The Day of Reckoning

And so we have arrived. It is New Year's Eve, the end of the year, and time to be weighed in the balances. Last January, dismayed that I had fallen off the literary wagon and become recreationally illiterate, I resolved to take it one day at a time and read 50 books in 365 days. I admitted that I was powerless over Recreational Illiteracy and that my life had become unmanageable; I came to believe that a Power/Bookstore/Library greater than myself could restore me to sanity; I made a decision to turn off my TV and turn my life over to the care of Amazon. I did not fully succeed. With 7 hours of reading time left in 2010, I have read 48 books--2 shy of my goal. They are:

1. And Only to Deceive - Tasha Alexander
2. A Poisoned Season - Tasha Alexander
3. A Fatal Waltz - Tasha Alexander
4. Tears of Pearl - Tasha Alexander
5. The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown
6. Possession - A.S. Byatt
7. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey
8. The Lady and the Unicorn - Tracy Chevalier
9. Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier
10. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
11. Diary of a Provincial Lady - E.M. Delafield
12. Great Cases of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
13. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
14. A Beautiful Blue Death - Charles Finch
15. The Magicians - Lev Grossman
16. What Angels Fear - C.S. Harris
17. The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
18. Ripley Under Ground - Patricia Highsmith
19. Ripley's Game - Patricia Highsmith
20. The Mist in the Mirror - Susan Hill
21. The Small Hand - Susan Hill
22. Never Let Me Go - Katsuo Ishiguro
23. The Swan Thieves - Elizabeth Kostova
24. Dressed for Death - Donna Leon
25. Through a Glass Darkly - Donna Leon
26. A Sea of Troubles - Donna Leon
27. Willful Behavior - Donna Leon
28. Doctored Evidence - Donna Leon
29. About Face - Donna Leon
30. Death in a Strange Country - Donna Leon
31. Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay
32. Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
33. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier
34. The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn - Robin Maxwell
35. Mademoiselle Boleyn - Robin Maxwell
36. Evening - Susan Minot
37. The Night Bookmobile - Audrey Niffenegger
38. An Instance of the Fingerpost -Iain Pears
39. Lush Life -Richard Price
40. Excellent Women - Barbara Pym
41. A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym
42. Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym
43. The Dead Travel Fast - Deanna Raybourn
44. Silent in the Grave - Deanna Raybourn
45. Silent in the Sanctuary - Deanna Raybourn
46. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
47. The Betrayal of the Blood Lily - Lauren Willig
48. The Mischief of the Mistletoe - Lauren Willig

Though I would have liked to have the "full set," as it were, with 50, I'm proud of this accomplishment. It's certainly leagues beyond my normal yearly "book count." These 48 include authors I wasn't familiar with before and now adore (Barbara Pym, Deanna Raybourn, Charles Finch, Katsuo Ishiguro), books I'd been meaning to read but hadn't gotten around to (Possession, The Name of the Rose), books I hadn't planned on reading and found greatly disappointing (The Power of One, Lush Life). I've discovered new genres--gothic/horrid novels, Victorian mysteries--that will now be mainstays. And I look forward to trying again in 2011 and continuing to expand my horizons.

Maybe putting a number--50--on reading isn't really the answer. I don't want to start rushing through books or picking "easy" ones just to meet a quota. Maybe a better attitude/approach is to always be reading something. Before this year I could go months at a time without an answer to "so, what are you reading now?" or even "read any good books lately?" I love that I've changed this. I love that I always have a novel in my bag and on the bedside table. I love being able to update my status pretty much every single day on Goodreads. I have loved almost every minute of this year of reading "dangerously," and I know that 2011 will be no different.

In light of this overwhelmingly maudlin positivity, I will close out my last post of the year with the top 10 best of the 48, in no particular order:

1. Possession - A.S. Byatt
2. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
3. Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier
4. The Magicians - Lev Grossman
5. Excellent Women - Barbara Pym
6. Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
7. Never Let Me Go - Katsuo Ishiguro
8. The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
9. The Betrayal of the Blood Lily - Lauren Willig
10. A toss-up between The Dead Travel Fast and Silent in the Grave - Deanna Raybourn

2010, it's been real.

