Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

I’m supposed to give you my favorite quotes about books, but while I highlight them in the books I read (and I have an unbelievable amount of books about books and reading), I don’t tend to remember them except for Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. I still use this passage from The Situation and the Story to talk about literature with my students:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

Obviously, the terms “the situation” and “the story” work best with creative nonfiction, but I’d argue you could use these terms to talk about all literature. It’s all a bit emotional, isn’t it?

Otherwise, it might be more productive to list my favorite books about books:

1. The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick - The subtitle is “The Art of Personal Narrative,” which probably explains this better than I could. If you’re a creative nonfiction writer and you haven’t read this, get it immediately. Everyone should read it, though.
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - It’s a memoir of Iran, post-Revolution, mixed with sections on Henry James, Jane Austen, Vladmir Nabokov (Lolita), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby), all of which were/are banned in Iran.
3. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby - Volume one of his columns in The Believer. Dude’s funny. He lists all of the books bought that month, all of the books read (almost never as many), and writes about all of them with his trademark wit.
4. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt by Nick Hornby - The Believer columns, volume two.
5. Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby - The Believer columns, volume three. His words encouraging John Updike to write more are pretty damn funny. And somewhere among all three volumes Hornby admits he’s been buying a lot more than he has previously admitted.
6. The Bibliophile’s Devotional by Hallie Ephron - There’s a book picked for all 365 days of the year. You’ll never be so inspired to read.

I guess I should’ve listed literary criticism, right? The Highbrow (capital H) stuff, right? Eh. Go to hell. I also refuse to list Christopher Hitchens or Harold Bloom, though I do appreciate them because they’re so curmudgeonly. And I quite enjoy how angry Timothy Steele was about what T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did to traditional meter. But, eh. I gave you my favorites.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #9

You know I’m a sucker for beautiful words. Here are my very favorite words and passages and quotes from books I’ve read, as per my 30-Day Book Challenge:

1. Henry James qtd. in Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
2. “What Feminism Means to Me” in Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick
3. “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5. Washington Square by Henry James
6. Ernest Hemingway interviewed in The Paris Review Interviews Vol. I
7. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
8. Songbook by Nick Hornby
9. “Season of the Body” (title essay) by Brenda Miller
10. “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #8)

We’re going to have to stretch this to the last year plus a few months, because I need to tell you that despite the fact that in the last twelve/thirteen months I have read a terrible, terribly-written book (The Chocolate Cupid Killings) in a terrible mystery series—which, really, is so bad that I cannot remember whether I’ve read any of the books because they pass through me like White Castle—it does not compare to Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed and its sequel, Something Blue. Seriously. It’s not that Emily Giffin’s a terrible writer, or that her books are so terribly predictable that I knew they’d adapt them for a romantic comedy before I really knew. (This is true for the latter.) Her books are terrible because she continually hates on women’s bodies. Every single woman in these books is described not so much by her personality as by her body type, and how hard she works, but poor thing! she just can’t catch a break with her lumpy, cellulite-ridden body. And of course, this is why it is so surprising that the protagonist of the first book, Something Borrowed, manages to steal the guy away from her best friend—who has a perfect body. It’s not surprising or shocking that a friend would betray another. No! It’s surprising and shocking that a frumpy, slightly-overweight (but really, barely overweight in the grand scheme of things) friend would steal a guy/fiance from her really perfect, so-perfect-you-of-course-hate-her best friend. Anyway.

I’m sorry if my writing has gone to shit. I’ve been reading too much David Foster Wallace (and by “too much” I mean a lot, but there can never be enough), and he really makes these sort of sentences work for him, but stylistically, I can’t/don’t. And yet, I can’t stop myself right now because I don’t really care to try, nor will I rewrite these sentences because this is a blog and nobody will probably read them anyway.

Anyway. What I’m really trying to say here is that I used to not notice when women hated on other women’s bodies, and I used to take all of the judgment in, silently, and examine my own body for all its flaws and hate myself more and more. But now, I refuse to. I notice when women pick apart other women, and frankly, I don’t fucking appreciate it. Don’t read these books if you can help it. Read something else for fun.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #7)

As my friend Savannah noted, it’s too hard to pick just one book, especially when you’re reading in multiple categories, so I’m going to pick best books I read from those categories. These are my favorites from roughly this past year, May 2011 to May 2012:

• Young Adult Fiction: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver - So good I cried. I read it right before I went to Greece.
• Memoir: Wild by Cheryl Strayed - Amazing, honest, heartbreaking, and written by my favorite, Sugar.
• Essays: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace - Even the stuff I didn’t care about I cared about by the end (e.g. I have a new respect for David Lynch). I read it in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
• Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy & A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - Post-apocalyptic heartbreak and ageing heartbreak. I read A Visit from the Goon Squad while I was in the UP of Michigan, working on my thesis.
• Classics: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - I guess it’s a love story, but for me, it’s always going to be a story about a woman finding strength in herself and strength in her gender. I read it in Michigan, too.
• Poetry: The Stranger Manual by Catie Rosemurgy - If you haven’t read this, run to the nearest computer and order it off of Amazon, and then read “Miss Peach Gets Lucky” on Structure & Style.
• Drama: The Oresteia by Aeschylus - It’s the only new drama I read, I think, and I didn’t always love, love, love The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and Eumenides). But I acknowledge the importance of reading ancient Greek literature while actually being in Greece.

Moral to this story: Place and time in my life play a big role in what I’m reading and how much I like it.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #6)