isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Magda fibrillates with anticipation at the thought of a box of books being shipped — through the mail! — from Poland just for her reading pleasure. I can relate to this; few things fill me with such a Christmas morning-y feeling as clicking on that Place Order button at Amazon. She is a bilingual reader, but sometimes the pull of the mother-tongue is just so strong. I mean, it even led her into the arms of Da Vinciewa Cifra, for crying out loud, so there’s desperate for you. If my guess is right, one of the three slips of paper in my pocket will be exchangeable for her books at the Pošta this afternoon. No clue what the other two are for. Maybe I ordered some books I’ve forgotten about…?

Adam is already obsessed with shredding reading material: magazines, catalogs, Where To? Ljubljana pamphlets, and books. He started out many months ago with The Book Of Fruit, but has since graduated to more engaging, tactile works such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies. Also the clothbound cloth version of The Kite in the Park.

Other than sharing Adam’s choices of literature, I haven’t been reading much these days, I am sorry to say. Just this morning I had not one but two conversations with colleagues about how little I manage to get read anymore. What used to be my favorite way of passing free hours has slipped off the narrow little chart that logs my daily sliver of free time. For this reason, responding to this book meme is going to be a little bit tricky. When I got memed previously I was intractably grouchy about it. This one is a good deal less silly, so I’ll try to be more meme-compliant.

[1] Name five of your favorite books

This takes some thought. There are various criteria I could apply here, but I think I’ll go with re-readability. There are certain books that I can read over and over, and do, so I’ll give them the honors. In no particular order:

• A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
  This is a beautiful, terrible novel veined with many varieties of love. I try to get people to read this more than is becoming. It was a favorite book of mine before I moved here to the area where it is set, and each time I read it I love it a little more. This book has caused me to seek out a specific museum in order to stand in front of a single painting. The painting is very small.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
  ‘Segundus’ is among the top 100 words in this book*. That should say it all, really. Reading this last winter made me happier than almost anything before or since, book-wise. When I finished its insufficient, please-let-there-be-more, 326,729 words I almost started it over again right away. But I have been forcing myself to wait until enough time has gone by to have it feel new again. Not much longer now…
  *Amazon now has some statistical analysis of books’ text that is a lot of fun to sift through. My favorite: “Statistically Improbable Phrases.”
• Fisher’s Hornpipe, Todd McEwen
  This is another book about which I have been a shameless proselytizer, and another I can read again and again, or open at any random page and laugh myself slack-jawed. The slightly-not-right protagonist’s worldview is so on-target in its warpedness and wonderful, correct misanthropy, that I find myself thinking Fisher’s thoughts more often than can be healthy. William Fisher compares favorably with Ignatius J. Riley in A Confederacy of Dunces, another book I am overdue to re-read.
• The Aubrey-Maturin books, all 20 of them, Patrick O’Brian
  Easily dismissed as escapist sea stories or historical fiction, these are both. They are also some of the most engaging and engrossing books I’ve ever read. Few writers are able to so completely enfold you in a vanished world as O’Brian can. I’ve heard them described as “Jane Austen for boys”, too, and think that’s somewhat apt though sexist, as the minutiae and mores of life two centuries ago come so completely alive that you are there, or then, or whatever. I once did an experiment to see if it was possible to read nothing but these twenty not-unhefty novels around and around in an endless loop. It was not possible, but only just. There are not many writers I could say that of. The characters are so finely drawn that you come to know them intimately, and miss them when you’re not reading. I cried when Barrett Bonden died [umm, spoiler alert]
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TriQuadriQuintilogy, Douglas Adams
  The first of these books made it onto the list of the person who tagged me, and she explained better than I could why they matter. Remember that you can’t judge a book by its movie. Like with the preceding entry, I realize that listing the complete set is cheating on the number here, but I own them bound in one volume, so sue me. I also like his Dirk Gently books (the first of which just appeared one day in the mail, hard-cover first ed inscribed to me by Adams. It turned out to be the doing of Rodden Longue), and his curious, sad, humanistic non-fiction about endangered species, Last Chance To See.

That’s a difficult list to compile. There are too many candidates, but I’m happy with the criterion I chose. Fortunately, item [4] in this meme gives an overlapping crack at it.

[2] What was the last book you bought?

You know what, internet? I have to say that I am really not sure. My reading speed has crept to such a crawl that I have an enormous backlog of stuff I’ve bought and not gotten around to reading yet. I think the answer to that is The Cold Six Thousand, still uncracked, ordered after Rodden Longue got me to read its prequel, American Tabloid, both by James Ellroy. Or it could’ve been The Command of the Oceans: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815, by N. A. M. Rodger, which I started last autumn and then bogged down in the economics of. As I do lately.

Wait! The last book I bought was also the last book I read (below), Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. It pains me to say it, but it wasn’t very good. Maybe it was me. Mil Millington is assuredly hilarious on-line, and I hate to dismiss this book, but it was a let-down after the joy of his website of the same name.

[3] What was the last book you read?

