Engine Summer

There has been a lot of controversy over this book, which is fair, because it is tangled up with very complex issues about race, class, gender, power, parenting, immigration and assimilation... there is a great deal going on below the surface of a text which also has a great deal going on on the surface, and it's also a deceptively quick and easy read.

On the surface, it's infuriating. This is a memoir, though possibly not a manifesto, describing Amy Chua's methods of parenting her two daughters. She describes her parenting as typical Chinese parenting, and continually contrasts it with a style of parenting she tags as typically Western. One thing that I have not seen many reviews mention is that within the first three pages of the book she states that she has seen parents of extremely diverse ethnic backgrounds following both models, but I for one am leery at the tagging of, well, anything as typical, most of the time. Especially when the things being described as typical are identical to the stereotypes about the subject.

Because Chua was incredibly strict. An A- was not an acceptable grade. Three hours of daily music practice was barely considered sufficient. Her daughters chose none of their own activities, did not do slumber parties, were called worthless and lazy and stupid when they didn't obey. Chua tells stories here about wrestling with her younger daughter at the piano, not letting her up for hours until the piece was perfect; she excerpts her notes for her daughters in which she tells them measure-by-measure what they are doing wrong in each piece of music and insists that the errors be gone the next time she hears it. This is very, very stereotypical stuff.

And yet, what is infuriating to me is not, entirely, the literal content of this book, the way Chua parents, though I am mad as hell about the language she considers acceptable to use to her children. What is infuriating to me is that she clings to the insistence that there is something uniquely Chinese about her parenting style every time she thinks she's gone too far. Because she knows perfectly well there are times she goes too far. She describes the feeling of sitting there, knowing her daughters at occasional moments outright hate her despite a usually loving relationship, and not knowing if that will continue, and knowing it is justified. But every time she thinks that sort of thing, she literally accuses herself of betraying her culture, of letting the side down. At one point she thinks something along the lines of 'my daughters disobeying me makes a mockery of four thousand years of civilization'. However, it is European composers she insists her girls study. She says outright that she thinks that Chinese culture has produced nothing to equal Beethoven's Ninth. The Chinese she insists her daughters learn is Mandarin, which is not what her family speaks.

This is an example of what stereotypes can do, when mixed with the dilemma of degree of assimilation. Because Chua has, obviously, a standard of success, and a clear and distinct definition of what success is. Success is, for example, playing at Carnegie Hall. Success is being successful at American things (there is a thing she says about gamelan players that is fucking insulting to the entire Indonesian concept of music, when she's trying to explain why she picked violin and piano for her girls). But she has to make them successful in a way she sees as Chinese. So whenever she's going too far, and things aren't working, and relationships are fraying, and it's obvious that she's wrong about something somewhere because they got a dog even though she could see no utilitarian value in it whatsoever and now not only does she love it but they have a second and are considering a third-- then she tells herself, this set of things is what Chinese parents do, and so it is what I am supposed to be doing. The stereotype is part of her own justification for the way she parents.

As she says outright, because this is an intelligent and occasionally introspective woman, she is the most stubborn at defending the things she knows to be most problematic.

That's why this book is called the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's not meant to call anyone else to battle. It's a reassurance to herself, an attempt to answer the eternal question: did I do the right thing by my children? It is her own anthem.

And the thing is, the question of whether she did the right thing by her children is incredibly complex. Those measure-by-measure criticism notes? Are funny as hell. Loving, charming, and sweet. Her girls are by current standards incredibly high achievers, and in interviews state that they are happy, that they love her. She learned some flexibility with her younger daughter, when it was do so or break the relationship. And I remember, myself, very clearly how difficult it was for me when I hit college and no one had ever taught me how to do work I did not enjoy doing but that needed to be done. I still have trouble with that. I can't say that isn't a life skill you should teach your children.

But I am saddened and distressed that she sets up and uses this Chinese/Western dichotomy to help her maintain her confidence, because what kind of fucking world do we live in where that is a defense mechanism people reach for? Let alone a useful one? And the media and reviewers have run with it, absolutely run with it, a lot of them unquestioningly.

So that's my surface level of infuriated. There are others under that, but I don't feel like writing a screed about the entire concept of success and achievement as defined in popular culture, or one about the relations of class and gender, at this precise moment.

I highly recommend actually reading the book, because it will make you think about all those things, and because apart from sanguinity over at 50books_poc I have not read a single review of this yet that bore much relationship to the book I read. Also, as I said, it is occasionally funny, well-composed on a sentence-by-sentence level, and deceptively, simply, readable.

