Month: March 2014

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Things I Haven’t Done Before My Trip to London

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Photo op: at the library

Things I Haven’t Done Before My Trip to London:

1.  I didn’t lose any weight. Go on Weight Watchers…lose five pounds…gain it back…lose five pounds…gain it back…lose five pounds…decide you can’t live on an apple at dinner, which is the only way you’ve lost five pounds…  Then cook a colossal dinner of Mollie Katzen’s macaroni with mushrooms and spinach for your thin husband, the only one in the house who has lost weight on your diet, and he informs you that you are not going to have a swimsuit photo op in London.   And so I’m back to cooking dinner again.  “Thank God for that!”  he says.

2.  I didn’t dye my hair.  I thought briefly of dyeing my hair.  Yes, I was going to be thin in London…with dyed hair.  When it came right down to it, all I could stand at the salon was having my hair trimmed.

3.  Read a lot of London bloggers so I can have contact with the London blogging community.  News flash: I read no London bloggers.  None!  How did this happen?  Fortunately all the American and English bloggers have been to London and have given me excellent advice about everything. .. especially bookstores.

Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry

4. Figure out how to go to the Oxford Literary Festival to see Sebastian Barry one day and Margaret Drabble on another day.  The festival goes on for a WE-E-E-E-KKKKK and I don’t see how I can possibly go both days. But, wait,  I just found out there is something called the Daunt Books Spring Festival right in London.  Perhaps I can buy tickets for BOTH LITERARY FESTIVALS  just in case.  CAVEAT: You’re not rich, and you’ve seen Borges, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie…for free in the U.S.

5.  I didn’t reread all of Dickens, or any Dickens.  I’m going on the Dickens tour, right?  Well, probably.  For some reason I am reading Trollope this winter.  I don’t think there’s a Trollope tour, though.  Too bad…

6.  Travel with unstained clothes.  See that lovely spring sweater (above:  photo of me at the library)?  I spilled coffee on it .  It was nice to have coffee at the library…and then it spilled and I had to rush to the restroom and apply soap on a wet paper towel.  I don’t see a stain, do you?  I caught it in time. But I may be turning into Enderby, the tea-stained hero of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby books.

AND NOW I NEED ADVICE. Where do I buy groceries, i.e., lots of vegetables in London?   Grocery stores?  Co-ops?  I know about the markets from my guide books, and I can always find Starbucks…  But it might be nice just to buy some stuff quickly at a store and make sandwiches.

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Harriet the Spy’s 50th Anniversary, Nice Guys in Fiction, and More

My original copy of Harriet the Spy. N.B. I crossed out "zany," knowing even then it was an insult.

My original copy of Harriet the Spy. N.B. I crossed out “zany” in the top line, knowing even then it was an insult.

Oh my God, girls!  Did you grow up on Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy?

It is the 50th anniversary of Harriet –1964:  The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and Harriet the Spy!–and you can now buy an anniversary edition of this children’s classic, which “includes tributes by Judy Blume, Meg Cabot, Lois Lowry, Rebecca Stead, and many more, as well as a map of Harriet’s New York City neighborhood and spy route…”

Harriet was my favorite heroine. As many of you know, she is a writer.  She takes her notebook with her everywhere and writes down exactly what she thinks about friends and enemies.

She writes of Pinky Whitehead, a pale, thin weak boy who annoys her:

MY MOTHER IS ALWAYS SAYING THAT PINKY WHITEHEAD’S WHOLE PROBLEM IS HIS MOTHER.  I BETTER ASK HER WHAT THAT MEANS OR I’LL NEVER FIND OUT.  DOES HIS MOTHER HATE HIM?  IF I HAD HIM I’D HATE HIM.

And of her friend Janie, who wants to blow up the world:

JANIE GETS STRANGER EVERY YEAR.  I THINK SHE MIGHT BLOW UP THE WORLD.

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The worse for wear…

When her classmates get ahold of her notebook at recess, they read it aloud and shun her.  How can she win them back?  She only said what she thought…

As you can see, my edition is rather tatty, but it is still readable.  This is one of my favorite children’s books, though I hadn’t thought of it in years.   I won’t buy the anniversary copy,   but I liked it so much as a child that I insisted on wearing boys’ sneakers like Harriet.

AND FOUR LINKS. 

eugenie-grandet-honore-de-balzac-paperback-cover-art1.  At the Barnes and Noble Review, Heller McAlpin writes about Eugenie Grandet,  “Does anyone read Balzac for pleasure?” Well, yes, we do.  Here is the link to what I wrote about Eugenie Grandet last year.

