We're coming back to you, books, I swear!

Ever notice how life gets busier when the weather gets nicer?  Probably because it's finally nice enough outside to want to GO outside!  Plus, we've had birthdays, Easter and our anniversary to celebrate, car issues to take care of and I have been busy with making dog treat and/or baskets for the charity fundraising at work.  Fortunately, all of that is done now and we're hoping for some more reading time again!  So don't abandon us, fellow readers (do we even have fellow readers?  I feel like all we do is throw this information out into a deep void).  The weather is supposed to be rainy and colder here all week and I have no after-work responsibilities, so it's the perfect conditions for a productive reading week! 

Spring has sprung! Well...until Tuesday, I guess

Pages read today: 34 for Meredith, 107 for Ilya

The weather here was beeeeeeautiful today.  The sun was shining all day and I believe it almost hit 80!  This was the first time it has actually felt like spring here.  So after clearing out all the leaves and debris that have accumulated on the balcony since winter began, Gizmo and I relaxed out there most of the morning, soaking up the sun and nature-watching (our balcony faces out to a wooded area).  Gizmo LOVES being outside, as you can see (the air smells SO good!).

I had wanted to get my balcony garden going too, but since this is Rochester, NY, the weather can change at the drop of a hat and, apparently, will be doing just that on Tuesday when it is expected to dip back down into the 40s with SNOW!  Uncool, I tell ya.  So sadly, the balcony garden will have to wait a bit.  The rest of this weekend was spent with the usual cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc.  I have been making an effort to try out new recipes for the most part each week from my Pinterest boards, because I currently have about 800 trazillion recipes pinned and continue pinning more on a daily basis.  At least if I'm trying them out then I feel somewhat justified in my continued pinning.  This weekend's recipes were all new and all came out soooooo good!! There was a huge trend in the recipes, namely cheese, and also beef (every recipe except for 1 used beef, and they ALL used cheese!).  So no wonder we loved all of them, since we are huge cheese lovers (and are quite cheesy ourselves)!

This weekend also consisted of baking of dog treats and assembly of a dog gift basket.  The company I work for is involved in several charities and conducts fundraising activities/events throughout the year.  Right now we are engaging in the United Way campaign and this week there will be a week-long auction of various gift baskets.  As I was already making a couple similar dog baskets for a raffle at a cancer benefit for a friend last weekend and had a lot of extra stuff, it would be silly for me not to make one for this too!  

Gizmo LOVES helping in the treat-making and is a very eager volunteer for quality control (if you look hard you'll see him, lurking in the back off to the right, behind the couch...he shot up immediately after smelling the treats come out of the oven).  I tried out some new recipes because I will also be baking the dog treats for the bake sale that my work will be doing the last week of the month (also for the United Way campaign).  Gizmo seemed to approve of them all!

As for reading, it seems it's been quite a while since I've updated on here regarding my completed entries.  Labor Day was a good one.  It was a captivating story and had me hooked from beginning to end.  While reading it, I noticed that I kept envisioning the characters as the actors portraying them in the film version (though I have not seen the film yet...having a preference of reading the books first), and thinking what a superb choice Kate Winslet must be for this role.  She masters her depressed/troubled/borderline crazy roles (The Reader, Revolutionary Road, Carnage, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).  Surprisingly, the only thing that bothered me a little about the book was the ending felt drawn out, trying to wrap everything up neatly in all areas.  I know, I know, I'm always complaining about endings that felt rushed, however this was the other extreme and almost felt a bit contrived.  Overall, though, I really enjoyed the book.  So much so, in fact, that I was eager to read another Joyce Maynard book, and so chose to read After Her... though my experience with this one was nothing like that with Labor Day (except for the ending!  Same kind of drawn out, tidy everything up in a nice package to try and make the reader happy).  It did not have the same flow and felt like the book had been written all over the place out of order, as there were certain things explained several times (when it had already been explained, in almost the exact same words, several chapters ago).  At times it just felt like a checklist for the number of victims being tallied up and felt really overly drawn out, like a good chunk of the book was just space-filler.  It just felt like a mess and was not something I would recommend or ever read again.
Lastly, The Graveyard Book.  Also somewhat disappointing for me, after having come off The Ocean at the End of the Lane, another of Gaiman's which I absolutely loved.  It's not that I didn't enjoy this one... I mean it's still the same beautiful and elegant Gaiman writing.  The issue may have been as simple as the fact that this one is one of Gaiman's children's books.  It was eloquent and masterfully written, but it just wasn't the same experience as others of his.  Had I read this one as a child, however, it probably would have been one of my favorites.  It just seems like one of those books that would be so much better if reading it when you were younger. 
And that leaves us in the present, in which I am reading The Cuckoo's Calling by J.K. Rowling, writing under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  It's a crime novel, and so far that's all I really know.  We'll see how it goes.  I would say keep the pages turning, but have been told that is Ilya's sign-off (and so is basically copyrighted).  Sadly, I'm not clever enough to come up with anything brilliant so....

Some notes on very chipper and uplifting stories

So I see it's been over two months since I've posted. Whoops. I've been reading (look thou to thy left) but not writing about what I've read.

