TSS: Running, Reading, and Blogging

Happy Sunday, everyone. Today is going to be the start of a long week, because I am traveling to Seattle on Tuesday for work. I’ve never been to Seattle before, and I’m excited to see the city, but I admit that I’d rather stay home. I’ve yet to get back into a routine after the holidays, and almost a week away doesn’t help matters much.

Last week I started The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, but I realized that I was picking it up and setting it down too much, and it seems to me like a book that needs a longer attention span. Also, it’s a physical book, and I’m planning to take only my Kindle on this trip (plenty of TBR titles on that bad boy), so I decided to hold off on that one until I get home.

Instead, I started Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I wanted to read it mainly because I’ve mostly recovered from the problem I had last year (plantar fasciitis, which is essentially just severe heel pain–and a real pain in the butt to boot) and I thought it might motivate me to get back into a routine. So far so good: I ran (a very slow) four miles this afternoon. Probably it’s not fair to call it running—it was more like jogging, really—but I did it.

This morning, I came across this passage:

Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feel he’s accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can’t, then he’ll feel he hasn’t. Even if he doesn’t break the time he hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best—and possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process—then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race.

[...]

For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

What does any of this have to do with reading, you might be wondering? For me, it relates in a couple of ways. First was simply that much of last year was not a good running year for me–and when I wasn’t running, my reading tapered off as well. I think I set more books aside last year than I ever have, and even the ones I made it through often didn’t satisfy me. This was troubling to me because a big part of my identity is “reader.” Another big part of my identity was starting to become “runner.” Neither of those things were going well, and I was unable to reach the bar I had set for myself in either area. It wasn’t pretty.

The other reason the passage struck me was that since I started blogging again, I’ve been thinking a lot about what my goals are as a blogger. When I first started this blog in 2009, I joined all kinds of challenges and set all kinds of goals for myself: to read a certain number of books, to read certain kinds of books, to attract some number of readers, to attract publishers so I could read the latest and greatest releases, to join read-alongs, and so forth. All of my goals were driven by what I imagined I should be doing with a blog, rather than what I really wanted to do.

Even when I decided to start blogging again a few months ago, I thought about what I should do. For example, I should have a ratings system of some sort, so that people know what I think. The problem for me was: I couldn’t think of a ratings system I felt comfortable using. Should I give stars? Should I rate books on a scale of 1 to 5? 1 to 10? Should I rank things with simple terms such as “Recommended” or “Highly recommended”?

I thought about it for a long while, and I could not decide. Then one day, it hit me: I am not at all interested in ranking books for people. I have no problem with other people doing it; many of the blogs I follow have some sort of at-a-glance system, and I appreciate it as a time saver, especially if I know I can trust the person’s opinion (Jackie at Farm Lane Books and Matt at A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook come to mind). But for myself, for what I want to get out of blogging, a ranking system won’t work, because ultimately, I’m not really interested in reviewing books. I’m interested in having a conversation about books here on this blog, and to me, when I think of giving something a rank, I worry it closes the door. If I give something two stars, it might keep someone from commenting who really thought a book was four or five stars. (More likely, it would be the opposite: I’d give something four stars, and I’d get the inevitable, “You liked that? Hm” kind of comment that drives me insane.)

To bring it all home, because this post is longer than I planned and getting a bit out of control, I suppose what I’m saying is, I might be a very slow runner, but I’m only worried about improving my own time, not in beating anyone else. I read a lot of running blogs, and many of those people are faster than I could ever hope to be. Reading is not only something I enjoy, but in many ways it’s something I have trained—both as an “amateur” and professionally—to do. But the only goals that matter are my own. Nobody has to read or like the books I recommend here. I am not trying to be a taste-maker. Quite honestly, if I had only two or three readers who got something out of the conversation, I would be happy, because what ultimately matters to me is reading, in and of itself. I perform the act for the sheer joy of it, and nothing else.

