Books June 29, 2008
Posted by Jamieson Ridenhour in Uncategorized.Tags: Add new tag, books
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I’ve started reading Lord Dunsany’s Curse of the Wise Woman while I’m doing the treadmill in the mornings. I’ve wanted to read it for years–it sits on my shelf and remonstrates with me every time I choose another book. It remonstrates with an Irish accent, which is nice, and its language is never salty due to Dunsany’s gentility, but it still wears on you after a while. So I broke down this morning and started it. It also fits nicely on the treadmill console without sliding off, which the other two books I’m working on won’t do. It starts off with a metaphorical bang; I’m looking forward to reading it tomorrow. I’m vowing here to only read it on the treadmill, thereby giving me additional motivation to workout each morning.
At any rate, the copy I’m reading is a beautiful first edition from 1933 that I bought at the marvellous Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway, Ireland six or seven years ago (the photo is of Galway High Street–Kenny’s is halfway down on the left). It’s even got a great little stamp inside the back
cover letting me know that it was originally sold from Higganbotham’s Booksellers of Madras and Bangalore–one of the most important English booksellers in colonial India. It’s a beautiful little book, though not necessarily ornate. It’s hardcover, green with gold-embossed geese on the front cover and gold-embossed title on the spine. There’s an errata slip on the reverse of the title page. It’s lovely to smell the dust, accumulated over 75 years and three or four continents, while I’m reading.
It really pulled me back into appreciation of books as material objects. I’ve been aware lately of how much the publishing industry is moving towards alternative forms of publication and distribution–wholly electronic and/or print-on-demand is the coming wave. Blackwell’s in England is about to offer a publishing “espresso machine” that offers an in-store electronic search followed by in-store print-on-demand for over a million titles, and there is of course the Kindle (ye gods, how I want a Kindle!). And there are plenty of authors who are offering their books or stories online as downloadable pdf files–that’s how I got Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen. Even Kenny’s in Ireland, where I bought the Lord Dunsany book, bills itself on its web site as “Ireland’s largest online bookseller.” In general I’m in favor of all this. Storytelling–literature–needs to keep up with the changing technology in order to survive, and frankly that’s what it’s always done.
But, there’s still a special sort of attraction exerted, on me at least, by the printed book. The entire sensory experience of reading an actual book–smell, touch, sight–has yet to be equaled. And not just old books, though those are especially wonderful; I love new books as well. Walking through a bookshop and picking up random books is like recharging a battery for me. I believe that music will be 100% digital inside of ten years, but I can’t imagine that books will ever go completely away. I hope not anyway.
But I still want a Kindle.
Back in Bismarck June 25, 2008
Posted by Jamieson Ridenhour in Uncategorized.Tags: ballet, books, real estate
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We’ve been home about a week. After some serious grass-mowing things are looking good. We’re still trying to sell the house and still having no luck at all. I know some of you want to move to ND, so get out those checkbooks. We saw Northern Plains Ballet do Midsummer Night’s Dream for free at an outdoor theatre on Midsummer night, which was great. The kids loved it, and it was really well done. We missed the guest dancer from Atlanta who danced Puck during the February production, but it was otherwise a lovely show.
One of the best things about summer is that I get to read almost as much as I want to. Since posting last, I’ve finished Pinker’s the Stuff of Thought and Link’s Magic for Beginners (the title story is note-perfect–a small masterpiece of longing and adolescent unease) and have read Khaled Houseini’s Thousand Splendid Suns and Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. I described Houseini’s book in an email to my friend Brenna as being like Rushdie without the wordplay or the magical realism–it was well-written and evocative, but ultimately depressing as hell. A true picture, no doubt, of the plight of women in Afghanistan, but there was no affirmation, no looking towards a better way except by pointing out the ways in which female friendships can help you to endure. I would recommend it, but only if you’re in a good mood to begin with. Go into it grumpy and you may well end up suicidal.
So Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road was a welcome palette cleanser. I’m really interested in Michael Chabon–a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of late twentieth-century realism who has in recent years embraced stories and forms that border on genre fiction. He writes eloquently on the need for writers to entertain (not a popular idea amongst “serious” literary critics or scholars) and has crafted in Gentlemen of the Road a rollicking adventure tale of the old school. As a kid, I loved Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. This was as much for the fantasy as for the anti-hero status of the main characters. I remember being confused when I read the first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collection in the early eighties; I was a twelve-year-old who had recently read Tolkien, so I couldn’t figure out if these guys were really as dishonest and self-serving as they seemed. they were of course, that’s what made them interesting and much, much more fun than Frodo and company–the edginess, the roguish charm. Chabon’s short novel features two travelers who are certainly inspired by Leiber’s adventurer-thieves–their statures and behavior leave no doubt of this, but who also owe a debt to H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Cervantes. Lots of sword-play, stolen horses, elephants, a usurped throne, Vikings, Muslim armies, in an ancient Jewish kingdom in what is present-day Ukraine. A grand story–I’m hoping there are more to come. A good argument for the plot-based narratives Chabon advocates. Fun stuff.
Vacation June 10, 2008
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We’re spending a rather odd vacation in the Carolinas. Had a great time, more or less, at the wedding of our good friends Margee and Deaver, catching up with them and with Amber, Sam, Nag, Christian, K.C., Christel, and others. I say “or less,” because Gwyn had to be rushed to the emergency room during the rehearsal dinner and was diagnosed with a stony gall bladder. She ahd the offending organ removed last Tuesday in Florence, and then recuperated at my parents’ house. We then spent a night with Chad and Noelle in Hendersonville, NC on our way to Boone to spend a week with Gwyn’s family, where we are now. Gwyn is nearly back to normal, since gall bladder surgeries nowadays are an outpatient thing.
South Carolina was supremely hot and humid–over 100 every day we were there. It’s much cooler here in Boone, and a mountain thunderstorm is brewing up outside right now to cool it off even more. Being in the South reminds me how much I miss my family, but it has also underlined how much I HATE the heat. I hated summers through my entire childhood, and I hate the muggy burn when I come home in the summers now. I may live in the South again, but I won’t go outside from June through September if I do.
I’m hoping to do some writing this week, and when I get back. I’ve got Carmilla to finish before August, and there are several other projects I want to make some progress on. I’m nearly finished reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, which has been inspiring and impressive but fairly difficult–not my field, though I’m fascinated by cognitive linguistics. I’m also working on Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, the follow-up to the collection I reviewed in my last post. In between I’ve read Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants and Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. There is not nearly enough time to read everything I want–my “to read” list is growing and growing. I’m hoping to pick up Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night while I’m here in Boone. Gwyn just finished Audrey Niffenberger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife but doesn’t recommend it. I trust her.
That’s the news from Boone. We’ve got disc three of Doctor Who season three waiting for us when we get home–much excitement. I like season three so far, and am looking forward to “Blink” which I’ve heard a lot about. Gwyn still mourns the loss of Rose, but I’m digging Martha. It’s giving me something to watch while I wait for Joss Whedon to return to television next season.