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The disadvantage to writing a book review every day is that it means that I do not get much processing time. If I schedule things carefully, and read my book early, I can get a few hours to think about it, but often life intervenes (it's amazing how people want one to do things during daylight). I cannot always predict in advance what is going to need a particular sort of time and thought and care, when a book will require some turning over in my brain before I can even start to get my thoughts in order and make sentences. Some books one can review by starting to type, and some not.

It is five-thirty in the morning. I have been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes since half-past midnight. I would love to go away and think about this book for a week. Then I might begin to be able to tell you how good this is, and why.

On the other hand, I suppose the resultant review might lose something in immediacy. I do not think that is sufficient, but I guess it is something.

So: my apologies. I cannot live up to this book. It is too good for me to know how to write about right now. I will try. It will not be right. I'm sorry.

Edmund de Waal is a potter by profession, and, I have heard, a good one, with work in museums. He has inherited, from his great-uncle by way of his great-uncle's husband, a collection of two hundred and sixty-four Japanese netsuke pieces that has been in his family since the 1870s. This book is a history, a story of the collection in his family, or his family around the collection, and the world around that.

I can tell you in his own words what he is trying not to do, and what sort of book he is trying to make:

... I really don't want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss...

It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Époque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.

And I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. And I am not interested in thin. I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers-- hard and tricky and Japanese-- and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and what they thought about it-- if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed.

Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.

And that is exactly what he does, he builds that exactitude and he succeeds in every way. Because in order to make those rooms come alive, and to make the people come alive who lived in them, so that he can guess at the relationship those people had to these objects, he goes and does the kind of exacting, thorough, loving research that most historians wish they could live up to, and then he gives you his insanely wealthy, intelligent, Jewish, multi-lingual generations-back family and they walk off the page. This is the only work of its kind I can think of that is equally good on every time period and place it covers, which is two continents and more than a century.

And because of who his family were, and where they were, and the amount of money they had, this is also a very particular kind of history, one of the world of people one has heard of, the world of high society and the artists and thinkers around the edges of that. They knew the wealthy and the great: they were the wealthy and the great, and interested in the arts, and they knew everybody.

They were also, as I mentioned, Jewish. This is a book that engages fully with the anti-Semitism that was going on, in all its time periods, as it must.

It also, and this is rare and wondrous, engages with the orientalism, the various crazes for Japanese art, the ways that the sculptures and the sculptors and the country of Japan have been represented and misrepresented over the years. Because that needs to be thought about, too, when you're holding one of these objects.

It is a joyous book, a joy to read, and it made me cry for two separate reasons within the same paragraph, because it also has in it all the pain that was, of course, there. This is a book that can make you rage against history as you already know it to have happened, against what you already know is inevitable.

I need to stop writing about this. I am not doing well enough at it. This is one of those reviews that makes me so frustrated with myself, because this is not right, I am not saying this well enough, I am not making it sound like the incomparable, the specific and exact and weighted book it is, the real place it takes up in my brain, the way it widens out the world. This review should be giving you this precise book, because the author of it demanded no less of himself. I am not doing that, and I do not know how to do that. I should be silent where I cannot say the right thing. Read the book. It is a masterpiece. It is the best thing I have read this year.

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A book on Botticelli produced in conjunction with an exhibition, but still of general interest and relevance.

Botticelli is probably currently the most famous painter from Renaissance Florence-- I mean the most famous who did not also do other things, such as sculpting or goldsmithing-- but it's amazing how little is generally known about him. He lived between 1445 and 1510, and painted several things which are ridiculously famous such as the Birth of Venus, the Primavera, etc., and several things which aren't (I had not known he illustrated an edition of Dante).

The essays included provide a very good biographical overview of Botticelli: what we do know (that he apprenticed with Fra Lippo Lippi, that his father was a tanner), what we don't know (why he is called Botticelli, a nickname which means 'little pot' and which was apparently originally his brother's nickname and spread or something else confusing like that), and what has been debunked (Vasari's biography, which as most contemporary was taken as gospel for generations, is apparently factually inaccurate about the last years of Botticelli's life).

It also gives a good overview of Florentine politics of the time, the reign of Lorenzo de Medici and his attempts to make Florence into the next Athens or Rome fading into the brief reign of the monk Savonarola, who held the famous Bonfire of the Vanities and wished to make Florence the New Jerusalem. Many famous artists and scholars, including Botticelli, followed Savonarola, which has confused later academics; this book argues convincingly that there is not that much difference, in some ways, between one scheme to reform humanity along utopian ideals and another. It also argues convincingly that many of Botticelli's later-period works, due to the changes in his style because of his association with Savonarola, have been inaccurately seen as lesser, and that it's quite possible many of them have not even been properly attributed to him yet.

