The Bookhive List: 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad

To say that Heart of Darkness has had a complicated existence is putting it mildly. It is simultaneously one of the most revered and reviled fictional accounts of colonialism -- all the more reason for it to be considered essential reading.

I have always personally enjoyed this novella, especially for its adventure qualities, seething and subtle as they may be. It's a great quick book for a very hot, muggy day, and if you haven't read it since high school, please give it another look.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'Train Dreams' by Denis Johnson

Sometimes the best way to get back on the proverbial horse is to read something small and satisfying that can be finished very quickly, and that's exactly what I did with Train Dreams. It was succinct and lovely and the perfect thing to get me back in the groove of reading. Immediately upon finishing and re-shelving it I picked up a 400 page novel so I think I'm officially back.

This is also the perfect novella for when you're in a 'There Will Be Blood' kind of mood, which is always my mood when it's hot and sunny.

The Bookhive List: 'The Tempest' by William Shakespeare

I first read The Tempest as a junior in high school, and I really didn't care for it. I liked it well enough, but I didn't connect with it in the same way that I had with other plays by Shakespeare, particularly the tragedies, which probably appealed to the melodramatic angsty teen in me. I also remember our teacher making us watch a truly horrific tv adaptation that relocates the story to the swamps of Louisiana during the Civil War, and that wretchedness still lingers in my psyche.

I encountered it again in a college Shakespeare class that emphasized a theatrical reading over a literary one, and I realized so much of what I had missed the first time around.

My love for it was finally solidified when I was able to see an actual performance of it -- in this case the July Taymor/Helen Mirren film adaptation. (The trailer is very Taymor-y, but don't let that deter you -- it is a really incredible film. The performances are remarkable, especially Felicity Jones and Helen Mirren, and the production design is amazing).  I'd really like to see it performed live but I've never had the opportunity. The next time it's performed at Stratford, I'll be there front and center.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

Big Fat Book: 'War and Peace' Weeks 12, 13, 14, 15, 16? Who can say anymore...?

I remain in some kind of page 712 of War and Peace purgatory. The fact that I used to sit down twice a week and read 50 pages of that thing at a time is utterly mind-boggling, but that really summarizes the nature of Michigan in January vs. May. I cannot even remember what it was like to have snow and ice on the ground, but I know it must have occurred, and presumably I dealt with it by reading this enormous, ridiculous book.

The really great thing about this whole experience is that when I finally got around to picking it up again, it was as if no time had passed. I am so deeply embedded in this world that all the characters and situations immediately came back to me, and it was very easy to dive back in. That is essential with a novel of this size, because ordinarily reading it would take so long that the average reader would forget the beginning before they made it to the end. I had a similar experience when reading Moby Dick; it took months and there were some extended breaks in there, but whenever I picked it back up, it was as if no time had passed.

I promise I won't post anything about War and Peace again until I have actually read more of it and have something new to say.

April's (Failed) Attempt at Poetry: Emily Dickinson

So April's poetry selection did not go very well -- mostly in the sense that I never even cracked this thing open. As I've mentioned, the month of April was mostly a vacation from reading for me, and if I'm not motivated to read an Elena Ferrante novel, I'm certainly not motivated to read poetry, which is already a bit of a struggle. The saddest thing of all is that EdX had a course on Emily Dickinson that I signed up for and then failed to participate in, so this was actually a double failure. The questions now is whether I should shake it off and move on to some other poet who is perhaps more inspiring, or double-down and call Emily Dickinson my "April-May" poetry selection. 

To Be Read...

How do you decide what qualifies for your queue, your bedside stack, your 'to be read' list?  I used to have a much simpler methodology, which was lazily pacing in front of my bookshelves, grabbing anything that looked intriguing. I have a tendency to buy books slightly faster than I read them, so at any given time, about 25% of the books I own remain unread. Now that I have a Kindle, the process is much more complicated, because I keep a steady stream of unread materials on there, in addition to the physical collection. Then there is my public library request queue, which is problematic because I normally use it for the latest release, which tend to be popular, which means I rarely get them when I'm ready to read them (6 of 10 on H is for Hawk). 

After taking a long break from actively engaging in reading, I feel a bit like I'm starting fresh, and I'm ready to construct a new TBR list for myself, but I can't really figure out where to begin...

What should I read next?

What I'm Reading: Nothing!

This post is remarkable for me because for the first time in at least a year, I haven't really had a book on my plate; yes, War and Peace is still taking up space on my nightstand, and I've got a few things on my Kindle that still need to be wrapped up (Hausfrau, Kindred, more Elena Ferrante), but I've taken a long and enjoyable break from really engaging with literature. 

