In which my childhood is not ruined

Anne of Green Gables, y'all. Like so many other girls my age, I was obsessed with Anne of Green Gables when I was 10ish. I read all the book in the series multiple times; I don't think I ever owned them but I knew right where to find them in the library. My Victorian dollhouse Playmobil figures were always Anne and Gilbert and family, acting out incredibly dramatic scenes.

I didn't have this puppy, so I would use masking tape to make a house floorplan on my bedroom floor.

When I got to the end of the series, I would start over; at one point I remember feeling vaguely like maybe I should read something else, but ANNE was all I wanted to read, so ONE MORE TIME. That's just the kind of groove I get into now with 30 Rock on Netflix so, as they say in Quebec, plus ça change.

For all that, I discovered in conversation with some friends this winter that I had mostly forgotten what the books were about. I mean, I recognized various incidents ("oh yeaaaah...") but I couldn't have summarized anything to save my life. So when I saw this very attractive Oxford Children's Classics edition:

the book magpie strikes again

I thought I should re-read it. Not without some trepidation! You may remember that my re-reading of Nancy Drew was rather disappointing. And in general, what are the odds that a book for little girls published in 1908 wouldn't be embarrassing in 2014?

Actually, as it turns out, the book holds up pretty well! A lot of that has to do with one of Anne's key characteristics: that she is a whiz kid at school. There's no conflict about this in the book; I hate hypotheticals like this, but if it were a historical novel being written today, would the author have refrained from making "Anne is made to feel unfeminine for being smart" a major plot point? As I was reading, I both recognized that this is why I identified so intensely with Anne and also that this book, with its glorification of studying to win top marks, really shaped the way I approached my schoolwork as a kid.

And, not unrelatedly, Gilbert is still such. a. dish.*

Let's review, shall we? Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) is a boy who teases Anne about the color of her hair and she not only schools him good at the moment, she swears eternal hatred. Anne and Gilbert battle it out to be the top student in school on every assignment, exam, etc. Gilbert is clearly attracted to this girl who is so able and willing to fight back. Anne is mostly contemptuous, but by the end of the book they agree to be friends.

Amen amen, my fellow Ameriwomen, you can put away your tired "ooo, Disney princes gave me unrealistic expectations" meme, because that right there is kryptonite. Oh, you mean the most handsome boy in school will only love me more if I whoop him on spelling tests? I CAN DO THAT. And definitely, an antagonistic relationship like that will resolve in mutual respect and eventual love. Oh yes; Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) remains my one and only fictional crush.


* I've never seen the Canadian TV movie (series?), mind you. It seemed relevant to mention that at this particular moment.

Something Different: Something Other Than God

A few points to note before we get started today, class:

1. This is a review of a Catholic book written for a Catholic audience. Act accordingly.
2. This post contains links to where you can buy the book, but they are not affiliate links.
3. This post is being entered in a random drawing for a prize being offered by the author of the book to mark its launch and encourage people to read and write about it. However, the post is not sponsored or anything like that, and the opinions here are 100% my own, blah blah blah.

Now, on with the post... 

It occurred to me this afternoon that the Church gives us saints in response to our desire for celebrities. A celebrity is someone we want to think we know; they represent something — sex, or genius, or a particular system of belief — and we watch them like hawks. We think we know them, and we think we know their story, ignoring the fact that they are human beings like we are, in the middle of an uncertain life with unknown twists and turns ahead. When our celebrities fall or stray from their designated narrative we criticize them, we question or abandon our beliefs and affiliations, we recontextualize and rationalize and talk and talk and talk. We want so much to see particular values played out in someone else’s life, to have someone to point to (not always positively; we want someone to represent wrongness as much as to be our role model). The saints are an answer to this. Their lives have been lived, with all their messiness, but they have lived out particular virtues and heroisms, and we know that they have run the good race. In short, the Church tells us that if we want someone to model for us what virtue and devotion look like, we should look to these saints who are now eternally with God. (True to Philippians 4:8, the Church apparently isn't particularly concerned with providing bad examples.)

I was thinking about this because the book I’m reviewing here, Jennifer Fulwiler’s Something Other Than God (click for links to buy, a free excerpt, a video featuring a man in a banana suit, &c), is an example of a genre I really don’t ever read: the conversion story.