Where the Magic Happens

Yesterday, I spent an inordinate amount of time between conference calls and editing projects avoiding my real work (writing) by looking at this site. I am fascinated by other people’s work spaces, particularly if those people happen to be writers.

Below are some of my favorite spaces. Some of these authors are familiar to me, and some of these authors are new–but I am curious about them just based on seeing where, as many of them jokingly say, “the magic happens”:

Nicholson Baker writes in his sunny kitchen

Peter Straub has the movie-set version of a writer's space

Joe Hill has the cover of True Grit hanging on his wall (and his dog is named McMurtry)--I must read his books

Lev Grossman's office looks professorial to me...

Cherie Priest shares a common pitfall for writers who work at home.

Tayari Jones can be productive on an airplane...I envy her.

Laurie Halse Anderson's office. Speaks for itself, I think. (No pun intended.)

And finally…below is my work space. I spent many years in cubicles that were brown or gray, with or without windows, that offered very little privacy.  Now I’m a marketing writer and I work from home, in this “office” that’s one side of my guest bedroom, but this is also where I write my blog posts, put too many library books on hold, watch Downton Abbey, and hope, someday, to write a story I actually send out to be published. I wrote all 48,278 words of my NaNoWriMo draft at this desk as well. Don’t laugh. Did you know The Night Circus started off as a NaNoWriMo project? (Take that, Laura Miller.)

Not exactly magic but I love it nonetheless...

The picture on my computer desktop is my husband, drinking a very large beer in the Marienplatz in Munich at the start of Oktoberfest. Our seats faced the Neues Rathaus and the Glockenspiel, and it was cold and rainy but fun anyway.

My assistant, Diva, napping on the job as usual...

I wish I were napping, but it’s back to work…Happy Thursday!

If David Mitchell Says It’s Okay…

If a book is so manky a dog that you’re going to regret reading it, you’ve only got yourself to blame if you do. I’m 42, I read maybe 25 books a year, with luck I’ll live another 40 years, which adds up to only 1000 books. I probably own more than a thousand unread books now. If, after 50 pages, a book isn’t doing anything for me, it’s time to say goodbye.

—David Mitchell. (source)

Reading as Conversation

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it – which comes to the same thing – is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake – not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him. —Excerpt from How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (source)

TSS: DNF, or DNWF?

I was looking through my books earlier this week, taking inventory for my TBR list, and I noticed something: I have a number of books in my TBR pile with bookmarks in them. I typically count these as part of my TBR, because to me, the fact that I deliberately left the bookmark in place means I clearly intended to return to the book at some point in the near or distant future.

This got me thinking: is there a difference between books one didn’t finish (DNF), and books one didn’t want to finish (DNWF)? For me, at least, the answer is yes. I’ve set down books and vowed to return to them later for any number of reasons: I was too busy with other things; a book I wanted to read more became available at the library; the book was fine but not matching my my mood.

For example, I remember the first time I read (or tried to read) Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I abandoned it maybe a quarter of the way through, but I left the bookmark in place. I think a number of reviews had compared it to The Secret History, which is a favorite book of mine, so the book wasn’t matching my expectations. It sat on the shelf for about a year, bookmark in place, and then one day I thought: I want to give that book another go. I plucked it from the shelf and started reading, not from the beginning but from where I had previously stopped. I read the whole thing quickly in a few days. When I got to the end of the book, I turned back to the beginning and read it again. Today I count it among my favorites.

That story isn’t typical for me–the books I pick up again and finish don’t generally strike such a chord–but it does make me think about all those other books on my shelf that I gave up on at some point. Not everything was abandoned with the best of intentions. Sometimes I simply dislike a book but feel I should finish it because I paid for it, or because the book is relevant to bloggers or the culture in some way and I don’t feel right joining a discussion when I haven’t read the book. For me, the prime example of such a book is We Need to Talk About Kevin. I’m not offended by the subject matter; I’m not even offended by the mother, as I know a lot of people have been. It’s an award-winner (Orange Prize); it’s an Important Book about Important Issues; it’s well-written; and now it’s a movie with Tilda Swinton. But I hated it. I hated it while I was reading it. As much as I love Tilda Swinton, I’m not sure I can bring myself to see the movie. But there it sits, with the bookmark at page 136. And so the question I face is this: is this book a DNF, or is it really a DNWF?

