Weekends are a pretty miscellanous time for me. I don’t usually even try to do much concentrated reading, though occasionally I surprise myself and burn through a book when circumstances conspire, for once, in my favor (or the book does not require particularly hard concentration). But in between errands and cooking and laundry and family activities and a lot of what (thanks to Mr Casaubon) my husband and I call “desultory vivacity,” I browse around online and see what’s on offer. Here are a few things that caught my eye, or that I went back to read again, this weekend:

In the Guardian, Rachel Cusk writes about D. H. Lawrence. I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover once but that and a couple of short stories (‘The Odor of Chrysanthemums,” for instance) are the total of my Lawrence experience. The section on Lawrence in Booth’s The Company We Keep is about the only thing I’ve read that made me consider changing that. Cusk’s piece is interesting, but comments like this always puzzle and frustrate me, and undermine my trust in the critical faculties of the writer:

The Victorian novel routinely used individual characters as emblems of wider social and geographical realities, to the extent that its concept of character often strikes the modern reader as stylised and lacking in reality. Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell: despite their interest in social change, regionalism, community, the position of women, these great English novelists have nothing in common with Lawrence at all. In The Rainbow Lawrence does more than part company with Victorian modes of narration – he destroys them by completely inverting the literary and actual function of “man” as a representative of “mankind”.

Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell actually have relatively little in common with each other at all, and generalizations about “Victorian modes of narration” should be much rarer than they are. It strikes me that writing about Lawrence tends to make people hyperbolic (“reading him remains a subversive, transformative, life-altering act”).

In the New York Times Book Review, Nancy Kline reviews Rosalind Brackenbury’s Becoming George Sand, which I recently downloaded from NetGalley. I read the first instalment of the contemporary story and wasn’t very engaged, so I haven’t pressed on into the George Sand bit. Kline doesn’t convince me that I should; indeed, leading off the discussion by saying that if the book “does nothing more than send us back to the source, it will have done its work” really damns and blasts the novel with faint praise, doesn’t it? Because surely sending us to a different novelist is not at all the “work” of the current novelist. On the other hand, Sand is another novelist I haven’t actually read, despite having read about her quite a bit. As Kline remarks, “Her admirers included Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. The last three thought her the greatest French stylist of her time.” That’s a fan club worth having! But, on the other other hand, George Eliot also greatly admired Sir Charles Grandison and Henry Esmond (which I have read).

At The Millions, Lydia Kiesling takes her turn convincing us that Lolita,”with its veritable panoply of horrors,” is nonetheless “the most bracing and perfect work of art I know.” Lolita has always seemed to me the kind of “great” literary work that really forces us to confront the problem, not of the good or bad book, but of the good or bad reader. Our standard of tolerance surely must be set by the good reader, the one who gets it that we are not supposed to (that we must not) share Humbert Humbert’s values. But we seem to be living in a moment–or maybe it is always such a moment?–in which unreliability, irony, or narrative distance are easily misunderstood or just rejected: I’m thinking, for example, of the recent decision to ban the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” from Canadian radio, or of the “cleaned-up” edition of Huckleberry Finn. Good thing nobody reads Victorian poetry, or someone would probably come after Browning pretty soon.

At The Second Pass, John Williams followed his round-up of women critics on women writers with an interview about the VIDA statistics with Jennifer Szalai, former book review editor at Harper’s; if you didn’t see it already, I think it adds some useful perspective to the discussion (a wide-ranging round-up of which can be found here):

The statistics approach the issue from two angles: reviews written by gender, and the books being reviewed by gender. How separate or entangled are those issues to you? What do you consider unique elements of each?

I suspect the issues are connected in some way, though I’m not sure whether it’s as straightforward as claiming that the dearth of reviewed books by women derives directly from the dearth of reviews written by women. In fact, Ruth Franklin at The New Republic concluded that “the magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year.” She then wonders whether the numbers have anything to do with how “we define ‘best’ and ‘most important’ in a field as subjective as literature, which, after all, is deeply of influenced by the cultural norms in any given age.” She raises the possibility that the dismal proportion of books published by women has to do with unconscious biases, but then she doesn’t go so far to provide a confirmation one way or the other — an approach that, to my mind, is less evasive than it is honest. With a work as complicated as a book, whose creation and reception is dependent on so many factors, I’d find it hard to believe anyone who claimed they could pinpoint exactly why so few women were published. We should also keep in mind that Ruth’s sample excluded those “books that were unlikely to be reviewed — self-help, cooking, art” — which also happen to be books that are often written by women.

