Marci Rae Johnson's Blog, page 5

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished reading On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. What a great book to get completely lost in! I gave the book a rare five stars on GoodReads, and I'm looking forward to hearing Smith speak at this year's Festival of Faith and Writing. Here's some information about Smith and her writing. In this book, the highly intelligent college professors and students bumbling through life reminds me so much of Iris Murdoch novels. At some point perhaps I'll write something comparing the two. In the meantime, I will definitely read more by Smith.

This week I started reading a book about Metallica, by David Masciotra. The book focuses on Metallica's most critically acclaimed album, The Black Album. In the early 1990s I went through a (brief) heavy-metal phase, and this was my favorite album, so it's fun to revisit it through this book. I've also been re-listening to the album while I read (and thus introducing it to my kids). I also started reading The Readers of the Broken Wheel Recommend, by Swedish author Katarina Bivald. Though the literary quality is not as high as, say, Zadie Smith, I'm enjoying this book so much that I read 166 pages of it yesterday! It's an easy read, but decently written, and falls into one of my new favorite genres of fiction: fiction about books. In this one, a Swedish tourists visits a small town in Iowa and ends up opening a bookstore there. I can't wait to find time to read some more in this book today.

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It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished reading The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. This is a memoir that pushes the boundaries of the memoir genre: sometimes stream-of-concious, sometimes scholarly/philosophical, sometimes standard memoir, and the whole book is composed of blocks of prose rather than your standard indented paragraph, some of which are tightly connected to the "paragraphs" surrounding and others that take leaps reminiscent of contemporary poetry. I enjoyed the book very much, though I think it will take more than one reading to really understand it.

This week I'm focusing on the Zadie Smith novel, On Beauty. I've been reading it for a couple of weeks now, and hope to finish it this week. It's on of these long, sprawling novels that includes exhaustive insights into each main character's psyche. I love this kind of book! It's also set on a college campus, which also attracts me. In these ways it feels rather similar to an Iris Murdoch novel.

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It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished reading Margaret Atwood's recent novel, The Heart Goes Last. I've read every novel Atwood has written, and she's one of my favorite writers; however, I have to admit I was disappointed by this one. While the writing, the sentences themselves, is excellent, the futuristic world in this book is not well-developed enough to make it either understandable or believable. But it was the ending that was most disappointing. Without giving away anything, I found the ending trite and cliche, and as I finished the book, it felt as though the whole book was simply a vehicle for leading up to this cliched ending.

This week I started a Zadie Smith novel, On Beauty. I've never read Smith before, and so far I'm absolutely loving the book. I'm a sucker for a book that stars professors and artists, so I'm sure that's one reason I'm finding the book so gripping, but both the writing and the character development are spectacular as well. Smith will be attending The Festival of Faith and Writing this year in April, which I will also be attending, so I'm looking forward to hearing her speak there.

I'm also reading a funky little memoir titled The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. It's so interesting because it includes philisophical insights and references to a variety of academic texts.

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Tiny Review: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke

Novel. Algonquin Books, 2008.

Guy who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson house hides his past from his wife and children. Someone arrives out of the past to break everything open. Disturbing (especially the ending), but darkly funny. Beautifully made, and sometimes profound, sentences.

Tiny review. Because who has time to read (or write) a long review when there are so many books to be read!

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished two books: The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, by Dan Barber, and the novel An Arsonists Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke. I started Margaret Atwood's recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, and another book about food, The Mad Fest: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank. Anyone else like to read books about food? Looking back, I think my interest in this genre began with Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which she writes about how she and her family attempted to eat only local and homegrown food for a year. At some point I'll make a list of all the food books I've read and post it on here. The Kingsolver book is my favorite of them, though I also loved Julie Childs' memoir, My Life in France. 

I also started a new audiobook this week, Atonement, by Ian McEwan. The writing and descriptions in this book are quite lovely, though I'm having more trouble following along with the audiobook this time. I suspect this comes from the fact that the book is description heavy, without a lot of action. Still, I appreciate the quality of the writing and the character development, so I'm going to stick with it. I've found that I notice description and beauty of language a lot more when I listen to books rather than read them on the page. Often I tend to skim through long passages of description when I read on the page.

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Keeping Lists of Books

I've got thirty pages of a notebook filled with titles, authors, and page numbers for every book I've read since the summer of 1988, corresponding with my graduation from high school. Now I've digitized the list on GoodReads, though I continue to add to this paper record as well.

As I read through this list, I'm realizing it's almost better than a journal for remembering the thoughts, feelings, and events that occurred throughout my life. For example, I remember very clearly the summer I visited my grandmother for a week or so and spent much of my time there in a backyard lounge chair (the type that leaves stripes from the vinyl all over your summer bare legs), reading Anna Karenina for the first time. And in 2000, when I was pregnant with my daughter and very ill with all-day morning sickness, I read and reread mostly children's and young-adult books because I didn't have the energy to read anything else.

Does anyone else keep a list like this?

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished All the Light We Cannot See on audiobook. The ending made me cry, from sadness and from the beauty of the book and from the redemption evident in the midst of the sadness. Books don't usually make me cry, so I'm not sure if it's a testament purely to the power of the book, or if it also has something to do with the audio format. This is the first book I've actually listened to rather than read on the page, and it was such a positive experience that I will definitely try again with another book. I think this was a good book to start with, since the writing is beautifully descriptive and the narrator read in such a way as to bring out that beauty. I honestly think I would have missed some of the beauty of the writing if I'd read it on the page, since I tend to read quickly and to skim description in order to get to the action more quickly. I also read The Silent Sister: A Novel by Diane Chamberlain, which was a quick and fun read, enjoyable mostly for the fast-paced plot rather than for particular beauty or high literary quality.

This week I started a book of poetry, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep by Linda Gregerson, which is just fabulous so far. Here's a sample poem from the book from The Poetry Foundation website. If you're never visited The Poetry Foundation website, you should check it out! They've got a huge archive from all eras of poetry, and you can browse it by topic, or search for poems using keywords. I also started reading the novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. So far this book is quirky, weird, and darkly humorous -- which means I'm enjoying it very much.

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It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished Summerlong, by Dean Bakopoulos. It's one of those rare books that I actually gave five stars to on GoodReads! Definitely one of the best novels I've read in awhile, but yeah, don't read it if you're sad, as this review from NPR suggests. This week I'm still working on on The Third Plate, and listening to the audiobook All the Light We Cannot See (almost finished with both). All the Light We Cannot See is also extremely sad, intense, and disturbing (but so good as well). I probably need a break for something lighter after these! I'm also planning to start a book of poetry this week, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, by Linda Gregerson - though that title doesn't sound any lighter/happier!

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A Poem from My New Book

Englewood Review of Books recently published a poem of mine, titled "Jesus Cleanses a Leper," on their website. Click here to read it! Then, if you like it, you can buy my book either at Amazon, or at Steel Toe Books.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished Song, poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy. Lucy Grealy was the novelist Ann Patchett's best friend, and the book is a memoir of Lucy's experience of having cancer as a young girl, and the many years of treatment and reconstruction she went through. It's a hard book to read because of the medical details and the difficulties Grealy had, but it's also full of inspiration and insights.

I'm still working on on The Third Plate, and listening to the audiobook All the Light We Cannot See. I've also been reading Summerlong, a novel by Dean Bakopoulos. Like Fates and Furies, this novel is one that's hard to put down. The characters are vivid, and the book is set around Grinnell College in Iowa, and some of the characters are writers and professors. I'm a sucker for books set on college campuses, but this one has to be one of the best.

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