I am back from my trip to Vancouver, where in spite of the rain (even, in some ways, because of it) I had a lovely time visiting with family and friends and drinking in the always inspiring sight of the mountains rising above the city and the sea. It was a a welcome interlude between the end of a challenging term and the beginning of a summer of reflection and writing.
I didn’t end up doing a lot of reading while I was in Vancouver. During the day I was often out and about, and in the evenings we talked and then wound down with a little TV. A particular treat was watching Dr. Thorne, which my Trollope-loving father had saved up for me. I thought it was delightful, though as I rather sheepishly confessed to him, it has been many years since I read the novel (one of his personal favorites) — perhaps it’s time I reread it! In return (?) I introduced my parents to the quirky little comedy Detectorists, which my husband and I found both hilarious and unexpectedly touching. I’m not 100% sure my parents were converted, but at least now they know it’s there.
I did get some travel reading done. I’m nervous on planes, so light or fast-paced books are good as my concentration isn’t always great. En route to Vancouver, I found Miranda Neville’s The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton an excellent diversion, and on the way home I alternated between Georgette Heyer’s Black Sheep (reliably amusing) and Adam Sternbergh’s The Blinds, which I’m reviewing for Quill & Quire. I plucked several promising titles off my mother’s well-stocked shelves, but the only one I read cover to cover was Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field. I didn’t think it was a very good novel, but it tells an important story based on Gellhorn’s experience reporting on the plight of refugees from the Sudetenland after its annexation by Nazi Germany: it’s not particularly artful, but it is certainly gripping. I read about two-thirds of a Donna Leon mystery but left it behind unfinished: I might try to find it here, just to know whodunit and why–but I don’t feel highly motivated to as I was finding Leon’s prose terribly stilted.
Though I didn’t manage a lot of good reading while I was away, I did bring back a nice stack of books to read here at home. One ritual my mother and I have on my visits is an expedition to Hager Books, which is a small store with a nice atmosphere and thoughtfully stocked shelves. We peer around at everything and kibitz, in our opinionated and idiosyncratic ways, about authors and titles we’ve read or are interested in–or, for whatever reason, want nothing to do with! I picked out Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata and Anita Brookner’s Providence as part of my “keep independent bookstores in business” project. As I observed when reporting on my last trip to Vancouver, my mother’s personal book collection is another great resource, and recently she has been pruning it, putting some boxes together to donate to the public library’s book sale. I had the bright idea to “just take a look” through them and of course found a few I couldn’t resist, including another by Anita Brookner, one by Angela Huth I haven’t read before (I really like both Invitation to the Married Life and Easy Silence), and Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour.
Including The Blinds, then, which had been mailed to Vancouver so I could get started on it sooner rather than later, I came home with 8 more books than I left with. And yet wouldn’t you know it: the book I most want to read next turned out to be waiting for me when I got back to Halifax. It’s Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause: On Life After Youth, a 50th birthday gift which seems like just the right book to help me think about where my own life is now and what I want to make of it next. That is likely, then, to be the next book I write about here.
I haven’t disappeared or given up blogging! It’s just that as soon as my final grades went in, I had to buckle down and finish two reviews that have been haunting me — not because I didn’t want to write them, but because though I have had the books for some time and had even started reading them, it just hadn’t been possible for me to get the hard work of writing thoughtfully about them done. The result was that even though neither of them was technically late, I felt guilty for weeks! But one went in last week and the other today, and while I now have to wait and find out what the editors think, including what revisions they want, I’m out from under that shadow and ready to contemplate the rest of my summer.
However! Rain is perfectly good weather for taking stock and making plans, and that’s the stage I’m at now. I actually feel as if I need some dedicated time for that, because I’m not really sure right now what my top priorities are. I spent a lot of the last two summers doing work related to 
Some of that was due to my specific teaching assignments this year. My fall term courses were both ones I have taught before and really enjoy. Since I first designed my version of Close Reading, I have tried to infuse its more technical aspects with both critical and moral purpose, and the result is that it generates some of the most interesting discussions and assignments I get. It was also balm to my soul to spend five weeks on Middlemarch for this class: that is not enough time, of course–what would be?–but still feels comparatively luxurious (when I teach Middlemarch in my standard 19th-century fiction class, we get three weeks). Finishing with The Remains of the Day is always marvelous, but Ishiguro’s novel felt 
One thing I realized as the term went by is that the big questions that, in my mind, really motivated the course–questions about the difference between “pulp” or “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction, for instance–were not of great interest (at least, as far as I could tell) to most of the students: they did not seem to be invested in either the distinction or arguments against it. My guess is that most of them had never thought much about genre categories or literary prestige before; certainly I got no sign that they believed themselves to be victims of or participants in any kind of “culture war” by virtue of having been assigned Elmore Leonard and Loretta Chase instead of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It’s possible that some of them are now more interested in how and why we might draw these kinds of lines, but it was at once disorienting and refreshing to realize that they were not nearly as exercised about them as people often are in the media or in the world of literary criticism and book reviewing. In the end it was just another thing I was trying to teach them about.