It's weird for me to say I've enjoyed it, because there is almost nothing I enjoy more than reading, but the weather has warmed up dramatically in the past few weeks and I've used every spare moment to be outside in my garden., which is a very new hobby for me. I suppose in the long-term I'm just trying to create an elaborate outdoor reading space, but there is a lot of labor involved. I also enjoyed a week-long vacation in Iceland, and although the Kindle made the journey with me, I barely picked it up. We camped several nights and by the time we snuggled into our sleeping bags I was exhausted and reading held no appeal.

Now that I'm home, however, and my flowering trees are in full bloom, I'm very ready to get back into it -- War and Peace will be finished, even if it takes me until December, and I'm ready to make a new stack of TBR books to litter the floor.

The Bookhive List: 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte

This will quite possibly be the easiest blog post I ever write. This book is dope. It is essential. It benefits from re-examination throughout your life, and it only gets better with age.

No one is a bigger pusher of the wider Bronte canon than me (also here and here) but this one is widely considered to be the best, and it is by far the most popular, and for a reason.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'The Interestings' by Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer should be a bigger deal. She is a great example, along with Clare Messud, of a contemporary woman writer who consistently churns out excellent work but is just never put on a pedestal the way her contemporaries tend to be...and by "contemporaries" I mostly mean her male contemporaries. You might notice a lovely and kind quote from Eugenides on the front cover of The Interestings, and that was an very pointed choice for a blurb, because Eugenides is often cited as an example of a writer who would not achieve the same kind of critical acclaim if he were a woman. I think that's not a good reason to hate on Eugenides, because he's an incredible write, but so is Meg Wolitzer, so please do yourself a favor and read her books as well.

The Interestings has been on my list for quite a long time now, and I'm ashamed to admit it's my first book by Wolitzer, but I'm really loving it. The first chapter introduces us to a group of adolescents who we'll then see come of age and devolve into middle-age over the course of the rest of the novel, and their introduction at summer camp in the early 1980s gave me such Wet, Hot American Summer vibes. I'm truly enjoying the experience and I'm excited to read more of her work.

The Bookhive List: 'The Dream of a Common Language' by Adrienne Rich

I came to Adrienne Rich via Cheryl Strayed and Wild and while that is not necessarily something to brag about, I do think it would make Cheryl Strayed incredibly happy. Wild was about literature and grief as much as it was about hiking and recovery and her inclusion of the books that were meaningful to her at that point in her life seemed incredibly deliberate. Especially because she left her favorite quotes as her signature in all of the trail books, suggesting a desire to share her favorite authors with the world.

Anyway, I read The Dream of a Common Language because she made it sound so entrancing, and it was a rich and rewarding experience that I've already indulged in a few more times. Like Strayed, I feel a strong desire to take it with me. This is a book that will probably go on some camping trips this summer. It is deeply personal but somehow manages to be very political, a feat it pulls off so gracefully. If you haven't spent much time with contemporary or feminist poetry, this is the essential text (in my humble opinion) to get you started.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'The Story of a New Name' by Elena Ferrante

As much as I enjoyed the first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, I think I enjoyed The Story of a New Name even more; the novel picks up quite neatly at the ending of the first novel, with a particularly defining narrative moment in the lives of Lila and Lenu, an event which will very much set the tone and the narrative course for the second novel (I hope that isn't spoiler-y). The girls are now 16 and although their lives diverged in childhood when Lenu continued her education and Lila was forced to drop out of school, the divergence becomes that much more pronounced as they come of age along with the rest of their childhood playmates in their impoverished Italian neighborhood.

Ferrante's ability to write about adolescence is really striking, and I'm curious how an actual teenager would react to The Story of a New Name. The narrative is so meticulous and detailed and maybe the reason it feels like such an accomplishment to me is that I, like Ferrante, am an adult woman, looking back on her teenage experiences, and thus, I share her vision, whereas an actual teenager currently entrenched in the experience wouldn't relate to Lila and Lenu's experiences at all. Nevertheless, the coming of age of these characters who the reader has grown to know so intimately in My Brilliant Friend is an incredibly satisfying and rewarding experience that only comes from a really long, rich novel of this scope. Perhaps most significantly, we see the fictional Elena Greco and the real Elena Ferrante merge more and more, and every moment of realization at a shared trait only enhances the reading experience and feels like the discovery of some further treasure in a novel that is already so rich.

I have really fallen deeply in love with these novels; I purchased Book 3 on my Kindle within minutes of finishing The Story of a New Name, and the September 2015 publication date for Book 4 (the final novel) was just announced, so I am very ready to continue living in this world for a while longer.

The Bookhive List: 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People who took four years of high school Spanish will tell you that you can't really appreciate Gabriel Garcia Marquez in English translation. These people probably heard this from their Spanish teacher and now whip it out at parties as a kind of intellectual gauntlet-throw-slash-conversation-ender. Gently remind these assholes that Gabriel Garcia Marquez read many of his favorite authors via translation, including those whose influence is most strongly felt in his work, like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. And to say this about Gabo and not every other author who doesn't write in English is truly insulting.

