- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). In 2018, Jill Lepore wrote an essay about Mary Shelley and her masterpiece in The New Yorker, and ever since then I've thought about reading it. I wish I'd reread the article before I did, but rereading it afterwards was worthwhile too. Lepore's analysis is excellent, and I'd forgotten her comparison of the monster's story with a slave narrative. I don't want to read this book again (it's very depressing), but I'm glad I finally read it and I'm definitely keeping it.
- Burmese Days by George Orwell (1934). I think this book has survived various bookshelf purges because I thought I might like to read about Burma in the 1920s. But when I actually sat down with it, I felt queasy. A review on Amazon claimed there were "no likable characters" in it. I hate books like that. I decided to read 50 of the 287 pages and then decide. Well, surprisingly, I liked it (and several characters were at least somewhat likable). I'm not sure I'd actually recommend it to anyone, but I liked it enough that I'm going to keep it (in case I want to refresh my memory of Orwell's take on Burma/Myanmar in the 1920s).
- Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951). This is a curious one. I took Latin in junior high/high school and Greek in college, and I still have a shelf of Greek and Latin books in the bookcase in the dining room (see below). So you'd think a novel based on the life of the late Roman emperor Hadrian would appeal to me. And it did, which is why I own it, but I'd never managed to read it before. This month I forced myself to, but I don't know. I read Joan Acocella's essay on the book in The New Yorker (February 2005) and found it much more interesting than the book itself. Yourcenar is a beautiful writer, and in Hadrian she had a fascinating subject, but I didn't find the book fascinating. I kept thinking, this would be better as nonfiction. Oh well, I'll probably keep this. It's the kind of book that is useful to have read, and I might want to refer to parts of it again.
- Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1957). One of my many failures as a reader is that I have never read Nabokov. As a teenager, I skimmed my parents' copy of Lolita, but that's about it. My parents owned Pnin too (I have their copy), and I've read Chapter One several times, but could never seem to get any further. This time, I read the whole book in one day, and I've been puzzling over why it took me so many years! Pnin is the story of a Russian immigrant, partly based on Nabokov himself. Nabokov makes fun of Pnin the character, and that may have been what stopped me from going further than Chapter One -- I don't like reading about pathetic people. But later in the book Pnin has a few successes, for instance, he's very good at croquet. More importantly, the book as a whole humanizes Pnin. I'm glad I finally read this, and yes, I'll try to read more Nabokov in the future.
A side note: in one chapter, Nabokov says something about how among people, there are solids and there are surds (Pnin is a surd). What on earth is a surd, I wondered. So I googled it and discovered that it can mean someone who is irrational or lacking in sense, a creative intellectual, something like that. While googling, I also discovered a book by the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany called Of Solids and Surds, so I requested it from the library. It's part of the Yale University Press series called Why I Write. I read it, expecting it to refer to Pnin, but it did not -- he does briefly mention Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire, and apparently the word "surd" appears in Pale Fire too. However, partway through, Delany talks about a novel he wrote called Phallos, in response to -- wait for it -- Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. So I requested Phallos from the library too. It's supposed to be quite pornographic (the title is a clue). I can hardly wait... - The Emperor of Ice Cream by Brian Moore (1965). An old friend gave me this book, eons ago (40 years?) and said it was good. I've never had any interest in reading it, but it's moved around with me through the years. I read the first page once or twice and set the book down again. This time, I persevered, and what do you know? It is a good book, well written, about a young man named Gavin (he ages from 17 to 19 over the course of the novel) in WWII-era Belfast who joins the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) because he's failed his school leaving exams and doesn't know what else to do. Not much happens: we meet his fellow ARP members, he has a difficult relationship with a girlfriend and with his father, and he struggles with his conscience. In the end, Belfast is bombed and Gavin, finally doing the job he's been trained for, realizes that he's become an adult. I'm going to keep this for now, and I also might try to read some of Moore's other novels.
- Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (1965). I acquired this paperback after my trip to Japan in 1986 and then never read it. I suppose I thought it would be depressing. It is of course a terrible, horrifying story, but I didn't find it depressing. It's actually a really good book -- yet another that I put off reading for whatever reason and then ended up liking a lot. It's about a man, Shigematsu Shizuma, who was on the outskirts of Hiroshima when the bomb went off, so he was injured, but didn't die. It's told as a story within a story: the outer story takes place a few years later, when Shigematsu and his wife are trying to get their niece Yasuko married, but there is some question as to whether Yasuko suffered radiation sickness from the bomb. To prove that she didn't, Shigematsu digs out his old diaries of what happened right after the bomb, to him and his wife and Yasuko. These diaries, as well as a few others from other people, form the inner, primary story of the book. They are based on the real diaries of the real Shigematsu Shizuma, so although this is a novel, it hews closely to the truth. I definitely recommend it. It's like a real-life dystopian novel, very interesting.
- Cheyenne Autumn by Mari Sandoz (1953). I left this for last because I thought it would be a good thing to read when we visited Yellowstone. It probably would have been, too, but I couldn't read it. It's just too horribly, impossibly sad. I thought I could handle it, after my year of reading books by/about American Indians. Nope. I decided to keep it, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to read it. I read the first few pages and then skimmed through some other parts -- and then all through the trip I kept thinking about the few lines I'd read and how sad they were. I kept looking at all the open country and thinking, why couldn't the Indians have stayed here? There are hardly any people, period, in Wyoming and Montana -- why did white people have to kill all the buffalo and most of the Indians and make the rest of them live on crummy reservations and then not give them enough food to survive? I take some responsibility for this because, since my people have been here for so long, undoubtedly I'm distantly related to some of the people who did the deeds (not to mention how I've indirectly benefited from what they did). But I don't know what to do with that responsibility.
We have a very small, crowded house, and a LOT of books, even though I keep sorting through them and giving them away.
This bookcase is full of things I've never read. Some of them are reference books, and thus not meant to be read cover to cover. Some are grammars of exotic languages, the remnants of my PhD in linguistics. The top shelf has Latin and Greek textbooks, somewhere in the middle are half a dozen baby name books, and on the bottom shelf there are yearbooks, some boxed record albums -- operas, mostly -- and the compact Oxford English Dictionary, complete with microscope. I remember the day my father brought that home from the office. We happily looked up all the dirty words we could think of.
However, there are some books in here that are meant to be read, many of which I've never had the pleasure. So I pulled out ten of them to entertain me this month. I'm not going to try to read all ten. I'll be lucky if I get through four or five. I think some of them are probably really out of date, and so I may find that they're not worth keeping (or reading).
But we'll see. Should be another interesting month.
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