Reading list - adding in the books I forgot to

In the interest of proving to myself that I have completed over half Francine Prose’s list of “Books to be Read Immediately”, I’m adding here the ones I forgot to earlier… To justify this patchwork blog post, there is Carl Jung, the answer to my query for “quote about completists” with the following: “Life calls not for perfection but for completeness.”

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Reading this book during the pandemic felt like a bit of vicarious travel… It was nice! Three quotes:

All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.
Up-stairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning's work. At eleven o'clock I went over to the Quai d'Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d'Orsay with Woolsey and Krum. (p 36)

“No, I don't believe it. And I'm fond of him, too. And I'd like to have children. I always thought we'd have children.”
She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don't want to think I'll never have them. I always thought I'd have them and then like them.” (p 47)

I had coffee out on the terrasse with the team manager of one of the big bicycle manufacturers. He said it had been a very pleasant race, and would have been worth watching if Bottechia had not abandoned it at Pamplona. The dust had been bad, but in Spain the roads were better than in France. Bicycle road-racing was the only sport in the world, he said. Had I ever followed the Tour de France? Only in the papers. The Tour de France was the greatest sporting event in the world. Following and organizing the road races had made him know France. Few people know France. All spring and all summer and all fall he spent on the road with bicycle road-racers. Look at the number of motor-cars now that followed the riders from town to town in a road race. It was a rich country and more sportif every year. It would be the most sportif country in the world. It was bicycle road-racing did it. That and football. He knew France. La France Sportive. He knew road-racing. We had a cognac. After all, though, it wasn't bad to get back to Paris. There is only one Paname. In all the world, that is. Paris is the town the most sportif in the world. Did I know the Chope de Negre? Did I not. I would see him there some time. I certainly would. We would drink another fine together. We certainly would. Would I be up for the depart? I would certainly try to. Would I like him to call me? It was very interesting. I would leave a call at the desk. He would not mind calling me. I could not let him take the trouble. I would leave a call at the desk. We said good-bye until the next morning.
In the morning when I awoke the bicycle-riders and their following cars had been on the road for three hours. (p 236-7)

The Trial by Franz Kafka

I read The Trial in 2015 and appreciated Kafka’s talent more in retrospect than when I was reading his books. The story is frustrating, but, that was the point. A few sentences I liked:

Through the open window he had another glimpse of the old woman, who with truly senile inquisitiveness had moved along to the window exactly opposite, in order to go on seeing all that could be seen. (p 3).

[…] less loud indeed than he had threatened, but with such explosive force that it hung in the air a moment before gradually spreading through the room. (p 30)

Many seemed convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time to think it over, suggested some joined who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or enquired of their neighbours, or escorted K. To a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information than they could. […] He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so practical. (p 40)

Selected Stories by Alice Munro.

Since this author’s death, her reputation and legacy have been revisited. I read the collection in July of 2013, because in a journal I’d kept, I write “This afternoon I read Alice Munro. Francine [Prose] points out the simple, spare language.” In fact, Prose writes, “Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box. Everything about her style is meant to attract no notice, to make you not pay attention. But if you read her work closely, every word challenges you to think of a more direct, less fussy or tarted-up way to say what she is saying.” (p 23 in Reading Like a Writer) 

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

This is a series of sketches of life as a soldier during the Vietnam War. I liked his description of the small town where he grew up: 

The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie - the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water.

It was a graceful, good-sized lake. [….] Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town’s first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth, a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. (p 157)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor; Wise Blood, Collected Stories

I liked “A Good Man is Hard to Find”… it’s such a perfectly contained story that it’s hard to extract a quote. But here is one:

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

Apart from that story, I find O’Connor hard to read. This is one assignment I didn’t complete. By contrast, I find her letters fascinating…

Freedomland by Richard Price

This is one of the few novels from the list adjacent to the mystery genre. The quotes I recorded are all ones that made me smile:

Danny stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and marched over to Bobby McDonald, who stood on the paved side of the tape, hands in pockets, squinting up at the trees as if attempting to count the number of pairs of sneakers thrown up there bolo-style and left to dangle like rubberized fruit. (p 93)

But McCoy’s… The air conditioning gave off Legionnaires’ disease, and although there was some kind of grudging, nominal menu, the geriatric cook had TB and it took twenty minutes for him to dismount from his bar stool, the resulting hamburger on white bread, with a side of potato chips, finally showing up something like six drinks after it had been ordered. (p 245)

“What do you self-help people with?”
“Happiness.” He gave her a shrug. “Aspects of happiness.” Then as if reading her mind, he added, “I’m happier than I look.” (p 253)

Swan’s Way by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust was magical. His long sentences that stretched like spider silk, weaving an ethereal architecture of thought that held me in awe. I read it in the original French, and here are a few favourite quotes: 

Elle me faisait luis dire le sujet des poèmes que j’avais l’intention de composer. Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être un écrivain, il était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naître. (p 170)

Les intérêts de notre vie sont si multiples qu’il n’est pas rare que dans une même circonstance les jalons d’un bonheur qui n’existe pas encore soient posés à côté de l’aggravation d’un chagrin dont nous souffrons. (p 375)

Et encore, même à ce point de vue de simple quantité, dans notre vie les jours ne sont pas égaux. Pour parcourir les jours, les natures un peu nerveuses, comme était la mienne, disposent, comme les voitures automobiles, de “vitesses” différentes. Il y a des jours montueux et malaisés qu’on met un temps infini à gravir et des jours en pente qui se laissent descendre à fond de train en chantant. (p 383)

Proust can be intimidating to begin, but I was encouraged by Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life. In it Botton uses Proust to reflect on suffering, language, and friendship, but a passage that is pertinent to this reading list project is the following:

Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he [Proust] argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves. (p 178)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

This is a short read. From it, a few short quotes…

Franny’s ministering to a pet goldfish:

She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans. (p 133)

The description of an outfit, (the reefer is a peacoat, the tam a hat similar to a beret):

She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. (p 150-1)

The nose-blowing that makes me wince:

Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. (p 151)

The Elements of Style by by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr.