I still haven’t decided about that particular book, to tell you the truth. But with so many books on my TBR to get through, I think I need to be honest with myself in terms of the difference between books I set aside for later and books I was really kidding myself about because I felt guilty or because I felt I “should” read them. How about you: do you distinguish between books you plan to pick up again and books you know you’ll never finish?

Happy Sunday, everyone!

The Art of Fielding

Before we begin, you need to understand one thing: The Art of Fielding is not a baseball story; The Art of Fielding is a love story. Yes, that’s right: a love story.

College Sophomore Mike Schwartz spots Henry Skrimshander–where else?–on a baseball field on a late summer afternoon. Schwartz has an eye for potential talent, and he recruits Henry to play baseball for his team at Westish College, a small, private liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Most of the novel covers the last half of Henry’s third year at Westish, where he’s poised to be recruited by the major leagues until an accident knocks everything off kilter, including Henry’s game.

I’m having the worst time trying to describe this book and how wonderful it is. I feel like I’m not really ready to write about it, but it has to go back to the library (three days overdue) and so it feels like now or never. On the one hand, I simply want to gush “It’s so good, you have to read it!” However, I know that’s probably not enough. So what did I love about it? It’s not a tricky book–it’s not clever. It tells a timeless story of love, the ways we’re interconnected, whether through love or friendship or what we sometimes even think of as destiny.

“Follow your passion”–those are common words of advice nowadays. Do what you love and everything will seem easy. Henry embodies that idea; he wants only to play baseball. He loves it and he lives for it. Mike Schwartz’s passions are Westish College and unlocking the potential talent in his teammates (especially Henry), but he’s convinced he should become a lawyer in order to really “be somebody.” Guert Affenlight loves his job as president of the college, which was his alma mater–he left a tenured teaching position at Harvard to return–but he finds himself unexpectedly in love and ready to risk everything, including his relationship with his daughter, Pella. Pella has run away from her older husband in San Francisco and is in search of who she wants to become, and part of that means being a daughter again.

The people in this book alternately strive for and fight against the people and things they love. It sounds so simple, but in truth it’s so complex, and The Art of Fielding (which gets it name from a zen-like rumination on baseball, The Art of Fielding, written by Henry’s favorite baseball player, Aparicio Rodriguez) shows their struggles with such humor, love, and care that for me, it was almost impossible to put down.

Another central figure in the book is Herman Melville. At some point in the past, Melville had been invited to Westish College to speak. As a student, Guert Affenlight finds a long-forgotten transcript of Melville’s speech to the students of Westish College that changes the course of his life. He becomes a Melville scholar, eventually writing the seminal (no pun intended, ha ha) work on Melville called The Sperm Squeezers. The college erects a statue of Melville, and in honor of Moby Dick, it changes the name of its sports teams to the Harpooners. The Melville reference is important because Henry is much like the whale in Moby Dick. His existence takes on a special significance for everyone around him, while all he wants to do is what comes most naturally to him: play baseball.

I can tell I am not doing it justice, but I’m afraid that right now I cannot do much better. As Jackie pointed out, The Art of Fielding is also a campus novel, but without the irony that seems to attend many campus novels. Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot to me seemed more a novel of pedantry and academia, for example; Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons debunks the idea that a life of the mind matters at all, even at our finest institutions. The Art of Fielding is mostly sincere in its portrayal of American college life. It reminds us that school, college, university–this was a place where many of us (thought we) were deciding who we wanted to be, where we were trying to find that passion–whether it was a person or a thing–that would stay with us the rest of our lives. I hope this book stays with me. I have a feeling it will.

