Some Books I Recently Bought

To tide you over until I start posting about actual books again, a picture of my newest acquisitions (at some point I will update this post to include a picture of the bookstore in which they were found, as well as a review of the bookstore: Books of Interest in Santa Fe).

Book Fifteen: THE LADY INVESTIGATES

The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives & Spies in Fiction, by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, 1981.



 


TTR: As with the last book, it is difficult to say how much time I took to read this. But approximately two weeks.

Comments: Although this book has the same goals as, say, The Woman Detective, it was much more focused on American Female detectives and was very useful to me while I wrote the second chapter of my thesis. As I quickly learned while writing my thesis, a book with a good bibliography is doubly invaluable. This one has both good content and a good bibliography.

Book Fourteen: THE WOMAN DETECTIVE: GENDER AND GENRE

The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, by Kathleen Gregory Klein, published by University of Illinois Press, 1988.


TTR: it is difficult to say how long this took me to read as I read through it as needed while writing my prospectus and thesis.

Comments: if you are interested in the history of the female detective (both British and American), this is an excellent place to start. I'd also suggest Michelle B. Slung's Crime on Her Mind, Joseph Kestner's Sherlock's Sisters, and Craig and Cadogan's The Lady Investigates.

Summer Lovin' Read-a-Thon

In hopes to boost my reading numbers, I'm signing up with the Summer Lovin' Read-a-Thon (though I'll have you know I am actually at 20 books read, I'm just a bit behind on blog posts). Check out the blurb below for more information!

The Summer Lovin’ Readathon is a week-long readathon event hosted by seven independent bloggers! (Oh, Chrys!, Tumbling Books, Effortlessly Reading, Love Life Read, Shelf Addiction, Read Sleep Repeat, and Reviewing Wonderland)

Spend the week reading at your own pace, when and how you want to. There will be daily challenges for awesome prizes and opportunities to get points toward the Grand Prize Packs.

As if that weren’t enough – the week will end with a 24-hr marathon readathon! Twitter parties, mini-challenges, games, prizes given EVERY HOUR, and more chances to get points toward the Grand Prize Packs.

Sign-ups will be open through July 6th. I’m in, are you?!

Book Thirteen: THE ROAD

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, published by Random House, 2007.


   

TTR: I read this in about two hours. I could not put it down. In fact, I got a phone call in the middle of reading and it jarred me so badly that I was probably rude to the caller (sorry, mom).

Comments: Aside from the fact that I kept expecting zombies and getting cannibals, I both loved and hated the book. Hurray for my inability to decide, right? The world McCarthy created was so alive for me, which is ironic considering that it is a dead world in this book. The simplicity of the dialogue and plot were poignant.

I *may* have cried at certain heart-rending parts. Ehem.

The ending, though, seemed to undermine itself. It presents a hope that cannot exist in the world McCarthy creates. I also felt very suspicious about the family that adopts the boy at the end.

Book Twelve: TROPIC OF ORANGE

Tropic of Orange, by Karen Tei Yamashita published by Coffee House Press, 1997.
 

TTR: On a whim, because the book is separated into seven parts that are named after the days of the week, I took a week to read. But the book is engaging, one of the best I've read this year, and I could have easily finished it in a day or so, if I hadn't been trying to finish my Thesis.

Comments:

I. Love. Magical Realism. I love Chican@ lit. I love post-modern culturally chaotic craziness in a novel. Tropic of Orange has it all and more.

The book is full of interesting characters, references to film noir, and even references to Place and Space theory. My favorites are a character called Buzzworm and one called Bobby, who Yamashita describes thusly: "Bobby's  Chinese. Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown. That's it" (15).

I know you probably all suspect my ability to hate a book, at this point, and that's okay--because I'm a literature scholar (it's weird not to say English major, but I'm taking a break before applying for doctoral programs, and it would be equally weird to call myself a major right now) and my success depends upon my ability to find ways to like books enough to enter into discourse with and about them.

But I didn't just find ways to like this book. I had no reason and no choice, I just loved it. From sentence one. I would read it again.

The Bookworm

Book Eleven: Gardens in the Dunes

Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko, 1999.

TTR: Two weeks, give or take. This is a fairly long book.

Comments:

Honestly, Gardens in the Dunes is probably my least favorite Silko novel. I think it is because of what Silko was trying to do with the novel, which is to step away from angry political writing in a sense. I'm a huge Ceremony fan, and I also love her poetry. But this book, while in many ways still intriguing, didn't feel all there for me. Mostly it was the ending, which I really disliked.

What did I love about the novel? The constant references to gardening across the globe, which I read as a sort of alternative globalization. I also loved the references to the Female Spiritual Principle and Hattie's very Victorian mannerisms.

My favorite character is Indigo, despite the fact that she is rather problematically idealized throughout the text, and her animal friends: Linnaeus, the monkey, and Rainbow, the parrot.