See [2]. I guess we can discount the two books currently holding down my nightstand, which are The Hundred Days (#19 in the Aubrey-Maturin series) yet again, and that historical linguistics book I’ve been ignoring since I last mentioned it in this space. So the last one I read in its entirety is TMGAIHAA, above. Although to be entirely accurate, the last book I read was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like, several times a day.

[4] Name five books that have been particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order)

Here I’ll ignore the meme’s “no particular order” stricture and go with chronological:

• Knight’s Castle, Edward Eager
  This was a much-read children’s novel in our house of five kids. The original copy ended up as tattered and bedraggled (and serially loved) as a hand-me-down teddy bear. I think my older sister still has that copy. It’s entirely possible that this book was the most pivotal of many in forming my love of reading at an early age. Eager wrote lots of such stories and I read them all, but this was and remains my favorite kids’ book. It has aged well and remains outstanding decades after I first loved it. I recently ordered it for one of my nieces. Thank god such things remain in print. Susanna Clarke for kids. Knocks Harry Potter into a cocked hat.
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
  This was the book that made me realize how many interesting arguments there are out there. Philosophy 101.
• By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, by, umm, I forget
  It’s fashionable to downgrade Hemingway as embodying the worst of the Dead White Male canon; misogynist, braggart, macho poseur, bunny-killer, you get the idea. I would argue that this take on the man as a writer is overblown, and that more careful reading of him will usually yield opposite results. I’d argue uphill, but anyway. This book is a collection of short pieces of non-fiction: political pieces, sporting sketches, war reportage, and some remarkably tender ‘human interest’ stuff. A fair amount of it comes from his free-lance days before he was famous — and famously self-aggrandizing, something that does come through in some of the later pieces, though with humor. But anyone who thinks of Hemingway as hawkish or obsessed with war would do well to read the prescient, pacifist pieces he filed between the two world wars.
  
  Anyway. This book was and remains meaningful to me because it was my travel reading at a formative age. I bought it in Florence the winter I was 20 and it went everywhere with me. The original dog-eared copy is one of very few things I’d like to get out of my mother’s cellar before she sells that house.
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  This book could just as easily have made the list of favorites, but it has more meaning. My father remembered reading this book in serialized form in a magazine while in an army hospital with pneumonia. Why was he in an army hospital with pneumonia? He had been forced to fall out in his field jacket, which was wet, in freezing weather. Because why? Read Catch-22 again.
  
  Oddly, this book was in my pocket the day I signed up. I cannot adequately explain how anyone who’s not only read Catch-22 but RE-READING it can join the army, but apparently it is possible. Maybe I wanted to know whether Heller was exaggerating. (He was not). No number of decades or generations will dull the satire and incisiveness of this book and how well it examines the monumental, absurd chowderheadedness and banal evil that is the military. This book is not so much a novel as a user’s manual.
• Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay
  I have not read this book. Sometimes a book is a talisman. One of the last times I saw my father alive he gave this book to his youngest grandson, my son, whose middle name is my father’s given name. My father was named for a great Roman poet and this book, a small wafer of a thing in faded dark blue cloth, was a gift to him on his fifth (!) birthday. It was from his grandfather, inscribed to my father by Adam’s great-great-grandfather in pale ink, and by Adam’s grandfather (to himself, I guess) in brown crayon scribbles, first, and then in my father’s distinctive hand seven decades later, to Adam. It’s all terribly sentimental, I know, but it’s one of the only objects I might pause to grab if the house were on fire.

[5] Name three books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t yet

Another tough one. I am so far out of the loop concerning what to read these days, as well as having so little time to do it, that I don’t have a long wish list — or rather my backlog is so great that I’ve just given up wishing. But this has made me think that I need to make more time for reading.

• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
  I have heard such positive things about this guy while managing never to have actually read him that I am very interested to see what all the recent fuss is about.
• One Man’s Wilderness, Sam Keith and Richard Proenneke
  This is about a guy who went to Alaska to build a cabin with nothing but a Leatherman, apparently. He’s 80 now and still living there, and I want to read about the experience of building a home from nothing but trees and dung. A Christmas gift from my sister and a brother-in-law who has built a few homes out of dung in his time. Gorgeous photographs, but still sitting on a shelf waiting for me to get to it.
• Anything by John McPhee that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I need to order some books.

[6] Tag five people and have them fill this quiz out on their own

The last time I responded to a meme I declined this part on moral grounds, but now I’ll completely contradict myself and do it, mainly because I’ll be genuinely interested in reading the responses, if any.

• The Fiery One, at Palinode’s Palace. Because I said I would if I ever got memed again, and because he eats books.
• Sarcastro, at Watching the Defectives. Because he will likely educate me about what I should be reading. Or not.
• E, at I Do Not Think They Will Sing To Me. Because it will make her all introspective and want to eat madeleines or something.
• Holly, at Nothing But Bonfires. Because I am dead curious to know what she reads when she is not being sucked into reality TV or harassed by drunken rednecks.
• Skot, at Izzle! Izzle Pfaff! Because he is “a cranky shut-in who only snarls at things like The Arts any more” and uses Statistically Improbable Phrases like “japing, fibrous, pemmican golem” to describe Mick Jagger.