The plates give a good overview of early Botticelli, with his master Lippi's influence clearly visible; mid-period, the ones everyone has memorized; the few that are known to be late-period, which certainly do look different and are clearly full of even more obscure academic and theological symbolism than the previous (if you think the Primavera is confusing, try the Mystical Crucifixion, yeesh); and the drawings from Dante, which fascinate me by conforming almost perfectly to the not-yet-evolved narrative conventions of the comic strip.

In short, ignore that this is exhibit-related, and find it if you can, if you need a good resource about this painter, his milieu, and how they related to each other, because there is a lot of very useful data packed into a very brief space here, including even rankings of the relative usefulness and accuracy of other books on the subject. This is one of the periods in history I know something about, both from natural inclination and from research for setting fiction in it, and there were things here I had not heard, which was not something I really expected.

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Via nineweaving.

This is Penelope Fitzgerald's loving and hilarious biography of her father and uncles: Edmund (Evoe) Knox, longtime editor of Punch magazine; Dillwyn Knox, classical scholar, famously of Bletchley Park during the era of the breaking of Enigma; Ronald Knox, mystery writer, Catholic priest, and translator of the entire Bible all by himself; and Wilfred Knox, best described as a uniquely Anglican sort of ascetic. The eldest and longest-lived, Edmund, was born in 1881 and died in 1971. The book goes into some light family history before the 1880s and is then comprehensive through the middle 1950s, when the younger three died.

And by comprehensive I mean comprehensive. The Knox brothers, by virtue of genius, wide-ranging interests, and quantities of luck, knew just about everyone famous in their generations and were also familiar with large swathes of the not-so-famous. This book serves very well as a history of its times, though it is perhaps best at the period just before World War I, a time it looks at with relief, interest, fury and regret-- the 'All That' Robert Graves was saying goodbye to.

But the reason to read this is its tender portrait of four very different, very opinionated, very brilliant men. Also, it is consistently hysterically funny, in that way that only happens when things are drawn directly from life. The young Edmund Knox, for instance, on first getting a house of his own, piled all his receipts and tailor's bills into two hatboxes on the floor of the closet. When he had to write a business letter, he would overturn the hatboxes, and then begin 'Dear Sir, on consulting my files...'

Or there is the inimitable diary entry their stepmother, a scholar of Greek, made and was never after let to live down: "Finished the Antigone. Married Bip."

( Or this excerpt, which is longer, but worth it. )

I am not going to try to attempt to excerpt the description of Wilfred at Christmas, except to say that I laughed until I hurt myself, and no favorite uncle ever had a better epitaph. There is also an utterly priceless description of Lytton Strachey, at Cambridge, falling into and out of love with Dillwyn in the space of about twenty minutes. (Dillwyn, though the book does not go into it, was seeing someone at that point-- Maynard Keynes.)

And yet it's a book that does handle the dark as well as the light, the losses and disappointments and the terrible rift that formed between Ronald and the rest of his family when he became a Roman Catholic. Wilfred was an Anglo-Catholic: it is not, remotely, the same thing. And their father was an Anglican bishop. And Dillwyn was an atheist. Unlike many families in such circumstances, they continued to speak, continued to see each other, continued to love; but they inflicted deep wounds. This is part of what makes this such a good history, the details of these doctrinal conflicts that mattered so terribly much, and which now I only know because I read a lot about this time period. Fitzgerald makes you care about them here.

I have left out so much that is good about this, from Ronald's scheme for writing bestselling mystery novels to support himself while Chaplain at Oxford (it worked) to Dillwyn's plans for writing poetry according to a schema based on cryptography (the poems, surprising everyone, aren't half bad). This is a lush book, an embarrassment of riches, the kind of thing I am always hoping to run into among the histories of various people's favorite Victorian and Edwardian relatives. This is a treasure.

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Day before yesterday's review. Via gallian.

I wanted to like this more than I did. Mooney, having spent most of his childhood and adolescence in various forms of special-ed due to diagnoses including dyslexia and possible ADD, bought a used short school bus of the kind commonly used by special-ed programs and spent a summer driving around the U.S. meeting and interviewing people with various conditions commonly considered disabilities. He originally met most of his contacts through speaking gigs in which he discusses his dyslexia and having gone to Brown; one of the things I liked most about this book is the not-quite-humor with which he states in the first sentence that one of his life goals used to be being an after-school special. Over the course of the summer he proposes to his girlfriend, goes to Burning Man, looks at conceptual art, hits a lot of major and minor cities briefly, travels with various family members and others, and of course talks with a great many people, some with clear-cut diagnoses and some not.