OK, I exaggerate slightly: I’ve also had some papers to grade. But the final exams for both of my winter term classes were this Tuesday. At 3 hours each, with set up and pack up time that meant over 7 hours straight in the dreary Dalplex fieldhouse, and I walked away with 120 exams which I will be working my way through until next Tuesday at least. Overall, it’s not exhilarating work: there are certainly bright spots (many of which so far have been in the essay answers from students in the 19th-century fiction class), but a lot of this marking is more or less drudgery. I do try to make the questions not just relevant but, where possible, interesting, for me as well as for the students, but as I’ve written about here before, the main value of exams for me is simply, and kind of sadly, 
I have been managing to get some reading done: some serious reading, with an eye to reviewing deadlines coming up, and some light reading. I just finished Julie James’s newest, The Thing About Love — and did not love it. It was entertaining enough, and she’s good at both plot and banter, but the awkwardness I always notice in her prose seemed particularly conspicuous this time. I can’t believe better editing couldn’t smooth a lot of it out: she has tics like explaining new names by adding “referring to etc. etc.” after them. I was diverted by the book, but also disappointed in it, especially as I like her previous novel, Suddenly Last Summer, a lot. I am really looking forward to doing some immersive reading that’s not for work (or for formal reviews, for that matter). I have some birthday gift cards I’m going to use to treat myself to some new books as soon as I file final grades! It will probably be pretty quiet around here until then.
Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler’s contribution to the 
As this line suggests, there’s not much taming in Tyler’s version, which I appreciated. Kate’s prickly personality instead is part of her appeal. Katherina’s famous closing speech becomes a rant from Katherine, not about how wives should lovingly obey their husband’s, but about how hard it is to be a man who always has to hide his feelings, while women “have been studying people’s feelings since they were toddlers.” “It’s like men and women are in two different countries,” she explains to Bunny, who accuses her of subordinating herself to Pyotr;
The adjectives in my post’s title all come from the nearly four pages of blurbs at the front of my paperback edition of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories. Looking them over after finishing the book, I was struck by how consistent the clips are, and how accurate: “exhilarating if dark,” “brilliantly chilling,” “artfully controlled savagery,” “brutally dissecting,” “brusque and brutal,” “cruelty is made manifest,” “dark and judgmental,” “harsh and comic,” “satisfyingly chilling.” I agree that these are just the qualities of the stories in this collection. I’m just not as sure as either these reviewers or the publicity team at Harper Perennial seem to be that these are signs of its greatness — that they are, or should be, unqualified selling points.
I found myself thinking, as I worked through the volume, about why I enjoyed the stories in Adam Johnson’s 
Anyway, the unusual silence here mostly reflects just how busy I’ve been, along with how tired I’ve been feeling when the work is done — too tired to do much good reading, too tired to do much extra writing. The reading I’ve done outside of work has mostly been light: I just finished both of 
I didn’t plan it this way, but it turns out that teaching Lord of Scoundrels at the end of a term that has also included Bleak House, Adam Bede, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a good way to bring home the truth of 
And yet, while the overt and (ultimately) happy sexiness of Lord of Scoundrels is indeed “awesomely excellent,” it’s not entirely fair to set up modern romance fiction as the positive alternative to punishing Victorian fiction, which I think can actually be quite “sex positive,” albeit usually in a much more subtle, and sometimes perverse, way. For one thing, the women who pay such a high price for breaking society’s rules are very often portrayed as victims: the novelists direct our disapprobation not against them but against the world that treats them so cruelly for something so understandable or natural. Lady Dedlock should not have died cold and alone reaching for her lover’s grave: all the moral and emotional force of Bleak House is directed against that outcome. It’s true that the implication may still be that she has sinned, but she deserves to be forgiven and brought back into the loving embrace of her long-lost daughter, our moral exemplar. Eliot and Hardy make it particularly clear that their “erring” heroines are participating (more or less willingly, of course) in a natural process made shameful and dangerous by social codes, not because it is intrinsically wrong. If only some reconciliation could be made between flesh and spirit, between nature and law — so much shame and fear and violence could be avoided!
The March madness continues – indeed, I’ve been wondering how I managed not just to read but also to blog about actual books more than once last week. I felt quite on top of things for a bit, but two sets of papers have just come in, more paper proposals are incoming even as I write, and by Friday I’ll have another set of tests to mark … whew! The trick is just to take it one item at a time, and to take regular breaks for tea and treats. 🙂
In 19th-Century Fiction we’ve been finishing up 
Novel Readings 