Long Books

Dear blog,
I've been ignoring you.  I apologize.  But I haven't been ignoring my reading (really), so I feel like we can pick up about where we left off.  This summer has, for all of my unemployed-ness, been uncharacteristically busy.  Most recently, I went home for my ten-year high school reunion, a fact which has little to do with reading and this blog, but it was so unexpectedly fun that I wanted to mention it (and to throw out a theory that Facebook and other social media make things like reunions way less stressful, given that any high school friend you are Facebook friends with already knows what you look like now and what you've been up to lately).

But really, we're here to talk about books.  I did make it to the midpoint of David Copperfield and have been taking a little break to breeze through Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, and Anne of Ingleside.  They are a different kind of charming than the earlier books and filled with more adult scrapes and triumphs and heartbreaks and amusements.  Still, I find them delightful and I continue to bask in their old-fashioned charm (and marvel at the descriptions of housekeeping and entertaining that are sprinkled throughout).

I think what I wanted to talk about in this post (and alluded to somewhere in the morass of the previous one) was being one of those people who read long books.  Classic books.  I've always been a little uncomfortable with dragging out these tomes in public, not wanting people to think I'm showing off.  I also prefer to avoid the questions and comments that arise when I get over myself and read what I want, when and where I want.  I hate being asked if I'm reading things for class (especially by people who know what classes I'm taking and must know that, though I wish I could read Joseph Campbell for one of my classes nowadays, it isn't going to happen).  I hate when people tell me I'm brave for reading long books.  No.  This is not bravery.  Nor is it masochism.  They are the books I want to be reading, and why would one assume anything different.

I certainly don't want this to come off bitter and rant-y (though I suspect we're approaching that territory).  What I want to convey is a certain sadness that a love of reading, especially a love of reading books that have been widely acknowledged to be great, is considered suspect by so many.  I would so like people to understand that I have come to love these "great books," and to believe that there is something in there for them as well, something they could connect with and immerse themselves in.

YA Literature

I had been planning to put off posting again until I reached the midpoint of David Copperfield.  An arbitrary decision, I suppose, but I have been ruminating on some things I wanted to say about reading the kind of books that I tend to read (and I am still mulling those thoughts over and will do my best to express them articulately when I get to that midpoint, which should be in the next day or so); also, that is the point where I plan to pause and take a little break with Anne of Windy Poplars.

You might be asking yourself (if you were able to muddle through those convolutions) why I'm posting this now, and that would be a good question.  To catch you up to where I am in the book, David/Trotwood Copperfield has finished school and is learning to be a proctor (now if he would just explain to me what precisely that means).  He is living on his own and, though he spends most of his evenings alone and lonely, he has had a few notable guests - Steerforth and company, and Uriah Heep.*  I've been struck by how timeless David's experiences are at this time in his life.


A couple of examples:

• When Steerforth and his friends dine with David Copperfield, they all (David especially) get absolutely wasted and David makes an utter fool of himself.  (Also, his description of being drunk, in which he keeps saying that somebody did this ridiculous thing, then comes to realize that it was himself, is brilliant.)
• This: "I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee; which I seem, on looking back, to have taken by the gallon at about this period of my existence."

Seriously.  I read a lot of YA literature over the last year (and will be reading a lot more in the year to come) and if you updated the rhetoric of these passages ever so slightly, you could drop them into just about any book that deals with coming of age.  

Where am I going with all this?  I have to make a little digression to explain.  Earlier this year, a student asked me for a book that was similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (a request which thrilled me, because I adore that book).  I gave him The Catcher in the Rye.  A rather obvious choice, but for good reasons (first-person narrative, coming of age story, deals with depression and loneliness, and so on).  A few weeks later, the teacher who had introduced him to Perks (they read it out loud in class, which is AWESOME) mentioned to me that he wasn't really getting into Salinger and she thought it was probably too dated for kids to connect with these days.  I didn't argue, but I also really vehemently disagreed.  The more books I read about that time of life (lumped together lately as Young Adult literature), the more I realize how little has changed.  Yes, Holden Caulfield didn't have computers and cell phones (though really, Perks doesn't have all those super-contemporary trappings either), but he has the same problems.  And so, for that matter, does David Copperfield.  When we suggest that kids can't connect with characters created 50 years ago or 150 years ago, I think we're doing them a disservice.  When they're confined to the YA lit of the last 5 or 10 years (and don't get me wrong, I think a lot of that stuff is incredible), they miss out on all of the profound things said about young adulthood by the authors of previous generations.  And really, young adulthood never changes that much - David Copperfield's attempts to discover who he is and where he's headed are, yes, more wordy than Holden's or the narrator of Perks, but the differences are superficial.  The core is the same.  