This is the gif Fulwiler made to celebrate the book launch. She is my people.

Fulwiler grew up as an atheist (in Texas, no less), without any real knowledge of religious culture or lore, and her objections were more to religion itself, as a guiding principle in someone’s life, than to any particular doctrine. This is more the culture that I recognize in my own surroundings, and part of the reason why I like reading Fulwiler’s blog. Her explanations and ponderings speak to the kinds of pushback I feel around me, and the currents I feel invited to fall into (that’s a terrible metaphor but whatever). The other reason her blog is so great is because Fulwiler is a funny, lively writer, who’s able to tell a hilarious story in all its absurd glory. She’s been working on this book for years (always a good sign), and when it was finally available to preorder I jumped on it. I also set up text alerts from Amazon to let me know when it was on its way. One of those texts arrived as I was counting down the minutes to a phone interview; if it had been my mother texting to wish me good luck I might have been annoyed at the near-heart attack it gave me, but since it was this book, I was just that much more excited. Priorities.

I was so psyched when it came I had to document the moment. And the tiles in my building's foyer. FEEL THE EXCITEMENT.

If I had to pick two words to describe the writing I might choose “clear” and “tight”. I was seeing reports on Twitter of people reading it in four or five hours, and I believe it. It’s not a quick read in the sense that there’s nothing to it, but in the sense that it draws you in and doesn’t slow you down. Since I’m a grad student I am contractually obligated to (a) like books, but also (b) make critical remarks, and this is really my only criticism: the book is so lean and focused that it can feel, well, too lean and focused. All the description of Fulwiler’s pre-conversion life is centered on her spiritual crises and the questions she had trouble answering within an atheist worldview. I would have liked a little more — I hate phrases like “word painting” or “pen portrait” but fine. I would have liked a little fuller pen portrait of atheist Jennifer Fulwiler, rather than getting it later on as a contrast to whatever was currently happening in the narrative. That being said, this tight focus gives the book a humble quality: it's not here to offer too much interpretation beyond the demands of the narrative. So, in my usual academic way: it's a plus and a minus.

The focus of the book is on the conversion process itself which is wrapped up in several dramatic changes that took place in her and her husband’s lives at the same time. This story is really interesting and relatable, even though it deals with fairly unusual circumstances, and in spite of the (realistic) complexity of all this, it's easy to follow. If you want to know the details, you should buy the book (also available as an ebook).

Which brings me around to the thoughts I opened this post with (eh? eh? I’m a writer). Conversion stories are like memoirs, being autobiographical narratives published while the writer is still alive. (That sentence is mocking me, pointing out that there is a ton of theory on exactly this topic that I have not read, but I am pushing through.) A conversion story could potentially play into a desire to latch onto celebrities, pulling us away from the real spiritual growth that could come from studying the lives of the saints into the roller coaster drama of constantly evaluating someone else’s life and opinions. As I was reflecting on the book, I thought about how difficult it would be to publish a narrative of your life like this. It would be strange to read a book written by a friend, offering her decided-on version of the part of her life which included you, particularly if you were part of the “before” picture. So what’s the point? Given that we don’t want to be idolizing our contemporaries, what’s the point of reading a story like this?

My answer to that question is that a book like this offers a unique kind of faith-sharing, where we can see what thoughts were going through someone else's mind and what challenges they faced, all in the context of a larger trajectory. Each of us is in the midst of our own story, striving to make little before-and-afters out of our faults and failings. Each of us is called to conversion throughout our lives: am I embracing that, or am I just trying to get comfortable? A story like this can also make us reflect on how we are helping others on their own way. Am I the camp counselor who pressures people in my care to conform? Am I the parishioner who celebrates the presence of a seeker?

This isn't a book that has all the answers, and of course it shouldn't be; Fulwiler, still alive (and long may she be) is not a saint, and she wisely isn't setting herself up as a celebrity either.* What it is, is a fascinating story about how — to quote the subtitle — the author "passionately sought happiness and accidentally found it." Something Other Than God is more than just a blog book; for one thing it gives a much more complete version of Fulwiler's story than I ever picked up reading her blog. More importantly, it's also a thoughtful account of how "conversion" means changing your life along with your mind. I enjoyed it just as much as I thought I would, and I can't wait to read/hear other people's thoughts about it.

