GASROPF. Maybe you can help me. It's about summer reading. Everyone... my best friend, my manicurist, my meter reader, and my great-aunt in Manalapan... everyone has recommended this book. They say it's sooo well-written, really absorbing, that it's can't-put-it-down good! Book one in a trilogy, I think. I just can’t remember the title. Something about Fifty....
CDBS. [breaking into a cold, ominous sweat] Over here, over here in the History and Travel section. Surely you must be referring to:
How the
States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein.
Smithsonian
Books, 2008. 332 pages.
History
and Travel
It’s about
fifty states... and the captivating story of their shifty shapes. It’s popular geography, humor-tinged history, and nonfiction madness, we tell you, nonfiction madness! We have twists and turns, notches and nubbins, contortions and convolutions: we discover the human foibles and terrestrial peculiarities that delineate the modern map of the United States. We cry out in astonishment as we consider the disheveled
borders of Maryland, the wild peripheries of Tennessee, the provenance
of Oklahoma’s panhandle. We ponder why one furtive finger of West Virginia creeps up the western flank of Pennsylvania... and as for the impassioned encounter that resulted in the Upper
Peninsula becoming part and parcel of Michigan?
Whew. We read the passage once; we read it twice; we read it
three times. We can't-put-it-down. Well, eventually we have to
put it down, but by then, the book has morphed into an amusingly educational series on the History Channel and into a sequel, How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People behind the Borderlines.
CDBS. Incidentally, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, a multilingual man of letters, also gained some renown as an ardent lifelong lepidopterist.
GASROPF. That sounds terribly... informative.
CDBS. [sighing]
Okay, okay, forget the fifty. How about a shade
of something? Here’s a recent release, wonderfully nuanced, full of light and
shadow:
The
Newlyweds: A Novel by Nell Freudenberger.
Knopf,
2012. 337 pages.
Fiction
Favorites
Her first
memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s,
watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog, holding
still in the ragged shade of a coconut palm....
This is the quietly compelling story of Amina Mazid, a bright and disciplined Bengali twenty-something who marries George Stillman, a lonely,
marginally pathetic thirty-something from Rochester, New York, after a
traditional twenty-first century dot-com courtship. It’s
about love and marriage, about loyalty and betrayal, about secrets concealed
and stories shared, about self-inflicted emotional wounds and fate-induced
cultural complications. Traveling
between suburban America and beleaguered Bangladesh, The Newlyweds insinuates
itself into our reading favor with close observation and graceful humor, with
sympathetic characters and scrupulous narrative elaboration. Indeed, KMJ wonders, Why did these people
become so important to me? Why was I
sobbing at the end when it all along seemed a fairly ordinary story?
And what about the cardinal on the cover? Soon after George lost his job, the cardinal had appeared in their yard. Amina had noticed the noise first: a peculiar thwanging sound, soft but solid. It wasn’t until she was working outside one day that she’d seen the bird himself, pitching his body repeatedly against the window screen. She thought he might eventually break it, but if he did any damage, it was only to himself. After each sally, he repaired to his habitual perch in the oak tree, ruffling his plumage and calling imperiously to others of his kind.
We recognize that peculiar thwanging sound. Last spring, an angry bird, pictured above, spent what seemed like fifty days engaged in epic narcissistic battle with our home, assaulting various ground floor windows in a feather-flapping, beak-busting, noggin-boggling avian effort to impress or kill... his own tenacious reflection.
GASROPF. [petulantly] I don’t like birds, and I don’t like books that make me sad. I want shades of something.
And what about the cardinal on the cover? Soon after George lost his job, the cardinal had appeared in their yard. Amina had noticed the noise first: a peculiar thwanging sound, soft but solid. It wasn’t until she was working outside one day that she’d seen the bird himself, pitching his body repeatedly against the window screen. She thought he might eventually break it, but if he did any damage, it was only to himself. After each sally, he repaired to his habitual perch in the oak tree, ruffling his plumage and calling imperiously to others of his kind.
We recognize that peculiar thwanging sound. Last spring, an angry bird, pictured above, spent what seemed like fifty days engaged in epic narcissistic battle with our home, assaulting various ground floor windows in a feather-flapping, beak-busting, noggin-boggling avian effort to impress or kill... his own tenacious reflection.