Some passages:

Fifteen minutes to game time. Schwartz, still dizzy, hauled himself to his feet. He would need two quarts of Gatorade to get through the final game, then a coffee and a can of dip for the long midnight drive. But first he headed for the far dugout, where the kid was packing up his gear. He’d figure out what to say on the way over. All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t walk away.

Henry slipped through a cool aperture between two buildings and emerged on a bright, bustling scene. This wasn’t Lankton CC: this was college in a movie. The buildings matched–each four or five stories high and made of squat gray weather-beaten stone, with deep-set windows and peaked, gabled roofs. The bike racks and benches were freshly painted navy.

Baseball–what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around. Affenlight looked about, bethinking his options. He had less than an hour. What he needed was a reason, an excuse, to circle over to the Milford side and thereby catch a glimpse of the person he was eager to glimpse. He scanned the visitors’ bleachers, and his eyes settled on two large, well-dressed men whose attitudes and accessories marked them as distinct from the other spectators. Affenlight, combining what he saw with what he’d lately heard, guessed that they must be professional scouts, here to see Harpooner shortstop Henry Skrimshander, a junior. Which seemed to afford the perfect excuse: he would pay his guests a cordial visit.

Affenlight found this hypothesis exciting, if dubiously constructed. Then he glanced at Aparicio, his hands folded mournfully in his lap, and his excitement curdled to embarrassment. Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

He wasn’t old but he looked it now, his arms limp at his sides, deep lines of worry scored into his forehead beneath his mussed solver-gray hair, his expression sand and beseeching. Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver? Ever since adolescence Pella had been gathering experience in the role of the younger person, the one clung-to, the beloved. That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.

The students’ mistakes lay ahead of them, were prospective and therefore glorious. His own lay in the past. They might have been glorious too, his own mistakes–at least, he would not change them for anyone else’s. He regretted only a single loss–those years he’d missed of Pella’s life, and the string of errors that led to a loss like that was so thick and knotted that he’d never found one end of the string, so that he could follow it in and up and around and figure out why. Perhaps he’d been too permissive and tolerant a parent, and thereby forced Pella to grow up too fast. Or perhaps he’d never been tolerant enough to accommodate  a girl pf Pella’s talents. Or perhaps he’d raised her perfectly, but every other parent in the world had miserably erred, and so Pella, precisely because of her perfect upbringing, had been forced to find her own way.

Book source: Library

TSS: The Great American Novel

Please forgive me for posting my Sunday Salon post on a Monday. I was busy and sick, sick and busy all weekend. If I wasn’t doing laundry, taking down the tree, or cleaning house, then I was sitting in a stupor most of the weekend. I finished The Art of Fielding Friday evening, and a post about that will be forthcoming this week, but first I wanted to talk about The Great American Novel.

I’d planned to write a Sunday Salon post about something else entirely, but when I saw this article in The Guardian (thanks, Largehearted Boy), I decided to switch topics. Essentially, the article is about all the hype The Art of Fielding is receiving. Neither The Guardian nor I believe that The Art of Fielding–as wonderful as it is–is The Great American Novel, mind you. But the article considers just exactly what The Great American Novel is, and how that concept has changed over the last four or five decades:

The Art of Fielding certainly cements the idea that a powerful new group of writers has emerged in America in the wake of Franzen’s success with his novels The Corrections and Freedom. The big beasts of US literature – Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth – who fought their battles, sometimes physically (“Lost for words again, Norman?” Gore Vidal said after being punched by Mailer) but more usually in intense, convoluted, poetic sentences, are mostly gone now.

Now, in the first place, for my part it’s a bit early to start including anything written in the last decade (or two–or three?) in the category of The Great American Novel. In this case, I side firmly with Matt Damon, who suggested that movies be shelved for about ten years before they are nominated for awards, because time tells us more than anything about what is possibly great enough to endure or deserve an award. That Jonathan Franzen is a pretty good writer and a media darling, I’ll grant you (and full disclosure: although I liked The Corrections, I don’t really get the hype). But it seems a bit early to say that he or Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace or any of our most of-the-moment literary darlings have ushered in a new era.

