Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

I think that if I had to categorize this book, I would call it a "messed-up masterpiece." Cormac McCarthy is a genius, but I can't help but think that he's more than a little crazy.

Blood Meridian is the second-to-last book for "Ideas of the Western". We're in our revisionary phase, and damn but is this revisionary. The story follows a group of men called the Glanton Gang (historically there were 19 of them, although I'm never quite sure in the book how many there are), led by a man named Judge Holden. The protagonist of the story, if there is one, is "the kid", who joins with the gang in their scalping escapades. Originally, the Glanton Gang were supposed to just protect the locals from Apaches, but they seem to have lost of sight of who they were supposed to be killing, and murdered nearly every citizen in 10,000 sq.m. Crazy. The Judge is also an absolutely inconceivable character. No one is sure if he's God, or if he's the devil, or if he's both. Either way, he is a HUGE character (both in presence, and it stature), and I agree with the critics who say that he is McCarthy's masterpiece.

This book has to be the most violent piece of fiction that I have ever read. Think of Kill Bill style violence- so unrelenting that you sort of become immune. That's Blood Meridian. It is insane, and it makes you feel like you're going to go insane, but it is also exquisitely written. If you feel like this review is really contradictory and vague, that's because my opinions of the book are also the same. I can't decide whether it is grotesque or wonderful.

McCarthy's newest book, The Road, has just been chosen as Oprah's book club selection. McCarthy is notoriously reclusive, and so he is going to do his first television appearance ever with her. I'm sure the sales of that book have already gone through the roof; it will be interesting to see what America thinks of Cormac McCarthy. I'm not sure I know what I think, yet. I'll let you know.

Rosalind K. Marshall- Scottish Queens, 1034-1714

I enjoy history, but I don't often get a chance to read about it as most of my time is consumed with reading books and articles for school. I've really been into British and Scottish royal history lately, probably because of my "Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing" class, so I picked up this book the last time I was at the public library. It's about three things that I'm interested in- women, royalty, and Scottish people (I'm mostly Scottish, with a bit of English, Irish, and French thrown in)- so it caught my eye.

The nice thing about this book is that Marshall has done all of the work for you. She researches all of the queens who she profiles from other people's histories, and then cuts the information down to manageable, and interesting, chapters on each. She profiles nearly twenty Scottish queens, from Lady Macbeth to Queen Anne, the last Stewart monarch, and their lives are fascinating. Most were of royal blood, or at least from noble families, and they surprisingly came from quite a number of countries: England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Norway.

All of them had to worry about providing their husbands, or themselves, with a male heir, and some of them succeeded (a notable failure was Queen Anne, who endured seventeen pregnancies, only to lose all of her children to miscarriage, stillbirth, childbirth, or childhood illness). None of them died a Protestant, even those who reigned after the Reformation, which quite interests me. None of them ever fully gained the respect of their subjects and courtiers, especially the male ones, as a ruler in her own right, even with the example of Elizabeth I just to the south. Most of them were considerably younger than their husbands (the largest age gap was twenty-six years), and the average age at marriage was fifteen-and-a-half.

The most interesting parts of the book come between the middle and the end when we get to the queens who kept journals and wrote letters, and whose portraits we have. There seems to be something about being able to read a woman's own words and see her face that really attracts us as readers; we talk about this a lot in my Early Modern class. I suppose we're looking for some kind of connection, something that we can relate to, and Marshall's writing makes these women and their lives very accessible. I have to admit that many of these women's lives and stories have run together in my mind, but I feel like I understand them and the pressures that they faced as a group much better.

Bill Bryson- Troublesome Words

I love Bill Bryson. Before last week, I had read every Bill Bryson book every published except for this one, but now I've read them all. Bryson mostly publishes travel books; they're non-fiction, but written more like novels or journals, and they're meant to be entertaining as much as informative. He also wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is the most fantastic educational book I've ever laid my eyes on. Bryson's books are the kind that make people stare at you on the subway because you're laughing like a lunatic for apparently no reason.

Troublesome Words functions both as a reference text, and as a great read. It really is about what it says it's about- troublesome words. You know, the ones that you use but don't really know what they mean, or the ones that you always misspell, even though you know that you should know better. Yes, it sounds boring, but it's not. It's Bill Bryson.

