I finished twelve books in August. Two were audiobooks and two (including one of the audiobooks) were rereads. I wrote up a couple of them here already: Jeanne Ray’s Calling Invisible Women and Mark Haddon’s Leaving Home–which was definitely the standout this month.
In lighter reading, I read another of Peter Grainger’s D. C. Smith mysteries, In This Bright Future. There are still a handful from the middle of the series that I haven’t gotten to you; the library doesn’t have them and the e-books go on sale intermittently so I’m waiting to snap them up when their turn comes. If you like classic British procedurals and haven’t read this series yet, I highly recommend it! They were self-published as e-boosk only initially, as I understand it, but have now been picked up by a “real” publisher and I even saw some on the shelf recently in a local bookstore. B. K. Borison’s And Now Back to You was an amusing romance (I enjoyed First Time Caller as well): predictable, but that more or less comes with the territory! I enjoyed the audiobook of Katherine Center’s Hello Stranger a lot even though I’d read the book before: credit to the narrator, Patti Murrin, who brought enough energy to it that it seemed to zip along. She made me think that Center might be generally better in audio, so I’m now listening to The Love-Haters, which I thought was just OK when I read it before. This is definitely the wild card factor with audiobooks: I was excited when my hold on The Gales of November finally came up but that narrator just was not for me, and I abandoned it after about half an hour.
Audiobooks–which I didn’t used to have much patience for–have been proving a good alternative this summer to the podcasts that are my regular listening, some of which are on summer hiatus. I’m not sure what has made the difference, as I used to find them at once too slow (I read pretty fast, on my own) and too easy to lose track of, between street noise and other external distractions and my own wandering mind. I still would not want to listen to a book that, for me, required or rewarded really meticulous attention. I have had the most success with non-fiction, like The Wager or Empire of Pain, which was gripping but also heartbreaking and infuriating. Another notable audiobook this month was also by Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling. I knew it might be a hard one for me in some ways given that its instigating incident is a fatal fall from a building; I was mostly able to depersonalize this, but still overall I had some ambivalence about the book, even though it is written clearly with a conscious effort not to sensationalize Zach’s death, to acknowledge it as a human tragedy and respect his parents’ suffering. Still, at times the fall felt like a plot point almost incidental to the outlandish chicanery that characterizes so much of the the story that unfolds. The line between investigative journalism and true crime seemed a lot blurrier to me than in either of the other of Radden Keefe’s books that I’ve read.
On a lighter note, my book club’s pick for our next meeting is Cold Comfort Farm, which somehow I’d never read before even though I bought it a few years back because it seemed sure to be delightful. It is delightful! I’m not sure what exactly we will find to discuss about it, but the send-up of rural fantasies is great, the constant undermining of the story’s gothic potential, the refreshing can-do attitude of the heroine–all so fun, and so funny, with plenty of genuine LOL moments.
On my latest trip home to Vancouver, I helped my mother downsize her book collection by taking Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf away with me (I did more than that! we filled their whole car trunk with books to donate!). Once I took a closer look at it I decided that it really needed to be read out loud, so I did that, much to Fred’s puzzlement and annoyance (she looks over her shoulder at me so peevishly if I dare to talk on the phone when she’s snoozing on my lap too, and usually gets up after a while to find a properly quiet place to nap). This too was so fun! One good thing about reading aloud is that it makes sure you are getting every word, which for me can be harder with long poems than with prose, but Beowulf is also of course so well suited, even intended, for it. I wonder if this would be a good strategy for returning to Shakespeare’s plays, which I have read only about a dozen of and those mostly as an undergraduate, in the great Kate Sirluck’s Shakespeare survey at UBC. (Oh my, how she intimidated me! But then when she heard I was going off to Cornell for grad school she told me not to take any BS, and in retrospect that’s advice I wish I had known better how to appreciate and act on!)
I read one short story collection, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day. This was prompted by reading my friend Alice Brittan’s syllabus for her fall seminar called “On Beauty,” where this is on the syllabus. Like so many readers I know, Alice is a great admirer of Keegan’s, and I have long wondered if I underestimated Small Things Like These, which did not wow me. I was pretty impressed by So Late in the Day so I went back to get Antarctica from Bookmark–which turns out to include one of the same stories, so that was very mildly annoying. I have read a couple of the stories in it so far and I just can’t decide. Maybe the thing to do is reread Small Things Like These, since I am far from the best short story reader (I genuinely think of it as a different skill from reading very long books, or even medium-sized books).
