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Recent reading
Oct. 22nd, 2008 08:31 amIt's been a very long time since I've written about my reading, and the backlog of books is beginning to pile up. These will, of necessity, be very short reviews but there are some books on this list that I really wish I could give more time to. Ah well.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I will confess that I was intimidated by this book, having read only isolated bits of Stein and having heard much about her difficulty. So I was surprised to find this book so readable, and so downright funny in places. It's an odd sort of memoir, skating along across the surface of Stein's and Toklas's life together and almost never delving into any sort of interiority or emotional depth, but it's full of clever lines and sharp little portraits of all the writers and artists that they knew in Paris before and after WWI, and if you read between the lines even a little, there's this great, subtle sense of the long intimacy between Stein and Toklas. What a project, to adopt someone else's voice like that! While reading it, I sometimes got the sense that it was all just a big shared joke between the two of them, and Gertrude and Alice were still off somewhere chuckling over it all.
Developing Ecological Consciousness by Christopher Uhl: This book walks a very fine line between appropriately earnest and being straight-up cheesy. It's a mix of scientific information, personal anecdotes, and "practices" that are meant to instill a sense of wonder and connectedness to the earth. It's a little unclear what audience Uhl intended for this book--teachers who want to help develop their students' ecological consciousnesses? The students themselves? People outside the educational context who are just interested in the subject?--and this issue becomes a weakness. It's an engaging book overall, even if it does inspire occasional eye-rolling.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: This is Hemingway's take on some of the same Parisian expatriate material covered by Gertrude Stein. Even though Hemingway and Stein are unflattering to each other in these books, I ended up enjoying both of them. My favorite part of this memoir was the first half, with its focus on austerity and hard work, the routines of writing that Hemingway established for himself, the cafes and the cheap good meals... Like the Stein, there was a lot more humor here than I expected to find.
The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald: This is a strange book, a posthumously collected group of autobiographical essays, jottings from Fitzgerald's notebooks, and selections of his correspondence. The essays are the most readable part of the book; there are gems among the notebook writings, but you have to go through a lot of not particularly interesting stuff to find them. The essays were notable to me mainly for their long, elaborately lyrical sentences--quite a change from Stein and Hemingway--and their sense of melancholy nostalgia. Essays like "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and "My Lost City" function as memorials to an age that has passed, but the funny thing about them is that the age that Fitzgerald is memorializing has only been over for three or four years at the time the essay was written. My favorite piece in this book was "Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ----", an account of a few years in the lives of the Fitzgerald's told entirely in the form of memories of various hotels in which they stayed.
Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow: Unfortunately, I have almost nothing to say about this book. Coming as it did on the heels of David Orr's Ecological Literacy and Uhl's Developing Ecological Consciousness, this poor book had very little chance of standing out in my mind. All three of these books have started to run together for me. Perhaps I'll come back to the Thomashow at some point when I can read it for its own sake.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: This is Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband and the ways she was made crazy by grief during that year. Parts of the book are harrowing--on the night that I read the first two chapters, I got in bed and just cried--but other parts are quite beautiful. There are certain words and phrases that ripple through the whole book, coming to the surface again and again, and there are lovely memories of Didion's 40-year partnership with her husband. I was amazed by the clarity of Didion's writing and complex way she structured her narrative.
And that is all for now! It's gotten quite chilly here in the past few days, and I'm really enjoying it.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I will confess that I was intimidated by this book, having read only isolated bits of Stein and having heard much about her difficulty. So I was surprised to find this book so readable, and so downright funny in places. It's an odd sort of memoir, skating along across the surface of Stein's and Toklas's life together and almost never delving into any sort of interiority or emotional depth, but it's full of clever lines and sharp little portraits of all the writers and artists that they knew in Paris before and after WWI, and if you read between the lines even a little, there's this great, subtle sense of the long intimacy between Stein and Toklas. What a project, to adopt someone else's voice like that! While reading it, I sometimes got the sense that it was all just a big shared joke between the two of them, and Gertrude and Alice were still off somewhere chuckling over it all.
Developing Ecological Consciousness by Christopher Uhl: This book walks a very fine line between appropriately earnest and being straight-up cheesy. It's a mix of scientific information, personal anecdotes, and "practices" that are meant to instill a sense of wonder and connectedness to the earth. It's a little unclear what audience Uhl intended for this book--teachers who want to help develop their students' ecological consciousnesses? The students themselves? People outside the educational context who are just interested in the subject?--and this issue becomes a weakness. It's an engaging book overall, even if it does inspire occasional eye-rolling.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: This is Hemingway's take on some of the same Parisian expatriate material covered by Gertrude Stein. Even though Hemingway and Stein are unflattering to each other in these books, I ended up enjoying both of them. My favorite part of this memoir was the first half, with its focus on austerity and hard work, the routines of writing that Hemingway established for himself, the cafes and the cheap good meals... Like the Stein, there was a lot more humor here than I expected to find.
The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald: This is a strange book, a posthumously collected group of autobiographical essays, jottings from Fitzgerald's notebooks, and selections of his correspondence. The essays are the most readable part of the book; there are gems among the notebook writings, but you have to go through a lot of not particularly interesting stuff to find them. The essays were notable to me mainly for their long, elaborately lyrical sentences--quite a change from Stein and Hemingway--and their sense of melancholy nostalgia. Essays like "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and "My Lost City" function as memorials to an age that has passed, but the funny thing about them is that the age that Fitzgerald is memorializing has only been over for three or four years at the time the essay was written. My favorite piece in this book was "Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ----", an account of a few years in the lives of the Fitzgerald's told entirely in the form of memories of various hotels in which they stayed.
Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow: Unfortunately, I have almost nothing to say about this book. Coming as it did on the heels of David Orr's Ecological Literacy and Uhl's Developing Ecological Consciousness, this poor book had very little chance of standing out in my mind. All three of these books have started to run together for me. Perhaps I'll come back to the Thomashow at some point when I can read it for its own sake.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: This is Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband and the ways she was made crazy by grief during that year. Parts of the book are harrowing--on the night that I read the first two chapters, I got in bed and just cried--but other parts are quite beautiful. There are certain words and phrases that ripple through the whole book, coming to the surface again and again, and there are lovely memories of Didion's 40-year partnership with her husband. I was amazed by the clarity of Didion's writing and complex way she structured her narrative.
And that is all for now! It's gotten quite chilly here in the past few days, and I'm really enjoying it.