For example, did you know that there are about eight different kinds of inflation? There's inflation, deflation, hyper-inflation, disinflation, and stagflation. I certainly did not know that (although the hubby did, but that's because he's got a commerce degree). Did you know that "effete" is not a synonym for "effeminate"? It means exhausted and barren. I really thought that I knew what effete meant, but Bryson has enlightened me otherwise. That's why I love this book. It makes being wrong fun.

I can't seem to remember which words Bryson describes in a particularly funny way, but rest assured that they exist. I found this book highly entertaining, to the point that I stayed up reading it until 2:00 a.m. and reading passages aloud to the hubby who was in fact asleep. I know that a book like this might be an acquired taste, as grammar, spelling and punctuation aren't many people's cup of tea, but I know that enough of you are teachers and grad students to make posting this relevant. As my Facebook group listing says "I judge you when you use poor grammar." Harsh, but true. And why use poor grammar when learning how to have good grammar is so much fun?

Leslie Marmon Silko- Ceremony

Ceremony is this week's novel for "Ideas of the Western", and it fits into our section on "revisionist Westerns". Ceremony is quite different from the other books that we've read so far in that it is the only book on our syllabus to be written by a Native American author, and because it focuses on issues that we haven't come across yet- the Vietnam War and recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Tayo is a half-native man of the Laguna tribe in New Mexico who has just returned from the Vietnam War. He signed up to protect his cousin, Rocky, the family favourite, from harm overseas. However, Tayo is captured by Japanese soldiers while trying to carry an injured Rocky to safety, and Rocky either dies or is killed by a Japanese soldier (we're never quite sure). As well, when Tayo is forced to execute Japanese soldiers, he believes that one of them is his uncle Josiah, who on a rational level he knows is still back in New Mexico, but who he can't help but feeling like he has killed.

I think what interests me most about Ceremony is how relevant it is to issues that are going on today. This Monday's Maclean's has a cover story about soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and trying to reintegrate themselves into society, which is exactly what Tayo is trying to do. However, he has the additional difficulty of having been treated as an equal by white people while he was a solider, but having to go back to being treated as a second-class citizen now that he is just a Native war veteran. As well, much of Tayo's journey towards recovery is also a journey toward healing his country from the ills inflicted on it by wasteful and greedy white characters. What is making Tayo ill is not just the experience of the war, but the imbalance that he sees between what the land can offer and what white people are taking from it. His people, who know the secret of living in harmony with the land, have been pushed onto reservations and into poverty, while the white ranchers, farmers, and city dwellers take everything that they can.

This is something that I've really been thinking a lot about lately. There is this fascinating online quiz that measures your ecological footprint; I took it recently, and although I live a fairly minimal lifestyle, at least by North American standards (I live in a 700 square foot apartment that I share with someone else, I don't have a car, I don't fly very often, and I don't use a lot of electricity), we would still require three planets to support us if everyone lived the way that I do. It is really a wake up call. And this is part of what is making Tayo sick. His surroundings are completely out of balance, and that is reflected not only in the land, but in the war, and in his illness.

Ceremony is a fascinating look at a culture that seems to make a lot more sense than ours does a lot of the time. Tayo, through the medicine man Betonie, comes to understand that in order to make himself well again, he must address the imbalance that exists in society around him. He does this by reclaiming his Native identity, and rejecting his white one. He stops drinking, refuses to sleep around like his other war veteran friends do, refuses to return to the veteran's hospital, and reclaims Josiah's cows from the white rancher who stole them when he died. At the end, Tayo is breeding a new kind of cow that can live with very little food and water- a pretty good symbol of how we should perhaps be breeding our new generations so that we don't end up completely consuming our planet.

Janet & Greta Podleski- Eat, Shrink & Be Merry

Janet & Greta Podleski have been publishing goofy cookbooks for over a decade now. Their first and second books, Looneyspoons and Crazyplates, are some of the best-selling Canadian books around (cookbook or otherwise). Their success comes from both their utter silliness, and the fact that their food actually tastes really good.

