Shelfari

Revisiting 1994: Eerie similarities

Review: In the Lake Of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

                           

“In September, after the primary, they rented an old yellow cottage in the timber at the edge of Lake of the Woods.” So begins Tim O’Brien's 1994 novel of suspense, In The Lake of the Woods.

When I taught freshman English there was a sure way to sort out the students who liked to think about possibilities from those who wanted definite answers. The ones who courted imagination and the ones who went after fact. It all depended on their reaction to the old short story by Frank Stockton, The Lady or the Tiger?

You remember the story, a king obsessed with order and power has a beautiful daughter. He also has a method of justice that is unique. People in his kingdom who are accused of a crime are put into a great arena where they are forced to choose between two doors. Behind one door crouches a terrible tiger, ready to rip the accused to bloody shreds; behind the other waits a blushing and trembling lady, one most suitable to the age and station of the accused. The accused holds his fate in his own hands, and is immediately either punished or rewarded, and the masses watching are entertained in either case.

So, one day a lowborn lad has the misfortune to fall in love with the daughter of the powerful king, and in accordance with law, is thrown into the arena.

A little background, the princess loves her young man with a semi-barbaric passion. Stockton tells the reader how the princess discovers the secret of the doors, which one conceals the ravenous tiger, which the lovely lady. Gold crosses palms and she learns that the lady is one she knows well, and she is not happy. The princess has to make a tough decision. Should she send her lover to certain death, or into the arms of another woman? Sleep is lost, tears are shed, but the inevitable day arrives and the princess decides.

The crowds wait in the arena. The king and the princess have prime seats. The lover is in the middle of it. He glances up and instantly he knows that she knows. She knows that he knows that she knows. The tension grows. Her hand twitches bit, and the lover walks confidently to a door and opens it.

That’s it. Stockton leaves the reader to decide if the lady or the tiger waits on the other side of the door. That is the title, after all.

The story is wonderful to discuss, but it causes howls of protest from students who don’t see the ending coming. But it happens that those who are interested in analyzing the psychology of the semi-barbaric princess begin to think and talk. Slowly it dawns upon them that the story is not so much about the princess as it is about the reader. What would the reader do in that impossible circumstance? Would love or barbarism prevail?

I suspect that the same people who hate the ambiguous ending of the classic short story will also be frustrated by Tim O’Brien’s book, but for me it is as compelling today as it was when it was first published. Today’s news is full of stories of campaigning, of politicians maneuvering to win the confidence of their constituents. We’ve seen it before, a slip of the tongue, a skeleton in the closet, and the game is over. The masses watch it all on television or read about it over morning coffee, and they wait to see who falls next. The other story that is unfolding before us is that of our military entanglements overseas, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear of soldiers maimed and killed in roadside bombs, of suicide bombers and of snipers. Stories emerge of women and children killed, and once again it is clear that nothing is really clear at all. Deja vu for those able to remember Vietnam. What will the future hold for those men and women who return home from the carnage they witness and participate in during wartime?

The reader of O’Brien’s novel is put in the same position as my hapless freshmen. He or she must decide what happened to Kathy Wade, wife of John Wade, defeated politician, former Vietnam soldier, magician and fatherless son. Did she run off to begin a new life, meet with a simple boating accident, or was she murdered by her husband? Was she an innocent whose life was violently taken, or did she take her fate into her own hands? Is Wade a murderer? Or is he a survivor who does whatever he must to live with what his life has handed him?

Some people will crave a resolution, but others will enjoy piecing together the whole story as it flips between the present the past, shifts point of view, and presents bits of evidence and hypothesis. In the end it will be up to you to decide what really happened In The Lake of the Woods.

                     ~sthurner~

The gift that keeps on giving

Sunday is Mother's Day.  I could go on and on about how much I love and appreciate my mother.  There is one everlasting gift I'd like to say "thank you" for this year.  It's something I am grateful for each day--the love of reading. 

Money may have been tight growing up, but library cards were free.  I couldn't wait for our weekly trips to the library.  I'd browse for hours before leaving with as many books as my little arms could carry.  I participated in summer reading competition and family vacations always included books on tape (from the library, of course). 

One of my fondest childhood memories was listening to mom read aloud.  With incredible patience and passion, she brought to life imaginary characters and flights of fancy. I could listen for hours without interrupting, except for the occasional encouragement to "keep reading, mom".  One more chapter was never enough.

My mother instilled ideas, values and a passion for reading into me and my two siblings.  What precious gifts these books! They contained fantastic tales, moral lessons, creative ideas, and enduring principals; allowing me to discover the world for myself. My mom has given me more then I deserve and I am truly blessed.  How can I repay such a gift?  The only way I know how, by sharing it. 