I read The Elements of Style as a university student. I had trouble being concise when writing essays and this book transformed my writing in the middle of a course on literature. The professor noticed, and I kept a copy of the essay I’d handed in (“Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers”) and professor Doug Reimer’s response to a note I’d added, fretting over my writing. He wrote: “White’s Elements cannot be bettered, never, today, or next millennium. Your new ‘simplicity’ of style is exactly the right approach for you to take.”

The book had made such an impact, that it was always the first thing I recommended, when asked, as a writing tutor, some years later. Here, from the introduction, a little taste of William Strunk’s advice:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky 

“He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,” she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure, manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault for which she stood guilty before him. (p 189)

Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. (p 241)

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is. (p 302)

Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

I read this book but took note of only four sentences, two because they were funny:

The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened teeth when she smiled. (p 97)

and

You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in. (p 133).

The two others denote the novel’s mood…

The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. “The Irish are like that,” my mother had explained. (p 107)

and

I stood with the nun in the hall of St. Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes Fluid. (p 138)

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

I recently re-read this short essay, reviving my appreciation for Woolf’s talent. Nevermind this quote I like… you can read it here and see if you find something you like too. 

But to return to the invalid. “I am in bed with influenza,” he says, and actually complains that he gets no sympathy. “I am in bed with influenza”—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry out, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

In a blog post in 2022, I wrote about appreciating the contrast of writers’ styles when reading more than one book at a time. I illustrated it then with a quote from Yates here. In addition are the following that I also liked.

A landscape I have seen:

At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays - always, it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white, the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shrivelled snow. (p 5)

A calm feeling:

The rain had stopped but it was still a wet, gray day and good to be indoors. The radio was dimly playing Mozart and a gentle, sherry-scented repose settled over the kitchen. This was the way he had often wished his marriage could always be - unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance - and as they sat there quietly talking, waiting for the sight of the Givingses’ station wagon to appear through the dripping trees, he shivered pleasurably once or twice as a man who has been out since before dawn will shiver at the feel of the first faint warmth of sun on his neck. He felt himself at peace; and by theme the car did come, he was ready for it. (p 182)

The incongruity of death:

Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn’t possibly be dying. People didn’t die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor, like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn’t be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum. And he certainly wouldn’t be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn’t have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance (“Fun! Refreshments!”) and they wouldn’t have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. (p 317)

As I re-read these quotes, I’m reminded of the pleasure of discovering these sentences and the authors who penned them. Prose writes: “They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.”

Happy reading!

Reading List: Crime and Punishment

How to start: Google “What’s so great about Crime and Punishment” and you’ll come across videos like this one from TED-Ed:

Three quotations:

“Meanwhile the room had become so full of people that you couldn’t have dropped a pin.” (p 144)

“It’s nothing but misfortunes now,” she added suddenly with that peculiarly sedate are which children try hard to assume when they want to speak like grown-up people.” (p 150)

“‘She has certainly gone mad!’ He said to Raskolnikov, as they went out into the street. ‘I didn’t want to frighten Sofya Semyonovna, so I said ‘it seemed like it,’ but there isn’t a doubt of it. They say that in consumption the tubercles sometimes occur in the brain; it’s a pity I know nothing of medicine. I did try to persuade her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Did you talk to her about the tubercles?”
“Not precisely of the tubercles. Besides, she wouldn’t have understood! But what I say is, that if you convince a person logically that he has nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying. That’s clear. Is it your conviction that he won’t?”
“Life would be too easy if it were so,” answered Raskolnikov.” (p 333)

Reading list: Lolita

How to start: Jump in!

[Sept 2023 edit] Woah, woah, woah… I actually recommend the opposite of jumping in. I approach most literature this way, a kind of “read and figure it out later” attitude that in this case would be a disservice to the gravity of the subject matter of this book. Since reading, I’ve learned about a podcast series called “The Lolita Podcast” by Jamie Loftus and it is well worth listening to.

Fravourite quote: “I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow's hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been.” (p 265)

(This quote reminds me a Philip Roth quote I like and re-reading it, I appreciate the contrasting voices!)

Tangential: I didn’t know what to think of Lolita, even as I was reading it. These Yale Courses lectures (parts one, two and three) were very helpful! [Sept 2023 edit] Yeah… I didn’t know what to think and most readers, reading this for the first time, don’t know either. But listening to Jamie Loftus’s research into the book and society’s response, was eye-opening. I particularly appreciated episodes 1 and 2 and episode 10.

Reading List: Ulysses by James Joyce

How to begin: When I feel my enthusiasm flagging for a book, I Google "What's so great about [the book's title]" and often find someone's appreciation provides new encouragement to keep going. This Ted-Ed video by Sam Slote, on the subject of Ulysses, is excellent. 

A few quotes:

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. (p 533)

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? (p 789)

Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father? Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

With what success had he attempted direct instruction? She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.

Further thoughts: Ulysses is everywhere. I smiled when listening to Orwell's Roses in which Solnit quotes a letter he wrote to a girlfriend beginning with "Have you read Ulysses yet?" I don't read the books on this list in order to analyze them too closely. (There's How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton in PDF format for that!) I read them to see what I notice. I like how Francine Prose writes "to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another (...) will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art." And so, while there are many guides to help with reading Ulysses, (including a map drawn by Nabokov) I prefered just jumping in and letting the experience wash over me.

Reading list: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

How to start: I was reading this book on the plane and my seat mate asked if it was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t, I said, and felt a little shy… Was this film some kind of adaptation, I wondered? It’s not. Most definitely not.