Of course, all of this begs the question: What is The Great American Novel? I don’t mean, what specific novel is The Great American Novel (although if you have one in mind, feel free to share your opinion); I mean, what qualities exactly does this mythical tome possess? What makes it so great? American themes? (And what are those, anyway? Striving? Pioneer spirit? God? War? Money? Baseball? Football?) Just to keep it simple, here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The “Great American Novel” is the concept of a novel that is distinguished in both craft and theme as being the most accurate representative of the zeitgeist in the United States at the time of its writing. It is presumed to be written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of the common American citizen. In historical terms, it is sometimes equated as being the American response to the national epic.

The national epic, in case you weren’t sure or didn’t click that link, is an epic poem, such as The Odyssey or The Aeneid. Interesting that the Wikipedia article also has a picture of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as the first visual representation of such a book in its article.

Given that definition…First, it raises the temporal issue I brought up earlier: while we may think a novel is great and an accurate portrayal of our world at the time it’s published, how will we really know, without the passage of time? Second, I don’t believe a “common American citizen” exists. (God help us if someone is writing a novel with Joe Sixpack as the main character, although then again…) We certainly have common American archetypes, and I suppose a great novel can treat those archetypes in interesting ways.  Or does a great novel actually define those archetypes, make us aware of them, bring them to bear on our literary culture?

Or does The Great American Novel these days mean the biggest book deal? The most references to things like iPod and Facebook and PowerPoint? Does it mean the movie rights sell early to someone like Aaron Sorkin or Sofia Coppola? Does it mean they have to teach the novel in school? Who decides?

Most of the novels whose names I hear thrown around as contenders–Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Rabbit, Run, Portnoy’s Complaint (or any other Roth novel), White Noise, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I guess, now, The Corrections–are all written by men. White men. Some of them Jewish. And while I’m not about to argue that any of those authors get it wrong or that those are not all what I think of as works of classic American literature, where is Ralph Ellison? Where is Toni Morrison? Where is Leslie Marmon Silko? Yeah, okay, I am getting into a canon discussion here, but I think you see my point.

Finally (for this post, anyway–I could chew on this topic forever), and perhaps most importantly, I wonder this: once something has become a thing (The Great American Novel) and someone can consciously set out to achieve that thing (write The Great American Novel), does it actually cancel out the whole idea of greatness? Does it mean a writer gives up something else, something perhaps more interesting, to follow a standard? I don’t have an answer for this one, but I’m inclined to think it does. I’m inclined to believe that a writer can only write The Great American Novel in response to all the other Great American Novels that have gone before it, so in fact it is a novel of type, but not necessarily great beyond being of that type. (I think I just broke a sweat.)

So what do you think about The Great American Novel? Does it exist? Should it exist? What book(s) would you choose?

Releases I’m Anticipating in 2012

This is the year my husband finally gets out of jail!

Kidding.

I’m actually talking about book releases in 2012. My husband is still in jail.

Seriously. He’s not in jail. He’s knocking around in the other room. He’s never done anything–that I know of–to deserve jail time. (My kidding is not meant to offend anyone whose spouse might be/has been in prison.)

Anyway, books. The other day on The Millions I came across a list of books being published in 2012, so from an extensive list of some very interesting new releases, I picked the ones I am anticipating the most. Never mind that I’ve committed not to buy anything for the first three months of the year (or that even after the first three months I still really have no business buying books)…Here they are:

Stay Awake, Dan Chaon. (February) I loved You Remind Me if Me, and I also enjoyed Await Your Reply, which I would love to re-read in the near future, as it was one of those books that didn’t leave a strong impression immediately but one that continued to linger and grow over the last couple of years. Stay Awake is his latest collection of short stories, which according to The Millions is “[populated] with night terrors, impossible memories, ghosts, mysterious messages, and paranoia.” Who wouldn’t want to read that?

