Bookshop Bumblings

“As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

This is the third, and the last, of the local summer reading list book which I wanted to dive into this season. I remember this volume had gone out of print until Eudora Welty’s death rekindled an interest in her work. After having wanted to read it for quite some time, I rather enjoyed myself with this one. Welty focused more on her family, specifically her parents, than on writing but the way she wove how the elements of her childhood into the end product of her work was intriguing.

I also noticed that both she and Harper Lee were quite well educated. Lee was almost a law school graduate when she dropped out to pursue writing, and Welty attended graduate school at Columbia for her business degree. There goes my damned daydreams of being able to write undereducated masterpieces from a damp room in the back of a rural post office.

Overall, I was quite smitten with it – much more so than Dillard’s “The Writing Life” which one teacher chose to replace this one. (No matter how similar they might seem on the surface I would never compare them to each other otherwise.) Such sadness!

“When we seek to replace family in new environs, we seek to reestablish trust, and love, and comfort. But too often we end up establishing difference instead of love. We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us, and tend to push away that which is different and worrisome. That is what happened to Boo Radley, and to Tom Robinson. They were not set apart by evil men, or evil women, or evil thoughts. They were set apart by an evil past, which good people in the present were ill equipped to change. The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort, no one will have comfort. It means we must bury our pasts by seeing them, and destroy our differences through learning another way.” — Harper Lee to a freshman class at West Point

Isn’t it a shame Miss Lee wasn’t ever into giving talks and public speeches?

This is the second title which I’ve taken from the Lit List in the past month, and it was just the luck of the draw as to which arrived to me first that I read it before Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita”.

First off, I have absolutely no knowledge about the background of this story which is the Russian Civil War between the White and Red. Evidently, it was a brief time immediately following WWI and before the Bolshevik Revolution. The main characters are a middle class doctor’s family in Kiev who join the White Guard to help defend their home.

It was good, although I find the book description on the used marketplace where I bought it which said it was, “lovely” quite laughable. It’s your typical war horror novel with all of the bloody horrors and disturbing leaders so how “lovely” fits in there is beyond me. Calling The White Guard “lovely” would be like describing a hunting trip with Dick Cheney as “delightful and heart warming.”

My second summer reading list book was assigned to students who also have to read “The Scarlet Letter” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

It’s quite different than those two as it is a coming of age novel of a young Mexican woman in Chicago that is told in short little literary sketches rather than chapters. It’s quite well written, and I’m definitely happy that I picked this one up. Plus, like all Mexican related things it’s a shorty!

(I’m going to hell for that, aren’t I?)

I always try to at least try to keep up with the local schools’ summer reading list books which students buy here at the bookstore. Most I’ve already read, but every once in a while a teacher will be daring and sway from the normal “Scarlet Letter” and “1984” choices. This summer I have three on my own personal list, and this was the first. It was assigned to an AP Language and Composition class along with, “Into The Wild” by Jon Krakauer. Interesting choices, yes?

I adored Dillard’s “Pilgrim At Tinker Creek” and in this book she goes into a little of where she was (both physically and what kind of state of mind) when she wrote it. She also delves into other writers in sometimes amusing and in sometimes insightful ways. It’s at times both inspiring and discouraging.

An example of a paragraph that both encourages and discourages me:
“Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cats. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”

Since I discovered the website, I’ve been addicted to PostSecret. Thus, I got the book when it first came out but just got around to reading through the entire thing (opposed to just flipping through it). I’m quite excited that there’s another book coming out this autumn – huzzah.

Guess what everyone is getting for Christmas for this year?

I’ve always been a little wary of short stories until I discovered Lorrie Moore who I adore with a passion. There’s something about the emotional blows she can deliver within the span of one paragraph that jar me so completely that I have to love her. After discovering Moore, I was excited to read other short stories thinking maybe I had just been missing it all these years. However, after searching I just couldn’t find another contemporary author who held a candle to her. That is until I came across this find. I ordered it a year ago (after I finished reading Lahiri’s novel, “Namesake”), but since I’m not in charge of book orders I wasn’t able to get my grubby hands on it until this weekend.

As much as I liked “Namesake,” it wasn’t anything but a mildly interesting tale compared to her skill at the short stories in this collection. Some of them were absolutely breathtaking in their execution. I’m trying to think of my favorite, but am having trouble deciding on one. Just read them all.

As if I could pass up a book which Kristen said this about:

“Reminded me of Dostoevsky ‘Notes from the Underground.’ The basis of the story is that there is a man who is in a coma and he’s trying to come out of it. Very surreal, existential kind of book.”

Having been underwhelmed by Garland’s “The Beach”, I would have never given him a second chance if it had not been for Kristen’s review. However, Notes From The Underground is one of my favorites so there’s no way I couldn’t take the bait.

There’s not too much for me to add except for that each chapter of the book begins with a black and white illustration (done by Nicholas Garland) which is so dark that a faint version of it can be seen through the page which has it ending each chapter as well. It added to the strangeness of the story, and was excellently executed. The story was quite unsettling, yet once I started it I couldn’t put it down even though I had picked it up with only the intention of skimming it for a second.

After hearing other booksellers rave about this book and request so many advanced readers copies, that the publisher ran a reprint of the ARC (which I didn’t even know publishers did) and seeing it voted as the top pick in the most recent Book Sense 76 listing, bookshop girl duty forced me to read this novel.

This novel masters the point of the prologue. From it, the reader believes they know the story arc and the pivotal plot point. Then, when the story finally reaches the place already descriped in the prologue it turns what you think happened on its head. It’s incredible. And although I would never consider it a great classic of literature for that point alone it’s a worthwhile read. Plus, it involves a circus! I’m a sucker for books where a distraught teen joins a circus to escape their troubles. (See: Amanda Davis’s “Will You Miss Me”)

I have no idea why there aren’t enough books with that storyline to make it its own genre. Circus fiction. Tell me you wouldn’t gravitate toward THAT section in a bookstore?!

Also, this book helped me answer one of my life’s biggest questions: What do I want to be when I grow up?

The answer:

I’m sure you will be completely shocked to discover that the Manchester, New Hampshire airport does not have a wealth of reading material in their bookshop. However after finding myself stuck for five hours because of flight delays, I was a little desperate myself. It was between The Kite Runner and a Lavryle Spencer slice. I took The Kite Runner and scampered before anyone could rip it from my grubby hands and I was forced into a conversation with the middle-aged man wearing the “I’m Huge In Japan” t-shirt who was sitting beside me.

It focuses on, Amir, a young awkward bookish wealthy(ish) boy in Afghanistan who yearns for the affection of his athletic socially celebrated single father and who mistreats his loyal heartbreakingly sincere best friend who Amir can never consider a friend due to social classes and standing. Eventually, he drives the best friend away through an act of childhood cowardness and moves to America with his father before the Russians descend upon his country. When he returns, after Russia has been replaced with the evil Taliban, he finds not only his childhood home but all of the main characters from his childhood destroyed.

Basically, it’s a middle eastern male soap opera that tugs at your heart strings like nothing else. All it’s missing is Susan Lucci in a burka shaking her fist at a closed door saying, “You will be mine, Amir! You will be mine!”