manach | Entries tagged with memory project

I was overambitious in my hopes of posting daily through March. Apparently, I would rather spend my time reading good writing than writing poorly about it. The main thing I've gained from this exercise is a feel for how challenging it is to compose and polish a coherent piece of writing, no matter how short, every day. So far as the books were concerned, some I remember better than others, which was as expected.

It quickly became evident that this project (conceived as it was in a fit of mild snarkiness) was not a great use of my time. My reason for trying to write this blog is to follow up with and respond to the literature that resonates with me. These were not, for the most part, the books that I want to be writing about -- the ones that I remember most vividly and still think about, and the ones I am currently seeking. Things that are engaging, engrossing, troubling. Stuff that confuses me and causes me to notice something new and want to learn more. I need to think up a project that will be a better vehicle for exploring and structuring those thoughts.

Author: Julia Alvarez
Date completed: March 31, 2010
What I remember:

This is one of those books that I felt I ought to read, since it is something of a contemporary American classic. It was the first work I read by Julia Alvarez, and I wasn't that into it. (As tends to be the case with books that I select from a vague sense of obligation rather than genuine curiosity...) I didn't find it personally compelling or otherwise engaging at the time, and so put it (and Alvarez) out of my mind for almost a year.

The following winter I was on an essay-reading kick, which led me to pick up her collection Something to Declare. These personal essays were, by contrast, so compelling that I immediately went on to read two of her other novels, which I appreciated much more, being better equipped with an understanding of the author's life and history and what it meant to be Dominican-American in the 1960s and 70s. The upshot is that, despite my initial, lukewarm reaction to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez is currently one of my favorite authors and I am quite eager to re-read it.

Author: Julie Wakefield
Date completed: March 28, 2011
What I remember:

Edmond Halley, he of the famous comet, had other scientific interests. Shifting his gaze away from the sky for a bit, he made significant contributions to the field of navigation through his work on magnetism. People were still scratching their heads over how to calculate longitude in the 18th century, and Halley's efforts were valuable in helping ocean-going sailors figure out where the heck they were. He did other stuff too. Highly readable and, as biographies go, comparatively short.

Book this post was intended to be about: A Car, Some Cash, and a Place to Crash
Author: Rebecca Knight
Date completed: March 21, 2009
What happened:

This morning I wrote the paragraph below, thinking it was about this title. Then I looked it up to find the author's first name and discovered that I was talking about a completely different book! A Car, Some Cash, and a Place to Crash is a guide to navigating post-college life, which does sound familiar now that I'm thinking about it. When I read it I was already several years out of college and past the point of finding it useful, so perhaps that is why it didn't stick. In any case, I don't recall it nearly as well as a book called World Stompers, which I actually read in June of 2008. I'm not sure how I managed to mix them up; you'd think the word "car" in the title would have tipped me off that it was not about backpacking...

Having adjusted the dates, this is what I had to say about World Stompers, by Brad Olsen:

I had travel on the brain in the spring of 2008. Ultimately I did not strike out with a backpack for another two years, but I read this offbeat travel guide while daydreaming about the possibilities. The author is a decidedly life-on-the-edge, spontaneous sort and offered advice accordingly. I prefer to do more planning myself, but it's fun to read about others' more adventurous adventures. Included are country overviews, a lot of useful information about finding work abroad to fund extended excursions, and a lot of less-useful-to-me information about partying opportunities. Fodor's this is not. Even Lonely Planet looks rather conservative by comparison. A particularly memorable tidbit was about sourcing weed in different countries -- and the consequences of being caught with it. I happen to think smoking is a waste of time, but does it merit life imprisonment or possible execution? Yikes.

Of course, I may not be remembering that correctly.

Author: Katherine Paterson
Date completed: March 20, 2010
What I remember:

This is another Vermont-affiliated novel. Katherine Paterson has written some of my all-time favorite children's and young adult books (Lyddie, Bridge to Terabithia...). The Day of the Pelican was being considered for a community-wide read at the college where I worked, so I made a point of reading it. It is a young adult novel about the experiences of an 11-year-old Muslim girl and her family, uprooted by ethnic conflict in Kosovo, who settle in Vermont as refugees. I thought it was a sensitive and age-appropriate treatment of the topic. I was not as taken with it as with some of Paterson's other works, but it may just be that it's difficult to compare anything to a book that one loved and was deeply affected by in childhood.

