Tag Archives: reading

The Lucretius Club, or Why We Don’t Drink out of Teacups

So I’m 23 years old, and I’m trying not to drop my teacup, because the professor’s wife might come home, and how to explain our illicit tea-drinking club?  I was a nubile blonde back then, no, a nervous nubile blonde, he said fondly, and despite our difference in status, we enjoyed our Lucretius-translating tea parties.

For the first time, atoms were clicking around in my head. Lucretius adored atoms, and I began to understand physics.  Incredible, isn’t it?  what poetry and Epicurean philosophy can teach you.

The prof always offers milk and sugar.

“No, thanks,” I say.  I can balance a cup of tea on the saucer, but not the spoon.

He and I were sort of friends, sort of buddies, really.  We talked in the conference room about what novels we were reading until an irate professor ordered us to go to the lounge so he “could think.” My laid-back prof recommended  Rosellen Brown and Barbara Pym, while I urged him to try Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Andre Dubus.  

Reading was our passion: that was our bond. While waiting at the reserve desk for the return of a scholarly journal on reserve at the library, I devoured the short stories of Raymond Carver and John Updike in The New Yorker. The library inevitably had only one copy of the journal with the assigned article, so I sometimes had to read the entire New Yorker.

But the Lucretius club was the highlight of the semester. Our bubbly casual chats about philosophy, broken up occasionally by literary analysis, bridged the gap between student and professor. In retrospect, he was a charming older man, though I took his charm entirely for granted. When you’re young, everyone is charming to you, because you see the world more kindly.

The memory of those rattling china tea cups remind me of Lucretius and his atoms.  I drink tea in mugs these days – they’re more stable, and hold more tea – but I might take out the old china in homage to this long-dead brilliant professor.

Carol Shields’ Autograph:  Where’s My Copy of “Larry’s Party”?


Somewhere in a box I have an autographed copy of Carol Shields’s novel, Larry’s Party.  At least I think it’s in a box.  I’ve searched the S shelves, and it is not with Shields’s other books.  That’s the problem with moving:  you never get around to unpacking all the boxes.  The Guardian publishes a Q&A interview series called “The Books of My Life.” My husband says it should be called “The Books of My Wife.” He has book radar: if anyone can find Larry’s Party, he can.

“Didn’t we go see her?” he asked.

“Yes, we went to a reading. She read from Larry’s Party.”  

The turnout was small: perhaps 20 people. Embarrassing. Didn’t the word get out? I’d expected a crowd of fans of The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Prize in Canada. (She qualified for both prizes: she grew up in the U.S. but moved to Canada.)

We all loved Carol Shields, a brilliant, charming woman and lively reader who spun out answers to our questions so that they seemed more intelligent than they were.

And then we lined up to get our books signed.  The man in front of me was very vivacious. He said he and his wife had looked forward to their commute while they read aloud Larry’s Party on their way to and from work.

“It’s your best book yet,. Thank you for writing it.” Hand on heart. He bowed.

I couldn’t top the courtly man’s anecdote. “I love your books,” I may have said. Verbal exclamation points! I may have mentioned a favorite book, though I don’t know which that would have been.

Since I can’t find Larry’s Party, which won the Orange Prize, by the way, I am rereading one of her early novels, The Box Garden (!977), and loving it.  Actually, it is better than Larry’s Party, but I still hope to find that missing book.

I’ll let you know!

The Way We Live Now

Last week we reorganized our books. We have over 1,000 books, distributed in bookcases throughout the house. Most of them are in alphabetical order, but we now have a Jane Austen section, a Bronte section, a Conrad section, and a Dickens section.  Most of these books have introductions, but not all have footnotes. (That’s why I often opt for Penguins.)  I used to skip the footnotes, but now enjoy the odd mix of trivia and essential information. I feel affection for the footnote writers who educate us about barouches, carriages, and 19th-century dialect.  

When I was getting used to the city, I bicycled daily to the public library to “rescue” discarded books. The main library was divesting itself of classics and out-of-print 20th-century books. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Sir Walter Scott abounded.  I also found D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim books and the Dutch mystery writer Willem Van de Wetering’s autobiographical books about Zen.