* I am emphatically not telling Jennifer Fulwiler "Careful Icarus", just to be clear.**
** Mostly I added that footnote so I could link the Careful Icarus clip. I'm only human.

"Quartet in Autumn" has an ugly cover, so no pictures for you

Fair warning: you should not read this book if you are having a "boo hoo, I'm going to die alone in a box under an overpass" moment. But otherwise you should definitely find a copy and read it. It's short.

I've only read three of Barbara Pym's books but I have a blog and no one can stop me from saying that Quartet in Autumn feels supremely Pymmian. The four main characters are all odd and unattractive; elderly people working admittedly useless and unskilled jobs, with very little apparently in their lives. The four don't really seem to have or want much of a relationship beyond their occupation of the same office, and when the two women retire not only is it uncertain what they will do with their time it is also unclear whether there is any relationship beyond the work relationship that can continue.

One of the threads in the book involves a well-meaning but frustrated social worker who finds visiting one of the retired women very unrewarding indeed. Lonely old dears might be cranky at first but they're truly grateful for the attention... eventually... right? The humor in Quartet in Autumn is less pronounced than in Excellent Women or Glass of Blessings but it's here, mostly making the point that sometimes a crusty exterior serves to hide an equally crusty interior.

There are a couple of other characteristically-Pym elements to this book. First, I think I commented in another Pym review that she portrays how badly plotted life can be, and here, instead of characters being pushed together by circumstances or discovering their feelings for one another, opportunities get hinted at and missed, and people are not particularly sorry for having stuck to the knowns. Secondly, the whole thing ends on a genuine, organic note of hope despite there not being much concrete foundation for it. I'm not an author (clearly) but I can see where it's easy to create a hopeful ending by, say, giving your character some cash or tickets to Paris or a new romantic interest. Pym gives her characters very little -- arguably in this book she takes away some of what the characters had in the beginning -- and yet she ends with new hope by allowing the characters a change in perspective. Or I wonder if it would be more accurate to say that the characters derive hope from a rediscovery of their own ability to choose. I'm thinking of this little Christian/Catholic book recommended by a friend, Interior Freedom, which discusses the idea that even if one is dissatisfied or unhappy with a situation, one can be at peace with it by freely choosing to endure it (obviously that's not a novel idea but this is the book I thought of off the bat). I wonder if that would be a better characterization of the way Pym's characters end up with a sense of a new beginning or if I'm refining it too much; it might fit with the Anglo-Catholic theme that runs through her books.

Quartet in Autumn is about old people and is mostly about how their problems are not easy to solve. It's not a sexy exciting book about sexy exciting people by any means. But they're not kidding on the back cover when they call it a masterpiece, and you'll be glad you read it. You'll also want to go open a retirement account, cultivate your relationships with your nieces and nephews, and otherwise figure out what you want life to be like when you're old.

Remember eBooks?

Oh, I know, you're probably thinking something like "eBooks are still a big deal, you dork, prissy articles about them get published all the dang time even though it's like almost 2014" but what I mean is remember when ebooks (and, eh, internal capitals) were like a thing in my life, and I had a Kindle and whatnot?

(If that's our standard, then remember blogs, those were a thing once upon a time and where did they goooo, is what you're thinking sarcastically (don't think I don't know) and I say to you

shameless Alice pandering

but also yeah, ok.)

BACK TO ME. So there I was sitting on the train the other day, fiddling with my phone and thinking about how I had Les Miserables in the Penguin Gorgeous Brick Edition sitting at home, when a lady got on the train with her Kindle and I had a wistful moment.

That was the nice thing about the Kindle, it made an excellent commuting companion because you didn't have to decide what to bring with you or whether or not your shoulder could stand it; it was just you and the text and a consistently dainty extra thing in your bag.

My Kindle is currently in my parents' basement after losing my page one time too many. Ultimately, I don't miss it that much. And I'm halfway through le brique and I've got a shelf of physical books I should get through, so, you know.