Regrettably, I can't recall anything about the pelican to which the title refers.

Author: Howard Frank Mosher
Dates completed: March 19 & 20, 2011
What I remember:

I read these back-to-back in two days and can't quite separate them. North Country is the product of Howard Frank Mosher's midlife crisis road trip along the US-Canadian border, describing the places, characters, and customs he encountered en route and connecting the pieces of his story-telling life in the process. To call it "midlife crisis" is maybe overly dramatic -- he may not have used the phrase himself -- but the journey did play a role in his coming to terms with middle age. I enjoyed everything about it: travelogue, narrative of a writer's life, mirrored inner and outer journeys, the tone and humor of the author, the landscape itself. I love the northern woods and the anarchic independence of people who are drawn to borderlands; I love liminal spaces of all kinds. It was the first thing I'd read by him, and as soon as it was finished I made a beeline for the nearest of his novels, The Fall of the Year.

It was ... okay. What was most interesting to me about it was knowing that it had been written shortly after North Country, and being able to see how some of his sources came from stories people had told him during the trip. The Fall of the Year, like several of his other novels, follows the townspeople of Kingdom Common, situated in a fictionalized version of the rugged and mountainous Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I love the landscape, both the reality and as he imagines it. I was disappointed not to love the book, since he is a local author and this is my home territory, in a way. But his fiction style, as represented here and in another novel I've read since (On Kingdom Mountain), just isn't to my taste. It is straightforward but somehow less direct than his nonfiction voice, more "folksy" and almost jocular. It makes sense that the voice would be different, since The Fall of the Year is told from the main character's first-person perspective, but I felt the same way about On Kingdom Mountain, which is in third-person. The style of the language simply doesn't appeal to me. It is intriguing to think about a novelist as participant in his own story, stepping into the guise of a raconteur who, though he does not appear within the story proper, is nonetheless a person belonging to the fictional world in a way that the actual writer himself cannot.

Though I wasn't wild about the novels I have read so far, they haven't put me off trying more of his fiction. On the strength of North Country alone I expect to continue picking up more of his work as I keep reading.

Author: Ethan Hawke
Date completed: March 18, 2010
What I remember:

I sort of read this by accident. It came to my attention when I was shelving a cart of books in the library and noticed the author's name. Ethan Hawke -- the actor? A Hollywood pretty face writing something that wasn't an "autobiography" struck me as a relatively unusual occurrence, so I opened it to take a look and found myself unexpectedly engrossed. It's not one that springs to mind when people ask me for book recommendations, but it wasn't awful. The protagonist is a young actor (no big surprise) who has recently, rapidly attained some degree of fame and the pressures and ego issues that accompany that. There is a girlfriend, a reasonably three-dimensional figure. One can guess which elements were drawn from the author's life and which imagined, but though the story lacks oomph, it is clearly a serious effort from a not-untalented writer. He has also published another novel, Ash Wednesday, and written some stage plays, none of which would I be averse to reading/seeing should the opportunity arise.

Two books for today...

Book 1: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss
Date completed: March 7, 2011
What I remember:

A whole book about punctuation! Hilariously funny, short enough to read in one afternoon. This cleared up some distinctions between British and American comma usage, which previously I had thought was just people being confused. Which they often are anyway, probably because there are multiple standards.

Book 2: New York, by Edward Rutherfurd
Date completed: March 7, 2012
What I remember:

Quite a bit -- some of which I covered in a separate post a couple of weeks ago. I read this only a year ago, more recently than others I've covered for this project so far. Here I'll just add that I read it on a Kindle, which was both an advantage and disadvantage for a book of this size. It was nice not to lug around an 800-page tome, but frustrating when I wanted to revisit earlier passages; it is possible to search for a keyword or phrase if you know exactly what you're looking for, but I found this more laborious than flipping through pages by hand. (Unlike most of Rutherfurd's other books, New York did not have a family tree of characters listed at the beginning, so I was tracking it myself as I read.)

