A Little Angry Bird Told Us to Read This Book

They say that there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps I may kill a few.  –Jane Austen, in correspondence with her sister, 1796.

Gentle Reader, there's an app for that.  Since we’ve downloaded Angry Birds for iPad, we’ve been positively app happy: slinging cardinals, scattershotting blue birds, launching kamikaze yellow birds, detonating black birds, boomeranging green guys, and chucking incomprehensibly ineffectual white chickens in the morning, noon, and nighttime.  We are mortified that Angry Birds abbreviates our prideful and prejudicial reading time, yet we are unable to avert our eyes from the colorful plumage and cartoon carnage dancing across our guiltily smudged-up screens. 

 

And while Jane remains silent apropos savagery against green pigs, we get the distinct impression that unleashing avian hell upon creatures with cloven hooves is precisely the sort of diverting entertainment that inhabitants of Jane’s Most Excellent World would appreciate.  After all, Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.  When considering the delicate matter of killing two lime-colored swine with one projectile bird, then, we are satisfied that Jane would condescend to offer her approval.
   

Not so fast. The pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
Will someone please wrest this iPad from our feather-plucking fingers?

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James.

A.A. Knopf, 2011.  291 pages.
British Invasion, Mysteries and Suspense
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, recommends Jane.  We do, and our senses and sensibilities are all a-twitter when we learn that one of Britain’s most celebrated mystery writers has dwelt on guilt and misery for the Pride and Prejudice crew and has visited a heap of culpability and wretchedness upon the perfectly-situated Pemberley.

 

We read the book and agree on most points: P.D. James magnificently replicates Jane Austen’s voice. Proper names, social relationships, and allusions to domestic history prove daunting to those unacquainted with Pride and Prejudice.  The mystery is not exceptionally mysterious, and Darcy’s all-consuming devotion to previously ancillary magisterial duties becomes a tad tedious.
 

We are disappointed to note that preparations for the much-anticipated Autumn Ball are thrown into disarray and dishevelment when Death Comes to Pemberley.  Perfectly good delicate tarts and savouries are going to waste, and buckets and buckets of hothouse flowers from the conservatory are going to wilt.  Speaking of delicate tarts and savouries, take a nibble of the Nutella Pound Cake, charmingly prepared and presented by CS.  This perfect refreshment makes it virtually impossible for us to eat like elegant Regency females or little angry birds.  Days later, GW reminisces, You must know that the Nutella actually oozed from my slice of pound cake! 

We are further disheartened to learn that we won’t be dancing Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot in the foreseeable future; however, a careening coach, a disgraced and hysterically shrieking sister, joined with a battered and bloody corpse on the grounds of one’s magnificent estate, will inevitably wreak all manner of havoc upon the fall social calendar.  Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot!  How unfortunate the name, how lovely the dance:

Despite these little disappointments and the occasional disheartenment, GW and BJM declare that to visit with Elizabeth and Darcy and to gaze upon the blissful verdue of Pemberley once again—even in the shadow of murder and emotional mayhem-- is the most perfect reading refreshment!  We appreciate that in the midst of all that guilt and misery, sensible Elizabeth finds herself dwelling upon what could best be done with the many birds plucked for roasting.  There's an app for that, too, Mrs. Darcy.
 

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.  406 pages.
Fiction Favorites

A few of our Phi Beta Kappa acquaintances dismiss this as chick-lit written by a non-chick. Admittedly, it feels fluffier than Middlesex (coming soon to The Pulitzer Project), but we enjoy triangulating with 1980s English major Madeleine Hanna-- she's writing her senior thesis on the Most Excellent Jane Austen and the Equally Excellent George Eliot-- enigmatic loner Leonard Bankhead, and spiritually adrift Mitchell Grammaticus.  At one point, Mitchell driftily ruminates, Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends’ replacements for religion didn’t look too impressive.  No one had an answer for the riddle of existence.  It was like that Talking Heads song… He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live:

The Marriage Plot is amusing and beguiling and intelligent, also like that Talking Heads song.  It’s a novel paying homage to the notion of the great English novel. 