Last but not least I will mention Ann Patchett’s Whistler, which if I had had less heat-and-humidity-induced inertia over the past couple of weeks would have gotten its own post. I did really enjoy reading it. I appreciated its “glass half-full” view of the world, which contrasts so much with the “glass mostly empty” tone of Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say (my review of that is here). I found the gently metafictional ‘twist’ at the end perhaps unnecessary: the novel before it (unless I missed something crucial!) didn’t seem to me to be changed much by it, unlike, say, Atonement, which is a very different novel on a reread, or Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins–which, IMHO, was spoiled by Atkinson’s inability to let her story be what it was. (My cranky review of that one is here.) After I finished Whistler I poked around in the reviews and was surprised how many I came across that disliked for just the reasons I liked it: too nice, too feel-good, ‘sentimental,’ even ‘saccharine.’ It did not seem that way to me, and these complaints made me think about what our expectations are for fiction we think is offered up seriously (as good a working definition as I know for what we mean by ‘literary’ fiction). Must it be grim, or angry? Why (to go back to another pet peeve) is Elena Ferrante characterized as honest because she seems so furious–can’t other emotions, positive emotions, also be honest? (My rant about Ferrante’s effusive reception is here!) Whistler seemed to me an intelligent and nuanced novel, not cheesy feel-good pablum. Does it go really deep? Not really. Does it serve up social or political critique? Not explicitly, but you could see it as doing so implicitly by its tenderness for its characters and theirs for each other. A world in which people do brave things on each other’s behalf, in which broken relationships can be healed and complicated different realities can be reconciled–sounds nice! If we are left thinking (as one critic reasonably was) about the privilege her characters enjoy, both economically and emotionally, instead of being mad at them we could maybe more profitably be mad at the circumstances that limit those good things.
I’m in the middle of one more book but it seems unlikely I will finish it before the month is over: feeling frustrated with waiting for my library holds and with paying high prices to buy books that end up disappointing (ahem, The Very Secretive and Passionate Life of Miles Franklin, which I gave up on less than half way through), I decided to revisit Trollope’s Palliser series, which I read through in 2001-2002 and have not returned to since, with the exception of The Eustace Diamonds which I assigned in a graduate seminar around 2006. I am about half way through Can You Forgive Her? and am thoroughly enjoying it. Trollope’s pacing definitely takes a bit of adjustment at first, as not a lot happens from page to page but always at great length! Once you fall into the rhythm of it, though, it goes along more quickly than you expect, and you get invested really quickly in his characters’ dilemmas–which that expansiveness allows him to show us in all their complexity. Alice Vavasor’s “jilting” of the tediously worthy John Grey is (ostensibly) the main storyline, but I’d forgotten that here we are also plunged right into Lady Glencora’s wilder struggle between her tediously worthy husband “Planty Pall” and the handsome but unworthy Burgo Fitzgerald. Trollope has some conventional ideas about what makes women happy, but he is sharp about the constraints on and injustice for women who want to but can’t make their own decisions. I’m quite interested this time in the way Alice is (she thinks) financially supporting her less worthy suitor in his political ambitions: we know it isn’t actually her money, but both he and she believe it is, an unusual dynamic. I don’t remember exactly how things work out, but I’m all in at this point. I will probably intersperse some other reading along the way, but a full read-through of the series seems like a better fall-back when there’s a lull than doom-scrolling, a habit I am determined to break, not just because it is a waste of time but because it is so bad for my blood pressure. (“Lake America” indeed! Argh.)
I have read a fair amount of poetry in my life, for pleasure and for work. One of my very oldest books is an illustrated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and I went through a phase as a tween where I thought reading Poe’s “The Raven” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” aloud was the height of literary engagement; around the same time, I was given an anthology of Romantic poetry, which (read obsessively but selectively) confirmed my youthful predilection for angst and pathos. Mostly I read fiction, though, so it remains surprising to me that it was a poem—Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web,” specifically—that turned me into an English major (thank you again, 
Since I became an English professor myself, my research and teaching has primarily focused on fiction, but I actually consider poetry the highest form of literary art, and I always look forward to the chance to work through some examples with my students, something I rarely get to do except in first-year courses or when I teach our ‘theory and methods’ course on close reading. Once upon a time we had a full-year Victorian Literature course, which meant plenty of poetry and even (rarer still) some of the period’s great “sage” writing, and today sometimes I get to teach our survey course on British Literature from 1800 to the present: hooray, more opportunities for poetry! I also regularly assign as much of Aurora Leigh as I dare in my seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question.’ (If you’re curious about how I approach these courses, 
When I teach poetry, something I often remark is that even the most skeptical among us tacitly acknowledges its power and value on special occasions—weddings, for example, and funerals. There is something about poetry that we need, not just at those times but especially at those times. I knew this already in theory but only really understood its truth when Owen died. Lines of poetry that I had read many times before became new to me, in terrible but also beautiful ways; I reread them over and over, and also sought out (and was offered) more. Sometimes the words brought comfort, but more often they offered confirmation: yes, this, this is how I feel, this is what I would say myself, if I could. I have found some passages of prose that bring the same relief, but it is still poetry I turn to when the grief is hardest to bear. I copy passages into my journal and save screen shots, an ongoing commonplace book of sorrow. I don’t necessarily think that this is the best way, the best reason, to read poetry. It can feel solipsistic; I wouldn’t want it to be the only way I (or anyone) read poetry. I wouldn’t want these to be the only poems I read.
