A Year in Books/Day 86: American Bloomsbury

Posted on March 31, 2012 by maedez

Frontispiece for Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1855), by Sarah Margaret Fuller. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Title: American Bloomsbury
Author: Susan Cheever
Year Published: 2006 (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks)
Year Purchased: 2008
Source: Daedalus Books & Music
About: ‘American Bloomsbury’ weaves together the lives and friendships of five New England authors, loosely following them and their wider circles between the years 1840-1868. Alongside the expected Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two women: Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Susan Cheever devotes just enough space to the latter to whet the appetite for a deeper analysis of their lives and work. Within the constraints of this book, she manages to rescue Alcott from her reputation as the sappy creator of saccharine kiddie lit (a tired trope unfair to both her and ‘Little Women’), setting her firmly into the harsher but more rewarding world of reality; her gutsy complexity is given space to breathe. The mostly forgotten Fuller (one of my favourite women) suffers from no such reputation; in fact, she largely has no reputation from which to suffer or gain. Cheever does her best to correct that.* If you don’t know who she is, start with this book and your awakened curiosity will take care of the rest.
Motivation: Like so many teens before me (and since, or so my optimistic heart likes to think), I was pulled under the spell of Thoreau and, from there, to Emerson. Although in all my years I have never been able to warm to Hawthorne, the period when these New Englanders flourished is, for me, the best of 19th century American literature. With Alcott and Fuller added to this mix, I was sold.
Times Read: 1
Random Excerpt/Page 35: “Without this obscure lawsuit in 1836, it’s hard to know what would have happened in Concord, Massachusetts, if anything. It was Ellen Tucker’s share of the Tuckers’ fortune that bought the Emerson House on the Cambridge Turnpike and was sustaining the Alcotts as well as the Hawthornes and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson not only paid the rent; Louisa noticed that after a visit from Mr. Emerson there was often a small pile of bills under a candlestick on the dining room table, or left on top of a pile of books he had brought from his library.”
Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

* I just came across the more recent ‘Louisa May Alcott’ by Susan Cheever. Happy dance!

A Year in Books/Day 67: Literary Feuds

Posted on March 11, 2012 by maedez

Title: Literary Feuds A Century of Celebrated Quarrels from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe
Author: Anthony Arthur
Year Published: 2002 (MJF Books)
Year Purchased: 2005-2007
Source: Unknown
About: There are writers who spend their lives and careers building a literary community: where everyone is helpful and supportive of one another, where advice and camaraderie abound, where failures and successes are shared. Unfortunately, reality decrees that some people aren’t meant to get along. This same reality also dictates that some people are just jerks. I’ll leave you to decide how to categorize the titans covered in this book. At least wordsmiths lace their rancorous verbal wars with plenty of wit; unlike feuds involving reality “stars” or athletes, you’ll walk away from these encounters with all of your brain cells intact.
Sinclair Lewis-Image via Wikipedia
Motivation: Writers. History. Obscure facts. Intellectuals fussin’ and fightin’. Bring it on.
Times Read:1
Random Excerpt/Page 75: “Fortunately, a revised picture of Lewis is now available from Dreiser’s biographer, Richard Lingeman. Written with sympathetic insight instead of disdain, Lingeman’s ‘Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street’ was published early in 2002; although it adds nothing to our understanding of the quarrel between the two writers beyond what Lingeman had already described in his earlier works about Dreiser, it should help Lewis toward the literary resurrection he deserves. At the least, Lewis should be placed side by side as a literary giant with Theodore Dreiser, the difficult man he admired so much, and from whom he got so little in return.”
Happiness Scale: 10

Wanted: One Resourceful Book Lover

Posted on February 17, 2012 by maedez

Wanted: One resourceful book lover
Your Mission: To invent an easily removable price sticker that does not require any of the following: a razor, solvent or 20 minutes spent digging with a fingernail.
Requirements: Patience and excellent sales ability, as you will need every book shop in the world to use your product.
Your Reward: Eternal glory and the genuine thanks of millions of readers everywhere. Oh, and lots of cash, as you will doubtless become filthy rich in the
Paradise Ruined by Another Cheap Label

process.
Signed: Maedez

A Year in Books/Day 38: Bedside Book of Famous French Stories

Posted on February 9, 2012 by maedez

Title: Bedside Book of Famous French Stories
Edited By: Belle Decker and Robert N. Linscott
Year Published: 1945 (Random House)
Year Purchased: 1991
Source: Columbus Public Library, library sale
About: A compilation of French short stories by such heavyweights as Honore de Balzac, Prosper Merimee, George Sand, Anatole France, Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Motivation: Even as a teenager, I had an affinity for short stories. I think I knew that, as a writer, it would be my most natural (fiction) medium. This book was my introduction to the work of those listed above. Prior to that, they were just enticing but empty names. I also really love old books. I picked up an 80-year-old copy of Zola’s ‘Nana’ at the same sale. It was a good day.
Times Read: 1
Random Excerpt/Page 23: “The old lady meanwhile, passive as a child and almost dazed, sat down on her chair again. But the honest pastry-cook came back directly. A countenance red enough to begin with, and further flushed by the bake-house fire, was suddenly blanched; such terror perturbed him that he reeled as he walked, and stared about him like a drunken man.”
Happiness Scale: 7 1/2
Image via Wikipedia