Reading the Classics

I came across this essay by novelist Cathleen Schine while flipping through a stack of recent New York Times Book Reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Schine-t.html?scp=1&sq=dostoyevsky%20%22the%20idiot%22&st=cse

In it, she talks about being "illiterate" after developing an aversion to reading when she bit off more than she could chew as a seventh grader picking up Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. She describes standing in The Strand after years of graduate work in medieval history, trying to find something to read. She describes all the great classics that are still new to her--Dickens and Austen.

I'm fairly well-read in the canonical classics. I was an English major and focused on eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels. And yet I still relate to her feeling of the endless possibilities awaiting--especially as I'm hunkered down in my own Dostoyevsky novel. (1/3 of the way through Karamazov!!) I've never read a Henry James novel . . . or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. I've been wanting to read Lolita and Gone With the Wind for some time now. There are so many books out there, I think there will always be new territory to explore, even for life-long voracious readers.

Okay, enough wistful thinking. It's back to the 9o0+-page Russian novel for me!

Franny and Zooey

Putting Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger on my list was really cheating--I've read it before. But, I've been wanting to reread it and now seemed like a good time to do so, in light of Salinger's death.

I wanted to revisit this book, because when I read it in high school, I remember being really moved by the discussions of religion and spirituality. I wanted to see if I'd still feel that way. Well, this time around, it struck me that Franny was being quite self-indulgent to have a major meltdown and refuse any help from her worried family during her crisis of faith. Sure, a crisis of faith is major, but it just seemed like she didn't have to ignore her family. Her brother Zooey, however, comes off as quite the saint by talking her through her conundrum.

Even though Franny did annoy me this time around, I still found it to be a brilliant book. Reading this and The Bell Jar and the short stories of Dorothy Parker, which I've been picking up now and again, I really want to audit some classes in twentieth-century American lit. I don't want to write papers or anything, but I'd love to be in a really smart book club led by an expert.

In the not-so-brilliant-book category, I tried to read Lauren Henderson's Jane Austen's Guide to Dating at the gym, but it took itself far too seriously. I thought it'd be a fun, tongue-in-cheek approach to looking at modern dating situations through the lens of Austen's characters, but it was an earnest dating guide based on principles from her books. It even had a quiz to see which Austen heroine you most resembled, which Austen hero your love interest matched, and then a chart to see if you would be compatible. I abandoned this one about 14 pages in.

Now it's on to The Brothers Karamazov, which I think I'll be reading for awhile . . .

The Monsters of Templeton

As I'm reading through my accumulated books, I realize why many of them have sat on my shelves for years. Someone of them just aren't all that compelling. Lauren Groff's debut novel The Monsters of Templeton, however, was a hidden gem. Billed as part contemporary story, part historical novel, and part ghost story in the flap copy, I tacked it on to my series of supernatural books, following Her Fearful Symmetry and The Grift. The ghost story was minimal, though, and it turned out to be one of those sweeping novels covering several generations of a fascinating family. (I'd call it epic, but at only 360 pages, that seems like an overstatement.)

Willie Upton returns to Templeton, her small Hudson Valley hometown, when she finds herself pregnant with her thesis adviser's child. According to an author's note, Templeton is based on the author's home town, Cooperstown. Both were founded by--and named after--one man. Both are home to a famous nineteenth-century novelist. And both are home to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

To get Willie's mind off her predicament, her mother tells her that her father, who Willie had previously believed was one of three random guys at a hippie commune, actually lives in town and is related to the town's patriarch Marmaduke Temple through an illegitimate birth. This sends Willie scouring through the town's history and that of her family, learning many secrets of the previous generations.

The first 50 pages were a little disjointed, and I didn't think I was going to finish the book. But once Willie starts her quest to discover her father, it became unputdownable. After a quick internet search, it seems as if this book got a good reception--Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review--but doesn't seem to be an overwhelming bestseller. It'd be perfect for a book club. I will definitely look for more from Lauren Groff, although I may skip her short story collection Delicate Edible Birds, because I have a strong fear of birds . . . especially little delicate ones.