Guess what I did: LibraryThing!

I'm still re-reading "The Ambassadors." I was trying to finish it on vacation, because going to Central Ohio was almost like going to Europe, in terms of the lack of distractions, which is a situation I require when I am reading "The Ambassadors." There was no other media in English to claim my attention, no Internet, no grown-up TV, and we only got the newspaper twice, and once was mainly to get the fire going.

Reading: "The Ambassadors," Henry James, year (manyboooks.net)
Why: Talking about the death of the telegram last year. Made me think of this book.
Takeaway: The action of this book hangs on telegrams, but the text is also an insight into the way the telegram affected speech and thought. Conversations always seem to start on the second sentence, without preamble or even a lede. People open with sentences like "You are scared of me." Meanwhile, the inner monologue soaks up all the excess words and subphrases. This is one of my Top 10 books and I am thrilled to be reading it again, on my Palm this time.

Read: "Space Prison," Tom Godwin, 1958 (manybooks.net)
Why: Space and Prison
Takeaway: People just die and die and die in this book. The main characters are dropped off on an inhospitable Earthlike planet by their alien oppressors. They reform society with one goal: to lure the oppressors back and beat them. The fictional aspect is how everyone works together with only a few exceptions to become a strong and powerful society capable of beating an alien oppressor. There's one snake-in-the-grass character, who is an administrator, and then the rest of the story is Arthurian, long quests and battles by noble guys who know all kinds of science. It is a dream of scientists, I guess, to breed out everyone of weak character, every backbiter and bureaucrat and lazy commentator on the action.

Read: "The Club of Queer Trades," G.K. Chesterton, 1905 (manybooks.net)
Why: Finished "The Innocence of Father Brown," also on manybooks
Takeaway: Completely annoying. Maybe this would be fun if you read one of these per year, in a magazine, but to read them all at once was a bad idea. There's a mystery, and the solution is incredibly obscure, and one character goes through the entire story knowing the solution and eventually tells you it.

Read: "Barks and Purrs," by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, no year (manybooks.net)
Why: Assembling a reading list of the best dog books on manybooks.net, also the only thing by Colette in English so far
Takeaway: I'm not sure I can tell too many people to read this book, but it's wonderful and I loved it. Even describing it makes me sad, because it is about the thoughts of a dog and a cat. It is about the mystery of the human relationship with nature, domesticated nature. The relationships in this book between human and pet are filled with sweet devotion but also infinite sadness and misunderstanding. The dog is a bulldog, which makes it even sadder. His pains of love and confusion are exquisitely awful for him, as he explains them to the cat. Meanwhile, the cat, at one point, says the most catlike thing: "A fear that my sensibilities might be destroyed took possession of me."

Read: "Blindsight," by Peter Watts, 2006 (manybooks.net)
Why: On manybooks, was free and modern, looked freaky
Takeaway: Very freaky, lots of fun, kind of a head-breaker. This was the kind of book where the author carefully describes the shapes of things, and the relationships between people, and in general does a lot of setup work, then starts getting into the very nature of perception of those very things -- are things that we see really what they look like? who really likes who? what is perception? is your theory of it better than my theory of it? and all the time, you're floating in space, separated from the heart of things, from real life. What is real, though? I mean this to be a giant compliment when I say that reading this book helped me understand exactly what it would be like to be a grad student in Toronto.

Read: "Andersonville," by John McElroy, 1879 (manybooks.net)
Why: It looked awesome, and the preface says that it is written in simplified spelling
A memoir of the Confederates' Andersonville prison
Takeaway: Incredible. The writer was captured by the Rebels at Cumberland Gap and sent to Andersonville prison, in southeast Georgia, where he stayed for seven months. I have always wondered about the practice of taking war prisoners; the idea that you would go from trying to kill your enemy to treating him well, feeding and clothing him and letting him get mail, always seemed a little odd. So the Rebels just didn't; they dumped 30,000 Yankee prisoners into a stockade, gave them a piece of cornbread 2 inches square once a day, no tents, no bedding or clothing, no toilets, no nothing. It's amazing that more prisoners didn't die, but only 10,000 of them did in seven months. McElroy writes like a reporter, with wit and directness. His point-by-point explanation of why the North and South stopped trading prisoners, resulting in such a horrible loss of life, is clear and understandable, which is an accomplishment when you remember that he was one of the prisoners who was not traded, and thus came close to death, and saw his friends die of hunger, slowly. The story was published as a serial in the Toledo Blade!

I love "whither the e-book" stories. All of them (including the one I helped write and which was just translated into Spanish!) contain some variation of the line: Wouldn't it be great to carry around the book you're reading now, your next three books, a couple books you don't know if you want to start or not, including several heavy classics you've always meant to read, plus all your contacts and emails? All in a package weighting less than 8 ounces?

Right now on my Palm, I have all that. The tough part is remembering what's on there, what I read already, and what I thought about it. I'm not a huge keeper of reading lists, but I'm consuming e-books at such a rate that it seems important to keep a list.