An excerpt:

Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in travelling: after which he had found himself perched on a high stool in his father's bank. The responsibility and honour of such positions is not, I believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other considerations: Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of standing, and even of walking about, at his work. To this exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at the end of some eighteen months he had become aware of his being seriously out of health. He had caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lungs and threw them into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at least to have a certain grudging tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect for him. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows, and our young man, feeling that he had something at stake in the matter - it usually struck him as his reputation for ordinary wit - devoted to his graceless charge an amount of attention of which note was duly taken and which had at least the effect of keeping the poor fellow alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other promised to follow its example, and he was assured he might outweather a dozen winters if he would betake himself to those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate. As he had grown extremely fond of London, he cursed the flatness of exile: but at the same time that he cursed he conformed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad as the phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice when it had snowed overnight, almost never got up again. (p 51)

Tangential: Henry James’s biography on Britannica is fascinating… he met so many authors and travelled just as much as his characters do in this book.

Reading list: Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

How to start: Randall Jarrell’s book is full of humour… The quotes are all like shorter or longer jokes.

Quotes: They both sounded a little too hearty, but they knew that one necessarily sounds that way in such circumstances: who comments on the weather with all the lack of interest that he really feels? (p 14)

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel? The President was such invaluable material that Gertrude walked around and around him rubbing up and down against his legs, looking affectionately into the dish of nice fresh mackerel he wore instead of a face; and the dish looked back, uneasy, unsuspecting. (p 16-7)

But it was foolish of him even to want to try: he possessed, and would possess until he died, youth's one elixir, Ignorance; he drank each day long draughts from the only magic horn, Belief. (p 25)

My wife and I drove by for Constance. Before we got her we were a youngish - we would have said - couple going out to dinner; after our first look we sighed, and saw stretching before us a short, safe, uneventful pathway to the grave. It was like having the moon get into our car, the new moon: we looked at each other by her thoughtless light. (p 44-5)

...and after a moment he smiled at something he said, and I smiled back, relishing as I always did the little crinkles in the skin around his eyes. But when he stopped smiling the crinkles did not go: they were wrinkles, now. (p 39-40)

As I looked I appreciated - and not for the first time - what a gift for decoration Gertrude had: she and Sidney had gone into a bare apartment and after a few days had got it looking barer. (p 46)

Nothing spoils malice like explanation. (p 49)

At first President Robbins talked a little stiffly and warily, but then he warmed to himself. He liked to say: "The secret of good conversation is to talk to a man about what he's interested in." This was his Field Theory of Conversation. He always found out what your field was (if you hadn't had one I don't know what he would have done; but this had never happened) and then talked to you about it. After a while he had told you what he thought about it, and he would have liked to hear what you thought about it, if there had been time. (p 51)

...she was so thin you could have recognized her skeleton. (p 52)

...but here he seemed very human and attractive, for he lost his way in his sentence. The sentence was bewildered: it had begun so promisingly, and now had to finish with a lame depicted by the pen of a master. In the classroom, where Dr. Whittaker was almost as much at home as in his study, this would not have happened; there each sentence lived its appointed term, died mourned by its people, and was succeeded by a legitimate heir. (p 58)

Without his sister he would have been in Paradise. But Fern was, as people say, a Little Manager; Fern wanted, as people say, Her Own Way. (That was all she wanted, but it was enough: the Milky Way was small beside Fern's.) This was hard on John, just as it was hard on Dr. Whitaker, on Mrs. Whittaker, on the cocker spaniel, on the turtles in the back yard, even, who dreamed that Something Was Happening as Fern arranged them in a pile with a better shape to it. (p 65)

Outside, the long evening was drawing to its close. Owls caught mice, and fish, and rabbits, and brought them home to their babies; people turned off their television sets and went to bed; people woke, turned over, and went back to sleep; the girls of Benton, their hair in metal hair-curlers, their limbs in ski-pyjamas or black nylon nightgowns, slept like dormice, their mouths open to the big soft stars. (p 69)

This would not have happened if I had been a novelist. Then I might have stolen Gertrude's ideas, might have looked at them with a colleague's bright awful eye. But I was only a poet - that is to say, a maker of stone axes - and she felt a real pity for me because of it: what a shame that I hadn't lived back in the days when they used stone axes! And yet, why make them now? Every once in a while she would say to be, "Haven't you ever thought of writing a novel?" I would shake my head and say that my memory was too bad; later I would just say, "That again!" and laugh. She would laugh too, but it puzzled her; finally she dismissed it from her mind, saying to herself - as you do about someone who won't go on relief, or mind the doctor - "Well, he has only himself to blame!"

(...) But sometimes I felt sheepish - felt like a flock of sheep, that is - as Gertrude sheared from me (with barber's clippers that pulled a little) my poor coat of facts, worked over it with knitted brows, and then, smiling like Morgan le Fay, cast over my bare limbs her big blanket conclusions. (p 102)

She was far too sophisticated to speak of Human Nature, Which Never Changes, but her novels spoke for her: they were as suspicious as an old woman, and their suspicions were as easily and as depressingly and as uniformly satisfied. (p 115)

Not every child has, at the age of five, lost a mother; at the age of fourteen, lost a twin sister and a father. This had happened to Constance; or had it? Such events were not in her style of life, which was dreamy absent innocent style. She had been, somehow, sheltered from things; and when she hadn't been she had managed, like a sleepwalker, to shelter herself from them without ever seeming to. Later on what she knew already would recur to Constance, and this time it would be transmuted: life is, so to speak, the philosopher's stone that turns knowledge into truth. (p 157)

There is no good resting-place between Man and men: to say that someone is typically anything is an unfavourable judgement, and even the oddest of foreigners cannot help seeming to us, in some ways, typically foreign. We despair of any nationality except our own, and we don't despair of it only because we don't take it seriously - we know that, at bottom, Americans are just people, a little more so than any foreigner ever manages to be; didn't Adam and Eve and the snake speak to each other in Standard American? (p 187)

They were, in the first place, what they seemed to be, just as a beautiful woman in an evening dress is first of all what she seems to be. But underneath her dress, on one side of her stomach, is the scar of an operation for appendicitis; some of the skin below it, of the skin along her thighs, has a grained or marbly look - this came from the strain of childbirth; and her teeth would not be so regular and magnificent as they are if she had not worn braces on them, an unwilling child. There is a reality behind the outer reality; it is no more real than the other, both are as real as real can be, but it is different. (p 190)

