hope springs eternal

ok, here's the list of books i hope to read before march 21. most of this is catching up on gifts i've neglected for too long.

1. "i have to move my car: tales of unpersuasive advocates and injudicious judges" by david pannick
2. "what the dog saw and other adventures" by malcolm gladwell
3. "winter vault" by anne michaels
4. "pleasures and sorrows of work" by alain de botton
5. "gulliver's travels" by jonathan swift
6. "hoard of mathematical treasures" by ian stewart
7. at least five short stories from "elements of fiction"
8. if i get really ambitious, "the satanic verses" by salman rushdie. it's a bit heady right off the bat.

these are real books, for the most part, but i'm not giving up mysteries in the meantime! they should bring me up to 10. in fact i've already read two of the four novels folded into the "miss marple omnibus, volume 1." those count, don't they?

New on the Shelf

Due to Chapters coupons that required several large purchases, finding cheap used books at Goodwill, and receiving gifts, I have many new books on my shelf. (And these days I am much more likely to actually read the new books I get than I used to be, instead of letting them sit unattended forever.) Here's some of what I plan to be reading in the near future:

1. At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon a
2. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink a
3. Anthem by Ayn Rand a
4. Dune by Frank Herbert a
5. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert a
6. Essays by George Orwell a
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert a
8. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
9. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton a
10. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
11. The Piano Man's Daughter by Timothy Findley a
12. The Birth House by Ami McKay a
13. Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery a
14. Candide by Voltaire a
15. The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathana

Do any of these interest you guys? Would you care to join me?

promises, promises

new year's resolutions!

how many (not for school/work) books do you intend to read by march 31? june 30? september 30? december 31, 2010?

The Wisdom of Homer Simpson

Homer: Books are useless! I only ever read one book, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin…but what good does *that* do me?


I came by this quote and just had to add it to our reading blog!
Oh Homer you crack me up!

poirot's investigations

following up on what i said last time:

genre books tend to get a bad reputation, on account of appearing superficial. but the more agatha christie i read, the more i see important psychological and sociological insights in her writing. "appointment with death" has more to do with dysfunctional families than with sleuthing. the murder seems entirely incidental to the story. and it's not just the mystery genre - or, indeed, just christie - that works this way. if verne and wells are any indication, science fiction is likewise a means of dissecting sociological/political themes.

anyway, one well-documented characteristic among the more interesting fictional detectives is that they're sort of rogues - their relationship with the established process of law enforcement is a precarious one. holmes, poirot, marple, and even house all fall into that category. i haven't read enough of arthur canon doyle's work to say if this part is also ubiquitous, but it is absolutely fascinating to me how often in hercule poirot's "practice" the murderer manages to escape charges by committing suicide, suffering from a terminal illness, or ending up in a fatal accident. agatha christie just didn't seem all that interested in legal procedure, though the importance of justice was underscored in all her mysteries. indeed, she gave tacit (and sometimes reluctant) approval to vigilante justice in at least three of her novels.

i've been collecting the poirot books for years now, and when i got to 24 out of 39, i realized that the editions i wanted were no longer in print. i'm determined to get all the titles, one way or another, in close-to-similar-editions. my most recent acquisition was "dumb witness" which involves a posthumous letter, a rich spinster, and an adorable dog named bob.

owned
read
missing!

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Murder on the Links (1923)
Poirot Investigates (1924)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

The Big Four (1927)

The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
Black Coffee (1930)

Peril at End House (1932)

Lord Edgware Dies (1933)
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
Three Act Tragedy (1935)

Death in the Clouds (1935)

The A.B.C. Murders (1936)

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

Cards on the Table (1936)

Death on the Nile (1937)
Dumb Witness (1937)

Murder in the Mews (1937)

Appointment with Death (1938)
Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938)

Sad Cypress (1940)

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)

Evil Under the Sun (1941)
Five Little Pigs (1942)
The Hollow (1946)
The Labours of Hercules (1947)
Taken at the Flood (1948)
Mrs McGinty's Dead (1952)
After the Funeral (1953)
Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)
Dead Man's Folly (1956)
Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960)
The Clocks (1963)
Third Girl (1966)
Hallowe'en Party (1969)
Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Poirot's Early Cases (1974)
Curtain (written about 1940, published 1975)

also posted at sound of laughter.
updated on 18 june 2010.

guilty pleasures

i read a lot of agatha christie mysteries. i collect the hercule poirot ones... they're super. it's still semi-intelligent, there are always interesting psychological case studies, and they're even fun on rereading.
what's your favourite genre for casual reading?

On Love

I read Essays in Love by Alain de Botton, recommended by Mara. (Thank you, friend!) And while I read it, I found myself thinking: this isn't how it has to be. This book helped me realize anew that the word "love" can contain a whole galaxy of meanings - and not just I-love-ice-cream vs. I-love-my-Mom - even examples of romantic love can look vastly different and still be love. My experience isn't like the one described, and that's okay. His story is one of "love at first sight," and as I read it, I found myself thinking that it borders on obsession. I don't know that I want love like that. It made both the lover and the beloved quite unattractive at times.

I found the most value in something he said right at the end (pg 202-203):
"The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated... Immature love, on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real."

Many of my food-for-thought questions come out of that paragraph...
- Would the relationship described in the book best be considered mature or immature? Is De Botton describing something less than ideal?
- Do relationships fit exclusively in either one category or the other, or are maturity and immaturity two ends on a continuum, and do most relationships contain a mixture of both?
- Is it the normal pattern for relationships to grow from immature to mature love, or do they tend to remain as they began?
- Is immaturity blame-worthy, or natural and suitable for a time?
- Could the description of mature love also be the description of a lack of love?