I would like to read more poetry, and to read more different kinds of poetry better. You’d think this would be easy, and of course the steps themselves are simple enough, but the feeling of not “getting” it (which I have, cumulatively, spent many hours trying to train my students out of) does get in the way of my good intentions. Lately, therefore, I’ve come up with a little game I call “Poetry Serendipity”: every time I go up into the stacks of the university library, I take different routes on my way to and from whatever section I am specifically visiting and, as I wander, I scan the shelves for names I recognize or (more random and risky, but also more fun) for those tell-tale slim volumes that you just know must be poetry collections. Sometimes I have a few names in mind, so that if I notice I’m in the (say) contemporary American section around names starting with M or P, I can look around for (say) W. S. Merwin, or Marge Piercy. I sign out a few books, bring them home, and browse them without purpose or pressure. If I like something, I pause and reread; if I don’t connect, I close the book and move on without shame or regret—sometimes from very famous poets! I haven’t had many big successes, but pretty often I find at least one poem I like enough to copy out. Along the way I think I am learning something about myself as a poetry reader. I like form, or the feeling of it; I like clarity, sometimes (though not always) simplicity; I like concrete details; I like ideas but not elusive abstractions; I like moments in time, poignant or reflective; I like calm, and melancholy, not exultation; I do not like religion (with rare exceptions). Yet somehow I also like many poems that meet none of these specifications.
We have had more storms since the last time I posted but happily no more storm days, so we are still on schedule … for now! (In fact, things are looking 
I really did enjoy rereading the novel this time, especially the reliably hilarious as well as deliciously subversive final encounter between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine. One thing we spent a fair amount of time on in class is the way Austen manipulates us into liking or disliking characters, only, much of the time, to undercut or at least complicate our “first impressions” so that we realize we are vulnerable to the same interpretive mistakes as the characters. In this respect I think even Mr Collins gets a bit of a reprieve from our initial distaste. Not only is his offer to Lizzie actually quite honorable, despite also being laughable, considering he has no obligation to make up to the Bennet sisters for the future loss of their home, but at Hunsford we see that while he is still absurd, he treats Charlotte well and has made it possible for her to live a dignified life. I don’t think there’s any backtracking on Lady Catherine, though: she remains an antagonist to that bitterly delightful end:
In British Literature After 1800 we are still reading poetry and I am still struggling with “how to balance attention to context and content with attention to form,” as I put it in 
This is hardly a radical strategy, including for me. I do often (and did this term) provide study questions for the novels in my 19th-Century Fiction classes, for example, to help students organize their observations as they read the long books–to know what, of all the many details flooding past them, to really pay attention to. But I also find it pretty easy to ask questions in 19th-Century Fiction that will get at least some answers, and usually lots of them, because we always have plot and character as starting points, from which we can level up to questions about form and theme. Maybe because I don’t teach poetry often, I underestimated the difference it makes to be working on, not just poetry, but poetry much of which is in a somewhat archaic diction. My impression (though I may be mistaken) is that many of the students are struggling with the literal meaning of the poems–their basic paraphraseable content. Perhaps, too, the variety in our reading list that keeps things interesting for me (and is to some extent necessitated by the survey format) is making things harder for them because each poet is so different and thus makes different demands on our attention as readers. With that in mind, in the study questions I came up with I tried to make the assigned poems more legible for them, combining questions about theme with prompts to consider form, and making some connections across the poems.
In British Literature After 1800 we are skipping briskly through our small sample of Romantic poets. The rapid pace is at once the blessing and the curse of a survey course with a mandate to span more than 200 years of writing in multiple genres: we don’t spend long enough in any one place to go into a great deal of depth, which means we also don’t spend long enough on any one topic to get tired of it. I enjoy the variety myself, including the chance to talk about genres and examples that don’t come up in the courses I teach more often–such as Romantic poetry! In fact, because the introductory courses I’ve taught for the last several years have been either Introduction to Prose and Fiction or Pulp Fiction, I’ve spend hardly any time on poetry at all except for Close Reading, and the last time I taught that was Fall 2017. So I’m having fun, but also feeling a bit wobbly about how to balance attention to context and content with attention to form.
In my seminar on the Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ we started work last week on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel Aurora Leigh. It’s usually kind of hard going for the students: although it does have many of the familiar features of a Victorian marriage plot novel, it also includes (among quite a bit of more miscellaneous material) long meditations on, and also arguments about, the nature and purpose of poetry in the modern world — and its 9 books of blank verse add up to a total of approximately 15,000 lines of iambic pentameter, which, let’s face it, is not the easiest reading even when the verse itself is thrilling … which, frankly, for long stretches Aurora Leigh is not.
That Aurora Leigh has not lost its radicalism — that we are still fighting on some of the same fronts — was made unexpectedly clear to me this past weekend, as with so many others I watched the story of Donald Trump’s now-infamous bus tape break, and then one pontificating man after another denounce it in the name of his daughters (or his wife or his great aunt or whatever). For some men — too many men — women are still seen primarily as complementary, their value uncomfortably entangled with ownership (all those possessive pronouns!), their right to respect and dignity somehow contingent on their belonging to someone else (someone else male, of course). My 
Novel Readings 