If you know nothing whatsoever about the political issues surrounding disability, disability education, community integration etc., this might not be a terrible place to start, because he meets people from a lot of different communities who have a lot of different things going on, and he gives reasonable summary. He treats other people as human beings, consistently, and he admits when he has trouble doing it, which is more than many writers do, and he doesn't seem to want cookies for it. But-- hm. One of the people he spends some time with is an outsider artist in Maine, who has the label of 'town eccentric' but who also went through school being called retarded, slow, and so on in a way where there were no actual diagnoses involved but a lot of terrible bullying. And one of the things that becomes obvious is that she's a trans woman, which is orthogonal to the various mental health labels but sure as hell had something to do with the bullying. And, well. The author means well. He really does. But this is kind of the epitome of the sort of piece written by a well-meaning person who does not know much about the issues he is writing about, and the main thing I have to say to him about that entire chapter is: use the right fucking pronouns.

So this set of issues concerning the part of the book that involves something I know something about does not inspire me with confidence in the parts of the book that involve things I don't know as much about, you know? I have confidence in everything about his personal life and his issues, that he knows the truth he speaks there, because duh. But the rest of it-- given the format of this, it's inevitably going to be a quick skim over the top of a great many separate sets of things, he's traveling, he's always moving on. But it is so damn important that that skim be as accurately representative as humanly possible, and I just don't have that faith.

He also spends a lot of time talking about how the trip changed him, how much he changed and found himself, but this is a very clear-cut case of telling and not showing, because I didn't see much evidence of it. But that is what you have to say about trips like this, isn't it. I don't know, maybe he did profoundly change, but just didn't manage to communicate it?

Anyway, I might, with those very heavy caveats very clearly explained, hand this to someone as the beginning of a discussion about disability and politics. Assuming I can't find something better. There really has to be something better out there. Doesn't there? Recs accepted.

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This is a very frank memoir about the experience of long-term childhood sexual abuse. It is also quite a good book, and one I have not seen before.

( Cut for possible triggery/disturbing content. )

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After yesterday I wanted something I knew I would like.

This is the least of the Jarman I've read so far, since a lot of it is collected interviews, which means that some of the material repeats itself and some of the interviewers ask really stupid questions. (e.g.: Interviewer: You were telling me why you don't regret no longer being promiscuous-- Jarman: No, you were telling me why I shouldn't regret no longer being promiscuous.)

Also, more than his diaries this is a set of meditations on the films he was making at the time of writing, as opposed to about his personal life, and I have not yet seen the films of this period, post-Caravaggio and pre-Edward II. The principal one of these films is The Last of England, and it is clear that a) Jarman considered it his masterpiece and b) it tongue-tied him, he couldn't talk about it, he said what he had to say in it and when trying to explain it he goes into sentence fragments and heaps of broken images and bricolage of Ezra Pound and William Blake in a blender. It's very entertaining and ludicrously erudite but I have no idea what he means. Maybe after seeing it those chunks of book will make more sense, but I am not betting on that.

But around the edges there are some lovely things, descriptions of things he likes and doesn't about other directors, of a trip to Moscow and south to the Caspian Sea, of the experience of the couple of times he acted in films instead of directing them (both times playing real people, a painter he knew and a director he admires: I may have to hunt down the film in which he plays Pier Paolo Pasolini, being buried in a muddy desert at four in the morning).

So. Not a book for people unfamiliar with Jarman as a director, or possibly even as a writer. But I liked it. It has all his facets, rage and irony and humor and endless benevolence and brilliance.

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This is from Sunday. I am hoping to catch up presently and not fall behind again, but let us just say that for the next couple of weeks things may be erratic-- if you don't see a review on a particular day, it doesn't mean I've stopped reading, I just feel like I've been hit by a car. That's not an exaggeration. I was hit by a car in college once, and I remember it quite distinctly. However, writing these reviews seems to have become enough of a habit that I get a little twitchy if I don't, and people seem to like even the reviews I've written when not technically really awake or mentally present, so I may as well do what I can.