*I understand David Copperfield's dislike of 'umble Uriah, though he hasn't really done anything particularly evil (yet, I suppose, since the back cover describes Uriah as the "most unforgettable villain in all literature").  I think this is primarily because he reminds me of Steerpike, from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books.  I'm hardly the first person to make this comparison - Peake's books are quite Dickensian (a conclusion I'm reaching in reverse, since I read them last summer and am really just now familiarizing myself with Dickens) and I wouldn't be shocked to learn that Steerpike's very appearance was based on Uriah's (the red eyes, the angular frame).  Anyway, I think that Steerpike is a particularly unforgettable villain (one of the most fascinatingly horrible characters I've ever encountered, really), and I can't recommend Gormenghast highly enough.  It was recommended to me largely because of the fabulous, verbose prose (Peake had such a command of English vocabulary and the sheer multitude and variety of words made my head spin), and I loved it for that and also for the weird, marvelous, and often creepy characters and the way Peake could make a slow, silent chase through vast tunnels and hallways in the early dawn utterly thrilling (I mean it - I don't know if I breathed while Titus and Flay followed Steerpike; if I did, I'm certain it was quiet and shallow, for fear that Steerpike would hear any noise that I made).

I was right.  I just needed to give Mr. Dickens another chance, to bring older and (hopefully) wiser eyes to his words.  In other words, I'm really digging David Copperfield.  It's rather slower going than, say, Anne of Green Gables, and decidedly longer, but I feel like I've set a good pace.  More importantly, I'm becoming more and more engrossed by the story.  I think David himself is quite charming and I adore Peggoty.  Mr. Barkis makes me laugh out loud.  The Murdstones are properly horrifying step-relations and the thought of Mr. Creakle's whisper makes me shiver when I think about it.  And I know this only scratches the surface when it comes to the characters that David will meet in his travels - just now, he's been packed off with Mr. Quinion to London.

I also love that David is a reader, and that he takes solace in his books during hard times.  I adore books about readers, and I've had the pleasure just this summer of spending time with David, Anne Shirley, Catherine Morland, and Roland Michell - their love of reading, described so eloquently by their creators, makes me feel a deep connection with each of them, separated though we may be by years and continents and, of course, the fact that they are fictional and I, last I checked, am not.  So, though reading may often be a lonely business (and that loneliness be the inspiration for this particular blog), I find myself slightly less lonely when I am reading with these characters.

By my count, it has been three days since last I posted.  It feels like longer.  I finished Anne of Avonlea, rushed through Anne of the Island, and decided to take a little hiatus from Lucy Maud for something I suspect Anne herself would approve of - David Copperfield (the Dickens, not the magician).

Why that particular tome, you ask?  I suppose Anne did play some part in the decision: in AotI, she reads The Pickwick Papers; there's something so right about chasing a book about a reader with a book that they were reading (and I don't own Pickwick, so it was this or Nicholas Nickleby or A Tale of Two Cities).  On top of which, I am watching Lost, a show that does not shy away from literary allusions, and Desmond David Hume is a great fan of Mr. Dickens (again, I didn't have immediate access to Our Mutual Friend).  Anyway, Dickens seemed the way to go.  

My past relationship with the oeuvre of Charles Dickens is limited to A Christmas Carol (which I have read probably once and seen in various iterations more times than I can remember) and Great Expectations.  The latter I read when I was in high school and had only recently begun to work through a list of recommended classics (a list of about 80 books that I did ultimately complete, sometime in college or shortly after).  I don't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about it, though I suspect my perspectives have changed somewhat, hopefully enough to make DC a thoroughly enjoyable experience (I experienced similar shifts in opinion about Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf).  It's a long book, so I expect to have plenty of time to reflect on how I feel about it, but I take heart in Anne's and Desmond's love for Dickens, as well as the knowledge that, of his many works, DC was the favorite of Dickens himself.  

Happy Independence Day!

I've been neglecting my self-imposed blogging duties.  I finished Freakonomics a few days ago (on Saturday, June 30, to be precise) and haven't managed to get myself here to say anything else about it since. In my defense, I came home for the weekend to do family things and there really hasn't been much down time (all this relaxing is just exhausting!), plus I feel like most of what I wanted to say about the book was summed up in my previous post.  Still, the fact that I didn't post has been nagging at me, so here I am. 

I did want to say that, despite the tone and tenor of the previous post, I did wind up mostly enjoying Freakonomics.  It is certainly interesting, and I generally like seeing things that I wouldn't normally consider quantifiable broken down into clear and uncompromising numbers.

Now, before I rush off for more family things, let me add that I'm halfway through Anne of Avonlea.  More on this later.