Currently I am making my way through a book of novellas by Leo Tolstoy, the War and Peace dude. (I tried reading War and Peace once a couple of years ago but didn't make it very far.) The novellas number four: there's the early work Family Happiness (1859), the rather well-known The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and Hadji Murad (1904). With the exception of Ivan Ilych, which I read in my senior year of high school, the stories are new to me.

As I recall, I sought out Ivan Ilych because that same year I had also read a bunch of Kafka short stories in the Complete Stories. John Updike wrote an introduction to that volume drawing a parallel between Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Tolstoy's novella; the parallel, if I recall correctly (that very same volume of Kafka still sits on my bookshelf and I could go doublecheck, but I'm more enthusiastic about exercising my memory than about accurate reportage), was that both stories are about men stricken suddenly and mysteriously, lying afflicted in the midst of their obliviously scornful families. And so I tracked down Ivan Ilych in the high school library, and read it, and liked it. At least, it stuck with me enough that when I read (for a class) the Epic of Gilgamesh a few months later, I found exceedingly marvelous the parallels between the ancient encounter with the fear of death and the (relatively) modern encounter with the same, so much so that I even attempted feebly to elaborate on these parallels by writing two fragments of a Gilgamesh short story. (As I recall, I was also deeply under the influence of Faulkner's Light in August at that time, having read that novel that year as well, and the Gilgamesh fragments were also intended to be an exercise in Faulknerian style. I came upon said fragments a few years back and am sad to report that in the latter regard they were more long-winded and repetitive than Faulknerian; and as to the former concern, they didn't express much about anything at all.)

Beyond making that connection with Gilgamesh, I don't particularly recall the specifics of my reaction to the novella when I read it fourteen years ago; which in itself suggests that it didn't make a terribly deep impression. Oh, callow youth: what could you possibly have seen in this story? The Death of Ivan Ilych tells the tale of a judge in Czarist Russia, a petty-minded regular schmoe, who falls ill and takes a good while to die, which gives him time to think things over and decide that he's wasted his life on trivialities. A substantial portion of the novella is given over to a recounting of the incidents of Ivan Ilych's life; the incidents, such as they are, being utterly ordinary: moving, decorating a house, not getting a promotion, getting a promotion, etc. Depending on outlook, this material is either a) incredibly petty and boring, or b) very fine-toothed satire by Tolstoy. (I'm puzzled here: I'm relatively sure that I didn't pick up on the possibility of satire back in high school, but neither was I bored. So what was I?) My modern self definitely thinks it's the latter option: how else to explain sentences, rare but potent, like the following, which introduces the recounting: "The previous history of Ivan Ilych was the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful." When Ivan Ilych is delighted about how proper and classy his new house looks -- he's been arranging and supervising the furnishing and decoration thereof himself -- Tolstoy breaks away from Ivan Ilych's point of view suddenly to point out how, "in reality," the interior of the house just looks like every other upper-middle-class home striving to keep up with the Joneses.

So in other words, how can the story be anything but almost completely meaningless to the innocence of youth, uncorrupted and uncompromised? There's nothing like accepting the indubitable compromise of spending eight or more hours per day in a cubicle farm helping to administer governmental bureaucracy to make Ivan Ilych hit you where it hurts. Here, have some satire:

People with petitions, inquiries in the office, the office itself, the sittings -- public and preliminary. In all this the great thing necessary was to exclude everything with the sap of life in it, which always disturbs the regular course of official business, not to admit any sort of relations with people except the official relations... A man would come, for instance, anxious for certain information. Ivan Ilych, not being the functionary on duty, would have nothing whatever to do with such a man. But if this man's relation to him as a member of the court is such as can be formulated on official stamped paper -- within the limits of such a relation Ivan Ilych would do everything, positively everything he could, and in doing so would observe the semblance of human friendly relations, that is, the courtesies of social life. But where the official relation ended, there everything else stopped too. (translation by Constance Garnett)

I haven't yet read the last and longest of the novellas in the Tolstoy volume, Hadji Murad, but the other two stories, Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata, deal with matters similar to that of Ivan Ilych. Family Happiness is a rather dissatisfactory piece of fiction; mostly it depicts the evolution of a married couple's love as it cools over the course of a couple of years. This it rendered in great psychological detail and I quite liked it; but for some reason the novella has a tacked-on "happy" (or at least I am presuming that this is the desired effect) ending in which the protagonist (the wife) learns, very suddenly and without exploration of any whatsoever implications, to accept love of children and family as a substitute for her youthful passion for her husband. The Kreutzer Sonata begins as something of a prolonged harangue on the consequences of the society-wide confusion between lust and love, delivered by a man who killed his wife in a fit of jealous passion. Much of the harangue remains applicable to our modern and supposedly more enlightened society; a great deal of the material here reminded me of a class I took in my last semester at college, "Problems in Western Civilization." It deals with so many of that class's themes and preoccupations that I'm surprised I'm only encountering the novella now: why didn't the professor have us read it then? Eventually the harangue is replaced by narrative, the story of how and why the wife-murderer did the deed, and the narrative is quite involving, gripping, and intense.

As I understand it, Hadji Murad is about bandits, or something, adventuring in the Caucasus Mountains. Something of a departure, then, it seems like; we'll see. Until next time, keep the pages turning...