She saw the worst: it was, indeed, her only principle of explanation. Consequently she seemed to most people a writer of extraordinary penetration - she appealed to the Original La Rochefoucauld in everybody. People looked up to her just as they looked up to all those who know why everything is as it is: because of munitions makers, the Elders of Zion, agents of the Kremlin, Oedipus complexes, the class struggle, Adamic sin, something; these men can explain everything, and we cannot. People who were affectionate, cheerful, and brave - and human too, all too human - felt in their veins the piercing joy of understanding, of pure disinterested insight, as they read Gertrude's demonstration that they did everything because of greed, lust, and middle-class hypocrisy. She told them that they were very bad and, because they were fairly stupid, they believed her. (p 199)

Mrs. Robbins was always one to apologize, necessarily or unnecessarily, and you could see how she felt: it was a pity to leave unused for even an hour a Sorry! so superior as hers. (246-7)

But mostly he talked about great books - about a hundred of them; I don't know why he stopped at a hundred, but he did, and let the rest go; he must have made up his mind that it was no use trying to get people to read more than a hundred. (p 252)

Mr. Daudier had a queer look on his face, as if he were a box of mixed nuts, but mostly peanuts; but you could see that he agreed with this remark down to the last cell of his toenails. (p 254)

Tangential: My daughter and I read Animal Family together earlier this month, also written by Jarrell. She remarked how she liked the way he wrote… Indeed, reading the short story, one can feel the poetry. So charming to also find in the book illustrations by Maurice Sendak!

Reading list: The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West

How to start: Rebecca West is an acclaimed British author with an impressively long Wikipedia entry. The Birds Fall Down is a “spy thriller based on the deeds of the historical double agent Yevno Azef”.

Favourite quotes: “That taught me a lesson I’ve always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them they become soft.” (p. 23)

“His voice was strong now that he had re-established the importance of his grief.” (p. 78)

“‘When there is a great tragedy, all other things should go well,’ he sighed. ‘It’s not fair, having to look after all sorts of secondary matters as well.’” (p. 95)

“It’s often been remarked that every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. A Polish professor has found an explanation in the presence in the subsoil of the city of certain earths heavily charged with electricity. It is wonderful how science is solving all mysteries. It seemed to me that the proportion of men and women quite evidently in love was higher than would have been the case in Berlin or Zurich or St. Petersburg, but also that they were exhibiting their state more candidly than they would have done in these other capitals. They walked arm in arm, their eyes shining, and they chattered and laughed.” (p. 172)

“The glasses had come from Prague, from another honeymoon, and they had survived a hundred years, only because they were always washed in a basin lined with several layers of flannel.” (p. 175)

“Most of the crowd had dispersed, but a few people still watched him as they might have watched a cab-horse fallen in the street, with maudlin smiles of pity confused with gratification at their own pity and a cold expectation of further calamity.” (p. 213)

“…for it’s sound medical practice to put the patient’s mind to rest before we start on correcting his body.” (p. 236)

“…but their real occupation was the talk, which by jerked hands, shrugged shoulders, hands flung out palm upwards, wove the French fairytale about other people having shown an extraordinary lack of common sense. In the middle of the paved causeway children in blue overalls played gentle games. If a wrangle turned rough, parents started forward in their chairs and shot out jets of scolding, but the mellowness set in again at once. As the street darkened the sky grew brighter.” (p. 247)

“They raised their glasses to each other in gaiety which was false yet true; it was a container for their kindness to her.” (p. 268)

“She recognized what he was doing; piling up grievances to kill his sense that he was in the wrong. She often did it herself, but had hoped that she would grow out of it.” (p. 361)

“But she assumed it to be a point of honour with Chubinov not to take grace poured out generously.” (p. 422)

Tangential: Googling the title of this book leads to alarming reports and investigations of birds falling from the sky. But it comes from the line of a poem the author uses as an epigraph. But neither the poem nor the poet exist… West used a pseudonym and invented the poem herself. We know this thanks to Victoria Glendinning’s biography of West, excerpted here.

Reading list: Two books by Henry Green

How to begin: From an article in The New Yorker, “The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.”

Favourite quotes from Loving:

“So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed French windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith’s curls a trifle. Between the books and walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought of the draught.” (p 141)

“It’s so hard for my generation to talk to yours about the things one really feels.” (p 203)

Favourite quotes from Doting:

“… a juggler walked on the small stage.
”The man started with three billiard balls. He flung one up and caught it. He flung it up again then sent a second ball to chase the first. In no time he had three, fountaining from out his hands. And he did not stop at that. He introduced, he insinuated one at a time, one more after another, and threw the exact inches higher each time to give six, seven balls room until, to no applause, he had a dozen chasing themselves up then down into his two lazy-seeming hands, each ball so precisely placed that it could be thought to follow grooves in violet air.” (p 7)

“‘The fact is’ he explained with calm ‘the minute one begins a discussion of mutual troubles or miseries, it invariably becomes a kind of fierce competition as to who, in effect, is the worse off.’” (p 52)

Reading List: A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

How to begin: Francine Prose uses the opening scene from A Perfect Spy to demonstrate an example of how dialogue advances the plot. Indeed, the book has lots of dialogue, but often what made me smile were the broad-stroke descriptions of people and places.

Quotes: “Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.” (p 2)

“He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. (…) It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t beat to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem.” (p 186)

“She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out…” (p 273)

“It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again.” (p 274)

“He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat.” (p 278)

“Brotherhood had bathed and shaved and cut himself and put on a suit.” (p 288)

“At number 18 he paused and in the manner of a protective purchaser stood back and surveyed the house. Bach and a smell of breakfast issued from the ground-floor kitchen.” (p 289)

“He was tall but reassuringly unathletic.” (p 291)

“It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.” (p 386)

“Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish.” (p 415)

“Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber fertile, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.” (p 502)

“We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege.” (p 528)

“What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-class humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia.” (p 533)

“The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes.” (p 536)

Tangential: I read this book after listening to John Le Carré’s memoir, and somehow, I often still heard his voice in my head, narrating these passages. A Perfect Spy was made into a seven episode mini-series released in 1987 on the BBC.