This connects to the question of which books are considered “important” enough to review. I do think there are a whole host of cultural norms that come into play — among them the bizarre obsession with “the Great American Novel,” as well as a condescension toward certain subjects like motherhood and a young woman’s coming of age — but then it’s hard to see how this contributes to the gender imbalance among reviewers (though I can see how it might very well derive from it).

At American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis reviews The Late American Novel, a collection of essays about the future of books and reading:

The majority of the essays are structured by the writer’s taking notice of the alarms—e-books, tablets, an ever-destabilizing economy for writers, readers’ decreased attention spans, the novelist’s loss of centricity in the culture—and then choosing to ignore them. We’re wired for story; story will never die; writing is worthy labor; there will always be readers who appreciate it; and hey, didn’t Choose Your Own Adventure books prove the physical book can play with form well before the iPad? The arguments’ shape, along with their homily-like brevity, reminded me of a line from Roger Lambert, the bitter, pervy divinity-school teacher at the heart of John Updike‘s Roger’s Version: “Raise the doubts, then do the reassurances. People have no idea what they’re hearing, they just want a certain kind of verbal music. The major, the minor, and back to the major, then Bless you and keep you, and out the door to the luncheon party.”

This weekend I’ve also finished up The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, but I won’t be writing it up until after my book club meets this week. And I’ve just begun Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, which is this month’s pick for the Slaves of Golconda group. Anyone who’s interested is welcome to read along and contribute to the discussion. So far I am liking the novel a lot. I find aspects of Hazzard’s prose perplexing (what’s with the words that are just not there, at the end of sentences, for instance?) but it’s difficult in a more inviting way than Christina Stead’s ranting cadences (The Man Who Loved Children has been retired, for now–just not a mental space I could be in).

International Women’s Day seems like a fitting occasion to declare that I have had enough of the intensely masculine atmosphere of police procedurals for a while. I have now read 5 of the Martin Beck books and while I think they are very good of their kind, it is still not the kind that best suits my own personal taste and I’m ready to read something different. I don’t even want to finish the attempt at a properly nuanced commentary on the role and depiction of women in them that I started to write just now and then deleted! There’s plenty to be said about it, I’m sure, and I’m not calling the books sexist. I just want to take my mental life somewhere else for a while–which means I’m also not keen on reading more Henning Mankell just yet either. Reading Danielle’s nice post at A Work in Progress about her own March reading plans made me think about what I have to look forward to or might choose to focus on for the rest of this month. One of the great luxuries of being on sabbatical, after all, is exactly that choice!

I think it’s going to be a pretty intense month for women writers–which is not unusual for me, of course. In fact, prompted by the flap about the VIDA statistics, I did a quick tally of the contemporary books I’ve written up on Novel Readings and came up with around 72% women authors. (This may in itself be one tiny piece of anecdotal evidence for the difference it might make having more women involved in editorial roles at the major periodicals: if their own reading skewed at all towards women writers, that would inevitably shift the sense of what books deserve attention.) Like Danielle, I’m reading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. I’m also determined to finish Margaret Kennedy’s Together and Apart. I’m going to reread Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and also, maybe, Agnes Grey, as I’m hoping to write something about AB for Open Letters Monthly. First, though, I’ve just begun Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, because after all the detective novels with their mostly pedestrian prose I really wanted to dive into something where the writing really mattered–and the first two chapters have already convinced me that an extraordinary (if not altogether pleasant) reading experience lies ahead. Here’s her description, for instance, of Henny Pollit’s family home:

She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.

The passage starts out calmly enough, but that riff on marriage as a diseased body wrapped in the veils of domesticity lacerates the imagination. I’ve also already had to look two words up in the dictionary: “desquamating” and “crepitations.” (I’m sure you all already knew just what these mean.)

The other two books I’m planning to get through are Trollope’s La Vendée, which one of my PhD students is writing a chapter on (I’m about three chapters into that one, and as she and I were discussing today, it reads more like Scott–though not, perhaps, Scott at his best!–than like Trollope) and, for my other reading group, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. I haven’t started that one yet, but I will say that the NYRB Classics edition has a gorgeous cover:

It sounds like a great month, actually. If I do get through all of these, I’ll be pretty proud of myself! But if I don’t, that’s OK too, because there’s always April…

So what about you? Anything on your TBR pile that you are especially looking forward to?