Arcadia, Lauren Groff. (March) I have not read Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, but I remember it had mixed reviews from most bloggers. However, I did read her debut story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, in 2009 and I thought it was a knockout. Arcadia is about a boy who grows up in a utopian commune in New York state, and how growing up there influences the rest of his life.

The Cove, Ron Rash. (April) Ron Rash is one of those writers whom I’ve quietly followed even though I’ve never actually read any of his books. I have Serena out from the library now, but I’m already looking forward to this new one. According to The Millions: “The Cove, set in the North Carolina mountains during the First World War, is the story of Laurel Shelton and her war-damaged brother Hank, who live on land that the locals believe is cursed. Everything changes when Laurel comes upon a mysterious stranger in the woods, who she saves from a near-fatal accident.” This sounds like the sort of Southern/Appalachian Gothic tale I enjoy.

The Newlyweds, Nell Freudenberger. (May) I’ve read and enjoyed Freudenberger’s short stories in The New Yorker and in The Best American Short Stories, so I’m interested to see how she handles her first novel. From the book blurb: “Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. It’s a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient traditions–the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina because she is ‘straightforward’ and doesn’t ‘play games,’ each is hiding something from the other. Amina struggles to find her place in America–as a Muslim woman, an aspiring teacher, a wife with her own desires. But it is only when they put an ocean between them that Amina and George will discover whether they have a future–or if their secrets will tear them apart.” Sounds like an intelligent summer read to me.

Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter. (June) In 2011 I finally got around to reading The Financial Lives of the Poets, and while it wasn’t one of the best books I read, it was thoroughly enjoyable enough for me to know that I would gladly spend more time with Walter’s characters. The Millions says, “Beautiful Ruins, unfolds in 1962 when a young Italian innkeeper, gazing at the Ligurian Sea, has a vision: a gorgeous blonde woman is approaching in a boat. She’s an American movie starlet. And she’s dying. Fast forward to today, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a Hollywood studio’s back lot searching for the mystery woman he last saw at his seaside inn half a century ago.”

Broken Harbor, Tana French. (July) Two words: Tana French. Do I really have to say anything else? She is one of my favorite writers, and I loved her first three books–although The Likeness gets top honors. Broken Harbor follows a minor character from French’s last book, Faithful Place, as he investigates the murder of a father and two daughters. If her past books serve as an example, the writing will be terrific, the characters well-drawn, and the plot will be both complex and well-paced.

That at least covers the first half of the year. Any new releases you are anticipating in 2012?

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

I decided to pick up The Sense of an Ending after hearing an interview with the author, Julian Barnes, on NPR. This is the first of his novels that I’ve read, and I’m not familiar with much of his work, but after this I plan to seek out more of his work.

Tony Webster, an English man in his 60s, is briefly nudged out of his routine life as a retiree after he receives an odd, unexpected bequest from a former girlfriend’s mother. He’s been left 500 pounds and the diary of a former schoolmate. As it turns out, the former girlfriend, Veronica, refuses to hand over the diary. Tony sets out to reconnect with her so that he can retrieve it, or at least that’s what he tells himself on the surface of things.

The surface of things, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who other people in our lives are relative to ourselves and our own stories, is the premise of the book. Tony’s relationships with Veronica and Adrian did not end well, and at the beginning of the book he clearly blames each of them, but as he attempts to recover the diary from Veronica and revisits his past, he begins to re-frame what happened and his part in it.

The plot is thin, but I still don’t want to give too much away about the mechanics, because they are central to how Tony’s understanding of himself begins to change. The book begins with a series of images:

I remember, in no particular order:

–a shiny inner wrist;

–steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;

–gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;

–a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torch beams;

–another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;

–bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.