Reading list: Cosmicomics by Italino Calvino

How to start: I really liked this article about Italino Calvino in The Guardian. For Cosmicomics, Chris Powell writes: “each story uses scientific statements as launch pads for imaginative tours de force, exploring the domestic, the romantic and the existential via astronomy, geology and evolutionary biology.” He also perfectly describes the feeling I had while reading Cosmicomics: “to begin a new Calvino story is like embarking on a voyage to unknown lands; there is a joy to the sense of expectation he inspires.”

Favourite quotes: (The Origin of the Birds) In the strip that follows, you see the wisest of us all, old U(h), who moves from the group of the others and says: “Don’t look at him! He’s a mistake!” and he holds out his hands as if he wanted to cover the eyes of those present. “Now I’ll erase him!” he says, or thinks, and to depict this desire of his we could have him draw a diagonal line across the frame. The bird flaps his wings, eludes the diagonal, and flies to safety in the opposite corner. U(h) is happy because, with that diagonal line between them, he can’t see the bird any more. The bird pecks at the line, breaks it, and flies at old U(h). Old U(h) to erase him, tries to draw a couple of crossed lines over him. At the point where the two lines meet, the bird alights and lays an egg. Old U(h) pulls the lines from under him, the egg falls, the bird darts off. There is one frame all stained with egg yolk.
I like telling things in cartoon form, but I would have to alternate the action frames with idea frames, and explain for example this stubbornness of U(h)’s in not wanting to admit the existence of the bird. So imagine one of those little frames all filled with writing, which are used to bring you up to date on what went before: After the failure of the Pterosauria, for millions and millions of years all trace of animals with wings had been lost. (“Except for Insects”, a footnote would clarify.)
(…)
There’s no use my telling you in detail the cunning I used to succeed in returning to the continent of the Birds. In the strips it would be told with one of those tricks that work well only in drawings. (The frame is empty. I arrive. I spread paste on the upper hand right-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail becomes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, allowing myself to be carried along. Thus I arrive at the Land of the Birds. If you don’t like this story you can think up another one: the important thing is to have me arrive there.)

(I.Mitosis) Now I know all of you will raise a flock of objections because being in love presupposes not only self-awareness but also awareness of the other, et cetera, et cetera, and all I can answer is thanks a lot I know that much myself but if you aren’t going to be patient there’s no use in my trying to explain, and above all you have to forget for a minute the way you fall in love nowadays, the way I do too now, if you’ll permit me confidences of this sort. I say confidences because I know if I told you about my falling in love at present you could accuse me of being indiscreet, whereas I can talk without any scruples about the time when I was a unicellular organism, that is I can talk about it objectively as the saying goes, because it’s all water under the bridge now, and it’s a feat on my part even to remember it, and yet what I do remember is still enough to disturb me from head to foot, so when I use the word “objectively” it’s a figure of speech, as it always is when you start out saying you’re objective and then what with one thing and another you end up being subjective, and so this business I want to tell you about is difficult for me precisely because it keeps slipping into the subjective, in my subjective state of those days, which though I recall it only partially still disturbs me from head to foot like my subjective of the present, and that’s why I’ve used expressions that have the disadvantage of creating confusion with what is different nowadays while they have the advantage of bringing to light what is common between the two times.
(…)
Let’s begin this way, then: there is a cell, and this cell is a unicellular organism, and this unicellular organism is me, and I know it, and I’m pleased about it. Nothing special so far. Now let’s try to represent this situation for ourselves in space and time. Time passes, and I, more and more pleased with being in it and with being me, am also more and more pleased that there is time, and that I am in time, or rather that time passes and I pass time and time passes me, or rather I am pleased to be contained in time, to be the content of time, or the container, in short, to mark by being me the passing of time. Now you must admit this begins to arouse a sense of expectation, a happy and hopeful waiting, a happy youthful impatience and also an anxiety, a youthful excited anxiety also basically painful, a painful unbearable tension and impatience. In addition you must keep in mind that existing also means being in space, and in fact I was dished out into space to my full width, with space all around, and even though I had no knowledge it obviously continued on on all sides. There’s no point in bothering now about what else this space contained, I was closed in myself and I minded my own business, and I didn’T even have a nose so I couldn’t stick my nose out, or an eye to take an interest in outside, in what was and what wasn’t; however, I had the sense of occupying space within space, of wallowing in it, of growing with my protoplasm in various directions, but as I said, I don’t want to insist on this quantitative and material aspect, I want to talk above all about the satisfaction and the burning desire to do something with space, to have time to extract enjoyment from space, to have space to make something in the passing of time.

Tangential: There are hundreds of articles with tips on how to appreciate literature, and not one, in my very quick search, that describes how reading can fall into two categories: the kind that whisks you along on in a story, and the kind that says, here, let me expand your senses. It’s like eating to satisfy hunger or eating to enjoy taste. Not that one excludes the other, but rather, that sometimes, when reading, you can feel that one takes priority over the other. Who knows… my theory is probably too simplistic. If you’d like some good advice, I’d recommend the second point on Iphigene’s “How to Appreciate/Read a Classic”, namely, “immerse yourself”.

Reading list: Middlemarch by George Elliot

How to start: Part way through reading this book, I googled its importance for reassurance. It is, as Robert McCrum wrote in 2014, “supremely a work of serious literature. According to Virginia Woolf, it is ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.” To quote McCrum again, it is “a work of genius” and his article provides a glimpse at why.

Favourite quotes: “Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.” (p. 22)

“Sometimes, when her uncle’s easy way of talking did not happen to be exasperating, it was rather soothing.” (p. 39)

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.” (p. 62)

[About Casaubon’s blood not being red:] “‘no, somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parenthesis,’ said Mrs. Codewallader.” (p. 70)

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the course emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” (p. 189).