GASROPF. [petulantly] I don’t like birds, and I don’t like books that make me sad. I want shades of something.
CDBS. [rifling through the book] Hold on, hold on, here’s
a redolent shade of something from The Newlyweds: The bathroom was painted an unpleasant shade of lentil green, and in
the humidity the smell of sewage was unmistakable.
GASROPF. Yuck.
CDBS. [scanning the shelves, sensing a loss of enthusiasm for the task at hand] Now this is something you might be interested in... a can't-put-it-down novel about baseball and life. And the folks in the bleachers appear to be wearing nifty shades:
GASROPF. Yuck.
CDBS. [scanning the shelves, sensing a loss of enthusiasm for the task at hand] Now this is something you might be interested in... a can't-put-it-down novel about baseball and life. And the folks in the bleachers appear to be wearing nifty shades:
The
Art of Fielding: A Novel by Chad Harbach.
Little, Brown,
2011. 512 pages.
Fiction Favorites
Between pitches
Schwartz snuck glances at the crowds of scouts sitting three-deep behind their
backstop, their wraparound shades disguising their thoughts. If there wasn’t one from every major-league
team, it was damned close.... We take the field at Westish
College, a smallish institution of higher learning situated upon
the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Following
the inauspicious trajectory of a routine throw, we meet baseball phenom Henry
Skirmshander, suffering a devastating crisis of confidence; Henry’s shades-of-gay
roommate/teammate Owen Dunne, navigating a complicated relationship;
Harpooners’ team captain Mike Schwartz, sublimating personal dreams to Henry’s stellar collegiate career; college president Guert Affenlight, encountering an astonishing moment of
self-realization; and Guert’s daughter Pella, running from a failed marriage,
returning to Westish to begin a new life.
As the season winds down, the congenial quintet winds up
into a nifty ball of psychological angst and narrative mastery, confronting ambitions and limitations, aspirations and anxieties. MLB (appropriate initials here) calls The Art
of Fielding intelligent, poignant, and
sincere: a new fiction favorite about being true to others and to oneself,
about the rightness and responsibilities of family, friendship, love... and, of course,
baseball.
GASROPF. Well. That seems... complicated. Also, I don't like competitive sports.
CDBS. [palm pressed to forehead] Is there a
peculiar thwanging sound in the room, or is it just us?
Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition by Vladimir
Nabokov.
Vintage Books, 1997 (1955). 317 pages.
Oldies But Goodies
By our reckoning,
there are forty-eight brilliant evocations of gray in Lolita, including but not
limited to the wide gray world, gray spring, gray eyes, gray-haired and also
quite corpulent, gray tennis ball, gray cobweb, gray suit, dove-gray cloud,
gray hummingbirds, and the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day. We first encountered
culturally iconic Lolita twenty-five
years ago at the lyrical behest of The Police:
Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov....
Humbert Humbert. Good Heavens.
Aging intellectual highbrow Humbert Humbert’s illicit lowbrow obsession
with young Dolores Haze, aka Lolita, compels him to marry mother Charlotte Haze
so that he can be in close proximity to the object of his deeply troubling
affection. During fifty-count’em-fifty
days of conjugal cohabitation and twisted domesticity, Humbert Humbert stalks
his prey and watches Charlotte Haze glorify the home... with the zest of a
banal young bride... my... face
might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation
with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator....
Included in Time's inventory of top contemporary novels and ranked way-way up there on The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, Lolita exhibits the author’s trademark dark humor, ironic worldview, and exquisite mastery
of the English language. Make no mistake
about it: read it once, read it twice, read it three times... Lolita is opulent sensory overload, magnificent and
monumentally disturbing.
CDBS. Incidentally, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, a multilingual man of letters, also gained some renown as an ardent lifelong lepidopterist.
GASROPF. [poking at smartphone, looking for a Don't Stand So Close to Me ringtone] Oh, we won’t hold that against him.
CDBS. Maybe a different shade of gray.
CDBS. Maybe a different shade of gray.
The Picture
of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
Penguin
Books, 2010 (1891). 218 pages.
