My Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount and Thessaly La Force

What kind of fool buys a book like this?  A romantic fool.  A fool in love with books.  Me.

My Ideal Bookshelf collects brief essays and interviews from dozens of readers and pairs them with painted portraits of the books the subjects chose for their ideal bookshelf.  Jane Mount’s paintings of the books are beautiful to behold.  I know that there is this great current of fear out there that we are fetishizing the book and that we do books and publishing no great service by over-emphasizing the book-as-object.  But we do, and we collect and we covet and it’s a delicious indulgence.   You know that thrill of scanning a person’s bookshelves to see what’s on there?  With this book, you get to do that with the slight twist of looking at those books through the veil of art.  The spines are all hand-lettered, the Penguin Classics get the added beauty of the uneven line, the imperfect reproduction.  You recognize immediately the red and cream of the spine of The Catcher in the Rye, but it’s slightly off; mine, but not mine.

As interesting as the mix of subjects who share their ideal books (lawyers, chefs, designers, writers, dancers) is the mixed approach they took to the task: some made a desert island selection, some chose books that captured their childhood, some chose books that would make a good introduction to their field.  Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle appeared on a startlingly high number of shelves.

This is not the best book about books you will ever read, this is not the most moving selection of praises sung to the book.  The selection of people who contributed their ideal bookshelves was an odd collection (vampire lit’s Stephenie Meyer and cookbook author Mark Bittman; novelist Dave Eggers and fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy; picture-book writer Oliver Jeffers and essayist Malcolm Gladwell), and the essays are often annoyingly brief, cut short.  But the book had some great moments.  Did you know that there is a book out there that is a collection of photographs of junkyard dogs paired with quotations from William Shakespeare?  It’s called Junkyard Dogs and William Shakespeare.  It will, apparently, make you cry.

Coralie Bickford-Smith, a book designer for Penguin, wrote one of my favourite entries.  She describes the design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

The pattern I created for Dracula is composed of garlic flowers.  In the book, the heroine wears garlic flowers around her neck to stop Dracula from biting her in her sleep.  So the idea is that they’re wreathed around the book, too, to keep in the evil.

I love the fact that I get to repackage amazing literature that has stood the test of time.  I really couldn’t be designing anything more important.  (22)

Agreed.

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An Uncommon Heroine by Jamie Cox Robertson

An Uncommon Heroine: Scarlett, Edna, Sula and More Than 20 Other of Most Remarkable Women in Literature

Jamie Cox Robertson

Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2010.

Reviewed from a review copy.

Like Stephanie Stall, author of Reading Women, Jamie Cox Robertson had occasion to revisit the books of her youth after having a daughter.  For Robertson, the book that sent her on a re-reading spree was Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

In my twenties, I thought of Holly as a self-centered girl who dated entirely too many men.  But reading Capote’s novel again so many years later caused me to see Holly Golightly in a completely different way than I did back then.  Now I see a necessary rite of passage to her outrageousness and self-centeredness, and I think a woman’s twenties is the perfect time to be whimsical and unpredictable. … I got to thinking–would I see other women I had read about in a different light now that I was older, married, and had a daughter of my own?

The result of her re-reading the heroines of her youth, and of meeting some new ones, is this collection of excerpts from the classics of books by and about women.

Each chapter is named for the heroine and has brief sections on “her story,” “what makes her so memorable,” and “the life and times” of the author who brought her to life.  Those brief sketches are a useful reminder of the character’s back-story, and the context of the authors’ biographies helps to situate the memorable women they created. 