2.  At The Huffington Post, Claire Fallon writes, “These ‘Nice Guy’ Book Characters Aren’t Really That Nice.”  My problem with this article:  Two of her 10 examples are from Jane Austen, and two more from Shakespeare.  Doesn’t she read any other books?

What do you think?  Are these characters nice or not?  (I think some of them really are.)

3.  Locus, a science fiction magazine, announces Karen Joy Fowler has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.  Fowler, best known for The Jane Austen Book Club, is widely known for her science fiction.  Thumbs up to PEN/Faulkner for nominating this.

4.  And, finally, here are favorite paintings of women reading at The Sleepless Reader.

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VIDA Stats

stack_of_books“Oh, for God’s sake!”  I said as I read the latest VIDA study of gender in book review publications.

In late middle age, I focus less on gender than I used to.  In fact, one of the nicest things about the post-menopausal period of life has been that I now think about gender mainly in terms of the depiction of women’s lives in literature.

But the 2013 VIDA statistics show a considerable gender gap at book review publications in the U.S. and UK.   Many more men than women still review books, and more books by men than women are reviewed.

As far as gender gaps go, we are not naive.  There are many more serious gender issues.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women earned only 77 cents for every dollar that men earned in 2012.  Studies show that women are paid less than men even when they have the same experience and same job.

And the gender gap at book reviews is not the only gap in publishing.  A study in the journal Nature showed that male scientists publish more research than women, and that researchers are more likely to cite papers written by men.

But back to book reviews: VIDA monitors prestigious publications like The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, though my favorite American book review publication, The Washington Post Book World, was not “audited,” nor was The Guardian, which published a blog piece taunting the abysmal LRB stats.  VIDA pretty much ignores the Midwest:  there are women book review page editors at the Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the St. Louis Dispatch.   Perhaps the Midwest is more equitable for reviewers.

I started my own freelance career as a book reviewer in the Midwest.  I submitted a review of a small-press book to a newspaper, and the editor liked it and began to give me assignments. I was one of those solid, reliable reviewers who could take on something, anything, fiction or nonfiction, at the last minute:  and if, whoops!, a prominent book had somehow been overlooked, I could dash off a review in 24 hours.

If there was a gender gap, I didn’t notice it.  At parties I milled and thronged with other reviewers, and even the male reviewers seemed biased in favor of women:  Elizabeth Bowen and Nancy Mitford were the favorite authors of one of my male reviewer friends.

These days I would rather read than review, and I am more concerned with the quality of reviews than the sex of reviewers.

This is not to say I don’t take the gender issues seriously, but surely the editors can add intelligent female reviewers into the mix without taking away work from the tried-and-true regulars (both male and female).  This is not a life-and-death issue.

In general, women’s issues seem not to be treated seriously in publishing.  A backlash against feminism is reflected in the promotion of  S/M romances jump-started by Fifty Shades of Grey, not to mention popular Y.A. novels like Twilight and its successors.  In both Fifty Shades and Twilight, clutzy, passive heroines are constantly in need of being rescued.   Sex with sadists and vampires (and, believe me, I’d prefer the gentleman vampire any day) can lead to bruises and breakages.

And so, VIDA?  Keep it in mind, but don’t make all the changes at once.

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Classics & Trash, the Jean Plaidy Collection, & Giveaway of My Life in Middlemarch, a Virago & Miss Buncle Married

It's cold this winter!

It’s cold this winter!

I made it to the coffeehouse.  Whiskey Sour, I said.  It’s the name of a coffee, not a drink.

It was very quiet.  We talked about the weather.  We are all very, very sick of the weather.  It is the coldest winter since 2001.  It will be -11 tonight.

I remember the winter of 2001 very well:  ninety days of snow on the ground without a break. A hard-core bicyclist, I rode all through that winter.  I bicycled to the mall, to the library downtown, and once out to a lake with my husband:  we wandered down a snowy hill to the beach.

Last year I was bicycling regularly by March, but this year it’s nothing but ice, wearing Yaktrax on your shoes (cleats), and last time I went to the gym, I got sick.

And so I have been reading, reading, reading:  many kinds of books this winter, some classics, some trash.

Here is a stack of the literary books I’m reading or have been reading.