“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.” (p. 201)

“The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates.” (p. 213)

“You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less course and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of a thing.” (p. 220)

“He was one or those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.” (p. 223)

“Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.” (p. 239)

“‘Poor dear Dido how dreadful!’ said Celia, feeling as much grieved as her own perfect happiness would allow.” (p. 275)

“Mr Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge.” (p. 316)

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” (p. 276)

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” (p. 421)

Tangential: If another argument for reading Middlemarch should be made, I really enjoy Kathryne Schulz’s “What Is It About Middlemarch?”

Reading list: The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

How to start: I sometimes plod through a book, but that was not the case with this one, speeding through in barely two weeks. Francine Prose notes the novel’s “energy and hilarity.” The New York Times qualifies it as “uproarious and highly entertaining.” And perhaps knowing neither of these things was what made the book such a quick read.

Favourite quotes: “He looked down the tracks where Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen’s visit.” (p. 405-6)

[This one of a car-chase sequence:]

“The thin Trabant squeezed past a trailer truck in front of them bearing the logo of a Swedish modular funiture company.
”Shell-shocked, Vladimir crawled back up to look through the nonexistent window behind him. The Swedish furniture trick now separated their car from the Groundhog’s shooting party like some kind of ad hoc U.N. reaction force. But the Hog’s men apparently had no respect for Swedish furniture. With a single-mindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students, they continued to shoot as the truck swerved madly to stay on the road. Finally, their labor produced results - with an audible whoosh, the back doors of the truck blew away.
”A houseful of Krovnik dining tables in assorted colours, Skanör solid-beech glass-door cabinets, Arkitekt retractable work lamps (with adjustable heads), and the daddy of them all - a Grinda three-piece sofa ensemble in ‘modern paisley,’ came sailing out of the back of the truck and onto the flotilla of BMWs to settle once and for all the Russo-Swedish War of 1709.” (p. 444)

Tangential: This is Shteyngart’s debut novel, published in 2002. What’s fun about that is that it makes him a contemporary, instead of a long-dead novelist like most of the ones on this list. He’s since published more novels, obviously, and someone’s collected his blurbs on Tumblr. Oh look! He’s just received his Covid shot!

Reading list: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

How to start: I think it was V.S. Naipaul, in Literary Occasions, who admired Dickens’ fresh prose and imaginative descriptions in Bleak House. Of the readers who debate which of his 16 books is the best, some make strong arguments for this one. Set against the backdrop of a protracted law case, it begins with a vivid, playfully-described, rainy day…

Favourite quote: “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets , as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in the mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
”Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green hits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”

Tangential: I had no idea the protracted law case was based on fact and learned via Wikipedia that “Scholars – such as the English legal historian Sir William Searle Holdsworth, in his 1928 series of lectures Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian published by Yale University Press – have made a plausible case for treating Dickens's novels, and Bleak House in particular, as primary sources illuminating the history of English law.”

Reading list: Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

How to start: Brodkey seems to have been a controversial character, gleaning from online articles about him. Francine Prose admires the way in which he depicts “people ranting to children” which she calls one of “several notable literary examples.” About a story titled “S.L.” Prose explains: “the ranter is the title character, a self-indulgent decent man who is about to adopt the little orphan to whom he is raving. Reading S.L.’s monologues, we become intensely aware of the way that people often talk to children - as if they aren’t sentient, comprehending beings - when in fact children, like the boy in the story, know perfectly well what the adults are saying. Though S.L. wants the child to love and accept him, everything he says increases our sense of the child’s isolation, confusion, and desperation.”

Favourite quotes: (Bookkeeping) “Sometimes it horrifies me,” he said, “that we dare talk about serious subjects - the camps, love, anything. We should leave the serious subjects to poets, who will tell us how to speak of them without lowering them; we should confine ourselves to the weather and the stock market like sensible people.”

(Innocence) “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style, he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.”

“There’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bread for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it’s in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near.”

(His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft) “The man I hugged or ran toward or ran from is not in any photograph: a photograph shows someone of whom I think, Oh, was he like that?”

(The Nurse’s Music) “I do not think memories lie for a cheap reason. It is just that memory deals in totals, in summaries, in portable forms of knowledge, so that what it dredges up are things that are like mottoes or aphorisms or apothegms rather than like real moments. And the totals are often true enough as they are pictured, even if the pictured thing never happened, but is a total, a mind thing, just as what’s in a photograph never happened but is the machine’s slice of a part of reality, which it then slides out sideways, so to speak, from the forward rush of real air. Time was never that stilled; the photograph lies; the eyelike machine slices off a thin and fixed souvenir; what gives it focus makes it untrue - no one I know was ever as still as a photograph.”

(The Boys on Their Bikes) “He’d gotten me to start to try to explain; explanations are demeaning: you’re in service to the other’s understanding you then; you’re not allowed to live but have to stand in a clear light and just explain.”

(Angel) But I imagined all that as laid aside with regret or even hatred, but since, if one lives, one will most likely be a witness from now on, what need is there for most of such aspects of will in one’s self as one has needed up until now when one was not a witness? Almost certainly, one can expect to be inspired now and protected - oh, not physically: one can be martyred, used in various ways in whatever time or timelessness there is to be now: one has a very different sort of soul - the total of one’s self now includes this occasion and one is different.”

Tangential: Harold Brodkey’s obituary in The Independent, as written by Andrew Rosenheim, makes light of the opinion that Brodkey was a narcissist: “He was, to be sure, an incurable narcissist…” but some of Brodkey’s stories describe Narcissistic Personality Disorder to a T, namely “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” and “Largely an Oral History of my Mother”. I wish more could be written about narcissism in literature, but I do feel that this website has it right when they state: “Creating a believable narcissist for fiction ultimately requires real life experiences of living or working with a person.”