I’m not quite ready to do my annual year-end post as the year isn’t over and there’s more novel reading to be done! But I have been unwrapping all kinds of goodies which I will be reading and reviewing in 2011. A few years ago we decided that opening all the Christmas presents in one frenzied morning meant the individual presents were not fully appreciated and the let-down from the anticipation was unduly severe. So we started a brand new tradition (it’s important to launch these every so often!) of opening one present a day starting from the first day the kids are off school. I must say, I highly recommend this system! Everyone has something new to read or wear or watch or play with every day–and two, on Christmas day, plus stockings. It does mean, though, that I don’t yet know quite all the new books I’ve got (I can see some more distinctly book-shaped parcels still under the tree). So far, here’s my haul:

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. I opened this one a bit early, as its card (accidentally?) said ‘Happy Birthday’–which was in March. I wrote about it already, here. I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d take another look at the film adaptation; I’ve rewatched about the first hour and I find myself often wondering why they didn’t stick closer to the book.

Hilary Mantel, Fludd. I was so impressed with Wolf Hall that I immediately began working through Mantel’s back catalogue, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and The Giant O’Brien. One of these will certainly feature on my ‘best reads of 2010’ list, but you’ll have to check back to see which one! Fludd looks enticing.

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog. I’ve started this one already. Atkinson is a great storyteller whose Jackson Brodie novels stretch, or evade, genre categories such as ‘detective fiction’ or ‘crime fiction.’ They are strongly character-driven, and they have a persistent interest in the ways people get tangled up in their own pasts, and their own erratic impulses.

Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Seriously, how likely is it that there would be two books featuring characters named ‘Pettigrew’ on my list? This one looks like just the kind of book I’ll enjoy. I wish the publishers didn’t feel the need to fill several entire pages at the beginning with endorsements from every conceivable source, though: it makes them look anxious! And the selection is so ‘something for everybody,’ from O magazine to the New York Times. I guess it’s perverse to find this kind of effusion offputting. Certainly it won’t actually put me off the book!

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children. I first read about this in Elizabeth Hardwick’s A View of My Own, and since then I seem to have noticed a number of allusions to it elsewhere, all of which–but Hardwick’s essay especially–piqued my interest.

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind. I thought White Teeth was OK–really good in parts, strained or excessive in others–and I disliked On Beauty intensely. On the other hand, I often really enjoy Zadie Smith’s essays, including one she wrote some time ago on Middlemarch, so I’m looking forward to reading this collection.

I seem to have little to say for myself right now. I blame the end of term for the mental clutter it creates (there’s physical clutter, too, of course, but that’s more easily dealt with). Luckily, there are lots of other people writing interesting things about books.

For instance, the December issue of Open Letters Monthly is up! As usual, its essays and reviews range widely in both subject and style, which means there’s something for everyone. For instance, if you are in the mood for something darkly disturbing, check out Colleen Shea’s review of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris, which raises questions (in the context of the glut of press coverage of a horrifying recent murder trial) about aestheticizing violence against women. For the political junkies, there are pieces on both of the big “W”s:  Greg Waldmann casts a cold eye on George W. Bush’s Decision Points, while Steve Donoghue has a somewhat chilly response to Ron Chernow’s new biography of George Washington. Alice Brittan offers a compelling analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s collected short fiction, while Ingrid Norton completes her ‘Year with Short Novels’ with a look at Charles Portis’s True Grit. Andrew Flynn is not impressed with Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies, but Morten Hoi Jensen appreciates finding the human side of Saul Bellow in his collected letters. All this plus Stephen King, Halo, Stephen Sondheim, perfume, and more…

The book world is awash in year-end features (I guess nobody publishes anything worth reading in December?). The Millions is running its annual ‘Year in Reading’ series, with contributions so far from John Banville and Lionel Shriver, among others.  At The Little Professor, Miriam Burstein has her own unique take on the ‘Year in Books (including Brontes and vampires’:

Most appalling religious novel: Mme. Brendlah, Tales of a Jewess.

Best modern antidote to Tales of a Jewess: Lillian Nattel, The Singing Fire.

Religious novel above and beyond the call of duty: Martin Shee, Oldcourt.

Religious NOVEL most ADDICTED to CAPS for EMPHASIS: Robert Wood Kyle, The Martyr of Prusa, or the First and Last Prayer; A Tale of the Early Christians.

Has anyone seen the plot?: The Vicar of Iver: A Tale, which, despite the subtitle, had no storyline whatsoever. (read the whole list here!)

At Wuthering Expectations it has been just one interesting thing after another, as usual. Try these posts on Newman, for starters, and then these on Henry Esmond (no, AR, I don’t think it’s teachable–at least, I would never try! I read it for my PhD comps and then never again. “Conceptual purity” indeed!).

At Tales from the Reading Room, litlove recently offered a crime round-up, which may give some of us more ideas for our TBR lists (as if they needed to get any longer, right?).