Anyway. On our mantelpiece there are two sets of books: one side has things people in the house have written or contributed to (Thrud's dissertation, gaudior's dissertation, my poetry etc.) and the other has things people in the house have been helpful with in some way (the anime publications we've provided research data for, Cloud & Ashes, etc.). I noticed a while ago there was this book on the mantelpiece which I'd never heard of, and I had no idea what it was, so I asked Thrud. It turns out to be by her grandfather, George Higgins, and is a self-published biography of a doctor who helped found the hospital Higgins worked at as a surgeon for many years.

I decided to read it because I was curious about Thrud's grandfather, but also because I don't read much that's self-published, and I wanted to know what the differences would be between this and a book which sold to a conventional small press. Clearly it mattered to Higgins very much, or he wouldn't have chosen to do it, but I wasn't sure whether this would be a case of something which has too limited a readership to sell or whether it wouldn't be done well enough.

A little of both, I think. It's a biography of Dr. Richard J. Hall (1856-1897), the first American surgeon to successfully perform an operation for appendicitis. As a brilliant young doctor in New York City, Hall published several papers on abdominal operations and seemed ready to become one of the most famous and prominent physicians in the country; unfortunately, his research interests led him to the then-new study of cocaine solutions for use in local and general anesthesia, and self-experimentation quickly addicted him. After repeated physical and mental breakdowns, he relocated his family to Santa Barbara, California, where the drug would be less accessible, and became the founding surgeon of Cottage Hospital there (still in existence today). In a piece of painful irony, he developed appendicitis himself at the age of thirty-nine, and, as there was no other surgeon on the West Coast able to perform the operation, died before he could successfully teach anyone how to save him.

I can understand why a writer would be attracted to this story-- its multiple reversals, obvious might-have-beens, and ability to shed light on the state of American medical practice at the time make it a great centerpiece for historical work in a variety of directions. However, the lack of primary source material is a major hindrance-- Higgins has as far as I can tell unearthed everything possible, including Hall's published papers and his few surviving pieces of correspondence, and there's just not much there. If it were all put in order, carefully organized, and explained fully, I think a good writer could get a fifty-page pamphlet out of it, but not a book twice that length. It needs to be a centerpiece and jumping-off point for a look at the history of abdominal surgery, or the history of the early medical studies of cocaine and the way it became obvious the drug was dangerous (somebody do this! the bits of it around the edges here are fascinating and tragic!), or even the history of Santa Barbara. Higgins, however, is not an historian, and his book restates every fact twice, has everything in a jumbled and non-chronological order, goes into great detail on the biography of peripherally involved persons in order to take up space (while neglecting the biography of some people who were more involved and more interesting-- we find out in one tossed-off sentence that Hall's wife was the first female professional saxophone player in the country), and in general needs a good line edit.

So I can't fault Higgins' instincts. But no, this was not publishable. Fascinating, but frustrating. And hey, if you're doing this sort of history, here, some of the legwork has been done for you. Please, somebody take this material and go work with it as it ought to be. I'm not qualified in this field myself, but this could be so amazing.

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This is a fruit of my new method for trying to pick out reasonable Hollywood biographies in cases where I have not been recommended any, which is to say I took it off the shelf, looked at the bibliography for length and plausibility of sources, looked at the copyright date to ensure it was after the year 2000, and then based on that decided it would probably be okay.

Eliot's is not a terrible book, but I am considering raising that date to 2005 out of self-defense, as I have been noticing that dates after 2000 seem to indicate that the biographer is willing to talk about a subject's bisexuality/homosexuality but is still sometimes annoyingly judgmental and defensive about it (see my earlier complaints re: Donald Soto about Laurence Olivier; my complaints about that aspect of this book are identical but stronger). What I'd like is a bio that presents substantiated facts without elision and is, at least, value-neutral. Books after 2000 seem to get me the non-elided versions, but value-neutral is harder to come by.

At any rate, Cary Grant led a fascinating if clearly extremely unhappy life, and this book digs into aspects of it I had never thought to consider, such as what Grant did about the questions about immigration status and patriotism that dogged British expatriates in Hollywood during World War II, and the ways in which the friends and contacts Grant made during that period to help avoid problems shielded him during the HUAC era. (He became an American citizen shortly before the end of the war, and seems to have managed the ridiculous feat of being an avowed leftist whom J. Edgar Hoover liked enough to keep out of trouble.) It's a good book for facts and dates and quotations and that sort of detail, and therefore makes a good story if you are the sort of person for whom facts and dates and detail make a sentence, for whom these things come alive without the necessity of assisting description.