By the way, none of these were rare books.  Most were stained, smudged, dog-eared, you name it.  If they’d ever had value, they had none now.  All I could do was save them from the dumpster.

When you have opted out of the work force, you read more than normal people do. You don’t read all the time – I don’t mean to imply that – but at least three or four hours a day.  The complete works of Horace? Yes.  The complete works of Edith Wharton?  Of course.  Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands and E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady books? Affirmative.  And there was time for David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Caroline Gordon’s short stories, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

I was living, more or less, in a world of old-ish and ancient literature.  “Has school started?” a man quipped one summer day when I had spread out my notebooks and reference books on a table at a coffeehouse. 

But most people are oblivious of what you’re reading in public. Conducting a business on your laptop?  Boring, at worst.   Reading in a foreign language?  A nutcase, but no one comments on it.  Delving into reference books and taking notes?  Possibly a teacher or lawyer.  And then there are the conversationalists who talk about their intimate lives.  We listen, because the acoustics make it impossible not to.

That’s where I learned that the plans for a summer bluegrass festival had gone awry.  The young woman, the assistant director, had been fired for an “indiscretion,” as she called it.  She Had Had An  Affair with the Married Director.  More than an indiscretion, I thought.  People were fired all the time for less.  One of my friends, a popular teacher at a private school, was fired for giving C’s to students who had rich, influential parents.  But for the grace of gods… fortunately, the better and the best students signed up for my classes, so I didn’t have that dilemma. 

At one time I was a loudmouth like that fired assistant director.  Not only did I talk freely about my opinions of everything under the sun, I often referred to people by first and last names.  “Jane Bowers said…”  as if it were necessary to distinguish her from all the other Janes.

One day I was reading a Russian novel when a “frenemy” rushed over and confronted me because she and I had applied for the same job. “You ruined my chances!” she shrieked.  Wait, what, why… And what business was it of hers? Neither of us got the job. But “I’m glad you didn’t get it,” a friend who worked there said.  “You’re too nice.”  And one of the supervisors told me privately, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, Kat.” 

All I can say is, it is a good thing I am bookish.  Books have gotten me through every crisis in my life.  After a hospitalization, I binge-read Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles and Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool.  I took notes on what people read on the bus.  Mostly it was the newspapers, but there were also The Cat Who... mysteries, the latest Oprah book, and a book about Andy Warhol.

A friend who died in her early 40s asked me:  Do you think it’s enough to have been a reader in life? 

Yes, I do.  I adamantly do.  No one at her memorial service mentioned her love of books, and come to think of it, I have never heard anyone at a memorial service mention the love of reading.

But, believe me, she was bookish, and if she had lived, I would have found out about twice as many books.

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The Muddle of Acronyms:  Do You “DNF?”

The other day my husband and I ate popcorn and drank Diet Snapple in front of a BookTube vlog chat. “Why didn’t you DNF it?” the thirtysomething vlogger asked a guest.

My husband is new to BookTube. “What’s DNF?”  he asked me.

“’Did not finish.’” How I know this, where I learned this, how I translated it I cannot say.  It’s just there, it’s in the air, it’s on the internet. 

The guest vlogger told the hostess that he didn’t DNF because the book was a prize finalist and “too serious.”  He seemed shocked by the DNF question.

He’s a little older than his vlogger hostess, so perhaps he isn’t as casual about putting aside a book. It probably is a generational thing.  We didn’t grow up DNF-ing. In general I finish the books I start, though I recently gave up re–reading David Copperfield after 300 pages. 

My husband vaguely disapproves of the DNF concept. Only under extraordinary circumstances does he not finish a book. I do reject many new, much-lauded books, but I admit, I can’t remember not finishing a book till my thirties, when I gave up on the fifth volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Perhaps if we’d had the acronym DNF we wouldn’t feel obligated to finish our books. Language does influence our views.  And DNF is so cute: I like the sound of it, but on some level it trivializes the act of finishing a book. It implies that we deserve instant gratification, and that we should stop reading any book that ceases to amuse us. It’s not to stick it to the man, like Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner; we’re giving up the race because we’re self-indulgent.

Still, David Copperfield is a shocking book to DNF, isn’t it?  But perhaps I didn’t quite DNF it, since I’ve already read it four times.