I'm reading an ebook right now called "Andersonville," an eyewitness account of the Andersonville prison in the Civil War. It is so amazing that, every so often today during my day, I go upstairs and read another few pages. A couple points of note, aside from the basic point that this is a carefully told story full of astounding facts of man's inhumanity to man:
The book was written in 1870-something in what the author calls "modernized" spelling in his preface. I was looking forward to a real freak show, a la reading Shaw, but this was actually just modern spelling, the kind we use today. It could have been written last week.
The book was first published as articles in the Toledo Blade. And this was not the first significant contribution the Blade had made to Civil War literature -- the book reminded me to finally look into and read the Petroleum V. Nasby letters, a plaque commemorating which appears on the outside of the Toledo Blade building. They're written in dialect and pretty much broke my head, but they're pretty funny for all that. You can see how they might have helped make the South's case for slavery seem pretty weak. And at the same time, now, in the present, they helped me to understand how seriously the case for slavery was being made. Modern historians point out that there were 50-hundred other causes for the Civil War, that slavery was only one reason for the conflict between North and South, but no matter where you stood on all the other tax and rights issues at (um) issue, you'd have to believe pretty deeply in slavery to remain a Southerner, I think, once the war started.

I am reading "the fiction" which is called Bel Canto. It is the middlest of middlebrow literature and doesn't yet have the redeeming value of being a tearjerker. I'm not sure why I thought I might like it, but it leaves me cold. I think one clue is that the book has a lot of weird spellcheck-proof errors, like "vile" for "vial" and "sight" for "site." Which leads me to assume that the book had a lot more errors that were caught in spellcheck. Which leads me to assume a fact that I also assume in a few other ways, that the writer wasn't paying a lot of attention to the writing and is mainly using words to whiz the characters from set piece to set piece. I don't feel like there's a single living person in the book. Which leads me to think it is supposed to be magic realism, so I am trying not to get too fixated on the things that are clearly ridiculous. I can suspend disbelief as well as the next person, but I am not sure if this writer intends me to.

But look: there's a scene where 58 people in a tense situation are frozen by the power of opera. The opera singer gets what she wants in a gun-filled standoff by crossing the room and singing "O Mio Bambino Caro." And then refusing to sing again, ever, unless she gets her way. I can imagine the writer thinking, what opera-type song will my readers know, that I can use here? And assuming everyone who reads this book also saw "Room With a View" 20 years ago and knows the song, and wants to be an opera lover and understander.

Opera is great, don't get me wrong, but rarely is it the kind of beautiful thing that knocks an unsuspecting person on their ass. One or two people will be caught up by it, in an ordinary situation, but most people would be begging for an end to the opera.

I will always remember watching Amadeus on a summer afternoon, in a crowd of recent high school graduates, the summer after high school, for the eighth time, and when the Pergolisi "Stabat Mater" was about to start, me and one other person both leaned forward and said SSSHHHHHH at the same time. It was enough of an icebreaker that we went on a couple dates.

On Tuesday we were all talking about books after a meeting, and it struck me that I hadn't
bought a new novel in a bookstore in about two years. The last trade paperback novel I bought, that I could remember off the top of my head, was the K*** R*****. I had better start compiling my list of books I have read so this awful book isn't at the top of my mind. It's probably also time to join LibraryThing as a paid member so I can put all my stuff on it and start drawing patterns from it. And to be honest about the books I have read too, including all the pulp, mysteries and science fiction as well as the Robert Musil.

As an outgrowth of this discussion, I now have a trade paperback copy of Bel Canto, which everyone assures me is great, and another work of fiction called Two Junes or Three Junes. Another outgrowth is that I might have turned another young person on to Joseph Mitchell.

So I should start compiling my list of the books I read in the past year, before I start to forget what they were. One thing that will make this job difficult this year is that a lot of the books I read were in ebook form. It's tough when there isn't a stack of printed paper books by the bed.

One paper book I am reading now and just dying for is Robert Musil's "Five Women." Musil is the author of "Young Törless," which I adored a while ago. Found this new (to me) book at the last bookstore in Harvard Square, when I was there this winter. It is hard to believe that Harvard Square, where I spent so much time kicking around as a 19- and 20-year-old, going to bookstores and record stores, has so few bookstores and record stores left. This is a tedious thing to point out but I will point it out.

Another serendipitous find at this same bookstore was a small volume called "The Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller." It's about the life of Martin Farquhar Tupper, a distant relative of mine who wrote a bestselling volume of inspiring poetry and then spent the rest of his life first as a celebrity and then as a wreck of a former celebrity. His book of poetry stayed in print for 80 years. There were three copies of this biography of him on the shelf, and I bought two, because I know father W would enjoy reading this book. It makes many flattering references to the American branch of the Tupper family, evidently my people, which supposedly had a distinguished fighting record in the Revolutionary War. And a member of that same family, of course, invented Tupperware.

I had a third astonishing find at this same bookstore but can't recall it. So why do I think I can recall every book I read in the entire past year?