Because let me tell you, the description there is in this book is actively detractive. Eliot can write a clear, grammatical, lucid and informative English sentence, and does so frequently. What he cannot do is write a clear, grammatical, lucid and informative English sentence when he is trying to give his own opinion in any way at all. As long as he is laying out and delivering facts the man can write. Otherwise, he falls into a sort of anti-writing, where he seems to be actively working against the overall quality of his book by producing similes that have the effect of horrific little land-mines of pretentiousness. You could probably enjoy this really thoroughly if you skip any sentence containing an adjective.

It did remind me of how much I like Bringing Up Baby, and that there are a couple of things by Hitchcock I really ought to go and watch already. And it did, in the portions without adjectives, provide an interesting portrait of a very complicated, obsessive, and not entirely sympathetic man with great gifts and a talent for marketing. I had not known that Cary Grant was the first Hollywood star to manage to break free of the studio system, exist as a contract player, and still have a career; that's the move which broke Valentino shortly before his death, and which Charlie Chaplin had to found his own studio to get away with. That increases my respect for Grant tremendously.

Mind you, there are levels in which I wonder why I ever read Hollywood biographies. One could, after all, be watching the movies instead, and they don't usually work that well as film criticism or as movie recommendations. I suppose it's worth keeping on until I figure out why I do it. Or until I find one good enough that it is, in itself, worthwhile.

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Maureen Corrigan is the book reviewer for the NPR program Fresh Air, and a lit professor and writer of reviews for various publications. This is her memoir about reading and books and the things books have done to her life, good, bad, and indifferent.

In general there are two things that cause me to enjoy a memoir about reading (assuming it is at least moderately competently written). The first is the amount of insight the writer has into the whys and hows of their personal ways of reading, the reasons behind themselves as a reader; I tend to become annoyed with writers who settle on one explanation for their love of books and stick to it (especially if that reason is 'clearly it must have been escapism', Francis Spufford, I am looking at you). The second is the number of new-to-me books that the author makes sound interesting and worthwhile.

Corrigan is completely covered on that second front, because, bless her, she includes an entire separate list of the books recommended in her book, at the back, where you can find it easily, and it is a solid mix of things I have never heard of and things I have loved passionately for years, which bodes very well. I had been getting ready to get a piece of paper and a pen and go back through the entire text to note things down and I very much appreciate not having to do that.

As far as the first thing goes, she does the usual thing of weaving her own life and the books she was reading at the time together and discussing what effects the books had on her choices, and this is competently done, but she also does something I haven't seen in this genre before, which is that a pretty significant chunk of the book is devoted to actual interesting criticism. Apparently this trumps deep personal insights for me in terms of enjoyability. At any rate, she has some lovely close-reading work in here, and some thoughts on various genres that are original and insightful, and she's interested in many of the same things I am-- books about women, about aging, about work and other subjects not generally written about-- only her home genre is the mystery and not the fantastic, and so most of her examples are new to me. And glory be, she's a real feminist critic too, and a well-grounded one, cites Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic straight off and shares the heart-stopping terror over Charlotte Bronte's Villette that I have only previously seen among critics in Joanna Russ (seriously, there are ways in which Villette is the most frightening book I have ever read, period, end of sentence). She appears to have missed reading anything at all in fantasy or science fiction, which is enough to make one want to send her a huge pile of things poste restante, except that due to her radio celebrity people evidently do this to her all the time; but she is explicitly writing about female visions of utopia in twentieth-century American literature and oh there are things that could fit into her arguments.

Also, she read Gaudy Night while teaching at Bryn Mawr, which means she has all the same associations with it that I do, which Does Not Happen With Critics.

Honestly, my primary complaint about this book is that it's a memoir. Because as a memoir it is interesting, it is well-done, but it doesn't have the originality and free play of the criticism; I've seen things very much like it before. She's thought through her reasons for reading rather more thoroughly than many writers have, but still. I suspect this of being more publishable as a memoir than as a freestanding book of lit-crit using elements of memoir in portions of its argument-- I'm not even sure you can just publish generalist critical studies in a non-academic context right now, not when the point is the generalism and not a readily summarizable thesis statement. But I would cheerfully read stacks more of her critical essays, whereas, if I were told she'd written a more conventional autobiography, not so much.

If you read criticism for fun-- and if you don't, why don't you? it's the best way ever to pick up book recommendations, and to figure out which theorists you consider particularly pernicious, so that when people express fervent devotion to them at parties you can back away slowly-- if you read criticism for fun, you will not want to miss this. If you are an aficionado of the reader's memoir, it isn't terrible.

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