Books I am Thinking About

This is like those articles Nick Hornby writes for True Believer where he lists the books he bought each month and then those he actually read. The lists never align. I have this Dawn Powell volume with a lovely strong cover right next to my bed that yesterday I realized was going to be one of those books I will read 'someday' but maybe not tomorrow. Bought--- yet---unread. These are what I am thinking about:

• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin



• Real Food by Michael Pollan



• Beginners Greek by James Collins



• Gentleman and Players by Joanne Harris



• Three Bags Full, a Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann (I always think I will like mysteries but never seem to except for cozy ones like Dorothy Sayers and Patricia Moyes. I do remember fondly lying on the hammock in high school a whole summer in Mexico reading an Agatha Christie every day and eating oranges. This is supposed to be about a Sheep who's a Detective. Hmm...maybe this won't be the one that turns me around)



• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Somebody Selznick



• Diary of an Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster



• Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom (Another wistful entry of a Mystery. I REALLY want to be a genre reader. I think they must be like people who have a religion. Everything all tidy and safe. One after another. Maybe that's why I'm veering into biography lately, you know the ending and you know it doesn't affect you in any way. Although my current bedside holds that massive first volume of the Picasso biography, not sure of the ending in that since it ends midstride.)



• The Diary of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing



• Oh and that book about Barack Obama's father. I don't know the name but am sure Borders will be dispaying it prominently.



• Fair Share for All: a Memoir of Food and Family by John Haney



• Maybe some Trollope again


• Proust (who am I kidding?)

In Which Our Heroine Reads the Diana Chronicles

There it is...the ugly truth, I read it. Why did I read the Diana Chronicles? I could pretend I was reading it as a shocking exposure of the tabloid system as I'm sure Tina Brown thought it was. I imagine her brow furrowed as she tapped away on her word processor thinking it all mattered, and it just had to get out there! "I've ripped the cover off the whole Establishment!" I imagine her thinking, hoping in vain that Someone Royal or Rupert Murdoch would declare a Fatwa on her like they did with Salman Rushdie. I'm sure she saw herself riding around in unmarked limos to literary cocktail parties where no one knew she'd be there till the last minute and then the standing ovation when they saw her..Tina Brown, brave journalist who stood by her story, "it was an ink blue evening dress not purple as they would have you believe".
In the end I read it because it was there and it is the sort of thing you read with a cold or while recovering from sinus surgery. And, of course, like a well oiled machine I blubbed away with all of Britain in the last chapter.
If anyone is suffering from a cold I can send it to you.

Follow the Light

After surgery ones thoughts turn naturally to Thomas Mann? No---more like tried and true and untaxing like something by Georgette Heyer. So I got one of the few I hadn't read, propped it by my sick bedside and waited till I felt like reading. Georgette Heyer never disappoints. Although they are "just Regency Romances" I did not feel I needed to read them under the covers since even A.S. Byatt wrote an essay in appreciation of Heyer in a collection she had called Passions of the Mind. A Margaret Drabble quote is blurbed on the front of this one, Infamous Army, "My favorite historical novelist". So it's not Barbara Cartland and is quite suitable for proud 'over the covers' reading. But sadly for me in my weakened state this is one of the few Heyers I have not read and the few I really didn't like. Too much history, too little novel. All about Napoleon, Waterloo and Duke Wellington. Yawn.

Now I am reduced to skimming Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and waiting for the UPS man to deliver some real light reading: Tina Brown's Diana. Meanwhile I like the Kingsolver, she is not too preachy or sanctimonious and she has some nice ideas. I like her point about vegetarians eating bananas from South America having more of a negative impact on the enviroment than eating a local farm raised pig. Her main theme seems to be mindfullness about what you put in your mouth and how it got there. I always thought I would like Kingsolver as a person, she seems very forgiving and un-shrill. I don't always like her books though, too cute sometimes and trying to be meaningful.

She Said it Better Than I Could

Still reading Doris Lessing Under My Skin and having just gotten through her scintillating account of her menstruation patterns we are thrust into childbirth! Shouldn't there be a longer gap there? But anyway she does describe labor pain and pain in general better than I ever could.

"Sometimes women say, It is not true you forget labor pains. But I think you remember you did have bad pain, but not the pain itself: you forget the intensity of the pains in between each pain. Real remembering is---if for even a flash, even a moment---being back in the experience itself. You remember pain with pain, love with love, one's real best self with one's best self."

It's true that the body has no physical memory of pain or hot or cold. I always wish I could save some of my shivers from a 6 degree day for an 86 degree one. If every time you thought wistfully of having another baby your body cramped up like it did while having childbirth there would be more "only children".

I am constantly surprised at how aimless Lessing was when she was young and how aimless the memoir is...it just meanders along, occasionally an idea bobs to the surface soon to be submerged again 1-2 pages later. It's interesting that she never tries to revise her youthful self to make the story more political and all about race relations in Rhodesia...the servants are called boys and piccanins are always popping in and out of the house. There is a glossary of about 20 words in the front with the word piccanin listed as a "small black boy" but it feels like the publisher wanted to make it seem like a curious word in a foreign language not a part of a larger issue. Lessing just sort of floats about above it all in her own aimless cloud of hormones and passivity.

One of her annoying habits that's has a slight air of "Buy the Book!" is her tendency to start a promising incident and then trail off with..."well, it's covered in Martha Quest." or "so and so is described in my short story The Antheap." Not being the Lessing Scholar that she seems to imagine reading her memoir, I don't remember every story in African Stories as she expects. In fact I will now enumerate the only Doris Lessing books I have ever read:

• In Pursuit of the English


• African Stories


• Memoirs of a Survivor


• The Fifth Child


• A Man and Two Women


• The Summer Before the Dark

Although I have the Golden Notebook I confess I have probably never gotten beyond page 50. It bored me. I read most all of them all in my twenties and at the time her voice echoed something in me that felt foreign in the USA. What she felt going to England from Africa mirrored something in how I felt coming to the USA from Mexico. I was American but it was not my home. Lessing was British but her home was Africa.

The most adorable video is on You Tube of Doris Lessing being told she has won the Nobel. She is getting out of a cab and the photographers have to hoist her out and with her is this rather pudgy bemused man with what appear to be artichokes strapped to him. When they tell her she's won she goes "Oh Christ!". She pays the cabbie while the artichoke man stands there muttering something or other.