At stevereads, there’s something for the intellectuals in the crowd as Steve continues his great series Penguins on Parade with Michael Psellus’s Fourteen Byzantine Rulers–but if you scroll down to the next post, you’ll find something a little less cerebral, too…

Stefanie at So Many Books has gone from May Sarton’s The Small Room to e. e. cummings’s The Enormous Room, which is quite a transition.

At The Second Pass, John Williams has “finally taken the plunge into Freedom“; his response to the first 187 pages is here, with, of course, more installments to follow.

That’s hardly all, but that’s all I have time to round up for now.

In other news, my copy of Skippy Dies has just arrived and has lured me away from the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. Eventually, I will be writing about these books and more–many more, once I get through the papers and exams and arrive in the free, clear air of my sabbatical next term.

OK, I got the review in to those taskmasters at OLM and now I can risk doing a little fresh blogging–though at this point I’m just going to play catch-up. I feel as if I’m in another of those reading slumps, which inevitably lead to blogging slumps unless I’m very disciplined: it’s not much fun to write up books you don’t like, or think are OK, and it’s even harder to face giving the full treatment to a book that has been very widely acclaimed that you are luke-warm about. The latter, in this particular case, is Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and though I concede that the prose is beautiful and the consciousness of the narrator beautifully rendered, there seemed to be a mushiness at its intellectual centre that I couldn’t blame on John Ames. I had a sneaking suspicion, as I read through its limpid sentences and its celebratory passages about life, interspersed with evasive passages about mysteries and the dissatisfactions of demands for proof, that it was highly acclaimed precisely because of those feel-good evasions so elegantly packaged. It’s all very affirmative and small-town nice. I know I’m not doing the novel justice: this isn’t all it has to offer. Also, I know I am influenced by interviews I’ve read and seen with Robinson, which make it impossible for me to hear any delicate irony separating her nice old man’s perspective from her own. Despite some of the blurbs insisting it is not just a book for believers, I think it is, though for the currently trendy New-Agey ones whose religion is not defined by doctrine or scripture but by personal experiences and vague spiritual ideas about God. I did relish many individual lines (for instance, “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it”).

I finished Sue Grafton’s ‘U’ is for Undertow, which was OK except for the whole TMI thing I wrote about before. I’ve been trying to read The Girl who Played with Fire but I’m completely stalled in it. Do you think all the millions of people who are buying these are actually reading them all the way through? Maybe they skip along to find out what happened and don’t trouble themselves too much about how plodding the prose and plotting are. But I think my copy will go sit on the shelf now. I’d rather read the new Elizabeth George mystery, which I just got from the library–not because I really want to know about the case but because I want to catch up with Inspector Lynley and the gang. I did enjoy the first story in The Penguin Book of Crime Stories Volume II, ed. Peter Robinson, which is Reginald Hill’s “The Dog Game.”

As I only have This Body of Death from the library for another week, I’ll finish that up next. Then I think I’ll see how far I can get in Scott’s The Antiquary, which I’ve pledged to read as part of the Scottish Literature Challenge sponsored by Wuthering Expectations. And that reminds me: something else I’ve been reading recently, with pleasure and interest, are the posts at WE about my anthology The Victorian Art of Fiction. As I’d hoped and expected (unwutheringly), fresh eyes see things differently, and the posts and comments have been excellent so far.

At the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes (author of this excellent biography of George Eliot) writes about the autobiographical resonance of The Mill on the Floss:

Unusually for such an intensely autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss was not Eliot’s first work of fiction, but her third. Shortly before it came out she explained to a friend that my “mind works with most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past”, and her first two novels had indeed truffled her own prehistory. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was drawn from stories circulating around her childhood community about a series of mild scandals that had taken place several decades earlier. Adam Bede (1859) was based on the young adulthood of her father, her uncle and her uncle’s wife. It was as if Eliot had been working through what she called the “many strata” of collective memory before she was ready, finally, to confront her own past. . . . (read the rest here)

As Hughes notes, “[l]iterary theorists tend not to approve of reading novels as if they were fictionalised autobiography,” though I don’t know any critical accounts of The Mill on the Floss that overlook the kinds of parallels Hughes draws attention to in her account. It’s not that they don’t exist–it’s just that ultimately, they aren’t that critically interesting, as I think Hughes’s own piece shows. Once you’ve done the mix-and-match exercise (“[Robert] Evans, like Tulliver, was a fond father, who doted on “his little wench”, born when he was already middle aged,”  “the Dodson aunts derive much of their grotesque energy from Eliot’s close observations of her own mother’s sisters, the Pearsons,” and so forth) you still won’t have said much about the novel’s internal energies and motivations.