Read One Hundred Years of Solitude, please, in whatever language you prefer. Besides being one of the greatest family epics ever written, it is also the quintessential magical-realism novel. It is beautiful and it is very affecting and despite what the wannabe Spanish snobs might tell you, it is a worthwhile endeavor even in English.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'Hausfrau' by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau is one of the few very contemporary books that has managed to crack my reading list so far this year, and that is thanks in large part to my husband buying me a copy after hearing an interview with the author on NPR's Weekend Edition. Normally my inclination is to wait until the end of the year to pick and choose from the best reviewed and most talked-about literary fiction from the year prior, but there is a unique kind of satisfaction that comes from reading something while it's shiny and new and being buzzed about.

I would describe Hausfrau as one part Madame Bovary and one part Anna Karenina, but although I still haven't finished it, I am not assuming it will end in any similar fashion. It doesn't function as the same kind of morality tale, but it is a story about a housewife and mother who becomes increasingly alienated from her husband and seeks solace in affairs. That is a total oversimplification of what is a very complex and psychological novel, but those comparisons immediately came to mind when I started it, and they place Hausfrau in excellent company.

The Bookhive List: P.G. Wodehouse

I couldn't settle on one P.G.Wodehouse book to recommend for the Bookhive List, because I have loved every one I've read equally, and I don't think any of them would be considered THE essential Wodehouse. The Jeeves stories are quite popular for obvious reasons (film and TV adaptations, the woefully mis-guided concept of "Ask Jeeves," etc. etc.), but all are excellent and if this is your cup of tea, you'll want to read the lot.

I came to Wodehouse via Evelyn Waugh, an absolute favorite writer of mine, who does much the same thing, that is, write fictional accounts of the British aristocracy between the wars, in the vein of Downton Abbey and the like, although Waugh gives his fiction a much bleaker and more macabre polish than Wodehouse, whose stories are pure fun and whimsy. Practically every line is a clever witticism and everything always works out for the heroes in the end, and yet that never protects them from getting into another scrape in the next novel (Wodehouse often recycles and repeatedly torments the same characters in novels and short stories). It is very light, fluffy reading material, but it never stoops to the kind of trashiness or sensationalism of a lot of popular fiction today -- there is never any violence (other than one bloke punching another bloke and them both falling into a fountain or something), and there is never any sex, and the plots are largely predictable, and yet they prove to be endlessly entertaining. I particularly recommend them on a relaxing vacation -- they make excellent poolside reading material.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'A Story Lately Told' by Anjelica Huston

Anjelica Huston's life is better than yours. It just is. If this bothers you, then this isn't the memoir for you. She gets a ruby from her father when she catches the measles, because it matches her red spots; nearly half the book describes equestrian dramas, etc. The best part is that she is so utterly nonchalant about the whole thing, as if being John Huston's daughter is perfectly ordinary, because to her it was. She makes for a terrific narrator and I highly recommend the audio book version, with her lovely, lovely voice over. I'm really just reading this to get to the second volume, which details her life as a young actress in the 70s, but this has made for a really whimsical, enchanting detour.

The Bookhive List: 'Dubliners' by James Joyce

James Joyces is an incredibly intimidating author, and for good reason. His novels are large, extraordinarily difficult, and considered to be among the greatest fiction ever written, so if you don't "get it," then you must be intellectually inferior. I will readily admit that I have not started the long, slow slog through his novels, although I fully intend to one day. I did, however, make time to read his short story collection Dubliners and I'm incredibly glad I did because it remains one of my absolute favorite books to this day, and I would highly recommend it as an introduction to his writing.

Probably the most important thing to note about Dubliners is that it lacks Joyce's later characteristic prose style, thus making it infinitely easier to read and understand. The narratives are relatively linear and each story feels so stripped down and bare, making its emotional impact that much stronger. It makes for a relatively quick, easy read, but a profoundly beautiful and compelling one.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

March's Attempt at Poetry: 'Citizen' by Claudia Rankine and 'Prelude to Bruise' by Saeed Jones

This month I went in a completely different direction on the poetry front, and chose two recently published volumes of very critically-acclaimed and very contemporary poetry, Citizen: an American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, and Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones. Both are pretty quick read (100 pages each), and they pair really nicely together; although stylistically and structurally they are very different, they tread much of the same subject matter, namely race and identity (in the case of Prelude to Bruise, much of that identity is related to sexual and gender identity). 

You shouldn't need my endorsement, because these were two of the most decorated books published in 2014, but I personally would recommend them to anyone who, like me, doesn't read much contemporary poetry. Reading them will also just make you a cooler/better person.