I do always like a good accessory, though, so here are some new e-reader cases from the British Library to ogle. They have a weird adhesive thing that sticks the device into the case (see it in action), and what they don't seem to have is any kind of closure dealie. But they have one that says "A Very Naughty Girl" on it so I guess you have to weigh it yourself.

especially about the way to end a post

I'm not convinced anything in this post makes sense

I'm sitting here having something of an omg moment, because there are so many things in the world and in my life that I want to (help) accomplish and yet I do so very little and, hello, exhibit A, there are two emails I've been avoiding in my inbox for two weeks now. And that's reminded me of something I could do to avoid those for a wee bit longer.

Welcome to this blog post, about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I really liked this book. More specifically I was in awe of and delighted by it. From about halfway through I tried to put together my reaction and here's the best I came up with: say you're visiting an art museum for the first time. You're on vacation, or it's Sunday, or whatever, and it was free, so you're sort of drifting merrily through the galleries. Pictures pictures pictures: landscapes, ladies, naked ladies, landscapes, Dutch interiors, shoopdedoo. And then as you're casting your eye lazily across one wall, a picture jumps out at you. This, you think, this is the real thing. I've looked at all these other pictures that are superficially doing the same stuff: but this one works. This is the piece of art all those other paintings are trying to be.

You know you like my pretentious analogies, don't lie

I haven't read many (any?) other books about Jewish-Americans or golems or comic books or whatnot but somehow this book felt like it got something that other books I've read missed. It just clicked for me in a way I wouldn't necessarily have predicted. And it was darn entertaining too. I don't think it's changed my life or anything, and maybe I won't remember it at all in a few years, but man! It hit me the right way this time.

So lemme tell you a little story about this book. I bought it for £2 used with the express intention of getting rid of it when I was done. I actually finished it when I was staying in a hotel, and when I saw a bookshelf in the lobby with miscellaneous books on it, I got super excited about this perfect chance to pass the book on, indirectly, to someone else. So excited that I got rid of the book before I'd made any notes about favorite passages or copied out any quotes.

*~*~so genius~*~*

But, to cycle back around to the start of this post, I think one of the reasons I liked this book so much was the character of Josef Kavalier. Of all the characters, he was the one I was most interested in (and really, he's the main character, so that's good). During the Second World War, he gains a sort of notoriety among his fellow soldiers because he never opens his mail, and when someone confronts him about it he (I think, see above) responds that... he just didn't open it. He couldn't quite deal with it, so he didn't. So, uh, I don't think it says anything good about me and my psyche that I do that sometimes too, but it was a detail that I liked.

Frenchy Frenchy French

I know this is annoying and pretentious, but here's me having read a best-seller and my major takeaway is, Golly, what does it Say about Us as a Society that The Elegance of the Hedgehog was so popular?

I disliked the two main characters. One is a concierge in a hoity-toity building; plain and from a humble background, she has taught herself a lot about culture, philosophy, literature, music, but feels compelled to hide it under a stereotypical "stupid old woman" surface for the comfort of her wealthy employers. The other is a young teenager, also highly intelligent, who hides her brilliance in order to be left alone by her vapid, elitist family and peers. They're both really bitter about leading lives of deception, and scornful of the people they're deceiving. This all seems pretty pointless to me. At least the concierge is pursuing her interests though. The teenager is planning to commit suicide and burn down her flat in a big Gesture, and is keeping notebooks of profound thoughts to leave behind her in the meantime. So, massively selfish as well.

The back of my edition has a quote from the Guardian: "Resistance is futile... You might as well buy it before someone recommends it for your book group. Its charm will make you say yes." Ignoring that half-hearted last sentence, that's a pretty hilariously lackluster endorsement, and sums up my expectation going in and my reaction after the fact. I guess book club members identify with bitter geniuses who feel compelled to hide their brilliance; and not only do they identify with them, they find them "charming". Well, they are French.

Believe it or not, I didn't actually hate this book. It's not bad, it's just... meh. It is extremely French in its obsession with the "oughts" of social position and particularly with the idea that great culture only belongs to one kind of person. Lordy, the French. I did find it blazingly predictable that Japanese culture is held out as pure, beautiful, and generally perfect. Sadly, this stereotype is not in any way subverted. Save us, Japan!