This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

In the first part of the book, Tony looks back at his past without telling the reader why he’s doing so, and he builds his story around the images he’s offered in the opening paragraph. The second part of the book is about his present quest to recover the diary. The opening of the book made me think of Brideshead Revisited, in that I expected the story of a formative relationship between classmates–and that is one element, although the relationship between Tony and Adrian is much different than the relationship between Charles and Sebastian. Adrian is somewhat of a mystery to Tony and the two other boys that make up their little group.

What I think Barnes does so well is to capture the overwhelming emotions of youth. I think we all have people from our pasts, people whom we may no longer keep in touch with or who may be gone, people we may not have ever been close to, really, in the first place, but who still hold sway over our memories, who still seem larger than life to us. It’s strange to think how people can stay trapped in our memories like insects in amber, forever frozen as who they were, even though in their present lives they might actually be quite different people.

The other thing that struck me as interesting about this book is how Tony must come to grips with how his own actions affected people in the past in ways he had never before realized or considered. In creating such large memories of people in our pasts, in holding on to what’s been done to us instead of what we have done, we somehow manage to diminish ourselves and our part in things. And in hanging on to our memories, we hang on to who we were then, even if it doesn’t suit who we are now.

As serious as all of this sounds, the book is not without humor. Tony is a likable, regular fellow for the most part, and he’s self-effacing and smart enough that you don’t mind spending time with him while he unravels everything that’s happened. He’s a bit like a friend who’s telling you an embarrassing story from which he’s not exactly going to emerge smelling like a rose, but you don’t mind because you like him anyway. You’re a lot alike, the two of you, and you’ve got stories of your own.

Some passages:

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire–and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you might muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records–in words, sound, pictures–you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

Book source: Library

Plans for the TBR Double Dare

Hello! As promised, I’m returning today with my list of prospects for the TBR Double Dare, which runs from January 1 to April 1. I signed up to read eight books, but I listed nine. And please forgive the photo–clearly I am not great with a camera!

From the shelves:

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. I actually had hoped to read this long ago, had even thought about having a read along way back when…

The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis. If I’m going to read the father’s first book, I might as well read the son’s first book, too, no? I originally asked for this because it was on a list that Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics, one of my favorite books) created of first novels everyone should read.

The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro. I have no excuse for not reading this book by one of my favorite authors, except that I keep forgetting I even have it on the shelf. No more!

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore. This is from the New York Review of Books series. I received it as a thank you for reviewing The Siege of Krishnapur in 2010. Guess it’s about time to read it.

The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton. Back in 2009 when I started this blog, it seemed like everyone was reading this book, so I asked for a copy as a gift, and like many others, it sat on my shelf untouched. Not this year.

Aiding and Abetting, Muriel Spark. I bought this from Better World Books just because it was ridiculously cheap (it’s a used copy) and because I had never read anything by Muriel Spark. If I read any reviews of it, I cannot remember where…

From the Kindle:

The Postmistress, Sarah Blake. I simply cannot wait to read this. I plan to read it as soon as I finish The Art of Fielding.

Small Island, Andrea Levy. Most of my picks are by British authors, so I thought this one would fit in nicely.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami. I plan to read this in January, mainly for some inspiration. I’m anxious to get back to a regular running routine, so I hope this will help me kick things off.

The terrific thing about this list is that it also applies to my other 2012 challenge, the Mount TBR Reading Challenge. You may have noticed that I chose rather slim volumes to read for the TBR Double Dare (although let’s face it, the NYRB picks are small but most likely quite dense), and that was no accident. I have plenty of big books to read later in the year, but my hope is that I can gain some momentum by reading the shorter books first. Nothing spurs me on like a sense of accomplishment, and frankly I don’t have as much reading time these days as I once did. I plan to make it a point to schedule time for reading during the day so I don’t end up doing what I do now, which is reading in bed and getting too sleepy before I get very far.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind about any f these books at any time, and pick up something else from my shelves if something really doesn’t seem to be clicking. But I plan to stick to my own books as much as possible, especially through the first half of the year. Here’s to making a dent in 2012!