Because this book began as an experience born of revisiting the heroines and revising her opinions, I would have liked to have heard a lot more from Robertson, but her voice all but disappears after the short introduction.  I would have liked much more lengthy discussions of how her perspective changed, about what having her daughter did to colour her perception of many of these women’s maternal ambivalence, for example.  For me, the joy of books about books so often lies in the personal narrative, in how authors’ lives have been shaded by their reading.  I am also not a big fan of excerpts, but I did enjoy the brief visits I had with these uncommon heroines, some of whom I met for the first time.  (I have gotten this far in life without reading My Antonia.  Summer seems like a good time to change that.)  This book is a gateway to others and an invitation to question her choices: Is Anne Elliot your favourite Austen heroine?  Is Little Dorrit worthy of inclusion?  Does Dorothea Brooke prevail as a heroine?  Many of the women on these pages also appear in The Heroine’s Bookshelf, and I’ve added some titles to my list for that reading challenge.  (Sometimes, “challenge” is just not the right word.  It’s just too easy to read and read and read books with these marvellous, complicated women.)

Ultimately, the book did what good books do: it sent me to my bookshelves. I pulled down Mrs. Dalloway for a re-read, and I will spend the summer solstice roaming through the streets of London and through the minds of Clarissa and Septimus, listening to the birds speak Greek.

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Favourite First Lines for 1/11/11

We’re all ones today. 

In honour of the number one, here are a few of my favourite first sentences (or two).

So.

In the beginning, there was nothing.  Just water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep.  That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming.  When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.

          I can tell you that.

Thomas King

Green Grass, Running Water

 

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit

 

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

The Go-Between

 

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm

 

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre

 

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.  In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

Lemony Snickett

The Bad Beginning

 

Greta was at the stove.  Turning hotcakes.  Reaching for the coffee beans.  Grinding away James’s voice.

Sheila Watson

The Double Hook

 

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning.  She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness.  Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed.  The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle,” and it would be possible for her to believe him.

Michael Ondaatje

In the Skin of a Lion

 

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

 

The birth was quick but the christening took forever.  Baby Stink was practically walking by the time everybody got their cowlicks battened down and the shit scraped off their heels.

Terry Griggs

The Lusty Man

 

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.  My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what.  She was in the white corner and that was that.

Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

 

My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

Robertson Davies

Fifth Business

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

 

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?  I used to think it didn’t.  Now I think it does.  And I think mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Donna Tartt

The Secret History

 

I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south…. 

Margaret Atwood

Surfacing

 

I don’t know whether you know Mariposa.  If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.

Stephen Leacock

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

 

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half its course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages.  Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.

David Lodge

Small World

What are your favourite first lines?

Here are some others.

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A Top Ten List of Books about Books

‘Tis the season for lists. 

Here is my list of favourite books about books, with brief raves and links to my posts.  The only one without a link is Anne Fadiman, whose Ex Libris was my first book about books.  I love it so much I can’t write about it, but I buy copies often to give as gifts.  If you have not read it yet, please do. 

Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is a collection of perfectly polished essays about loving and living with books.  Each essay is a gem.  You cannot do better than this collection for a book about books.  It should be on every bibliophile’s bookshelf.

Helene Hanff’s Q’s Legacy and 84, Charing Cross Road

When I first started collecting books about books, I would run across mentions of 84, Charing Cross Road frequently.  None of them did justice to its charms.  None of them prepared me for my infatuation with the book.  This is a collection of the letters exchanged between a woman in New York and the staff of a London bookstore who provide her with the books she cannot find at home.  It reads like an epistolary novel, complete with careful pacing of the plot and pitch-perfect characterization.  I love the spark that comes from the clash of English reserve and American forthrightness.  Helene’s persona as a letter writer is endearingly brash.  It made me laugh; it made me cry.  It is another indispensable book for bibliophiles. 

In Q’s Legacy, Hanff tells the story of what fostered her love of English literature, and it is a memoir whose voice and charms have stayed with me.  She is just so damned sure of herself.  This is one to read after 84, Charing Cross because in addition to giving the back story to her exchange of letters with Frank Doel, she takes up the story of the afterlife of that book.  (It was made into a play and a movie.)