It's dangerous to write a book in which your characters are supposed to be super-intelligent and having profound thoughts about culture on every page, but actually this one pulls it off. There were several points where I did, truly, feel enriched by the observations of these characters. For example, here is the teenager on grammar:

Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty... when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language... I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility.

And the concierge on "Dido's Lament" by Purcell:

In my opinion, the most beautiful music for the human voice on earth. It is beyond beautiful, it is sublime, because of the incredibly dense succession of sounds, as if each were linked to the next by an invisible force and, while each one remains distinct, they all melt into one another, at the edge of the human voice, verging on an animal cry. But there is a beauty in these sounds that no animal cry can ever attain, a beauty born of the subversion of phonetic articulation and the transgression of the careful verbal language that ordinarily creates distinct sounds.

I liked this book if for no other reason than that it reminded me to go listen to this piece again; and if people have discovered various works of art or music because of this book then it deserves every copy it sold.

One more:

To those who have not understood that the enchantment of language comes from such nuances, I shall address the following prayer: beware of commas.

The ending I found shocking and predictable all at once, and while I never did come to like the characters, I think I came around to something like sympathy, so there's that. All in all, I think this is a book worth reading if the opportunity comes around. And if my (hypothetical) book club picked it, I wouldn't decide to be "out of town" for the relevant dates.

Insanity! No, really: prepare the padded room

Lady Audley's Secret: it's no Woman in White.

Penguin knows that we cannot resist Coralie Bickford-Smith's beautiful clothbound designs, and so they've introduced (in the UK anyway; have these made to America yet? can't remember) the Penguin English Library. The fiends. I mean, look at this cover:

These are paperback editions with a slightly rubbery matte finish, and very reasonably priced; this one is £6. I noticed that this series started with the usual suspects, Austen, Dickens, etc, and you can tell it's been successful because they're digging pretty deeply into the classics catalog now. Coralie Bickford-Smith: cover design crack. (Side note: I was relieved when I saw her name credited on the back of these volumes; at first I was concerned that Penguin had genuinely ripped themselves off, so I'm glad that it's rather a case of a good designer getting more work.)

This was not an especially notable book; it takes far sterner insaner stuff than this to impress a veteran of Alice's Woman in White Readalong.

memmmmries

There are a couple of notable things about it, though. I did like Robert Audley, who's a sort of lovable layabout who nevertheless gets sucked into Mysterious Doings when he can't just let his friend's mysterious disappearance go. It's a sort of Code-of-the-Woosters thing. Braddon doesn't recognize the good thing she has here though, and like a true killjoy Victorian sensationalist, she seems to think we'll actually dislike Audley for being a nominal barrister who doesn't really care about making a legal career but is happy to lounge around leading a mildly dissolute, unstriving bachelor life. In the final analysis, Audley is only an embryonic awesome character; Braddon sort of leads him through a conversion to being serious-minded and diligent and booooo-ring.

Granted, it's been many, many weeks since I finished this book and therefore stopped actively thinking about it, but is it even slightly possible to see Audley as a predecessor for Bertie Wooster? Maybe through several other literary degrees of separation that I can't think of? Alternatively, I'm reading the fully developed awesomeness of a character like Bertie onto the unlikely-hero lead of a fairly unpretentious popular thriller. (Yeah, okay, I'm seeing it.) Still.

Audley is embryonically awesome in another way: he's clearly (that is, clumsily) presented as a man qualified to become, for the purposes of the story, the Detective. As someone with legal training, Audley knows about evidence and reasoning and so can investigate the case. In our modern post-post-post-conventional genre world, Audley could carry a whole series of increasingly tenuous mystery novels. Dame Crawley's Enigma. Viscountess Grande's Private Affair. Comtesse L'Enfant's Confidence (the foreign installment). Princess Edwina's Riddle: The Stunning Conclusion of the Robert Audley Chronicles.

As I flip through my dogeared pages, I'm reminded that there's a lot of entertaining wackiness in this book of both the intentional and unintentional variety. For instance, I'm pretty sure Braddon's having a larf when she puts this reflection into Robert Audley's mouth (or brain) (you get it):

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle and murder and clamour and desperation. [sic] If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups.

Suddenly I don't really care to give this blog post an ending. My first sentence stands as my final verdict.