Dead or Alive: What Makes a Good Reading Year?


Was 2024 a good reading year?

Every year is a good reading year because I am picky-picky-picky. I don’t finish a book unless it is (a) fascinating, (b) well-written, and (c) works some kind of spell on me. You know, Girls just want to have fun! But we also are earnest. I don’t care if it is the Book of the Year, I don’t care if if it wins every award, I’m blasé about reviews in the mainstream presses – but I seem to be able to pick the books that are right for me.

Every century is different. The twentieth century was different. So many voices and styles characterize an era. One minute you’re enchanted by Jean Stafford’s Pulitzer Prize winning short stories, next you’re reading Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust, then you’re taking a break with Sue Grafton’s mysteries, then you are lost in Frank Herbert’s Dune, and then you discover the brilliant Margaret Drabble.

The New Yorker had a great influence on everybody. We were mad about the minimalist stories of Raymond Carver. And I remember going to bookstores all over town to find Bobbie Ann Mason’s books, though it might have been Harper’s or The Atlantic that drove me.

So why have I returned to the classics and the dead? It is partly due to a long illness. Once, when I was extremely ill in the hospital, I finally recovered enough to read a little. I chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I realized what I needed was the highest quality. And the doctor decided I was ready to leave the hospital when he found me reading Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). The doctor loved foreign languages and was impressed to meet a soulmate. The nurses informed me he knew eight languages.

Perhaps Jane Austen and Lucretius kept me alive. (Well, there was also medicine.) But there is no doubting the magic of literature. Fate brought these books to me when I needed them most.

Reading in the Adirondack Chair

Not an Adirondack chair but the same spirit.

We used to have webbed cloth lawn chairs, which were uncomfortable for reading, but the Adirondack chair is perfect. I sit there drinking “blue” tea (the color of the teabag wrapper) and slouching to avoid the too-friendly bees.  And do you know you’re supposed to talk to the bees?  I learned the latter from a novel by Elizabeth Goudge.

Here’s what I recommend: Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), a family saga about three generations of Native American women.  Written in the present tense, it is told from the points-of-view of three women, Rayona, who runs away from home, her mother, Christine, who grew up in the sixties and worried about her male friends’ Draft numbers, and finally Rayona’s grandmother, Ida.  On the first page: “We play solitaire on the sliding deck pulled across the foot of the electric bed….  [Mom’s] round face is screwed into a mask of concentration, like a stumped contestant on “Jeopardy” with time running out.” 

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s The Years, another family saga about three generations, only this has a multitude of characters. We follow the complex web of the Pargiters from 1880 to the 1930s. One of Woolf’s most traditional novels, but my favorite.

I hope you’re enjoying your summer reading and have a good weekend!

The Daily Planner:  Notebooks in a Box, Version with Complete Essay from Notebook

I used to whine about the closing of The Daily Planner, a New York stationery store that sold its wares online.  I ordered the most splendid notebooks and notepads over the years.

And then The Daily Planner closed.

“Goddamn it!  Where am I supposed to get notebooks now?”

There was Target, there was K-Mart, there were office supply stores.  But I could not find any of the brands from the Daily Planner. 

And then… Eureka!  I was looking through a box today and found four notebooks from the Daily Planner. The orange Nava Notes notebook was still in the cellophane wrapping.  I’m clutching it to my bosom.

Let me very briefly catalogue these notebooks.

  1. An oversized orange Nave Notes paperback notebook. I love the quality of the paper and the spaces for Year, Day, and Month in tiny letters at the top of each page.  I used my first Nava Notes  for a book journal, but plan to be more eclectic now. .
  2. An oversized Clairefontaine green-and-purple pad (size A4, made in France).  Clairefontaine is known for its silky paper,  but, hilariously,  I used it to scribble an essay on the modern obsession with  butts.  (Essay below this list.)
  3.  a Miquelerius black and red spiral notebook, in which I have scribbled a strange story, or God knows what.    
  4. A light blue, aesthetic Apica spiral notebook, made in Japan.  I used it for notes on various Latin stuff I was reading.   There is a whole page on Latin synonyms for “conspire” and “conspiracy.”

And here is , yes, my infamous essay on butts, even cigarette butts.