Each cookbook is filled with trivia about healthy eating, exercising, and the foods that are in each recipe. All of the recipes have dorky, punning titles like "Wowie Maui Chicken" (pineapple chicken), "Britney's Spears" (roasted asparagus) and "A Bundt in the Oven" (blueberry coffee cake) that are accompanied by hilarious cartoons. I've made a number of the recipes from this book, and they've all turned out really well. "Mashed Fauxtatoes" are really good- whipped cauliflower that looks & tastes like mashed potatoes. I'm going for "The Grill of My Dreams" (barbecued pork tenderloin) and "No Way Jose!" (Mexican lasagne) next. Janet & Greta (who are now a trained chef and a trained nutritionist, which they weren't when they started writing cookbooks) really try to make sure that their recipes are healthy, full of fruits & veggies and whole grains, and great tasting. It works. I love their "Crazyplates" frozen meals too. Way better than Hamburger Helper, that's for sure.

I know a lot of people are nervous about cooking, but this book is incredibly simple, and fun to read (which is the reason that it is included in a reading blog!) I flip through it just for fun, not even when I'm worrying about what the heck to cook for dinner the millionth night in a row. Yes, the goofy titles sometimes drive me crazy, but the food is good, and what more can you ask for?

Carolly Erickon- The Last Wife of Henry VIII

Sometimes I enjoy combining the parts of me that like English, and the parts that like history (which I did as a minor in my undergraduate). In my "Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing", we've been reading pieces written by Elizabethan & Jacobean women, but for most of them, there's not a whole lot known about their lives. Think about how little we know about Shakespeare; consider that for women, this lack is compounded by the fact that they lived not in what we would consider the public sphere. However, some of them are people about whom a lot are known, and Catherine (or Katherine) Parr, the last wife of King Henry VIII, is one of those women.

Normally, I would not look for historical information from a fictional source, but while I still read The Last Wife with a large dose of scepticism, I felt better trusting Erickson's portrayal than I might have otherwise because she was initially a historian. Even if her portrayal is skewed (which it by necessity must be, as all fictional portrayals of historical characters are), I still feel like I know more about Parr, which is what I wanted along with a good read. Of course, Erickson's portrayal is problematized by the fact that a) she has to create a likable character, b) she's working with limited information, and c) she has her own personal biases. However, as long as I kept that in mind, I felt safe enough.

Catherine Parr was Henry VIII's last wife, and Queen Elizabeth I's step-mother. By the time she married Henry, she was in her early thirties and had already been married twice. Her first husband died of exhaustion and sickness, and the second of old age. Catherine married Henry knowing that he had his eye on her from the time of her first marriage, and also knowing that he had killed, either by neglect or execution, five previous wives. She married him anyway, outlived him, and went on to marry one last time: the dangerously unbalanced Thomas Seymour, who abandoned her after failing to overthrow the government. She herself died after giving birth to a daughter, Mary, in her mid-thirties. She was quite a fascinating person- smart, well-educated, opinionated, strong- and not at all liked by her step-daughter the future queen (who, according to Erickson, was infatuated with Seymour and may have borne his child. So much for the Virgin Queen!)

Erickson's writing is not particularly commanding, and most of the interest 0f the book comes from her choice of character. I'm interested to read her book in Marie Antoinette, which garnered some critical praise. This book reminds me of a more sophisticated version of some YA fiction that I read when I was in school- Catherine, Called Birdy, and that sort of thing. Read it for the history and the sense of time, and you won't be disappointed.

Virginia Woolf- Orlando

I originally read Orlando for my very first English course of my undergraduate career, ENG120: Contemporary Fiction. Our prof was a little nuts (one of his claims to fame was playing a ninja in a martial arts movie filmed in Alberta. He was short and had extremely curly blond hair. Not exactly the most congruous picture), and it was almost the worst English class that I've ever taken (that prize goes to ENG252: Canadian Literature, which was taught by a professor who was born to British parents, raised in Korea, and had only lived in Canada for a couple of years before teaching this course. Not exactly an expert, if you get the drift.) But in 120, we read Orlando, and I got my first taste of Virginia Woolf.

I have to say that the first time I read it, I was not a huge fan. Woolf is definitely an acquired taste, and coming from HNM, where we read The Great Gatsby, Pride & Prejudice, some C.S. Lewis, and a lot of Shakespeare, she was a bit of a shock. However, I sincerely enjoyed reading it this time around.

Woolf's goal with Orlando was two-fold. One, she wanted to, as she put it, revolutionize biography overnight. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (still a venerable institution), so she knew exactly what it was that she was revolutionizing. Second, she wanted to write a tribute to the woman some people consider the love of her life, Vita Sackville-West, who the character of Orlando is based on.

