Books

Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

“She had learned that what had seemed rudeness in garage men and hotel clerks was often a resentful reflection of her own Eastern attitude that she was necessarily superior to a race she had been trained to call “common people.” If she spoke up frankly, they made her one of their own, and gave her companionable aid.

For two days of sunshine and drying mud she followed a road flung straight across flat wheatlands, then curving among low hills. Often there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot that she was driving, as she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of clouds, prairie clouds, wisps of vapor like a ribbed beach, or mounts of cumulus swelling to gold-washed snowy peaks.

The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed stores.

Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days were colored with the sun.”

I started reading this because a character in the HBO show Boardwalk Empire recommends it to a prostitute he is going out with. I was pleasantly surprised to find it a light, amusing proto-feminist road trip novel. Ok, it’s a bit cheesy, but I was happy to suspend my cynicism and enjoy Lewis’ optimistic little artefact - published in 1919, when automobiles and America really could mean freedom and democracy, and class boundaries were being crossed all over the place in the great new cities and frontier towns of the West. A hymn to adventure, travel and independence.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

“Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found,some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.”

The story of a girl growing to artistic maturity, and sexual awakening, in the face of an evangelist, small-town upbringing. An almost universal story really, because we all feel like that when we are young, maybe - lonely, curious, rebellious, in love, at the centre of a spiraling narrative. 

The Witch and Other Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov 

“The cuckoo kept reckoning someone’s years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: “That’s what you are! That’s what you are!” What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.

A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars. Lipa had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a single light.”

Wikipedia tells me that Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: “Medicine is my lawful wife”, he once said, “and literature is my mistress.” - I am very interested in what  happens when literature and art and science cross-over. Doctors, like poets, rely on their senses. Checkhov’s stories feel like pebbles that you pick up on the beach that are perfectly smooth and round but without design or artifice. Sometimes they are just short scenes that cut off at a moment of intense feeling and leave you wanting more, sometimes they are longer and you get into the rhythm and swing of it and Chekhov brings you in gently to an ending. 

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

“Arthur was an energetic, headstrong boy who did not easily sit still; but once the Mam raised her porridge stick he was held in a state of silent enchantment - as if a villain from one of her stories had slipped a secret herb into his food. Knights and their ladies then moved about the tiny kitchen; challenges were issued, quests miraculously fulfilled; armour clanked, chain mail rustled, and honour was always upheld.”

A surprisingly sweet and gentle tale from an author I expected to be a bit more cutting. Its a roomy, ambling historical novel with a real-life detective tale featuring Arthur Conan Doyle himself…

The Corrections by Johnathan Franzen

“All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?”

Another re-read. Better the second time around, maybe because the first time I read it I think I was too young to really appreciate that feeling of gnawing family guilt. And the inexorable advancement of age. And money worries. It’s ultimately uplifting and life-affirming though, because that’s what Franzen is all about, I think? For some reason I can kind of see Franzen ending up like Leo Tolstoy, as played by Christopher Plummer in The Last Station. 

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

 

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”

 

You can’t go wrong with Austen. The more I read her as I get older the more I appreciate her ironic gaze, and her character dissection, and, like, at once managing to be critical of everything but also almost a benevolent god in her understanding. And someta. So much reading going on here and so many readers. I’ve read this a few times before, but it seemed like maybe I should try one of the free classics on my Kindle, and I was spending a few days at my parents’ house over Christmas, so I indulged and it made me feel warm inside.  

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

“It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand— it seemed so dull, so life- as- usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), andtake the fucking thing.”

As you read through the different vignettes in Goon Squad the tenuous, fleeting networks and intersections between the characters begin to emerge. The book jumps between voices, places and decades - coming to an end with a scene that is perhaps meant to be redemptive, perhaps to unite the disparate themes, but feels a little forced. ‘Time is a goon’ - I liked the idea, and I liked thinking about the Novel and the representation of Time, and how writers growing up with Twitter and Facebook might deal with it, and what Proust might have thought about it all and how maybe he’s already done it all already, really, anyway. But then Proust never got to do a whole chapter of PowerPoint slides. It also made me the think about the fleeting nature of my own life and how I’m going to be 25 this year. So that’s good.

Veins by Drew

“You have to stay positive if you want to make it in life. It’s not easy, but you just think about the best thing that can happen. Then, if it happens, you’re a psychic too. When people complain, its because they’re not looking at the good side. If they have a dog, and the dog rolls on a dead bird, or a dead squirrel, and then it comes inside and licks them, they get mad because of the smell. But I would say “Thanks, dog” because he just wants attention. (I would say his name but sometimes you don’t know a dog’s name. They don’t mind being called dog, it’s like if you call me “dude” because it automatically means they’re man’s best friend.)”

A stream-of-consciousness narrative about a social outcast. A witty, incisive indictment of modern society as well as an entertaining read. We can all identify with the outsider narrator, a mentally impaired young man struggling to make sense of a life in Columbus, Ohio - his unflagging optimism and unfiltered desires make him at once charming, heartbreaking and kind of gross. lolz.