Monthly Archives: January 2012

A Year in Books/Day 31: Ernest Hemingway A to Z

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  • Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918

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    Title: Ernest Hemingway A to Z

  • Author: Charles M. Oliver
  • Year Published: 1999 (Checkmark Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2004/2005
  • Source: Unknown book seller, Upstate New York
  • About: Every knowable fact about Hemingway, contained in one large volume. With photographs.
  • Motivation: I’m of 3 or 4 minds about Hemingway the writer, and many more about Hemingway the man. However, since I write about dead writers, I knew this would be a useful reference tool. I also love-love!-any kind of encyclopedia.
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/as reference-countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page 348: “In criticizing her husband’s writing, Catherine Bourne says, in ‘The Garden of Eden’ , that a wastebasket is “the most important thing for a writer”. She later burns his stories and the reviews of his second novel in a wastebasket.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 30: The Medieval World Europe 1100-1350

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  • Title: The Medieval World Europe 1100-1350
  • Author: Friedrich Heer
  • Year Published: 1961/This Edition: 1998 (WELCOME RAIN)
  • Year Purchased: 2000/2001
  • Source: Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company
    English: A medieval page presumably from a Boo...

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  • About: A modern, scholarly classic that remains enjoyably readable whilst sparing no attention to detail.
  • Motivation: I felt a need to brush up on my Medieval European history. No, really.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page: “Our contemporary European societies, both Western and Eastern, in many ways continue to live on their medieval inheritance. History is the present, and the present is history. When we look more closely into the crises and catastrophes, the hopes and fears of our own day, whether we know it or not we are concerned with developments whose origins can be traced back directly or indirectly to their source in the high Middle Ages.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 29: The Gashlycrumb Tinies

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  • Title: The Gashlycrumb Tinies or, After the Outing
  • Author: Edward Gorey
  • Year Published: 1963/This Edition: 1991 (Harcourt Brace & Company)
  • Year Purchased: 1999/2000
  • Source: Gift from a friend
  • About: The delightfully macabre master’s most famous, and oddly eloquent, Edwardian-esque alphabet.
  • Motivation: I’m a squealing, hand-clapping Gorey fangirl.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt: “H is for Hector done in by a thug.”
  • Happiness Scale: Off the charts

A Year in Books/Day 28: Cinderella’s Big Score

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  • Siouxsie Sioux at the Edinburgh Tiffany's, 1980

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    Title: Cinderella’s Big Score Women of the punk and Indie Underground

  • Author: Maria Raha
  • Year Published: 2005 (Seal Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2010
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: ‘Cinderella’s Big Score’ is a potent combination of music history and witty, trenchant beatdown on the punk patriarchy, served up with an awesome array of black and white photographs.
  • Motivation: Come closer. Come closer still. You may not know it-after all, we’re fairly new acquaintances and I usually look so mild-mannered-but I’m a punk chick, old school. I’m also a feminist. This book is a dream come true.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 44: Exene Cervenka exudes pure power. This sense of assuredness emanates from a stark emotional purity and her ability to fully, bravely expose herself without posturing. She hits hight notes without compromise and her voice conveys a raw severity and nakedness, once prompting John Doe to extol: “She had poems that were obviously songs, plus she was cut from classic lead singer cloth. She was such a bad ass! I pretended to be, but Exene was the real thing. She had the ax to grind, the sadness of her mother’s death, and the unusual wiring that made it possible for her to throw a drink in somebody’s face and still be right. She totally delivered as a lead singer.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10++

A Year in Books/Day 27: Vera

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  • Title: Vera [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]
  • Author: Stacy Schiff
  • Year Published: 1999/This Edition: 2000 (Modern Library Paperback Edition)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Barnes & Noble Clearance Rack
  • About: Vera Slonim Nabokov was never a writer. Nor, as far as it is known, did she ever harbor that ambition. She was, by a series of disturbing historical circumstances, something of a professional refugee. Although she held a number of jobs, the impossibility-and ultimate imprudence-of separating Vera from her husband and their famous 52-year-marriage jumps starkly from the page. To her husband and posterity’s great good fortune, she quietly trespassed outside the bounds of musedom: it is every bit as impossible to separate Vladimir from his wife and her contributions to his psyche and soul and, eventually, his literature.
  • Motivation: Nabokov, Nabokov, Nabokov! So fantastic, revolutionary, disquieting (eh, I know his opinions on women writers and still I return to his words). This was a literary biography by proxy, in a way, as I knew it would be. The upshot was becoming acquainted with the enigmatic Vera.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 24: “Some things were to be insisted upon, on the other hand. Vera Slonim learned a great number of lessons from her father, only one of which was how to how to hold a thirteen-year-grudge, a lesson she would put to good use.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Signature of Vladimir Nabokov

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A Year in Books/Day 26: Door Wide Open

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  • Title: Door Wide Open Jack Kerouac & Joyce Johnson A Beat Love Affair in Letters 1957-1958
  • Author: Introduction and commentary by Joyce Johnson
  • Year Published: 2000 (Penguin Books)

    Signature of Jack Kerouac

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  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: When 21-year-old novelist Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) embarked on a relationship with Jack Kerouac, she met all of the surface requirements of non-conformity. In her letters, she made a calculated, mighty effort to match her peripatetic lover’s passionate, friendly detachment; as if writing it down made it so. But her commentary, written in her sixties, reveals the truth of a young woman desperately trying to break free of the gendered emotional conventions of the 1950s.
  • Motivation: I love the intimacy, and sense of immediacy, found in the personal letters of famous people (especially writers and artists). When the correspondence is between one of the leading-and most controversial-icons of his time and one of the few women artistically associated with the Beat Generation, then I’m extra intrigued.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 45: “The need and love Jack finally declared obliterated from my mind any consideration of the consequences of the earthquake. Nor did I take sufficient note of the fact that Jack had written this letter, so different in tone from all the others, during one of the few periods in recent years when he was completely sober. I only knew there suddenly seemed to be a profound change in our relationship. Here were the feelings, the “real” feelings, he had always held back.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 25: Beginning Again

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  • Title: Beginning Again An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918
  • Author: Leonard Woolf
  • Year Published: 1963/This Edition 1975 (A Harvest/HBJ Book)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: The third installment of Woolf’s 5-volume autobiography covers the early years of his marriage to budding novelist Virginia Stephen and the start of their famous Hogarth Press. Famous spouse Leonard Woolf gave more than a name to his famous wife. He was complex, fascinating and incredibly well-respected in more than one field.
  • Motivation: Although I am a fan of Virginia’s writing, and find her character and life more than a bit riveting, I have always been drawn to the deep, intellectual and exacting nature of her husband. He was also a damn fine writer.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 16: “I was born an introspective intellectual, and the man or woman who is by nature addicted to introspection gets into the habit, after the age of 15 or 16, of feeling himself, often intensely, as ‘I’ and yet at the same time of seeing himself out of the corner of his eye as ‘not I’, a stranger acting a part upon a stage.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10