Book Ten: BLOOD MERIDIAN

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy, 1985.

TTR: This took me more or less a week, mostly because, as I have stated elsewhere, reading McCarthy is like watching a tragedy unfold and being unable to either walk away or intervene. I think at most I made it through 4-5 chapters at a time before I had to put it down.

Comments:

Blood Meridian is many things, but scarring may be the most accurate. It is like and yet so disturbingly unlike McCarthy's other work. My friend and fellow grad student has suggested that his work in this book is particularly grotesque--a mixture of the beautiful and the terrible. I think it's an astute assessment.

Blood Meridian is so saturated with meaningless, gory violence that I began to wonder if I would eventually become desensitized. I think, more accurately, I just became so overwhelmed with it all that I stopped being able to process it, stumbling through page after page in an attempt just to make sense of it all.

That said, I think that this book is full of interesting, insightful moments (maybe this is just the English Geek in me).

While reading this sorta/kinda historically rooted novel, one character in particularly both intrigued and repulsed me: Judge Holden. So, I think I'll share a portion of the paper I wrote about this insane, giant, hairless judge:

In the first third of Blood Meridian, the kid poses a question that is one of the text’s central mysteries: “What’s [the Judge] a judge of?” (135). Hinted answers are scattered throughout the text, and nearly all of them are cryptic and ambiguous; the Judge is either the devil or a god, he is either a blessing to the gang or a curse, he is himself unknowable (Peebles 234; McCarthy 131). The Judge’s first meeting with Glanton’s gang, which occurred before the kid joined and while the gang was being pursued group of Apaches who had them outnumbered and outgunned, is related by Tobin and serves to emphasize the Judge’s discomfiting lack or moral, physical, spatial, and temporal context:

Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the Judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he’d brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all. He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. (125)

The Judge appears to Glanton and his men completely without context; his origins are never given and his first meeting with the gang is marked by an ambiguous mysticism. Tobin suggests that the rock upon which the Judge sits, solitary, in the middle of the desert, is a “merestone,” which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be used literally to mean “boundary stone,” an object used to mark spatial distances or the boundaries between distinct places, or, figuratively to indicate something that serves as the marker of an era, a temporal signifier of what has been (“merestone, n.” def. a-b). The Judge sits upon the metaphorical confluence of time and place, rather than existing within either time or place. In fact, in the novel’s final chapters we learn that “whoever would seek out [the Judge’s] history…must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin” and will ultimately “discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing” (309-10). The Judge has no discernable beginning and claims, likewise, to have no end.

Book Nine: The Professor's House

The Professor's House, by Willa Cather, 1926.

TTR: I sort of lost track of reading times for awhile, due to the impending doom of my Thesis Defense (which I rocked, by the way). I believe it took me a couple of days to read, while juggling all of my other assignments.

Comments:

I read this book in conjunction with Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and so a lot of my interpretation is based upon Bachelard's discussions of the home.

To be perfectly honest, if this had not been an assigned reading, I probably would not have read it. The narrative takes a long time to unfold, and there is no real plot to speak of. Plus, it lacks the obvious allure of some of Cather's other titles (such as Death Comes for the Archbishop). But there are some beautiful moments scattered throughout the text--the kind only Cather can really create--and so I am glad it was assigned. Here is an excerpt from one of my responses:

Read in the context of Bachelard's concept of moving as a way to access "motionless childhood", The Professor’s House by Willa Cather is an exploration of the intimate connection between a house and an identity, an interrogation of these “fixations of happiness” and what they mean in terms of an increasingly mobile, fluid (rather than fixed) society (6).  The text’s fascination with the always already absent Outland, whose name signifies his perceived placelessness, further emphasizes these fixations in terms of Motionless Childhood or the lack thereof. Although the Professor envies Outland’s freedom of movement, the Professor’s fixity provides him a literal living and Outland’s loss of place is what ultimately leads to his death, he struggles to find place himself both in Washington and in Michigan but ultimately finds only brief shelter (Cather 234, 260-1). While the Professor supposes that Outland has escaped some horrible fate by dying young, the fact remains that Tom’s death is “one great catastrophe” in which all of Outland and the Professor’s hopes for the future are “swept away” (260). Without a place of his own, Outland embodies loss, just as, without his house, the Professor is ultimately loss or absence, elided by inhabiting his family’s place at the cost of his own. In the final pages of the novel, the Professor succumbs to this placelessness, and perhaps this loss is the embodiment of the foreboding he has, in the final chapters, that “he was nearing the end of his life” (282-3). The Professor, however, does not technically die at the end of the text; rather, he sinks into apathy—a mentally, if not physically, absent father and husband. He concludes with the thought, “if his apathy hurt them, they could not possibly be so much hurt as he had already” (283).