Oldies But
Goodies
Oscar
Wilde’s cautionary tale of malignant narcissism and metamorphosing artwork begins
when young and innocent Dorian Gray’s portrait confirms him on canvas as a man of unusual handsomeness and Victorian vigor. Overwhelmed
by the painting’s reflected beauty, Gray makes a wish, a shockingly shady
wish, that turns everything topsy-turvy, allowing unpunished pursuit of decadence, degeneracy,
and debauchery: in short, a lifelong commitment to the seven deadly sins
without commensurate physical consequence.
 |
| The Picture of Oscar Wilde |
Forget the Frownies, bag the Botox, and lose the Lifestyle Lift: even as his portrait records ravages of age, wretchedness of heart, sketchiness of
soul, and gadabout ways, Dorian Gray continues to present a youthful and innocent face to the world. Incidentally,
Irish author and poet Oscar Wilde, noted for wit, sparkling conversation, and gadabout ways, was arrested, tried, and jailed
for several shades of flamboyance beyond the Victorian Pale. He gave us The Importance of Being Earnest
and died destitute in his forties.
CDBS.
The Picture of Dorian Gray may be a bit dated, a bit didactic, but it’s a
classic, certainly a worthwhile read.
GASROPF.
Uh-huh. Is there a good English translation available?
CDBS. [squinting somewhat wistfully at the ever-receding horizon of cultural literacy] Here's a book, written in English, about somebody named Grey:
Innocent
Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey by Alison Weir.
Ballantine
Books, 2006. 407 pages.
Historical
Fiction
14th
November 1553... It is over. My trial
has ended, and I am now back in the Tower of London, this place that was once
my palace and is now my prison... I am now a condemned traitor, and all I can
hear in my head are the sonorous words of the Lord President, sentencing me to
be burned or beheaded at the Queen’s pleasure.... This is popular historian Alison Weir’s first stab at historical fiction, one that imagines the short
life and shorter reign of Lady Jane Grey, aka the legendary Nine Days’
Queen. Weir plunges us into sixteenth-century English civil turmoil and religious tumult, captures the heroine’s preternaturally mature and emotionally intelligent voice,
and drops us on the doorstep of the dysfunctional House of Tudor.
Interesting times: Anne
Boleyn has lost her head, and Lady Jane’s great-uncle Henry VIII has died. After a brief, somewhat incongruous musical interlude, we learn
that Henry’s successor—Jane’s young cousin, Edward VI—has also expired
prematurely, prompting much social posturing and political maneuvering:
Herman's Hermits on The Ed Sullivan Show, June 1965
 |
| The Picture of Lady Jane Grey |
Bookish
Jane entertains no particular designs on the throne; she immerses
herself in sixteenth-century ladylike conduct and character-fortifying religious study. Her parents, however, succumb
to sixteenth-century helicopter parenting and socio-political ambition: before you
can say widow-next-door, teenage Jane finds herself with a crown upon
her honest head, struggling against a head-spinning dynastic
mess of intrigue, betrayal, and tragic consequence. Along
the way to Lady Jane’s historically accurate demise, we meet primary and secondary biographical
figures, including kindly Queen Katherine Parr, ruthless Catholic Bloody Mary,
and someday-iconic Queen Elizabeth I.
GASROPF. [poking again at smartphone, looking for Herman's Hermits ringtones] I don't think so, way too violent. You know what? I'm just gonna grab a few copies of whatever is flying off that large-prominently-placed display over there.
CDBS. [groveling now] We urge you to read with discernment and discrimination, to move beyond the Cash-Cow-Trilogy-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, to think outside the box...
GASROPF. [delighted] Oh, but I am thinking outside the box! Get a load of this bundled set! Sold! Thanks for your help, you've been a rock star....
CDBS. If you need us, we'll be over by the window, calling imperiously to others of our kind and making a peculiar thwanging noise with our heads.
GASROPF. [poking again at smartphone, looking for Herman's Hermits ringtones] I don't think so, way too violent. You know what? I'm just gonna grab a few copies of whatever is flying off that large-prominently-placed display over there.
CDBS. [groveling now] We urge you to read with discernment and discrimination, to move beyond the Cash-Cow-Trilogy-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, to think outside the box...
GASROPF. [delighted] Oh, but I am thinking outside the box! Get a load of this bundled set! Sold! Thanks for your help, you've been a rock star....
CDBS. If you need us, we'll be over by the window, calling imperiously to others of our kind and making a peculiar thwanging noise with our heads.
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