Thank you mom and Happy Mother's Day!

Amanda 

Are bibliophiles too sensitive? *gasp*

"Why is it, with bookish people especially, that taste (in books and film, and music, and other variables like visual art, food, wine, beer, architecture, interior design), is such a sensitive matter?" asks Emily Colette Wilkinson at The Millions.

Have you spent hours meticulously arranging the books on your shelf?  Does it seem convenient that books which convey something important about how [insert clever adjective] you are appear in the public spaces of your home?  Are there secret closets, hidden corners where you carefully place (hide) books that you enjoyed but wouldn't be caught dead reading?  Are books your favorite accessories?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you are a sensitive bibliophile.  Ms. Wilkinson at The Millions calls it competitive aesthetics. This sensitive snobbery even effects our dating according to The New York Times, who ran an article in March titled "It's Not You, It's Your Books".

I hate to admit it, but it's true.  I'm a bit of a snob (Webster's definition: one who has an offensive air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste) when it comes to books.  I coyly peek over my book to see what the person sitting next to me on the bus or airplane is reading.  In a coffee shop, I'll conveniently need to "stretch" letting my eyes wander to the readers around me.  Books are a must have topic of conversation on a first date.  Why?  Because I'm judging. 

Is it fair to judge a person based on their books? I cringe when my musically inclined friends ask to see my iPod.  I always warn that "I haven't organized my music very well and there's stuff I NEVER listen to".  It doesn't stop the occasional smirk or giggle when they see that <you didn't really think I'd put the artists name here, did you?> was on my playlist.  Reality check, perhaps. 

So, are you ready to share your reading list?  You book snob, you :)

Amanda

What we're reading this week

This week on Shelfari, the top 5 books everyone's reading are:

1. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
3. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement is actually in my reading pile right now (one of the lucky ones that's been coming with me on the bus this week).  I'm 3/4 through it and have to decide if I'll be renting the movie this weekend.  It's rare I actually read the book first (bad Amanda, I know).

Happy Reading!

Amanda

Sound familiar?

By Nick Owchar at Jacket Copy: Los Angeles Times

Before Lewis: What inspired his Narnia tales?

               

Well, it seems that C.S. Lewis doesn't hold the patent on inventing the magical wardrobe that transports children to other worlds. Edith Nesbit deserves more of the credit for her 1909 story, "The Aunt and Amabel," in which a young girl, banished by her aunt to a bedroom for committing some vague act of mischief, escapes her loneliness thus:

She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

"I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats," she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say "I told you so," but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.

Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only 'Now' in shining letters all round it, twelve times. ...

A train station too, huh? Shades of Mr. Potter. This delightful short story is among a rich selection that Douglas A. Anderson includes in "Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories" gives us not only a possible inspiration for Jadis, Lewis' villainous White Witch in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," but also for elements found in other modern fantasies--most specifically, I'm thinking of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Andersen's Snow Queen, for instance, lives in a palace illuminated only by the northern lights, and among her attendants are polar bears, which, in John Howe's illustration for this book's cover, pull the queen's sledge across the snow.

G.K. Chesterton is included, and so are Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Morris and many others. Even though the book's main title highlights its connection to Lewis' Narnia stories, editor Anderson is right, in the subtitle, to point out that the stories gathered here inspired more than a single author.

The Writer's "Revenge"

From The Huffington Post: "Men Explain Things to Me"

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."

I replied, "Several, actually."

He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.

Quite amused!

Amanda

Do you have the perfect library?

Telegraph UK has assembled a list of 110 best books that compose the perfect library.  The list is divided into: Classics, Poetry, Literary Fiction, Romantic Fiction, Children's Books, Sci-Fi, Crime, Books that Changed the World, Books that Changed Your World, History and Lives.  What do you think? 

A Loathed Profession

DEADLINE: April 17, 2008

Okay, okay, I'm being melodramatic.  Consider this a friendly reminder that taxes are due in less then 2 weeks.   Timely that Powell's original essay by Richard Yancey's caught my eye. Yancey spent almost 13 years as a Revenue Office for the IRS and captured his experience in the book "Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS".  In my life, I’ve imagined what it would be like to be a spy, actress, professional photographer, advertising executive, and president, but never a “Revenue Officer”.  To channel Pam (from The Office), “I don’t think it’s many little girls’ dream…”

Welcome to the IRS

by Richard Yancey

October 18, 2003: After twelve years, nine months and five days, my tour-of-duty was over. In a matter of hours, my manager would arrive in the office for the final, ironic act of confiscation. I sat at my desk that morning, staring at my computer screen, and none of my co-workers spoke to me. I was no longer one of them.

