"If I am found with amnesia..."

     We came across a quote from Guy Gavriel Kay, the author of Song of Arbonne and Tigana, describing a wonderful gimmick that every book lover should enjoy.

"My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, "If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read..." And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out what happens next...the feeling that keeps you up half the night, the feeling that comes before the plot's been learned."

     This made us start thinking about books that we would not want to have missed reading. Ours are not for the suspense factor that Kay's brother sought but for the sheer experience of reading them. Here are our lists:

Frances ~
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - I read this when I was 12 and home from school with the flu.  Perhaps this heightened my perception of the novel at the time but it has remained a favorite.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë -  This one I read at age 12 or 13 as well when I was particularly susceptible to wild romance on the moors.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - I've read it over and over but I never tire of it.  I've even dreamt I went to Manderley!

The Complete Works of Shakespeare -If I could only list one book, this tome would be the one.  I know I'm cheating by including the complete works, but what can I say?  This one volume contains the essential knowledge of people, love, and life.  I wouldn't want to navigate the recovery from amnesia without it!

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - I love Thomas Hardy but this is my favorite of his novels.  Gabriel Oak rivals Mr. Rochester as my biggest literary crush!

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - I think I was the only one in my eleventh grade English class who loved this book.  I have read it many time since just for pleasure (I know!).  This is my favorite Hawthorne.

Rose ~

Green Darkness by Anya Seton - Outside of children's books, this is the only book I remember reading by flashlight. I stayed up most of the night trying to find out how the characters' past lives fit with their present. For that alone, it would be an interesting read with amnesia.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James - Frances says, "Rose would not be Rose without this book." I think she's right. I've read it countless times and currently own four copies. If I owned one book, this would be the one.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White - As if I needed another reason to love Arthur and Merlin!

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee - I don't think this is a very well-known book, but it sympathizes with anyone who has been in the back of beyond.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino - This book captures every child's dream of living in the trees, but is not in the least a children's book.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy - This is the only Hardy I have read so far, but I imagine it will be my favorite Hardy for some time to come.

Bookish Quotes #3

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us."
     ~ Thomas Carlyle

"'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are' is true enough but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."
     ~ François Muriac

Waxing Poetic: Marginalia by Billy Collins

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

     This poem would appeal to anyone who has found notes in the margins and items tucked in pages of used books. Not only does this connect you to the book's previous readers but it can give you insight into their lives, for better or for worse. We've found some very interesting things over the years: $5 in a book about pregnancy (while pregnant); an invitation to "Baise-Moi: An art show in a porno shop"; and someone practicing their closing for a love letter, apparently (it was between "yours with love" or "your fawn"). This makes it sound like we've been reading VERY trashy books, but the latter margin notes were in Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.

     Can you beat these?

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

     Donna Tartt’s talent at weaving a story is proven in her ability to craft a compelling murder-mystery of 500+ pages even though the reader knows from the beginning who is murdered and who the killers are.

     The novel is set in a small, elite Vermont college in the 1980’s, but it has a dreamlike quality that makes it seem timeless.  The narrator, Richard Papen, leaves his unhappy life with his working-class family in Plano, California to attend Hampden College.  He wants to continue his study of Classical Greek but is told that the classics professor, Julian Morrow, has accepted his five student limit.  Richard becomes obsessed with the aloof, arrogant, highbrow intellectuals who study Greek.  He observes them as they move around campus, oddly dressed (mostly in black) and in a world of their own.  Eventually, he manages to capture their attention when he helps them solve a question of Greek grammar while they are studying in the library.  With advice from them on how to impress Julian, he is admitted into the Classics program.

     The characters are wonderfully detailed and their relationships are complex.  The students are immersed in the world of the classics and out of touch with the modern world.  There is a priceless scene in which Henry, a linguistic genius and very much the leader of the group, is shocked to learn that man has walked on the moon.  The other members of the group are just as unusual:  a pair of fraternal twins, Charles and Camilla, orphans who are ethereal and charming but very secretive; Francis, whose aunt’s abandoned house in the country becomes a sanctuary for the group; and Edmund, known as Bunny, who is dyslexic, loud, older, and a bit of a misfit in this bunch of intellectuals.  Richard fabricates a history for himself including an elite private school background and a father with oil money (his real father owns a gas station) in order to blend in with the group.  Julian is an eccentric, elusive man who, perhaps, does not know how strong an influence his is on his pupils.  

       One day in class, he lectures on Bacchanalian ritual:

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?  It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one.  Beauty is terror.  Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.  And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?  To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of or moral selves?... One is quite, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways.  But how glorious to release them in a single burst!  To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!