IMG_2820!.  Yes, I’m about to finish Mrs. Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, which is a very, very amusing satire of small-town life in Carlingford, Mrs. Oliphant’s famous fictious town. When Miss Lucilla Marjoribanks, a doctor’s daughter, comes home from school and a trip abroad, she says she wants to make Papa’s life comfortable.  Instead, this powerful young woman rules society with her “Thursday evenings,” interferes in friends’ lives, usually for the good, and creatively achieves what is almost, not quite, equality to a man in a misogynistic society.    I love Lucilla dearly, and she’s a predecessor of Lucia (E. F. Benson’s books), though not as hyperbolically drawn.  If Benson didn’t read Miss Marjoribanks, I’ll eat my hat.

2. Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch.  (AND I’M GIVING THIS AWAY, SO LEAVE A COMMENT IF YOU WANT IT.)  New Yorker writer Mead celebrates her love of the book Middlemarch, which she’s read over and over since she first studied for her Oxford exam (or perhaps  O-levels or A-levels:  I gave up Mead’s book a month ago).  I love Middlemarch, but honestly?  114 pages into My Life in Middlemarch, I find Mead’s prose disappointing and inelegant.

She worked as a young woman as a fact-checker for what she calls “a weekly magazine” (surely The New Yorker?).  This is an example of her lifeless prose:

Often we would be there until late at night, long after senior editorial staff had gone home, and we’d order dinner on expenses from the Italian restaurant across the street and make jokes at the expense of certain writers we worked with.  How lazy they were, we’d complain; how badly they wrote.  In truth, I was learning a lot from doing this work:  seeing how to build a story, discovering where to find a fact.  But still, I was eager for my chance to show I could do it better.

Part of my problem?  I have read two perfect books in this genre:  Robert Dessaix’s Twilight of Love:  Travels with Turgenev and Peter Stothard’s Alexandria:  The Last Nights of Cleopatra.

I have to say, I’ve given this a fair shot–usually I give up a book I don’t like after only 25 pages.

3.  Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.  I read it, loved it, haven’t written about it here, though I will.  It is a life-changing classic.  Who are we? Actors or audience?

4.  Constance Beresford-Howe’s The Book of Eve.  I’m searching for North American lost women’s classics this winter (any recommendations?) and am very much looking forward to reading The Book of Eve, highly recommended by the blogger Buried in Print.  The jacket says:  “When Eva Carroll walks out on her husband, it is an unplanned, completely spontaneous gesture.”  And apparently she finds happiness “on the wrong side of Montreal.”

5.  Jill Robinson’s Bed/Time/Story.  A popular novel from the ’70s, compared to Erica Jong, et al.  Some of these women’s pop book are good, some are bad; it may hold up, it may not.

6.  Nora Johnson’s The Two of Us.  Nora Johnson, author of The World of Henry Orient, Uncharted Places (an intriguing mess of a novel), and a stunning memoir, Coast to Coast:  A Family Romance, is always fascinating.  The first 50 pages or so of The Two of Us, a novel about identical twins, are a bit trashy:  Cassie, the twin who “married up” in Hollywood, enjoys shopping more than sex, and when her husband, who has affairs, says he wants to leave her, she ignores him.  Her twin, Celia, a New York photographer who has freelanced and now works for a magazine, has lived in a tiny rent-controlled apartment since her vicious lawyer husband left her nothing in a divorce, and now is having an affair with a married man.  I’m enjoying this:  parts are highly intelligent, parts a bit trashy:  The New York Times praised it, but so did Jackie Collins.  Perhaps it was Johnson’s shot at pop fiction?

AND NOW FOR THE JEAN PLAIDY COLLECTION.

IMG_2823Yes!  We were at the library book sale and my husband found me copies of Jean Plaidy’s books.

“Is this one of your authors?”  He looked at me askance.  I am well-known for reading Plato, Katherine Anne Porter, and Jean Plaidy, and shelving them all together.

“I LO-O-O-O-VE JEAN PLAIDY,” I said to shock him.

And I do enjoy reading her historical novels late at night.  I read myself to sleep with genre books.  The writer Eleanor Hibbet wrote historical novels under the name Jean Plaidy, Gothic novels under the name Victoria Holt, and some other women’s fiction under the name Philippa Carr.

So aren’t you envious of these? Doesn’t this look like tremendous fun?  I’ll probably get through one a year.

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AND THE BIG GIVEAWAY!

Would any of you like a copy of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch,  Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons:  A Wartime Diary (Virago), D. E. Stevenson’s Miss Buncle Married, (a sequel to Miss Buncle’s Book) or L. M. Montgomery’s A Tangled Web (a romance by the author of Anne of Green Gables)?  Leave a comment.

IMG_2825Everything must go!