker. One of my favorite professors had just had her first child, and I clipped the poem out of the magazine to give to her. The spare intimacy of it was striking. She is the most physical of poets - her work is sharp and uncluttered, but will move you so powerfully into the realm of an idea or belief that you feel it in your body. I have all of her books of poetry, and choosing this particular one to recommend is really mostly random. I'm basing my choice on the fact that I wanted to use a specific poem here, and it's in The Wellspring. Like a lot of Olds' work, it's both funny and devastating; it feels light, but you'll notice it hanging around later on.

Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil
by Sharon Olds

In the strange quiet, I realize
there's no on else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill--
Charlie is dead, the last of our children's half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman's body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful calls of a young animal.

created in darkness by troubled americans: the best of mcsweeney's humor category

McSweeney's humor writing is one of those magic treatments that can improve the worst day - kind of like the Swedish Chef. This gem in Short Imagined Monologues is still making me giggle. A couple of years ago, some genius over there at the Internet Tendency thought it would be a swell idea to collect the really, really, really funny stuff and put it in portable paper form as Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans. This is great, because I can carry it around in my bag. Kind of an aspirin for the soul. Travel-size endorphins, accessible at will.

Grab a copy, and immerse yourself in lists (Words That Would Make Nice Names for Babies, If It Weren't for Their Unsuitable Meanings; Canceled Regional Morning TV Shows). Or maybe a nerd diatribe (On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor). In case you're not already convinced by these three titles alone (and don't forget the read the Steampunk monologue linked above), here's a sample list (lists are my favorite McSweeneyism - they're so efficient):

Subjects My Dad Doesn't Like and Will Discuss At Length If Raised
by Kate Harris

Peacocks

The blue rug my mother bought for the front room

People borrowing things from his shed

The motion picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Food courts

Sugar that has been spilled on the kitchen tiles

Alternative medicine

The fact that the cat is putting on weight

Odors that can't be explained

who wants to be a poodle i don't, by lauren child

I've neglected childrens literature in my what I'm reading posts. Leslie bought this book for some small friends of ours recently, and I recommend it to anyone who's a fan of this art form. Trixie Twinkle Toes hates her name, and longs to run through puddles. She's stuck indoors through every rainy day in deference to her glamorous owner's impressive shoe collection. Trixie yearns to be a real dog. Follow the story of how Trixie earns her doggie cred through Lauren Child's enchanting Who Wants to be a Poodle I Don't (published by the always impressive Candlewick Press). Gorgeous, densely collaged illustrations by the author are a treat in themselves - a wonderful story just makes it that much better.

fragile things, by neil gaiman

Once again, I bring you Neil Gaiman and a book I haven't finished reading. As with my last unfinished read, this is a case of savoring something so pleasurable that I'm loathe to let it go. Fragile Things is a collection, subtitled Short Fictions and Wonders. That about sums it up. Gaiman is at his funny and unsettling best (often simultaneously) in these pieces. My favorite so far has been "October in the Chair," a mild and atmospheric fantasy that's a perfect showcase for Gaiman's elastic voice and that acrobatic way he twists about from one thing to another without any sense of vertigo at all.

"They looked at one another across the fire, the months of the year.

June, hesitant and clean, raised her hand and said, "I have one about a guard on the X-ray machines at LaGuardia Airport, who could read all about people from the outlines of their luggage on the screen, and one day she saw a luggage X-ray so beautiful that she fell in love with the person, and she had to figure out which person in the line it was, and she couldn't, and she pined for months and months. And when the person came through again she knew it this time, and it was the man, and he was a wizened old Indian man and she was pretty and black and, like, twenty-five, and she knew it would never work out and she let him go, because she could also see from the shapes of his bags on the screen that he was going to die soon."

October said, "Fair enough, young June. Tell that one."

June stared at him, like a spooked animal. "I just did," she said."

That's one of the tidiest pieces of wonderful I've ever encountered. First of all, the personification of each month is spot-on perfect. Secondly, that little tidbit there is one of the most wonderful stories I've ever read. And it's tossed off as a joke of a half-story within a story. Such are the riches lurking in this man's head that he can take a gem like x-ray-reading lady and use it to show how the month of June is an adolescent. That's why I'm reading slowly. You could overdose from the clever.

tabloid dreams: stories, by robert olen butler

I'm fast approaching the Fail Zone for my January book reviews, so I'm going to try to post two today to make up for missing the entire weekend. Or to overachieve for today. Either way.

I first heard of Robert Olen Butler on NPR when he won the Pulitzer for his collection of short stories A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. He's written many novels, most of which I think are mediocre, but he has a wonderful touch with short stories - light, but profoundly intimate. I came across Tabloid Dreams more than a decade ago (I know, I'm straying pretty far off the last-two-years path here) when I was working part time at a Crown Books. I'd enjoyed the first collection and thought this would be good too, but really I bought it for the cover. (We've talked about this...) It's a triumph of lurid seduction. "Look at me!" I couldn't resist.

Each of these stories has a title that might be a tabloid headline: "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed;" "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot;" "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover." (Butler later wrote a full-length novel based on "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover.") A surreal and profoundly moving story is behind each of these ludicrously magical titles. My favorite story is "Every Man She Kisses Dies." It's tender and strange and profoundly disturbing. You can read it here. Or just get yourself a gorgeously bright copy of Tabloid Dreams for your very own.