Review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

In 1327, Sean Connery--I mean Brother William of Baskerville--arrives at a remote monastery in northern Italy ostensibly to facilitate a meeting between a delegation from Pope John XXII and the Franciscan Michael of Cesena, whose cause (monastic poverty) has the backing of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Church is on the brink of schism (yes, the Great Western one), as hostilities between the papacy and the Empire reach a boiling point, and the meeting's success is of critical importance. Tensions are high as William and his assistant, our narrator Adso, arrive, and not just because of the impending talks. A monk has died suspiciously and, fearing for the talks' success and his monastery's reputation, the abbot asks William to investigate. At first Adelmo's death appears to be a private matter, but then another monk is gruesomely murdered, and another and another, the manner of their deaths seeming to deliberately evoke the Book of Revelation. William, a follower of Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas, applies cool Aristotelian logic to sort through the clues, which seem increasingly to point to the abbey's mysterious, labyrinthine, and closely-guarded library. What is the secret that it contains? Heresy, political intrigue, murder, or all three?

I had high hopes for this book. My doctorate is in the religious art (and history) of Renaissance Italy; I took multiple graduate and undergraduate courses in Medieval apocalyptic and Eucharistic art and theology; I studied and loved Latin to the point of embarrassment. Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics, which I find interesting. In short, all signs pointed to me sitting up all night feverishly clutching this book in my grubby little paws (unwashed because showering would take time away from reading) completely enraptured.

What went wrong?

In a nutshell, this book is too smart for its own good. Though called a murder mystery, the mystery is incidental. The Name of the Rose is a philosophical meditation that just happens to contain a murder mystery and these two plotlines don't come together until the very end (and there only loosely). The result is that each distracts from the other. Eco's knowledge of Medieval history is dizzying, literally: the long excursuses on the various religious factions were hard to follow without constantly looking up names, dates, summaries, and definitions nor was their relevance always clear. When the mystery resumed, I'd often forgotten key events or characters (and vice versa). To navigate through these portions without sacrificing the pace of the novel requires a comparable fluency in the events surrounding the Investiture Controversy, the Avignon Papacy, the Dulcinian heresy, the Inquisition, and the debates about Apostolic poverty, etc., that I just don't have. The solution to this doesn't have to be removing the history or dumbing down its presentation. To guide her readers through the labyrinthine world of Tudor politics and its players in the Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel employs a deceptively simple solution: a dramatis personae. Had Eco inserted a few pages in the beginning, glossing the key characters, religious groups, and historical figures/events, I think the history would have complemented his storytelling rather than impeding it.

But perhaps we are meant to be impeded?

Umberto Eco is a declared proponent of the "open text," (reader response theory, which incidentally I also studied in college), which emphasizes the role of the reader in creating the meaning and experience of a text. The murder mystery, therefore, is not so much a story as a device, a metaphor for our experience of textual interpretation. The meaning of The Name of the Rose, therefore, is neither absolute nor transparently laid out; it is up to the reader to generate it. Such a challenge can be liberating and exciting, but here I felt overwhelmed. Whether it was the constant looking up of references or the flipping back to recall details, I felt like Eco was just asking too much of me and giving me very little in return. I am grateful that this was the opposite of the puffed up, reductive, and just plain wrong pseudo-"history" of that atrocity The Da Vinci Code. But there's a fine line between a book that feels like a challenge (Possession for example) and one that just feels like work. In an interview, Eco reportedly said that he made the first several hundred pages deliberately opaque to weed out "unworthy" readers. I hope that isn't true--by all means don't dumb down your content but don't deliberately alienate your audience either.

This may be a simple case of reality/expectation disconnect. I hope it is. When I first saw Gosford Park, I hated it. Reviews compared it to Agatha Christie, so I went in expecting a neat, tidy, cozy whodunit and was, of course, disappointed when it turned out to be social commentary/domestic drama couched in a murder mystery. Viewing it a second time without expecting it to be something different, I loved it. I bought the dvd and I watch it every time I get sick. I began The Name of the Rose expecting more of a page-turning historical mystery and that's just not what this book is. Perhaps, if I hadn't brought misinformed expectations to the table, I would have enjoyed it for what it was? When I read Ulysses in college, in that class on the open text, my professor described is a book that was meant not to be read but to be re-read. So that we might better understand and appreciate it, she had us read it out of order so that we were exploring a text rather than trying to follow a story.