Literally and figuratively, Madeleine and Leonard meet in a semiotics seminar.  We’d like to say that our reading of this narrative contributes to a greater understanding of semiotics.  But we would be lying.  Signs and semantics and syntactics and pragmatics: Great Allegorical Heavens, former 1980s English majors KMJ and BJM are waving the white flag on this one.  Is that a sign of something?

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Picador, 1993.  243 pages.
Fiction Favorites

We decide to complete a rare Eugenides trifecta with a reading of his early work, a spellbinding story of youth, mysteries of gender, memories of love and loss, awash with warmth of feeling and macabre humor. 

In a tranquil Detroit suburb, five disquieting sisters—drenched in feminine loveliness and carefully observed by a collective pronoun of neighborhood boys, commit suicide in the course of a single calendar year. As the hormonally-transfixed guys watch the Lisbon girls from afar, they begin to piece together the puzzle of the family's isolationism and lethal gloominess, sharing fact, gossip, and popular psychology: Often, in today’s world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood.  We feel another song coming on…

 It's only teenage wasteland...

We pluck at common thematic and stylistic threads woven through The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex and The Marriage Plot, unraveling varying degrees of authorial ambition but a consistent deftness and poetry in the writing.

Moloka’I by Alan Brennert.

St. Martin’s Press, 2003.  389 pages.
Historical Fiction

At approximately 9:45 am on January 18, 2012, in a library setting, we receive an enthusiastic endorsement of this: historical fiction about a young woman faced with a diagnosis of leprosy in the 1890s.  Forcibly removed from her idyllic Honolulu home and banished to an isolated island leper colony, the embattled heroine hopes for acceptance, friendship, and love…

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir by Neil White.

William Morrow, 2009.  316 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

… and seven hours later, in a domestic setting, KMJ praises this authorial reflection on time served for bank fraud in a Louisiana prison that doubles as… a leper colony!

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and two leprosy-related book recommendations within a twenty-four hour period are worthy of attention as we make final preparations for Plague Month.

Plague Month?  Oh yes, Plague Month.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks.

Penguin Books, 2001.  308 pages.
Historical Fiction

The Cellar Door Book Society traditionally designates February as Plague Month: twenty-eight or twenty-nine frosty, flaky days of fiction fun, a season fairly bursting with epidemic, pestilence, scourge, and affliction.
We recall a particularly significant Plague Month, 2002… We gather on BJM’s sun porch, where a few pathetic rays of mid-winter sunlight filter through windows rather in need of early-spring-if-not-sooner washing.  These are the early days of the bewildering government-designed color-coded security-threat system.  The color is orange.  The design trend is duct tape. We are living in interesting historical times and imminently, it seems, in hermetically-sealed rooms.

Our response to the book selection is unanimously positive.  Birds, after all, in their little nests agree.  We appreciate the quiet strength of housemaid heroine Anna Firth.  We repudiate the increasingly arrogant behavior of local spiritual leader Michael Mompellion.  We are mildly unsettled by gory aspects of daily life in a plague-riddled English village, circa 1666.  Roll out the duct tape: it’s another orange-alert historical time.  NWC, our ending specialist, is not offended by The Wonder-full First Ending or by The Even Wonder-fuller Second Ending of the novel.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Penguin Books, 2003.  909 pages.
Oldies But Goodies

Reflecting upon translated selections from this fourteenth-century creation-- wherein ten young Florentine noblemen and women take turns telling tales while fleeing the Black Death of 1348-- JKL marvels at the consistency of our behavior and emotion over time.  There are one hundred story-within-stories in all: BJM highly recommends “Fourth Day” and “Fifth Day,” fables of affection, friendship, and love… some that end happily and some that end quite badly.  

Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.  Elizabeth, to Mr. Collins, in Pride and Prejudice 

But enough of wrathful wrens, plaguing and plotting, and suburban virgins: we are admiring JM’s still-standing Christmas tree!  It has remote-control lights, and we are mesmerized by the show: no lights (click) white lights (click) multi-colored lights (click) white-and-multi-colored lights repeat… What’s next, wonders DS.  A hologram holiday tree?

Appropriate use of feathers.

String her with lights and spritz her with Scent of the Tree Home Fragrance. Plug her in, and we’re good to go.  No fuss, no muss, no dropping needles, no combustion hazard.   How quick come the reasons for approving what we like! exclaims Jane.