Nick Hornby’s first and other collections of book reviews also play with the culture gap between England and America.  He is unapologetically English with his prose style, but he explains things for his readers in America, with great comedic effect.  These are the collected “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, but they work really well collected in book form.  Inside jokes mature from one month to the next, and it is always fun to see if/when the books that appear in his “Books Bought” column will turn up in his “Books Read” column.  There is often no overlap between the two, which is comforting, really.  I am a crazy woman in a bookstore, and it’s nice to know that I am not alone.  (My friend Marcelle gave me a button that reads “I’m not to be trusted in a bookstore with a credit card.”) 

Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing gave me the idea of trying to put a stop to my book buying at the beginning of this year.  That’s what she did: she spent a year with the books she already owned, and this is a memoir of her student and writing life through the rereading of the books on her shelves.  Again, it is her wonderfully assured voice that stays with me.  This is a woman with firm opinions, and it is so refreshing to read opinions that come from a writer’s character and not out of a need to shock or make tweet traffic.

Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop must go on to a top ten list, to represent a book about bookstores.  Part cultural history, part memoir, this is a lovely book to curl up with.  He has such a sensible outlook on the whole business of book selling, and it was relaxing to read a book that took the long view and was not all doom and gloom about the current state of books and print. 

 

Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book is one of the most well-written books I read all year.  I loved every minute of reading this book, and I simply marveled at Miller’s prose.  This is a book about her changing relationship to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, but it is also a biography of Lewis and literary criticism about the books themselves.  Miller moves deftly between these narrative modes, and her autobiography is shot through with the clean, crisp prose of research.  I recommend it highly for any book lover.

Fellow New-Yorker David Denby’s Great Books was also one of my favourite reads of the year.  I picked up his book for my stint of reading books about the great books, and I found so much more than I expected.  Again, it was how he incorporated autobiography into his discussion of the great books programme at Columbia University that made the book exceptional.  His chapter on King Lear blew my socks off with its poignant reading of Shakespeare through his mother’s demanding personality.

One of my great joys as a mother is reading to my kids, and I have discovered a wonderful world of books about children’s books in my quest to find the next great book to read with them.  Anita Silvey’s 100 Best Books for Children ranks among my favourites because, like Laura Miller, you sense that the words on the page represent just a fraction of the encyclopedic knowledge that the authors possess about their subjects.  Silvey caters to the keener in me, and she provides all kinds of wonderful anecdotes about the authors’ lives and publishing careers along with brief synopses of the books.  Her vast store of knowledge is now also available in daily instalments online.

Ahhh.  That felt great!  Bibliophilia, autobiography, memoir, anglophilia, women with strong opinions.  What’s not to love?  I hope some of them have piqued your interest.

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What Should I Read Next?

Ask him:

Results for “I’ve just finished reading Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman.  What should I read next?”

Amazon recommends:

• At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist by Anne Fadiman
• The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop (a Memoir, a History) by Lewis Buzbee
• So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson
• Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love by Anne Fadiman
• Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home by Susan Hill
• At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries by Estelle Ellis
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books by Alberto Manguel
• Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence Goldstone

Great suggestions.  I’ve read them all!

Full disclosure: there’s a suggestion to go to local bookstore or library and ask, but I think this is an amazon thing.  When I clicked the local bookshop link, it took me to England.

Thanks to the Canadian Bookshelf for the link.

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Wreath & Recommendations

WordPress appears to be making it snow on my blog.  Festive.

It’s December.  Day one of advent calendars in our house and on this blog.  Along with reviews of books about books, there will be daily book art to count down the days until books appear under the tree.  Right, Santa? 

Photo from Fuck Yeah Books of the Kansas City Library, Plaza Branch.

Also in blog news, I am one of the panelists for Canada Reads Independently over at Pickle Me This.  My selection is Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, which will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me.  Head over there to read all about it, and, hopefully, read along with the rest of us. 

I loved Kerry’s Canada Reads Independently last year.  A lovely, varied pile of great Canadian reads, and through it I reconnected with Carrie Snyder.  Her short story collection Hair Hat was one of the recommended books, and I discovered her fabulous blog, Obscure Canlit Mama.  I can’t wait to see what’s in store this year!

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