That afternoon I surrendered my credentials and my receipt book to my manager, a precise, no-nonsense "company man," whose political shrewdness was matched only by his technical incompetence. He was destined for great things in the Service; I was destined for oblivion. We respected but did not like each other, and our parting was strained, an awkward pall hanging over my "employee-closeout," the Service's euphemism for the final act of surrender, the last goodbye to my identity. As I walked to my car that mild, cloudless, breathtakingly beautiful fall afternoon, I touched my empty breast pocket. For almost thirteen years, I had carried my commission there, and now that commission was gone. "You will become what you do," my trainer with the Service had warned me in the beginning of my career. His words had proved prophetic, and now I wasn't a revenue officer anymore. I wasn't one of us; I was one of them.

On that following Monday, five new trainees began their careers with the IRS. I did not envy them, although, thanks to Congress, the Service is not the same beast it was when I came on-board in early 1991. The ranks of the revenue officer corps have thinned, new laws have made the collection of taxes a mind-numbing, complex task fraught with legal and ethical challenges, and the Service, like a great ship that has lost its rudder, drifts upon a sea of indecision, caught between a disgruntled workforce and a Congress hell-bent on limiting its ability to enforce the very laws it is charged with enforcing. The one constant over the years has been the public's perception of the Service as a heartless, intrusive, overbearing, unresponsive bureaucracy, at once incompetent and ruthless, all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely inept.

You will become what you do, and people will hate you for it.

A few months after my last day, I heard the story of one of the new-hires getting her hair done, not long after she came on-board.

"So, what are you up to now?" the stylist asked.

"I finally got a job," the trainee answered.

"Hey, that's great. Where?"

"The IRS."

"The what?"

"You know, the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service."

The stylist abruptly ripped the apron from the trainee, spun the chair around and pointed to the door.

"Get out."

"Excuse me?"

"Get out. Get out of my chair and get out of my shop and never come back here."

"But I can't leave now," the trainee protested. "You haven't finished my cut!"

"And I'm not going to finish it either. I want you to leave and I want you to leave now!"

The trainee left. In tears, she called her new boss, who listened sympathetically to the story and then said, "Welcome to the IRS." (Read more)

Happy Reading,

Amanda

7 Deadly Words

Bob Harris at the New York Times criticizes book reviewers of literary overindulgence.  He points out "seven deadly words" that book reviewers are guilty of mis/overusing.  How do you fare?

• poignant: Something you read may affect you, or move you. That doesn’t mean it’s poignant. Something is poignant when it’s keenly, even painfully, affecting. When Bambi’s mom dies an adult may think it poignant. A child probably finds it terrifying.

• compelling: Many things in life, and in books, are compelling. The problem is that too often in book reviews far too many things are found to be such. A book may be a page turner, but that doesn’t necessarily make it compelling. Overuse has weakened a word that implies an overwhelming force.  Reviewers often combine these first two words. Like Chekhov’s gun. If there is a poignant in a review’s third paragraph, a compelling will most likely follow. Frequently reviewers forestall the suspense and link the words right away, as in “this poignant and compelling novel…”

• intriguing: It doesn’t mean merely interesting or fascinating although it’s almost always used in place of one of those words. When it is, the sense of something illicit and mysterious is lost.

• eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in writing when the perp is stretching for a flashy synonym for avoid or reject or shun.

• craft (used as a verb): In “The Careful Writer,” Theodore M. Bernstein reminds us that “the advertising fraternity has decided craft is a verb.” Undeterred, reviewers use it when they are needlessly afraid of using plain old write. They also try to make pen a verb, as in “he penned a tome.”

• muse (used as a verb): Few things in this world are mused. They are much more often simply written, thought or said. “War is hell,” he mused. Not much dreamy rumination there. Stretching for the fanciful — writing “he crafts or pens” instead of “he writes”; writing “he muses” instead of “he says or thinks” — is a sure tip-off of weak writing.

• lyrical: Reviewers use this adjective when they want to say something is well written. But using the word loosely misses the sense of expressing emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way. Save lyrical for your next review of Wordsworth. (For the complete article)

Happy Reading!

Amanda

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

       What Counsel has the Hooded Moon

What counsel has the hooded moon
Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet,
Of Love in ancient plenilune,
Glory and stars beneath his feet--
A sage that is but kith and kin
With the comedian Capuchin?

Believe me rather that am wise
In disregard of the divine,
A glory kindles in those eyes,
Trembles to starlight. Mine, O Mine!
No more be tears in moon or mist
For thee, sweet sentimentalist.

~James Joyce (Irish Poet)