Author: D.H. Lawrence
Date completed: March 7, 2011
What I remember:

This is the sort of classic I read a lot of as a teenager. At that time there was nothing I loved better, but reading this made me realize how much my tastes have shifted. I have been reading much more contemporary fiction in recent years, and the pacing and use of language are jarringly different. It took some concentration to get through it and appreciate the nuances. It resides in my memory as a kind of verbal Impressionist painting; I have a sense of the whole without recalling many specifics of the plot. It was written during the first world war, but seems to take place in some unspecified time shortly before; the story is caught in a rift between the stasis of upper-class ennui and the uneasiness of a brewing storm that, in the novel, will never come. Overall it is an uncomfortable tale, and despite the passionate relationships of the four main characters, no one is having much fun. It does pop into my consciousness as musing-fodder more frequently than A Bend in the River, but for the most part both are instances where I read the book and then moved on.

Author: V.S. Naipaul
Date completed: March 5, 2011
What I remember:

I guess I read this because it is a generally well-regarded piece of literature. The story is blurred in my mind -- I have the impression that the narrator, an Indian man in a post-colonial African country, felt distanced from his surroundings, which may be why I can't recall them clearly myself. Neo-colonialism. Unhappy characters. A disappointment.

Editor: Amy Sonnie
Date completed: March 1, 2011
What I remember:

Another late winter read from a few years ago, this is an anthology of queer youth writing from the 1990s. These voices are a gathering of strength from young people, who are (queer or straight) so often overlooked, dismissed, patted on the head and told to wait their turn. So much passion is in these pages, and a reminder of how much has changed for LGBT people within the last decade, and of how much still needs to change. It made me feel old, but hopeful for the future. These writers are my contemporaries -- in a way, I am one of them. While reading it I thought: This is the kind of book that could have changed my life had I discovered it as a teenager. Today I'm thinking: why can't it change my life now?

Book 1: A Handwriting Manual, by Alfred Fairbank
Completed: March 1, 2009
What I remember about it:

At the time, I was planning to take a course in calligraphy and bookbinding that coming fall. I picked this up because I was curious about the history of handwriting and the characteristics of penmanship and different scripts. The book was dated (originally published in the 1930s?) but short. This interest has waned.

Book 2: Suddenly Jewish, by Barbara Kessel
Completed: March 1, 2010
What I remember about it:

This was a fascinating array of personal accounts from people who, not having been raised Jewish, learned only in adulthood that they had Jewish ancestry.* Many were surprised by this discovery, some discomfited, others delighted. In particular, some descendants of conversos (Sephardim who underwent forced conversions in Spain during the Inquisition) felt that it explained many peculiarities in their family traditions or in the habits of elderly relatives. I found especially humorous and poignant the story of one man, raised a devout Christian, who in an effort to show respect immediately bared his head upon entering a synagogue for the first time.

*I remember wondering whether all of these people were in fact halachically Jewish (direct descent through the maternal line) or whether some simply had Jewish ancestors somewhere in their background. I think this was not always made clear in their accounts. A few went through a formal conversion process after learning about their heritage, and one woman had actually converted to Judaism before learning that it was also part of her background.

Over the winter holidays, around the table with family, I was quizzed about my reading habits and the number of books that I read in a year. I offered an estimate of 50, and things got a little heated, with one person claiming that another relative might get through even more, and a third noting defensively that, though she read comparatively few, each was very carefully chosen and clearly remembered.

Caught up in my own tension between quality and quantity, I was at first annoyed by the (probably unintentional) implication that my own reading is not well-chosen, and then worried that it is all a waste of time if I can't recall in great detail the plots or arguments of everything I peruse. I aim for both depth and breadth in reading, but I do read an awful lot, and some of it does -- and rightly should -- fade quickly away. When not feeling on the spot, I'm fine with this.

However, my curiosity has been piqued: As a memory exercise, I have decided to try to write every weekday in March, posting something that I remember about books read in Marches of previous years.