As a result, the group (excluding Bunny and Richard) set out to recreate the ecstasy of a Bacchanalian ritual.  A horrible turn of events results in the murder a local farmer. 

       This secret binds them together and also divides them when Bunny, informed of the events begins to behave erratically and the others fear being betrayed.  Richard is drawn into the inner circle and made privy to its secret.  The reader, like Richard will find it hard not to like and sympathize with these characters in spite of what he knows. He becomes aware of Henry’s ‘plan’ and becomes a part of it, ultimately being present when Bunny is murdered.

       The story focuses on how this murder haunts and eventually destroys them but it is as much about friendship and the human longing to be accepted.    I loved this book.  I was captivated from the first page and found it hard to put down in spite of the fact that I’m not fan of murder mysteries.  This book is so much more!

- Frances

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

 

     Set in a finishing school called College Sunrise, currently located in Switzerland but whose location changes from year to year, Muriel Spark's The Finishing School is a comic novel that reminded me of her early novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
     A married couple, Rowland and Nina Mahler, run the school while Rowland works (or mostly doesn't work) on a novel.  The school is small, unorthodox, and has exorbitant tuition.The student body consists of a group of affluent teens, including a princess of a possibly fictitious country, whose parents seem to want to get them off their hands.
     Among their nine students is Chris, a 17-year old who is writing an historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots and already has publishers interested in the work-in-progress.  Rowland immediately develops an intense jealousy of Chris and his novel.  His thoughts stray to wishing the boy would "die peacefully in his sleep."  He visualizes himself pouring green paint on Chris's bright red hair as he writes and watching it pour over the novel.  Chris is aware of Rowland's jealousy and enrolls a fellow student to keep his computer, discs, and printed pages of the novel locked away while Rowland continuously attempts to find and destroy it.
     Meanwhile, school is in session but the teachers own lives occupy them as much as teaching the students.  Rowland teaches creative writing and spends class time recording observations of Chris.  He tells Nina, "I've changed my mind about the book I'm writing.  It won't be a novel.  It will be a life study of a real person, Chris."  Nina secretly plots to leave Rowland at the end of the term but continues to teach her etiquette class (she calls it 'comme it faut'), instructing the students in how to properly eat an artichoke, the chances that a man inviting a girl to attend Ascot will be a crook, and the hazards of being too well-mannered.  Through it all the students and teachers get entangled with each other, the visiting lecturers, neighbors, and the hired help.
     The tension between Rowland and Chris intensifies and comes to a head when a publisher comes to see Chris about publishing his novel and agrees to also publish Rowland's The School Observed.  Things deteriorate from there and come to a surprising ending.
   The novel explores the themes of jealousy, ambition, and attraction.  Spark has a gift for creating eccentric but believable characters and these are briefly but vividly drawn.  It was a quick and humorous read.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but not as much a The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.


Favorite Lines:  (from Nina's 'comme il faut' class)
"First, if you, as a U.N. employee, are chased by an elephant stand still and wave a white handkerchief.  This confuses the elephant's legs."

     
- Frances

Bookish Quotes #2

"We read to know we are not alone."
     ~ C.S. Lewis

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
     ~ Jean Rhys

Waxing Poetic: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne

 

     John Donne is my favorite poet, and this is one of my favorite of his poems. It was written in 1611 to his wife, Anne More Donne, to comfort her while he was away in France on government business and she remained at home in England. The poem argues that he and his wife will remain together spiritually even though they are apart physically. It contains one of Donne's most famous metaphors: he compares his relationship with his wife to that of the two legs of a drawing compass. The poem was not published until 1633, two years after Donne's death in a poetry collection entitled Songs and Sonnets.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

"The breath goes now," and some say

"No";

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harm and fears;

Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent,

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

That ourselves know not what it is,

Inter-assurèd of the mind,

Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if the other do,

And though it in the center sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like the other foot obliquely run:

Thy firmness draws my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

     If you are a fan of Donne's poetry, you might enjoy the novel The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. It is the story of a British calligrapher (one of the few left who earn a living at it) who has been commissioned to transcribe the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne for a rich American client. As he works on the commission, he finds that the poems begin to illuminate his own experiences. The novel is witty and clever, like Donne's poems. I thought it was a great read with an unexpected ending.

     If you're into the lives of poets, you might enjoy The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran. It tells of Donne's courtship of his wife, Anne. They married against her father's wishes and those of his employer's (her uncle by marriage). As a result, he lost his job and was imprisoned for a brief time.

 - Frances