Nobody ever talked about the Beatles’ butts.

On the cover of Abbey Road, John, Paul, Ringo and George are crossing Abbey Road. Their long suit jackets “cover their asses.” George wears jeans with a denim shirt tucked in. His butt is flat. I guess the question is, do John, Paul, and Ringo have butts? And the second question is: Do we care?

Personally, I’m more interested in their footwear.

John: white sneakers. George: white or tan desert boots. Ringo: black shoes. Paul: barefoot. Paul also holds a cigarette.

It’s 1969.  Were people showing off their butts? I don’t think so. Not unless they were Bridget Bardot. I don’t think Twiggy had  a butt. People “covered their asses” or “saved their asses.” Butts were also the ends of cigarettes. Unfortunate people are the butts of jokes.

But suddenly in the twenty-first century everything was about butts.  Women, by the way, are allowed to be flat-chested again – the first time since the 1920s flappers probably- because everything is about the cute, firm butt. To achieve that miracle, women are expected to work out at gyms and become as muscular as men: people in photos in the 1960’s and ’70s looked softer.

The obsession with butts is perhaps a bit scatological.

I’m too busy to think about it. But it’s very twenty-first century.

I am so silly. This is perfect blog fare. Sorry if I offended anyone.

I am normally in realistic mode, though.  No optimism about the future of the (daily) planet for me! I will use my new-old notebooks to  become a POSITIVE person. YES, I AM GOING TO LIVE MY LIFE AS A FANTASIST!

“Saw a unicorn today.”  Who cares if it’s a deer:  I say it is unicorn.

“Saw Gollum talking on a cell phone at a coffee house.”   

“A Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sighting in Omaha.”

“Shelley Duvall comes back to life and will star in a new movie.”  (I loved Shelley Duvall.)

I’ll fly in my house to the mall this afternoon.  It’s the new transportation.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?  DO YOU KNOW THESE GREAT BRANDS OF NOTEBOOKS?  WHAT BRAND, OR NON-BRAND, DO YOU USE?

LET ME KNOW.

The Reader at Large

There you are, on the bus, head in a book, headed home. You even have bedhead.   The woman next to you told you this. 

Having done her hairdo duty, she asks, “Is your book good?”

Am I Holden Caulfield?  Is she Ackley?  Do I dare say, “This sentence is terrific”?  

Maureen Howard (1930-2022)

Now it’s not always like that.  Many passengers are readers, or at least sympathetic to readers.  Sometimes they read a library book.  Sometimes they read on their phone.  I am, at present, reading a Penguin of Maureen Howard’s autobiographical novel, Bridgeport Bus. 

But there is much bustling, what with bicyclists struggling to hitch their bike on the rack on the front of the bus  (Driver:  “I’ve got to get moving, man!”), the homeless guy dragging his garbage bags down the aisle (some of us give up our seats, so we don’t trip over his bags later), men getting hysterical over baseball chat (“Go, team?”), and overhearing noisy conversations about private subjects.

No food and drink are allowed on the bus..  I once had to leave a coffee on the curb. I asked the driver, “Do you want me to litter?” He just raised an eyebrow.

When the reader at large get off the bus, she gallops home, changes into her pajamas, and flops on the couch. And finally she can enjoy the following comic conversation between mother and daughter.

 “Tess Mueller is coming over with their nice son who works at the bank.”…

“That’s a shame,” I tell my mother, “because tonight I’m going to the library in New Haven.”

“The library, the library!” – shrieks of coronary outrage.

This witty early novel by Maureen Howard, published in 1965, is one of my favorites. Some, but not all, of her later books are less straightforward, even experimental, so I recommend Bridgeport Bus as a starter book,

The critically-acclaimed Howard doesn’t seem to be well-known anymore, and that’s a shame. Her books are uneven, but her best are stunning. She was a great American writer.

Reading by Whim: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader

In an essay at the TLS, Ian Sansom gently mocks bookish New Year’s resolutions. Some readers bustle pompously, declaring it the Year of Proust – and perhaps getting a book out of it.  But Sansom’s plans to devote the year to Dickens, Henry James, or Simenon always fail.  By February, he is back to reading what he likes when he likes, “in as disorganized and haphazard fashion as always.”

