Two for the Taking - On Books and On Murder

Things have slowed down a bit here in BelleBookandCandle land. I have just barely started two books, both by authors I have not read before.

The first is More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby. It is a collection of his book columns — Stuff I've Been Reading —written for Believer, touted as "a magazine of interviews, essays, and reviews." The format is simple. Mr. Hornby begins each monthly essay listing Books Bought and Books Read. As you can imagine the lists don't always overlap. Usually, more bought, fewer read. 

I have only finished the first couple of essays/musings. Although many books about books lean heavily on fiction, Mr. Hornby includes many nonfiction titles. For example, Austerity Britain, 1945-51 by David Kynaston he finds to be surprisingly entertaining. But American Rust, a novel by Phillip Meyer about the "long, slow death of working-class America," also captures his heart.

Then there are his Muriel Spark binges, a tale of attending the Oscar ceremonies in Hollywood, meeting Patti Smith (Just Kids), and chatter about the World Cup. 

Something for everyone.

It appears that Mr. Hornby enjoyed writing these essays as much as I am enjoying reading them. They are quite witty. They were published in 2010-2011. This is the fourth and final collection of columns and I see now that many of them are on the magazine's website.  He also wrote a couple of books that were turned into films:  High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, and About a Boy. I will be checking Netflix for these. 

The second book is a mystery titled The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone. Dahlia, an unemployed not-your-Miss-Marple millennial, is not really a detective but is hired to be one. Her 'client' sends her on a quest to recover a virtual weapon — The Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing — from an online game called Zoth. He pays her a thousand dollars up front and promises her another thousand dollars when the spear is returned to him. Unfortunately, her client doesn't live long enough to pay her the second thousand dollars. 

That's as far as I have gotten in the tale. I'll just have to see how this one goes. It is pretty humorous but some of the 'gaming' talk is beyond me. Oh, well. Perhaps I will learn something as I try to solve the mystery along with Dahlia.

How are things in your book world?

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

The personal essays in The Little Virtues are very serious. But then I guess that is to be expected as the author is a woman who lived in Italy during the Second World War.  Her husband was arrested by the Germans and died in prison.

Be that as it may, and this is what I love about the personal essay form, Natalia Ginzburg assures the reader that she has an affinity for wearing worn out shoes and turns the piece into a musing on raising children. Or she writes that she started writing silly poems and moved on to even sillier short stories. Then she began spinning tales featuring more authentic characters and knew for certain that writing was her vocation. 

Her essay 'The Little Virtues' is a reflection on what she thinks children should be taught: 

In 'He and I' she writes a 12-page comparison between her likes and dislikes and the preferences of her second husband. He loves music, she doesn't understand it at all. He is always hot, she always feels cold. He loves traveling, she wants to stay at home. 

By the time I finished reading this entry, I wondered why on earth she stayed with this man. I suspect she wondered the same thing. 

The book has a copyright and translation date of 1985, although it was originally published in 1962 in Italy. Any biographical details included here I gleaned from the book's dust jacket.

The essays are thoughtful and wander about but I was hoping for a little humor. There is none. There is a darkness that pervades — not so much in specific details about her war experiences — but just knowing the time in which these were written gives the essays a certain heaviness. Perhaps it is the translation from the original Italian. I don't know, but this wasn't a book I thought, "Oh, I have to own this one so I can reread it often."

Many times while reading the essays in this slim volume I shook my head at the realization that the world situation she lived through and the current political climate have much in common. Alas, some things never change.

The Abundance by Annie Dillard

I don't know why I have not written about Annie Dillard before. She is one of my favorite authors. As I look at my bookshelf, I can see right away three of her books leaning casually against one another: Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I can never look at a tiny spider weaving its web in the corner of my bathroom without thinking of Ms. Dillard's story of living in harmony with a spider that had taken up residence in a corner of her cabin at Tinker Creek.

It has been a long time since I have dipped into any of her books - much to my loss.  If you have not read anything by Ms. Dillard you now have a chance to read examples of her wide range of intellect and interests. The Abundance, a collection of her essays new and old, was published last month.

There are four selections from Teaching a Stone to Talk, eight from An American Childhood, and two from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. But I dove in right away to her essays from sources that I had not read.

Encounters With Chinese Writers is based on her experiences as part of a delegation of American writers who visited China and also hosted Chinese writers in America. The essay from that book is the story of a trip with the Chinese visitors to Disneyland. You can just imagine the culture clash!

Reading this narrative reminded me that there was a time when I lived not too far from Disneyland and I would sometimes go to the park after dinner. Merely an evening's entertainment for me. I was often struck by the fact that some families had saved for a long time to afford the trip to Disneyland and here I could just drive over after dessert.

The text of the short commentary Tsunami that she recorded for NPR is also included. It is her attempt to come to terms with the devastation that in one day, twenty-five years ago on April 29,1991, a tsunami took the lives of 138,000 people in Bangladesh. Her reading of the essay is online and you can listen to it here.

And there are others.

The Abundance is a wonderful collection of Ms. Dillard’s thoughtful prose. I am sure reading these essays will send you in search of the books whence they came. I can tell you that the three that I own are now down off the shelf and next to my reading chair. I will be revisiting them soon.

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P.S. The preface to The Abundance is written by British author Geoff Dyer who will be speaking at the library here in May. You can be sure the date is circled on my calendar.

P.P.S. Let there be cake! Today, April 30, is Annie Dillard’s 71st birthday .

Women and the Italian Experience

I am on a roll with reading about travel in Italy. Next up: Italy, A Love Story (2005) edited by Camille Cusumano.

