Reading post: Books from the shelves by my bed

April has ended, so it is time for another reading challenge update. In April I aimed to read books from the shelves to the right of my bed above my nightstand -- shelves which are not supposed to have any unread books on them. I chose five books to read, all of which I finished.

1. Jason's Quest by Margaret Laurence. A children's book by the famous Canadian author (I love her Manawaka novels). It's a discard from the Palo Alto Public Library, so I must have picked it up at a Friends of the Library sale, eons ago. It started clumsily, but most of it was entertaining. I'm keeping it -- mainly because it's by Margaret Laurence, but also because it's very sweet. I'm only sorry I didn't read it to the kids when they were younger. They would have enjoyed the cat characters.
   
   
2. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams. This is a memoir by the author of Refuge, a book I really liked, so I thought I'd like this, but I had some trouble getting started -- which is why it was sitting on my shelves, unread. It seemed a little too precious, too beautifully written, too English department-y. Fortunately, once I forced myself to read it, I enjoyed it. The premise is that Terry's mother, just before dying of cancer at the age of 54, told Terry she was leaving her all her journals. But the journals turned out to be blank. As Terry writes about her own life, she dips in and out of the question of those blank journals. By the end they seem like a wonderful mystery.
   
   The one bit I didn't like was Chapter XXXI, about a time when a crazy man tried to kill her. She blames herself for (a) not refusing his advances and (b) not telling anyone other than her husband about him, neglecting to warn other women. No, no, I wanted to reach into the book and say to her. It is not your fault. This is what bad men do, this is how women are taught to respond. I wanted to send her an article ("Just Say No: The use of Conversation Analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal" by Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith, Discourse & Society, 1999). I wanted to say, it's OK, it's not you. Don't blame yourself. And of course then I started thinking about my own bad experience, decades ago, and I had to sit and be angry for a while before I could go on with the book.
   
   Anyway, I'm keeping this.
   
   
3. Wicked Things by Thomas Tessier. Tessier wrote one of my two favorite ghost stories of all time, Fog Heart (my other favorite is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House), so I thought I would like Wicked Things, but I didn't. It's Tessier trying to be Stephen King. I'm not a big King fan, and this isn't a very good imitation of him anyway. The "bonus novella" included, Scramburg, U.S.A., isn't scary at all. After reading this I decided that I do not need to read all of Tessier, nor do I need to collect him (I'll just keep Fog Heart and read it yet again). I put this in the "donate" pile.
   
   
4. We Were Amused by Rachel Ferguson. In A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym, Hazel Holt describes how Barbara and her sister Hilary loved to invent "sagas" about other people, and she mentions Rachel Ferguson's 1931 novel The Brontës Went to Woolworths as an example of a "saga" and this 1958 memoir as giving further information about them. I enjoyed The Brontës... but the memoir was difficult. First, Rachel Ferguson was born in 1892 and she's writing mostly about her childhood and young adulthood, and the references are so obscure. She namedrops constantly, and half the names mean nothing to me. Second, the book was published in 1958, the year of her death, which suggests that she may not have quite finished it before she died. Or perhaps I hope that, because the book is such a hodgepodge. Incredibly detailed when it comes to her childhood, but missing so much. Like... did Ferguson ever have a romantic relationship? Instead, she lists every kind of candy she used to like that isn't sold anymore. Finally, her politics are so conservative as to be almost funny... until the last chapter, when she goes off on a harangue against immigrants that started to make me feel sick, all about how "darkies" were taking up space in hospitals that white people need.
   
   I'm not going to keep this book. I can't imagine why I would want to read any part of it again and I very much don't want to read that last part. I also don't want to loan it to anyone for that reason. It's bound for Goodwill. Or the dustbin.
   
   
5. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I've read bits and pieces of this before, and a few years ago (when I was reading Civil War era books) I tried to read it all, but failed. So this time I set myself a certain number of pages per day and worked away at it for a couple of weeks. It was rough going in parts, but I did finally finish, on Friday. And I'm glad I read it -- there is some wonderful poetry in there. I read the "deathbed edition" which is the most complete, and partway through I read an article which recommended reading the first edition instead, which is about one third as long and still contains most of the best stuff. I can see how that would have been more enjoyable. Anyway, I'm keeping it. It's back on the shelf. And I've just started reading a biography of Whitman, because I want to know more about him. It probably would have been better to read the biography and the poetry at the same time, but I had to wait for Prospector to find the book and send it to me.
   
   

For May we move on to the white Ikea bookcase next to those shelves. This bookcase has what's left of my mystery collection (I thinned it extensively a few years ago), fiction by authors with last names A to H, the books I decided to keep from my Black, Native American, and Japanese/Japanese-American reading challenges, and a lot of random books on the bottom shelf. 

In other words, there are too many books in this bookcase and it would benefit from some additional thinning. 

There are also some Barbies and a lot of other random junk on the shelves -- lotions, scissors, surgical gloves, pens, boxes, a framed photo of my grandmother with her mother, etc. This is actually the bookcase AFTER a lot of FlyLady decluttering. What can I say -- it's my house, my side of our bedroom. Rocket Boy's side isn't much better (no Barbies, though).

I went through the bookcase and pulled out books that I've never read, or never finished. I kept checking books that I thought I'd read, but wasn't sure, against my master list and not finding them there. Really? I've never read that? Apparently not. I wasn't expecting to find SIXTEEN unread books in this bookcase, but there they are.

I haven't chosen my five yet. I might read more than five (once I finish the Whitman bio). I just don't know. This is a little overwhelming. I'll be back on June 1st to let you know how I did.