I know, I know: this was the it book of 2012, and I am late to the party.
It’s a pretty rad party.
Gone Girl is part mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, and entirely, viciously delightful. Amy disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, and police attention begins to swirl (inevitably?) on her attractive husband with the flimsy alibi. But nothing turns out how you think it will.
Highly recommended, especially as a highbrow beach read.
Well, I think it’s time to acknowledge the Romantics around here, don’t you?
Truth be told, Byron, Shelley (Percy, that is), and Wordsworth have never been my cup of tea (if they’re yours, please direct me to poems that will change my mind!), but I’ve loved Coleridge since I was a child, since Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner paint such vivid pictures in the mind (and they’re exciting!).
I think I may have run across Keats in high school, but it wasn’t until a Romanticism class in college that I got a big dose. Seriously, the only word that properly describes his poetry is “romantic” — he’s the epitome of the movement. You’ll find Wordsworth and Byron in some of my various anthologies, but one of my prized books is an 1892 copy of The Poetical Works of John Keats; when I win the lottery, I’ll be able to afford a binding repair.
I know it may sound a bit overly, ahem, romantic, but I love having a book of his poems from the same century during which he lived and breathed.
1892 edition of Keats’s works
“Bright Star” is a love sonnet he wrote to Fanny Brawne, his fiancee and center of adoration in the last two years of his life. Jane Campion’s gorgeous, perfect film Bright Star focuses on their relationship; if you haven’t seen it, please locate your handkerchief and then borrow it from your local library (you’ll want to buy it after, I promise.)
Here’s the poem:
Bright Star
Lovely, isn’t it?
Which Romantic poems are your favorites?
Tony Hoagland’s piece in Harper’s, which you can read here, is long and worth the length. His opening salvo is a lament for the state of poetry in schools, and an argument for poetry’s necessity:
. . . poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.
He’s certainly not the first to suggest that students (and sometimes teachers too!) have a difficult time engaging with non-contemporary poetry, but I like his concrete proposal for building a common American cultural vernacular: teach twenty contemporary poems to all students.
Now, I know there’s a lot of talk out there in the education world about Common Core standards, and I’m not going to get into it here (I have my doubts, to put it mildly.). But I do think it’s essential, as does Hoagland that we all share at least some cultural references in common. I’ve written before about the all-university summer reading requirement at Ohio State, and how wonderful that was.
As I used to tell my students, you’ll be awfully embarrassed at your in-laws’ cocktail party/barbecue/mini-golf outing/gallery opening if you don’t know who Hamlet is.
What I especially like about Mr. Hoagland’s piece is his suggestion that we do not jettison the classics, but rather work backwards toward them:
The cultural chain has been broken, as anyone paying attention knows. Moreover, the written word always needs renewal. Art must be recast continually. “Dover Beach” and “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” are not lost, but instead are being rewritten again and again, a hundred times for each new generation. Culture is always reanimating itself, and when it does so, it validates, reorganizes, and reinvigorates the past as well as the present.
If anthologies were structured to represent the way that most of us actually learn, they would begin in the present and “progress” into the past. I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti before I read D. H. Lawrence before I read Thomas Wyatt. Once the literate appetite is whetted, it will keep turning to new tastes. A reader who first falls in love with Billy Collins or Mary Oliver is likely then to drift into an anthology that includes Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy.
Brilliant. And true; pairing contemporary poems with older poems is an excellent teaching method, in my experience. Students are surprised (and thrilled) to learn just how sex-filled John Donne’s poetry is (oh is it ever), and that a good number of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a man.
You’ll find the list of twenty poems that Mr. Hoagland recommends at the end of his essay. I’d add Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and “Ecstatic in the Poison” by Andrew Hudgins. Which poem or poems would you add?
When Dust comes out this August, I’ll be first in line to buy the complete Silo trilogy, without even reading the last one first. These books are just so fun—suspenseful, inventive page-turners.
My practice is never to reveal spoilers, and I won’t start here. So really, I can’t say too much about the plot because you must read Wool first. Shift answers some of Wool‘s questions and will leave the reader with many more to ponder before the final installment comes out.
If anyone out there has read Hugh Howey’s other novels, I’d love to hear what you thought of them!
The plot of Louise Erdrich’s amazing novel concerns a boy’s search for the man who attacked his mother, while his father searches for justice despite the twisted web of federal, state, and tribal laws that stands in his way.
It sounds simple, but The Round House is the work of a master-storyteller, each detail bringing daily life on the reservation into focus. Joe, the narrator, is a funny, honest companion through the often-horrifying story, and through his eyes we see all the best of late-boyhood friendships in his adventures with Cappy, Zack, and Angus, as well as the worst in men.
The raw anger and frustration that this book made me feel was balanced by admiration for Ms. Erdrich’s stunning language and deft way of shaping her characters. One of my favorite passages is Joe’s relation of the boys’ love for Star Trek: The Next Generation. The boys all want to be Worf, but admire Data immensely. (Also, the chapter names are often taken from the names of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.)
I finished reading The Round House last Wednesday, and I’m thrilled that I’ve finally had the chance to recommend it.
This week I’ve been thinking about some of the opening lines to Mrs. Dalloway, one of my top-five favorite books of all time, because really, these lines are as close as prose ever comes to poetry. Specifically, I’m thinking of:
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh, as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge!
My son turned two this weekend, and because I was in the hospital for so long, I didn’t have the energy to throw him the little party we had planned. So instead, the three of us drove to our favorite beach, and just after it opened, we found ourselves with blue, blue skies, a crisp wind off the waves, and a warm tidal pool for H to play in. What a morning, indeed.
Fortuitously, today’s poem-of-the-day email from The Poetry Foundation brought just the right poem to my inbox: Marie Ponsot’s “Between,” a short, elegant poem about and for her adult daughter. It’s so lovely, a deft meditation on both parenthood and childhood that makes me wonder what it will be like to look at my own son in twenty, thirty years. For me, this is the eleven-line poetry analogue to Mrs. Dalloway, a way of seeing the past through the lens of the present, the everyday, the home.
Housekeeping is one of those books that’s impossible to read quickly. Every sentence is meticulously designed, flawless in execution, exquisite. In fact, the writing is so good that I feel self-conscious even attempting to write about it.
I’ve had the novel on my nightstand for at least a year, walking slowly through its passages. I stopped dog-earing pages long ago, because almost every page contains something I’d like to add to my commonplace book. I’ve had Gilead and Home, Ms. Robinson’s subsequent novels, socked away for ages, but I think I’ll let this one ruminate for awhile before I jump in. (Ms. Robinson is also a noted essayist, and I’m looking forward to reading her essay collections, too.)
Though tragic occurrences populate the novel, it wasn’t the events that made me cry (as they did, in, say, Tell the Wolves I’m Home). As I finished the novel last night, I was moved to tears, not only by the beauty of the language, but also by the portrait of Ruth, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, which is slowly revealed, page by page. She and her family are viscerally real.
I don’t want to say more. Housekeeping deserves a quiet and careful reading, and will reward its reader with a lake’s worth of depth and delight.
Rosemary and Reading Glasses 