In the book's twenty-eight essays "women describe the country they love and why they have fallen under its spell."

So we have titles such as Aromatherapy, Italian-Style; Italy of the Poets; Rome, the Art of Living; and, Sexing the Eggplant.

This book is part of a travel series published by Seal Press. Ms. Cusumano has edited other books of women's writings on France, Mexico, and Greece. 

Italy, A Love Story was given to me by a friend who knows my penchant both for essays and travel. Now where did I set down that espresso?

Montaigne and his Essais

Montaigne's tower library where he worked on his essais.

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell is a brilliant book.

I will tell you why. 

It is well written and never, ever boring. It takes a look at the life of a man who lived in 16th century France, a landowner and nobleman who suffered from excruciating bouts with kidney stones, served as mayor of Bordeaux in southwestern France, was married, and advised kings. 

Not much in common with this 21st century woman of a certain age. 

And yet, he retired to the tower library of his chateau one day (wouldn't I love to do that!) and over the course of twenty years wrote about his life. Not about his life as it should be but how it was. Life with all its pains and joys, its contradictions and certitudes (of which he discovered there were few). He wrote not about his great deeds or achievements, or historical events. Instead he wrote of his own experiences with friendship, cruelty, cannibals, smells, thumbs, and how we cry and laugh for the same thing.

Montaigne managed to write a hundred and seven essays, or essais. In fact, he invented the form. 

Ms. Bakewell explains:

Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence.

By structuring her book as answers to the question How to Live we come to know Montaigne through historical events, his deeds and accomplishments all of which he didn't write about himself. And we come to know Montaigne through his own writings, his own accidental philosophies, as he would call them.

The answers (and chapter headings) to the question How to Live include Don't worry about death; Pay attention; Survive love and loss; Question everything; See the world; Be ordinary and imperfect; and, Let life be its own answer.

Montaigne's own answers come from studying the classical Stoic and the Epicurean philosophies. Not abstract instructions but practical down-to-earth ways to approach life. We learn what worked for him, what didn't work, what he suffered and what he enjoyed. 

The books is simply a marvelous way of learning about the man, both his time in history, his travels, and his thoughts. 

One of the nice things about reading the Kindle edition borrowed from the library is that I could highlight passages to my heart's content - something I most likely wouldn't do in a paper book. And surprisingly, when the book disappeared from the Kindle after its 14-day loan period and I checked it out again, my highlighted sections were still marked. 

Because of this book, which I highly recommend, I purchased a volume of twenty-five of Montaigne's essays and am ready to dip into them. I have tried Montaigne before but just in bits and pieces. I feel that after reading Ms. Bakewell's book I am ready to try even larger chunks of his essays on How to Live.

Personal Pleasures: Reading

Rose Macaulay
1881-1958

As I am always on the lookout for essays about the everyday, I thought I would love this book of thoughts on everything from Armchairs to Fire Engines to Writing published in Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay. I was disappointed. Ms. Macaulay's writing isn't as straightforward as I would have liked and I had difficulty staying engaged. 

This is the opening of her essay on Reading:

Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by tracks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability,  the interdependence,  which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed; we have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems  essays, and what not, but we are never satiate,  we are greedy always for more.

The Unfuzzy Lamb

Charles Lamb
aka Elia
1775-1834

Anne Fadiman bemoans the fact that reading the essays of Charles Lamb, aka Elia, has gone out of fashion. And this from her essay on him entitled "The Unfuzzy Lamb" in her collection At Large and At Small that was published in 2005. I hate to think that even fewer people are reading him now seven years later. Maybe Ms. Fadiman and I are the only ones left.

If you love essays as I do, you will be as familiar with the name Elia as you are with Michel de Montaigne.

Lamb, born in 1775, did not have a charmed life, Fadiman writes. His sister Mary lost her mind and killed their mother, what he called "the family tragedy", when he was 21. He spent the rest of his life taking care of her and working as a clerk in a mind-numbing job that he hated and at which he was not really very good.

He began his career as an essayist to make money for Mary's keep as occasionally she would have to go back to the mental hospital for a while.  He wrote for five years - 1820-1825 - for London Magazine. When he retired from the East India House he retired from writing as well.

But what he left us, Fadiman writes, are 52 witty, sometimes dark, but always entertaining comments on books, witches, roast pig, ears, chimney sweeps. Nothing seems to have escaped his notice.

It has been a few years since I read with relish Essays by Elia, but you can be sure that I will be joining his company soon. Thanks to Anne Fadiman, fan extraordinaire.

I love reading essays from the past. The comments on that time's current culture and conundrums prove that there is nothing new under the sun.

For instance, in my 1934 copy of Derby Day and Other Adventures, author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton has this to say in his essay about the Grand National steeplechase:

"In a word, we (Americans) do not know how to enjoy life; we work like the devil and save our money, only to be robbed of it by our politicians and the bookmakers who call themselves bankers."

Doesn't that sound familiar.

Mr. Newton has nothing good to say about bankers or brokers. He lets slip little asides that one stumbles upon in the body of the essay. And don't even mention Prohibition, which at this time he is happy to refer to in the past tense.

He chats on in one essay about racing at Ascot and greyhound races, which were just coming into fashion, in another. He then moves on to a stroll through London. Recognizable landmarks are still standing today. Newton quotes Dr. Samuel Johnson quite often and I see from the book jacket that he has written a play about the distinguished British author.

A well-written essay is like having a spirited conversation with its author - the topic wanders here and there and comes back to here...usually. But if it doesn't, where's the harm.