I belong to the club of reading by whim – but I embrace it.  On New Year’s Eve, I, too, make grandiose plans, then abandon them in favor of independent reading.  I might declare it a year of reading Jane Austen – which is every year – or The Year of Finishing Proust – because I got stuck halfway through the fourth volume.  But then I pounce on Nobel Prize winner Anatole France’s Penguin Island, so smart and witty that all else must be put on hold.

Our hectic over-planning in modern life may be due to the ravages of the internet.   In the days of dial-up, online book groups throve but had a greater air of spontaneity.  We voted every month on the book we wanted to read, rather than waiting for someone to choose it for us. Nowadays, at blogs, vlogs, and other social media, there are countless organized reading events, which seem popular, if lonely.  There’s nothing that dashes hopes of intelligent conversation like a Twitter discussion of War and Peace. 

What is wrong with reading on one’s own, according to whim or mood? Why must everything be planned or directed?  Does it matter if I read Annie Ernaux this month or next year?  Does Gogol have to be on my reading calendar – say, for July 9 – or can I read him whenever?  And will I get my knuckles rapped if I take a day off to read a Mrs. Pollifax mystery?  (Yes, probably.)

In a house full of books, it is unnecessary to make reading plans.

May I Have This Book, Please? & Literary Links

May I have this book, please?

I am speaking of Two Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson, the new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When I read a review today in The Guardian, I was very excited. Oh, my God, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I said ecstatically to my husband. Could we go to the bookstore and pick it up?

Unfortunately, we could not, because it will not be published here till August. This happens so often. Why can it not be published at the same time as the UK version?

Well, I can always reread Barrett Browning. I have a pink copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems, a little the worse for wear for being in the mudroom for ten years. I paid 40 cents for this at the Planned Parenthood book sale.

Of course we all read Robert Browning, but Elizabeth Barrett used to be overlooked. And yet readers everywhere know the opening line of her famous sonnet:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Time to beat the gloom of February by reading some of her poems.

AND NOW FOR LITERARY LINKS.

  1. Will Self is writing a series of essays on reading for Lit Hub. And I think you will be especially intrigued by the autobiographical bits in the first one, How Should We Read?

Raised by bookish but undisciplined parents, I always felt I had just about the best introduction to reading imaginable: my American mother’s modish novels and zeitgeisty works on psychology mingling on the shelves with my English father’s English canonical tastes and his motley collection of philosophical texts (many of which came from my autodidactic grandfather’s own extensive library). And there were plenty of other books as well—acquired by my brothers or me at second-hand stores and flea markets. Nobody was remotely precious about these volumes: they were there to be read not revered. And since my parents had also decreed—in order to inculcate us with their own bookish tendencies—that we could have no television, reading was pretty much all we had to do: there was no street life in leafy middle class English suburbia in the 1960s, unless you liked watching lawns grow.

2. This week, the TLS published a review of Dorothy Whipple’s Random Commentary, first published in 1966, ” an assortment of writings from note-books and journals,” and reissued by Persephone.

Are you a fan of Dorothy Whipple? Persephone has been reviving her novels for years. I have enjoyed some of them, though I am not a mad Whipple fan. I remember reading a more or less “Virago vs. Persephone” article (in the Guardian?), in which one of the Virago editors said they never crossed “the Whipple line.” Well, Whipple is middlebrow, but some of the Viragos are too.

Anyway, the reviewer says,

We first meet Whipple in the mid-1920s. After her first love was killed during the First World War, she marries her employer, Henry Whipple, the director of education for Blackburn. She also struggles to establish herself as a writer, failing to sell a short story for five years. Modesty regarding her writing abilities and gentle wit suffuse these diaries. Whipple repeatedly berates herself for not working hard enough. Procrastinating, staring out of the window, or poking the fire – anything but writing: “When I have time to work, I don’t want to. When I haven’t time, I want to”. Whipple begins new drafts before finishing previous versions. Working on one book, she always wants to be working on another; “shaping and polishing” is her favourite part of the writing process. When her first novel, Young Anne (1927), is accepted for publication, the relief is palpable: “I’m not lost any more”.

Have a great reading weekend, whether you choose Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Dorothy Whipple, or someone else entirely.