Perhaps the same is true for The Name of the Rose? After all, there were many parts of the book that I liked (I'd probably give it 3 out of 5 stars). I wonder, now that I've got the "story," what would happen were I to go back and try again.

Reading Rituals

At exactly 8pm every night Margaret Lea, the bibliophile heroine of The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield), begins her elaborate ritual of literary retreat:

"It was nearly time. I moved swiftly. In the bathroom I soaped my face and brushed my teeth. By three minutes to eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to boil. Quickly, quickly. A minute to eight. My hot water bottle was ready, and I filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock, the world came to an end. It was reading time.

"The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world."

I have lately found myself thinking more and more of Margaret's nocturnal ceremony (for lack of a better word). For Christmas, my parents got me Audrey Niffenegger's graphic novel The Night Bookmobile, in which a young woman discovers a mysterious mobile library containing each and every book she has ever read over the course of her life. When reading it I got to thinking about my own literary memories--where I read certain books, what I was doing, what para-textual associations they conjure up, etc.--which, in turn, led to my thinking about how and where I read. I envy Margaret's cozy description of halting everything at eight on the dot, settling down with her hot water bottle, and vanishing into "the white pages of [her] open book." For me, reading is usually accomplished in snatched moments--during the 10 minute bus ride to campus and back, while scarfing my lunch in the basement lounge of my department, waiting for my therapist to show up. Even reading before I go to sleep seems somehow stolen or temporary. Perhaps this is because, unlike Margaret, my bed isn't really mine but shared with someone else whose idea of lights-out-time might differ from my own. Perhaps this is because, now back at school and working hard, I am tired at the end of the day and often preoccupied with the tasks that remain to be accomplished. Margaret's ritual, like her life, is a solitary one with few responsibilities and my life, thankfully, is not. While the ideal of her monastic retreat is attractive, it is not altogether feasible. (And I suspect that Setterfield herself, a former harried academic with a family, imagined Margaret's ritual with a wistful "if only...")

In resolving to read more in 2010 I had to find a place for reading. Once upon a time, subway, bus, and plane rides meant headphones and music; lunch time meant scarfing something quickly, often at my desk; bedtime meant lights out right away; free time (haha) meant television. Now commutes are spent with books, lunch is an hour's break away from work (also with said books), bedtime is eased into, and free time (hahaha) is something I seek out and try to use thoughtfully. But surely I can do more than this?

As 2010 draws to a close I must ruefully admit that my goal of 50 books in 52 weeks has not been met. I got close, though, at 47, and will renew my resolution/challenge for 2011. But more than that, my hope for 2011 is to carve out a truer and more permanent space for reading in my life. This may not be easy: I don't even know if I'll be on the same side of the Atlantic in 2011, much less what my routines will be like. But if my year of reading has taught me anything it has been that dedicating time to reading for fun has given me a much richer existence than I had before. The books I have read have not only been my companions, enlivening dull commutes or dreary days home sick, my refuge, distracting me when I've been sad or stressed, but they have given me new lenses through which to view my life and expanded my conception of the world. Anais Nin said that we do not see things as they are but as we are. What is a book but someone else's worldview couched in a story? And by encountering so many different views and so many different worlds, I like to think that my perspective has become a little more balanced. I feel that I know so many more "people" now. It has also given me a lot more to talk about at cocktail parties.

2010 was a year of getting back on track for me after two years of wandering. I don't know if reading has anything to do with that; I rather think it didn't. Reading is fun and edifying but it isn't magic (unless we're talking about that dreadful Inkheart movie...oh Brendan Fraser, what happened to you). Instead I think that my increased literacy has been a part of my broader push to set and accomplish goals. So if 2010, while not the year of 50 books, was the year of goals and Getting There, I hope that 2011 will be a year of routines. I will hope to develop good work habits--getting up and going to campus every day instead of mooning about the house--to develop a fitness routine, to not get overwhelmed and throw my hands up but to methodically work through whatever tasks I have before me, and to find a place in all that just for reading.

(Image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, c. 1770.)