Reading list: The Go-Between

How to start: I confess I really enjoyed this book. I brought it along during a three-week vacation and loved slipping away from the rudimentary demands of camping to a world of high-class English society and the author’s sophisticated use of words. L.P. Hartley has an interesting biography.

Quotes: “From being my enemy the summer had become my friend: this was another consequence of our Norwich shopping. I felt I had been given the freedom of the heat, and I roamed about in it as if I was exploring a new element. I liked to watch it rise shimmering from the ground and hang heavy on the tops of the darkening July trees. I liked the sense of suspended movement that it gave or seemed to give, reducing everything in Nature to the stillness of contemplation. I liked to touch it with my hand, and feel it on my throat and round my knees, which now were bare to its embrace. I learned to travel far, ever father into it, and achieve a close approximation with it; for I felt that my experience of it would somehow be cumulative and that if it would only get hotter and hotter there was a heart of heat I should attain to.”

“One remembers things at different levels. I still have an impression, distinct but hard to analyse, of the change that came over the household with Lord Trimingham’s arrival. Before, it had an air of self-sufficiency, and, in spite of Mrs. Maudsley’s hand on the reins, a go-as-you-please gait: now everyone seemed to be strung up, on tip-toe to face some test, as we were in the last weeks at school, with the examinations coming on. What one said and did seemed to matter more, as if something hung on it, as if it was contributing to a coming event.”

“Now the thought of the farmyard had lost its magic for me: it was as dead as a hobby that one has grown out of.”

“Also I knew we should not have the Litany, as we had had it last Sunday: this also was a great gain. Less than ever was I in a mood to repent of my sins or to feel that other people should repent of theirs: I could not find a flaw in the universe and was impatient with Christianity for bringing imperfection to my notice, so I closed my ears to its message and chose as a subject of meditation the annals of the Trimingham family emblazoned on the transept wall.”

“He indicated a row of small dark canvasses, set deep in heavy frames. (…) I didn’t like the look of the picture or its feeling; pictures, I thought, should be of something pretty, should record a moment chosen for its beauty. These people hadn’t even troubled to look their best; they were ugly and quite content to be so. They got something out of being their naked selves, their faces told me that: but this self-glory, depending on nobody’s approval but their own, struck me as rather shocking - more shocking than their occupations, unseemly as those were. They had forgotten themselves, that was it; and you should never forget yourself.”

“How everything else had been diminished by [the Ted and Marian relationship] and drained of quality! - for it was a standard of comparison but dwarfed other things. Its colours were brighter, its voice was louder, its power of attraction infinitely greater. It was a parasite of the emotions. Nothing else could live with it or have an independent existence while it was there. It created a desert, it wouldn’t share with anyone or anything, it wanted all the attention for itself. And being secret it contributed nothing to our daily life; it could no more be discussed than could some shameful illness.”

“We talked a little of my journey and of what I had done in life: both subjects that were easily disposed of. For conversational purpose, an ounce of incident is worth a pound of routine progress, and my life had little incident to record.”

Reading list: I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek

How to start: This is a fun collection of stories!

Favourite quotes: “He sang with facial expressions that caused him to cut himself shaving. He shaved with a straight razor rather than wasting money on blades, and he bled as he sang, the foam on the razor stained pink and his face stuck up with bloody clots of toilet paper. I was afraid that, reaching for a note, he’d cut his throat.” (p 15)

“I’d done it out of the same wildness that made for an alliance between us - a bond that turned life comic at the expense of anything gentle. An impulsiveness that permitted a stupid, callous curiosity, the same dangerous lack of sense that had made me ride one day down Luther, a sunless side street that ran only a block, and, peddling at full speed, attempt to jump off my J. C. Higgins bike and back on in a single bounce.” (p127)

“A curfew of cold had emptied the streets.” (p 164)

“Picnics on a windowsill: braunschweiger, Jewish rye, mayonnaise, raw onion, potato salad blushing with paprika, a cold beer, an enormous garlicky sea green pickle tonged just minutes before at the corner deli by a young woman with high cheekbones and a slavic accent, her golden hair standing from turquoise combs that could hardly contain the weight of curls, ample breasts so loose they had to be bare in the sleeveless blue sundress she wore, and the blond hair growing profusely under her arms flashing as she dipped into a huge glass crock where a school of kosher pickles darted away and tried to hide amidst the dill weed, roiled seeds, and wheeling peppercorns.” (p 217)

“Children herded by billowing nuns, jostled into lines.
”The pigeon-launching church bells tolled one o’clock, if a single ring can be considered a toll. Its reverberation filled my apartment.
”That was lunch at the Loyola Arms Hotel - on one or another of those days when nothing happened really but lunch - and yet I don’t remember ever feeling more free, or more alone, than when I’d watch the children marching into school, surrendering the street back to the pigeons and shadow until it was empty and quiet again, and I sat propped in the window, draining the foam, with the length of an entire afternoon still before me.” (p 232)

“At eight a.m., he was waiting in the doorway when the Chinese herbalist came to open his pharmacy. Mick stepped into the shop’s alien atmosphere of dried herbs and powdered animals and inhaled a smell that seemed in itself curative.” (p 264)

“The boy and his gran seem more real to him than his room in the present. Suddenly, it’s clear to him that memory is the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy; it’s how the past continues to love.” (p 283)

Tangential: This interview he gave makes me want to sit down and write!

Reading list: Collected Stories of Raymond Carver

How to start: The New York Times calls Raymond Carver "the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century". When the author himself writes about why he chose to write short stories and poems, he explains in an essay titled Fires: "During these ferocious years of parenting, I usually didn't have the time, or the heart, to think about working on anything very lengthy. (...) The circumstances of my life with these children dictated something else. They said if I wanted to write anything, and finish it, and if ever I wanted to take satisfaction out of finished work, I was going to have to stick to stories and poems." Later, his children grown, he reflects: "The circumstances of my life are much different now, but now I choose to write short stories and poems. Or at least I think I do. Maybe it's all a result of the old writing habits from those days."