Orlando is the "biography" of a young nobleman who starts life in the 1500s and is still living at the end of the book in 1927. Orlando is a writer, ambassador, patron of the arts, and house manager, among other things. He has numerous lovers, and even more numerous adventures. He also begins life as a man and ends it as a woman.

The thing to keep in mind when reading Orlando is that Woolf believes here that gender has little to do with the biological "container" that someone is in. Orlando begins life in a man's body, but ends it in a woman's, and remains essentially Orlando throughout (although Woolf does use the transition to great effect as a way to comment on social expectations for women). Orlando has relationships with both men and women, and sometimes the men are supposed to be men that Woolf and Sackville-West knew, and sometimes they are supposed to be women. Same goes for the girls. It's not confusing as long as you remember that body does not equal gender, which is something that we talk about a lot in my Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing class.

Another thing that I enjoy about reading Orlando is all of the inside jokes between herself and Sackville-West that Woolf inserts. Orlando by the end of the book has been alive for about 500 years, and it has taken her almost that long to complete her poem "The Oak Tree." Here, Woolf is ribbing Sackville-West for taking six years to write her award-winning poem "The Land." Woolf also states over and over that Orlando has fantastic legs, and in her letters and journals, she notes that Vita's legs were her most attractive feature.

If you're interested in reading some of Woolf's work, Orlando is a good place to start. It's light, fun, and more straightforward in terms of writing-style than some of Woolf's other books. A highly enjoyable read that still challenges your mind.

Michael Ondaatje- The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

I read Billy the Kid for my ENGL5812 class- Ideas of the Western. I have always been a big fan of Ondaatje's, especially of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, but this collection I found less appealing than his prose. In the back cover blurb, it states "In this remarkable composite of eye-witness accounts, tall tales, facts, forgeries, songs, and photographs, Michael Ondaatje conjures up Billy the Kid and the world he lived in, creating not only a powerfully moving portrait but also a more profound myth."
I suppose some of my discomfort comes from the fact that Ondaatje is fond of integrating other people's writing into his own poetry and prose so that it is difficult to know where his sources end and his own writing begins. He does the same in In the Skin of a Lion with Anne Wilkinson's character and poetry, and I find it disturbing. Perhaps I was too well brought up by the academic world which insists that one must always acknowledge one's sources. It may also come from some of the debates that we have, especially about collaborative writing, in deciding whose is the real "voice" in a work of poetry or prose. Whichever it is, it bothers me. Reading Billy the Kid was for me like reading Lacan; I can come away with a sense of what is going on, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you how I got there. I can feel Billy's madness, and that of his pursuer, Pat Garrett, and that of the men that they both travelled in company with. That crazy, surreal feeling was part of the West. I can't, however, properly pinpoint how and where Ondaatje creates that. I think it might take another reading to appreciate his poetic abilities and to reconcile myself with what on some level seems like plagiarism and a lack of creativity. The way the collection is put together is really creative, but I still have a bias toward poets who only use their own words. However, as a portrait of the wildness of the Wild, Wild West, Billy the Kid is well painted.

Why another blog?

I decided today that I needed another blog. Why, you might wonder? Well, you'll all have noticed my "Currently Reading" bar on the left hand side of Melissa's Miscellany where I post what I'm currently reading. But I've been feeling for awhile that the sidebar is inadequate. For one, the sidebar only says the title and gives a cover shot, which doesn't let me say anything at length about whether the book is good, bad, or indifferent.
Another thing that bothers me is that once I change the sidebar, whatever was there is gone. There is no record of what I've been reading, which is something that I want. Book lists are a time honoured tradition for authors and poets, male and female alike. Anne Wilkinson, who I'm writing my Master's thesis on, kept an extensive book list in her journal, and to have that is an amazing resource. I don't think that Virginia Woolf kept one, or if she did I haven't seen it, which is a total shame, because she reviewed hundreds of books for the Times. I have read thousands of books in my life, and I'm sure that I'll read thousands more, and I want to be able to look back at the end of my life and see what words were in my life.
For each post, I'll put up a screen shot of whatever it is that I'm reading, and comment on whatever it is. Books will be organized by genre in the labels tab on the left hand side of the screen, so you can just click on "Novel" to see all of the novels that I've put up. I'm normally reading three or four books at a time, so there will be lots of put up on here. So, here goes!