Tell me what you've read!
I wondered if this might be too detailed and packed with unfamiliar names for me to follow by ear. I was excited to try, though, since both Hunchback and Les Misérables are basic to the western canon and it is always good for my almost total ignorance of French to listen to names and places pronounced correctly. However, two sentences into the second cassette, the tape died. Grrno book to listen to for a day and a half! Definitely going to the 'brary tonight. Meanwhile, Michelle Shocked: "When I grow up I want to be an old woman" and so on. But still I want something French to listen to, and--why haven't I done this before?--I might get language tapes to listen to instead of a book. (not very long in December 1996)
This book was very popular when I worked at Phoebe after its publication
in 1983. I think one of the book groups might have read it. (The only one
I remember with certainty is William Kennedy's Ironweed, which I've
also intended to read since I worked there.) Blue Highways is another
one that works so well on tape that you feel you're being personally read
to. I bought the book for my father for Christmas because I think he might
like the American characters Least Heat Moon meets on his journeys, but
I worry that the philosophical retrospection might turn him off. Anyway,
having the book in the house means I have been able to see the photographs
the author took along the way. I've read that Blue Highways is similar
to On the Road, which I haven't read; RDC
says probably not and they have only the travel in common. My project for
the winter is American cultural novels and so I should get to Jack Kerouac
then. I also mean to read Truman Capote, Tim Robbins, William Burroughs,
William Gibson, Ralph Ellison, Tim O'Brien, and what females should I read?
Back to Blue Highways and its virtues as an audio book. The narrator
managed the accents very well to my untrained ear, made the Downeasters
sound like they were from Maine and not from a vaudeville show; I hope this
was also true for the accents I don't know as well. It is written for the
ear, not as much for the eye, and that's a Good Thing. Annie Dillard's blurb
on the back cover speaks of his luckily meeting good people at good times;
and not that I would ever contradict her but I think it's more than luck:
without the right attitude or personality, you'll never meet interesting
people and what they do will ever be dull. He maybe wanted to escape for
a few months, after losing his teaching position and maybe his wife; he
trekked off and came back in a circle (having missed my hometown by 14 miles),
and who knows, maybe he taught again, found his wife again. I just found
a later book, PrairyErth (in perfect condition in hardcover from
a used book store for ten dollars, a better price than I could pay for it
now in trade paper I suspect), and I can't wait for it.
November and December 1996
As I began to listen to this, I knew a frisson of dread. The same reader
as The Wizard of Oz! Could I stand it? I want to love Willa Cather
unrestrainedly! But she was much better reading Thea than reading Dorothy.
I decided I had been right in my initial assessment, that The Wizard
of Oz did suck, that it wasn't just the narrator, because I liked her
just fine reading Thea. Except I didn't think of how to spell her name until
the bit about everyone in Moonstone mispronouncing it. I thought
this was great until the very end, when Cather wrapped it up poorly like
a newspaper article that just has to be put to bed.
October 1996
Could Twain be any more chauvinistic? And I mean this in its original sense of national bigotry, not gender bigotry. Okay, he belittles himself, his region, and his era a bit also, but seriously to promote Protestantism as superior to Catholicism? If I had to be Christian I'd rather have my pick of those sects that sprang up post-Wittenberg, but if I had to direct the religious course of a country, Christianity as a whole would be right out. RDC read me bits of Innocents Abroad, which is also funny in bits, but the common thread in these two novels is Twain's going on and on and on and on and on. I've seen dead horses beaten worse before, but not often published.
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