Favourite quote: It could be said, for instance, that to take a wife is to take a history, And if that's so, the I understand that I'm outside history now - like horses and fog. Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I'm having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me - unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendos. That's when it dawns on me that Autobiography is the poor man's history. And that I am saying good-bye to history. Good-bye, my darling. (Blackbird Pie)

Tangential: There's a documentary on Youtube about his life.

Reading list: Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant

How to start: Mavis Gallant was a Canadian writer who lived in France. About reading short stories she writes the following in a Preface to The Selected Stories: "There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I’m doing it now because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."

Favourite quotes: “In loving and unloving families alike, the same problem arises after a death: What to do about the widow?” (p 32)

“Barbara often said she had no use for money, no head for it. ‘Thank God I’m Irish,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got rates of interest on the brain.’ She read Irishness into her nature as an explanation for it, the way some people attributed their gifts and failings to a sign of the zodiac. Anything natively Irish had dissolved long before, leaving only a family custom of Catholicism and another habit, fervent in Barbara’s case, of anti-clerical passion.” (p 195)

“Barbara was aware of Diana, the mouse, praying like a sewing machine somewhere behind her.” (p 229)

“The only woman his imagination offered, [Grippes] with some insistence was no use to him. She moved quietly on a winter evening to Saint-Nicholas-du-Chadonnet, the rebel church at the lower end of Boulevard Saint-Germain, where services were still conducted in Latin. […] She entered the church and knelt down and brought out her rosary, oval pearls strung on thin gold. Nobody saw rosaries anymore. They were not even in the windows of their traditional venues, across the square from the tax bureau. Believers went in for different articles now: cherub candles, quick prayers on plastic cards. Her iron meekness resisted change. She prayed constantly into the past. Grippes knew that one’s view of the past is just as misleading as speculation about the future. It was one of the few beliefs he would have gone to the stake for. She as praying to a mist, a mist-shrouded figures she persisted in seeing clear.” (p 251)

“She had destroyed this beauty, joyfully, willfully, as if to force him to value her on other terms.” (p 283)

Tangential: A 47 minute documentary about Mavis Gallant and her writing is available on Vimeo. It’s called “Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant”.

Reading list: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

How to start: In giving advice to an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson, Earnest Hemingway wrote: “Here’s a list of books any writer should have read as part of his education… If you haven’t read these, you just aren’t educated.” Wuthering Heights was included, of course, on his list of 16, seen here. In a chapter about narration, Francine Prose explains what makes the book so compelling: “It’s hard to imagine a more ornate or artificial structure. So what’s surprising is how natural it seems, how quickly our awareness of artifice fades before the urgency of the story being narrated, and how fully the various characters emerge through the eyes and in the voice of a woman who is intuitive, wise, but not, strictly speaking, omniscient.” (Reading Like A Writer, p 88.)

Favourite passage: “I used to draw a comparison between him, and Hindley Earnshaw, and perplex myself to explain satisfactorily, why their conduct was so opposite in similar circumstances. They had both been fond husbands, and were both attached to their children; and I could not see how they shouldn’t both have taken the same road, for good or evil. But, I though in my mind, Hindley, with apparently the stronger head, has shown himself sadly the worse and the weaker man. When his ship struck, the captain abandoned his post; and the crew, instead of trying to save her, rushed into riot and confusion, leaving no hope for their luckless vessel. Linton, on the contrary, displayed the true courage of a loyal and faithful soul: he trusted God; and God comforted him. One hoped, and the other despaired; they chose their own lots, and were righteously doomed to endure them.” 

Tangential: The Guardian published a list of the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time” and it included Elizabeth Gaskill’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister. I read the book and it has a passage that alludes to Charlotte’s impression of her sister’s book, Wuthering Heights. The author writes:

“In December 1847, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey appeared. The first-named of these stories has revolted many readers by the power with which wicked and exceptional characters are depicted. Others, again, have felt the attraction of remarkable genius, even when displayed on grim and terrible criminals. Miss [Charlotte] Brontë herself says, with regard to this tale,
‘Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people that pass her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious: circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though the feeling for the people around her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced; and yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, and their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued, that what her mind has gathered of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits, of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny – more powerful than sportive – found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliffe, like Earnshaw, like Catharine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable – of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë’s pseudonym] would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree – loftier, straighter, wider-spreading – and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work; to the influence of other intellects she was not amenable.’”

Reading list: A Moveable Feast

How to start: A Moveable Feast is an fun, easy read. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard who wrote that when a journalist alluded to his collection of books he’d answered that he hadn’t read most of them “and the ones I have I don’t remember a thing about” I too remember very little of the books I’ve read. I think that’s why I take care to write out quotes I like. In the case of this book, I have only one. “They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who made jokes in life the seeds were covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”

What I like better than that quote is one by Francine Prose. She writes:

Finally, before we leave the subject of sentences, let’s return once more to Hemingway, and to the passage from his memoir of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast, in which he describes his working method and which subsequent generations of writers have taken as a form of implicit literary advice:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going… I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

For years, I’ve heard this passage about the one true sentence cited as a sort of credo. And I’ve nodded my head, not wanting to admit that I honestly had no idea what in the world Hemingway was talking about. What is a ‘true’ sentence in this context – that is, the context of fiction? What makes Hemingway’s advice so hard to follow is that he never quite explains what ‘true’ means.

Perhaps it’s wisest to assume that Hemingway, like countless others, was simply confusing truth with beauty. Possibly what he really meant was a beautiful sentence – a concept that, as we have seen, is almost as hard to define as the one true sentence.

In any case, it should encourage us. Hemingway was not only thinking about the good and beautiful and true sentence, but also using it as sustenance – as a goal to focus on, as a way to keep himself going. And though it’s obvious that times have changed, that what was true in Hemingway’s era may no longer be true today, the fact remains that Hemingway not only cared about sentences, not only told his publishers that they mattered to him, but told his readers, and told the world. (Reading Like A Writer, pages 61-62) 

Ernest Hemingway also compiled and published writing advice. The Brain Pickings blog features a sample.